Origin Witch - Health-Potion Frenzy

[Sector 666 Market Notification: ‘Grade-E Health Potion’ listed by Corinne’s Store.]

The green text blurred into a continuous haze, and Corinne let the ruby vial roll once between her fingers before she answered it.

She had put up eighty vials. Just eighty.

She kept seventy vials back in her green stasis crate as a private reserve, plus thirty vials allocated to Jasper Finch for his private buyers on the southern ridge.

She wanted scarcity. If you flood a market with two hundred bottles of medicine on Day Eleven, people start thinking medicine is cheap. They start holding out for discounts. They start making speeches about human rights and community solidarity.

But if you put up eighty bottles in a sector with three thousand wounded outcasts, the math does the killing for you.

The public channel exploded. Red vials, she read, the white text scrolling past her black frames in a blur of caps-locked shouting. Lin Feng and Zhao Dulai worshipping the sight of actual health potions. Wu Gang counting all eighty. Karapo reading the stats out loud, giddy that fifty health points closed open wounds in ten seconds. James Bellman choking on the hundred-material price tag, the two cores, the fifty pounds of iron. Math-Nerd-Mike telling everyone to hold off, screeching about a sixty-six-percent monopoly markup while Garrett Thorne threatened to find his dirt hole and break his other arm. Then Garrett’s own confirmation pinged in: twenty cores sent, ten potions received, thanks for the allocation. Elodie followed a moment later with ten cores for five. And Victor Capone, his name highlighted in angry red, tagged her directly. Little girl, he wrote, my Syndicate has forty men with infected wolf bites from the storm. I will buy your entire eighty-vial listing right now for eight thousand wood units. Pull it off the public board and trade with my agent.

Corinne hovered on her high balcony, chewing slowly on a piece of dried salt-beef Piper Bell had sent over with breakfast. She watched Victor Capone’s red-highlighted message scroll past.

She did not type a reply. She did not even click his profile.

She just watched her store notifications ping as vial after vial cleared the exchange.

In four minutes and twelve seconds, all eighty vials of Grade-E Health Potion were completely wiped off her exchange store grid.

The feed lit up again the moment the grid cleared. Lin Feng demanded who bought it all. Bellman wailed about his iron ore still in storage. Capone tagged her a second time: she had ignored his offer, he wrote, and that was a mistake, little girl. Garrett Thorne answered for her before she could, promising to meet Capone at the ford if his boys crossed the central creek, his war-band now carrying fifty-HP potions in their pockets. Elodie added eight copper rounds to the invitation, promising to test Capone’s leather jacket near the oak tree. Asang Singh cackled that the mobster was being threatened by the mercs.

Corinne closed the public chat interface.

She did not need to hire bodyguards. She did not need to pay Victor Capone protection money or build a private army of thugs. By selling her high-purity potions directly to the strongest, most violent solo fighters in Sector 666, people like Garrett Thorne and Elodie, she had automatically turned them into her private security force.

Garrett Thorne defended her because if The Spire fell, his primary supply of 50-HP potions vanished. Elodie protected her because without Corinne’s mana potions, her sniper rifle talent was just a heavy piece of steel.

Capitalism was not about being liked. It was about making yourself so necessary that the deadliest bastards in the room would kill anyone who tried to break your front door.

A private chat ping flashed blue on her screen.

[Jasper Finch]: Outstanding execution, Miss Mercer. The public channel is practically weeping. My private brokerage inbox has forty-two high-tier trade requests.

He listed a scavenger team in Sector 666 East who had brought in three pieces of Black Obsidian and wanted five health potions and five mana potions for the set.

Corinne’s eyes widened slightly behind her black frames.

Obsidian was the core material required for the Tier-4 Shelter upgrade, the high-tier stone needed to construct reinforced mage-tower walls and automated defensive arrays.

[Corinne]: Take the trade. Give them six health potions and four mana potions.

Jasper confirmed the lock, then mentioned Piper Bell’s second batch of Volcanic Meat Stew would be ready by one. Corinne told him to double the Yellow-Ring Earthworm ratio for the six-hundred-point mana regen. Then he said one more thing. People on the street had stopped calling currency wood units or stone units. They were pricing items in Red Vials and Blue Vials now. One Red Vial equaled a hundred wood. One Blue Vial equaled sixty.

You didn’t just start a business, Corinne, he wrote. You minted the lifeblood currency of Sector 666.

Corinne did not answer. She closed the chat thread, pulled her spectacles off her nose, and rubbed her dry eyelids with the heel of her palm.

Liquid gold. Bottled in glass tubes filled with boiled weeds and worm dust.

A quiet, breathless sound escaped her throat, a dry laugh that turned into a short, wheezing cough as the cold morning wind blew across the high terrace.

“Sector mint,” she whispered to the sky, looking down at her dangling, motionless legs draped over the edge of the woven vine railing. “If my aunt could see me now, she’d probably try to sue me for her half of the wood.”

Steelwool hopped over from the window sill, landing on her lap with a soft clack-clack of its steel beak. The owl chick tucked its round, gray head under her palm, its warm feathers vibrating as it let out a satisfied, rumbling purr.

Corinne stroked the bird’s soft head with her thumb, feeling the strange, dense metallic weight of its feathers under her skin.

Down below, far beneath the high branches of The Spire, the giant green forest of Sector 666 stretched out into the hazy horizon. A wild, violent world filled with blood, rust, howling wolves, and three thousand desperate outcasts digging in the mud.

She put her spectacles back on, adjusted the dark wire frame against her nose, and looked north toward the uncharted mud-swamps where the Grade-D beasts were roaring into the wind.

She had ten cauldrons waiting downstairs. She had two hundred empty glass tubes lined up on her workbench. And she had a whole ocean of red and blue liquid left to boil.

The Magic Desk was screaming red before Corinne ever looked at it.

Mid-afternoon sun hit the western sliding door at an awkward forty-five-degree angle, scorching the resin in the oak frames until the whole third floor of the Spire smelled like a burned pine cone. Corinne leaned back against her straw mattress, a cold wet rag draped over her forehead to block out the dull throb pulsing right behind her left temple. Her tunic was soaked at the armpits, stiff with a salty crust of dried sweat and charcoal dust from her noon brewing run. Downstairs, the ten cauldrons were still cooling, their dark blue rims ticking softly as the star-iron contracted in the warm air. Clink. Clink. Clink.

She did not lift the rag to look at the screen. She did not have to. The Magic Desk on the ground floor was pinging every three seconds, a steady, maddening series of high-pitched chime bursts that echoed up the curved heartwood staircase like an angry sparrow trapped in a chimney.

“Finch is having a stroke,” she muttered into the dark folds of the wet cloth.

Steelwool let out a sharp, raspy click-click from its spot on the high bookshelf, its small metallic talons scraping against the grain as it shifted its weight. The bird had spent the last two hours tearing through three ounces of raw rabbit liver, and now it smelled like copper and wet dog.

Corinne dragged her right arm across her face, pulling the rag off, and let her torso drift six inches off the floorboards. Her dead legs hung down beneath her tunic in their familiar, limp shape, the faded cotton hem dangling loose around her calves. She drifted over the lip of the stairwell and dropped slowly toward the ground floor, steering herself with light taps against the smooth wood railing.

The main screen on her Magic Desk was glowing a deep, angry crimson.

A bold text banner, framed in thick red borders that mimicked cheap velvet theater ropes, was pinned directly across the top margin of the regional channel. It was not a normal user post. Someone had spent fifty basic material units on a system broadcast token to force the message to stay anchored at the top of every screen in Sector 666 for six full hours.

[REGIONAL BROADCAST – SECTOR 666 SOUTHERN COMMAND] [Sender: Mickey “The Mammoth” Callahan]

Corinne stopped her drift three feet from the desk, her black frames glinting under the amber light of her hanging lantern. She adjusted the black wire frame against the bridge of her nose and read.

Mickey Callahan declared himself. Most of you from the West Coast or the Midwest know how my organization operated back in L.A., he wrote. We built order out of dirt. He announced the Callahan Syndicate had formally established the Southern Defense Zone, controlling forty-two Tier-2 strongholds and three Tier-3 fortresses along the granite ridge, sixty-eight combat-ready men with iron-tipped pikes and longbows. Then came his rules. Every independent herbalist and crafter within four miles of the central creek would register their shelter coordinates with his lieutenants. A flat twenty-five percent security tariff on all daily raw material harvests. Independent potion brewing restricted, all liquid medical supplies routed through the Syndicate depot.

Then he named her.

@Corinne. I’m talking to you, girl, the banner read. You’ve been sitting up in your high tree playing bank manager while men are dying of wolf bites in the thickets. You’ve got ten minutes to send your private coordinates to my second-in-command, Marnell. Hand over fifty percent of your daily potion stock to the Syndicate depot, and my boys will make sure nobody ever touches your oak tree. Refuse, and once the next barrier shift opens the canopy routes, we will come up there and harvest the timber ourselves. You have until sunset.

The public chat beneath the red banner was a waterfall of salt-white text. Lin Feng and Wu Gang screaming that twenty-five percent was a joke. Asang Singh reporting the sixty men he had seen near the southern ford. Bellman asking what would happen to Corinne, warning that if Callahan got the red vials they were all screwed. Unknown User 4412 begging her not to give in. a scrawny Florida smuggler named Rusty-Edged Kev arguing the mobster made a valid point about societal stability. Zhao Dulai telling him to shut up.

Then a greasy, neon-yellow name cut through the feed.

Machinegun Jack tore into Mickey directly, vulgar and loud, calling him a senile bastard and telling the West Coast crew to fuck the tariff and fuck the Syndicate. Then he tagged Corinne, telling her not to listen to the washed-up guinea and offering wolf guts at half-price if she dropped two crates of red vials on his border.

Corinne leaned her elbow on the edge of the Magic Desk, resting her chin in her palm as the two gang leaders slung profanities back and forth across the glass interface.

“Sixty-eight men,” she murmured, her voice flat, almost bored. “And not one of them knows how to wash an herb root without snapping the tap.”

Her private inbox chimed.

[Jasper Finch]: I take it you’ve read the comedy broadcast on the main channel?

[Corinne]: Mickey wants fifty percent.

Jasper called Mickey an old man who thought a sixty-man street gang in a forest could function like the Chicago Outfit in 1930, missing the simple fact that without a central ammunition supply or a localized food grid, sixty men were just sixty mouths that ate three hundred pounds of meat a day. Corinne asked what his men were doing on the ground. Jasper said Marnell had set up three extortion checkpoints along the southern creek ford, stopping independent herbalists and demanding three pounds of Bitter-Grass per person before allowing them across. Two gatherers had refused that morning. Marnell’s boys beat one with an iron pipe and broke his shoulder.

Corinne’s eyes narrowed behind her black frames. The blue-tinted lenses flashed with tiny lines of floating data as she pulled up her internal inventory ledger.

Her herb supply from Piper Bell had dropped by fifteen pounds that morning because Piper’s gathering routes ran near the southern creek. If Marnell’s thugs started breaking the arms of her herbalists, her cauldron input was going to drop by thirty percent by tomorrow night.

“He’s touching my pipeline,” she said softly.

[Jasper Finch]: What’s the directive, Corinne? Should I adjust the private trading rates for Callahan’s registered buyers?

[Corinne]: Blacklist them. Every single person registered under Callahan’s stronghold tag or Marnell’s squad list.

[Jasper Finch]: All sixty-eight?

[Corinne]: All sixty-eight. No health potions. No mana potions. No thermo-salve. If they try to buy through second-party cut-outs on the public market, double the price for the proxy and cut the proxy’s allocation by half.

[Jasper Finch]: That will cause an immediate armed retaliation against my southern collection team.

[Corinne]: Tell Garrett Thorne to move his patrol line down to the southern creek ford. Give him twenty vials of Grade-E Health Potions and ten vials of my new Corrosive Slowness Decoction.

[Jasper Finch]: You’re funding a territorial war, Corinne.

[Corinne]: I’m protecting my supply chain, Finch. There’s a difference.

She closed the thread with Jasper and immediately pulled up her private chat with Garrett Thorne.

[Corinne]: Thorne. How many men are in your ridge group?

[Garrett Thorne]: Twelve. All former military or heavy woodsmen. Why?

[Corinne]: Marnell’s boys are breaking herbalists’ arms at the southern ford. They’re stopping my plant shipments.

[Garrett Thorne]: I saw them. Marnell’s a greasy little prick who used to run loan-sharking out of San Diego. His boys have cheap iron pikes, but half of them don’t even know how to set a stance.

[Corinne]: Clear the ford. Keep the creek open for Piper Bell and the independent gatherers. I’ll give your twelve men a permanent fifty percent discount on all health potions for the next two weeks, plus five vials of my new offensive slowness yellow-acid.

[Garrett Thorne]: Consider the ford cleared by sunset. We’ve been looking for an excuse to take their iron pikes anyway.

Corinne set her ballpoint pen down on the desk with a quiet click.

She did not feel angry. She did not feel heroic either. She did not care about the two gatherers who had gotten their shoulders smashed with iron pipes, nor did she care about Machinegun Jack’s vulgar speeches about West Coast freedom.

What she cared about was the ten Abyssal Meteorite cauldrons sitting in her second-floor workshop. They needed fifty pounds of fresh Bitter-Grass every eight hours to keep her profit margin at ninety percent. Anyone who stood between those cauldrons and their grass was just an obstacle that needed to be scrubbed off the floorboards.

She pulled up Mickey Callahan’s red announcement banner one last time.

The ten-minute deadline he had given her had already passed six minutes ago.

She hovered her cursor over Marnell’s profile, tapped the administration options, and added his name to her personal, non-reversible ban list. Then she added Mickey Callahan. Then she added every single one of the eight squad leaders listed under the Callahan Syndicate’s public roster.

System Notification: 10 primary targets permanently blacklisted from Corinne’s Store.

She closed the desk interface, pushed off the smooth timber surface with her hand, and floated slowly up the heartwood staircase toward her third-floor bedroom.

Steelwool fluttered down from the high shelf, landing softly on her shoulder, its hard metallic feathers rustling against her collar as it let out a low, vibrating purr.

Outside the glass sliding doors of her high balcony, the sun was beginning to drop toward the western hills, painting the endless green canopy of Sector 666 in streaks of blood-red and gold. Deep down in the valley, near the southern creek ford, the faint, distant sound of iron striking iron echoed through the giant trees.

Corinne did not look out at the sunset. She settled onto her mattress, opened Basic Mana Circuitry, and began studying the three-way nodal connections required to build an automated acid-spray trap.

— Origin Witch —