Joss didn't sleep.
He lay on his cot in the underground apartment -- eight feet by ten, walls sweating condensation, the hum of the water recycler next door grinding through the thin concrete -- and stared at his inventory screen. The translucent blue window hovered above his palm, visible only to him, listing everything he'd harvested in four hours of killing rabbits.
Rabbit Meat x38. Rabbit Hide x19. Rabbit Bone x19. Field Herb x19. Basic Recipe: Rabbit Stew x3. Rare Herb: Moonpetal x6. Skill Fragment: Quick Step x2.
Plus one Spirit Medicine Fragment.
That last one bothered him. It had dropped from his fourteenth kill, a fat rabbit near the tree line, and it didn't look like anything else in his inventory. Every other item had a colored border -- white for common, green for uncommon, blue for rare. The Spirit Medicine Fragment had no border at all. Just a silver shard icon, no description, no market value, no tooltip. When he focused on it, the system returned nothing. Like it didn't exist.
But it was there. In his inventory. Taking up a slot.
He closed the window and pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw sparks.
Math. Focus on the math.
The meat was trash -- 5 gold per unit, 190 gold total. Nobody got rich on rabbit meat. The hides were slightly better at 8 gold each, 152 gold. Bones, 3 gold each, 57 gold. Field Herbs, 20 gold each, 380 gold.
Then the real numbers. Rabbit Stew recipes, uncommon grade, 50,000 gold each on the open market. Three of them. That was 150,000 gold. Moonpetal herbs, rare, 15,000 gold each. Six of them. 90,000. Quick Step fragments, rare, 200,000 gold each. Two of them, but he'd already absorbed one. The skill was sitting in his skill tree right now, a movement ability that let him dash three meters in any direction. Worth more to keep. The second fragment was worth 200,000 gold to the right buyer.
Total value of four hours of killing rabbits: approximately 441,000 gold.
His family's monthly income was 1,200 gold.
Joss rolled onto his side and stared at the wall. A pipe ran along the ceiling, wrapped in electrical tape where it had cracked last winter. His father had fixed it with parts salvaged from a decommissioned sewer junction. That was their life. Salvaged parts, recycled water, nutrient bars split three ways.
441,000 gold. In four hours. From rabbits.
He got up at 4 AM, an hour before his mother's alarm. Dressed in the dark. Left a note on the table: "Grinding in the field. Back by dinner." Took his sword and his leather armor and walked through the tunnels to the freight elevator.
The surface was different before dawn. Quieter. The sky was purple-black, stars fading at the edges, and the air tasted clean in a way that tunnel air never did. He stood outside the elevator for ten seconds, breathing. Then he moved.
The field zone was empty at this hour. Too early for casual players, too late for the overnight grinders who'd camped inside the walls waiting for the Night Fog to lift. Joss had the rabbits to himself.
He killed the first one at 5:12 AM. Full loot table. Every item.
The second at 5:13 AM. Full table.
By 5:30, he'd killed eleven rabbits and confirmed what he already knew: it wasn't a fluke. It wasn't a one-time glitch. Every kill, every time, the full loot table dropped. Everything the monster could possibly give, he got.
Infinite Harvest.
He moved deeper into the field, where the rabbits were level 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2. The loot tables were slightly different -- higher-tier herbs, better meat cuts, and a small chance at leather crafting materials. For a normal player, "small chance" meant one drop in fifty kills. For Joss, it meant every single kill.
By 8 AM, he had a problem. His base inventory had 30 slots. Twenty-seven were full. The Rabbit Stew recipes alone were taking up seven slots because each one was a unique item -- you couldn't stack recipes. He needed storage or he needed to sell.
Selling was dangerous. A level-one Warrior walking into a trading post with seven uncommon recipes and a fistful of rare herbs would attract attention. The kind of attention that got underground kids robbed in alleyways or, worse, flagged by guild scouts looking for exploitable talents.
He thought about it while killing his forty-second rabbit. The sword cut was getting cleaner. The system's Basic Slash guidance was becoming second nature, the corrective nudge in his wrist shrinking each time. He was learning the motion.
The forty-second rabbit dropped two Spirit Medicine Fragments. Silver shards, sitting in his inventory beside the one from yesterday. Three fragments. No description. No value. No explanation.
He set them aside mentally. Problem for later.
Right now, the problem was sales.
---
Joss entered the eastern trading post at 9:15 AM. The post was a converted warehouse near the city gate, staffed by NPC merchants and a handful of player-run stalls. Prices here were worse than the main trading house downtown, but volume was lower and nobody paid attention to individual transactions.
He sold ten stacks of rabbit meat to an NPC food vendor. 190 gold. The NPC didn't blink.
He moved to a different stall and sold the hides and bones. 361 gold. The NPC processed the transaction and returned to staring at nothing.
Then he walked six blocks to the western trading post and sold three Moonpetal herbs. 45,000 gold. The NPC merchant's expression didn't change, but the player behind Joss in line glanced at the transaction receipt.
"Moonpetal? From the starter field?"
Joss shrugged. "Lucky drop."
The player, a Ranger in green leather, squinted at him. "That's a one-in-two-hundred drop. Off a rabbit."
"Like I said. Lucky."
He walked away before the Ranger could do the math on how a level-one kid in bargain-bin armor was carrying rare herbs. Lesson learned. Rare items attracted eyes. He needed to spread the sales out further. Different posts, different NPCs, different times of day.
He sold one Rabbit Stew recipe at the southern trading post for 48,000 gold -- slightly below market, because he didn't want to negotiate and draw attention. Then another at a player-run stall near the adventurer's guild for 52,000 gold. The stall owner, a middle-aged Merchant-class woman, looked at the recipe twice.
"Where'd you get this?"
"My uncle farms boars. He doesn't need chef recipes."
"Your uncle farms boars and gives away legendary-path recipes to his nephew?"
"It's uncommon, not legendary."
"The Nine-Turn Intestines is a legendary recipe. This is Rabbit Stew, uncommon. I know the difference." She paused. "But I also know that uncommon chef recipes don't drop from rabbits for anyone under level 10."
Joss kept his face flat. Trader's face. Underground kids learned it young. "My uncle gave it to me. Are you buying or not?"
She bought it. But she watched him leave, and that was two people in one morning who'd looked at him a beat too long.
He needed a better system.
---
By early afternoon, Joss had sold roughly half his inventory across four different trading posts. His balance sat at 268,000 gold. He kept the second Quick Step fragment, the remaining recipes, and the Moonpetals for later. The Spirit Medicine Fragments stayed untouched. He didn't know what they were. Selling an unknown item was a bad trade.
He sat on a bench in the commercial district and ate a nutrient bar from home. The surface bustled around him. Players in gleaming gear walked past, their equipment worth more than his family's lifetime earnings. A group of Mages from some guild -- matching blue robes, silver trim -- laughed about a dungeon run. A Chef-class player on the corner was selling skewers for 50 gold each. The smell hit Joss from ten meters away. Meat. Seasoned meat. Real food, not nutrient paste.
He bought one. 50 gold. The most expensive thing he'd ever eaten.
The flavor was so intense his eyes watered. Pepper, garlic, something sweet underneath. The meat was tender and hot and it tasted like the surface. Like everything the underground wasn't. He chewed slowly, the way he chewed everything, because you didn't waste food. You didn't rush it. Every bite mattered.
50 gold. He could afford a thousand of these now. Ten thousand, by the end of the week.
He finished the skewer, wiped his hands on his pants, and started planning.
The math was clear. His talent -- Infinite Harvest, the system called it -- gave him a 100% drop rate on every item in a monster's loot table. Every kill was a jackpot. The rarer the item, the wider the gap between his income and a normal player's. A Quick Step fragment worth 200,000 gold dropped once per thousand kills for a regular player. For Joss, it dropped every time.
But income was worthless if it got him killed. Underground kids who came into sudden wealth disappeared. Guilds recruited them, used them, discarded them. Or worse -- gangs stripped them of their gear and sold the account data. The underground had a saying: "Money you can't hide is money you don't have."
He needed rules.
One: never sell in volume at the same location. Spread it out. Different posts, different days, different cover stories.
Two: never sell rare items directly. Hold them, or find someone trustworthy to sell through. A middleman.
Three: never display wealth. Keep the bargain-bin armor. Keep the common sword. Look like what everyone expected an underground C-Rank Warrior to look like -- unremarkable.
Four: tell nobody about Infinite Harvest. Not his parents. Not his friends. Not anyone. The moment someone knew his talent, he became a target. Not "maybe a target." A target. Guilds would fight over him. Government agencies would recruit or conscript him. Criminal organizations would kidnap him and chain him to a dungeon entrance for the rest of his life.
Five: invest. Money sitting in an account was money losing value. He needed gear. Better gear meant faster kills, which meant higher-level zones, which meant exponentially better loot. The Moonfall legendary set was available at the main trading house for 2 million gold. At his current farming rate, he could afford it in three days.
Three days to go from a 400-gold sword to a 2-million-gold legendary set.
He checked his Quick Step skill one more time. The ability was simple: a three-meter dash in any direction, two-second cooldown. It made him faster than any other level-one player in the field. Combined with Basic Slash and Block, he had the tools to farm efficiently for the next several days.
Joss stood up from the bench. The sun was high. He had six hours before the Night Fog rolled in. Six hours of rabbits at one kill per minute, give or take, meant three hundred kills. Three hundred full loot tables.
He had never been good at estimates, but the number that formed in his head was large enough that he had to recalculate twice.
Then he walked back to the field and got to work.
At 6:15 PM, fifteen minutes before the Fog, Joss passed through the city gate with an inventory so full he'd had to prioritize. He'd dropped the common materials -- meat, bone, hide -- in piles on the field. Kept only the uncommon and rare drops. Recipes, herbs, skill fragments, crafting materials. Things worth selling.
He passed the freight elevator to the underground and stopped. Looked down the shaft. The fluorescent light from below was yellow and tired. Home was down there. His parents, his cot, the condensation on the walls, the nutrient bars.
Tomorrow he'd sell. The day after, he'd sell more. And by the end of the week, he would walk into the main trading house and put money on the counter that no underground kid had ever touched.
The elevator door closed. Joss took the stairs.
