Origin Witch - Cold Capitalism
Jasper’s name flashed across her private channel at 04:12, and Corinne let it sit there glowing while she wiped turquoise syrup off her knuckle with the Moonstone Carver.
The appraisal window above the desk kept scrolling the same three words—overpriced, scam, brewer’s a fool—and she almost laughed.
“Asshole,” she grunted, her voice raspy from inhaling eight hours of boiled herb fumes.
She grabbed the test tube she’d just appraised, uncorked the wooden stopper, and poured roughly five milliliters back into the iron cauldron. The appraisal system had flagged her for an imprecise volume when the glass was filled to the brim. She pressed the cork stopper back in, squeak-pop, leaving a precise half-inch of empty air below the neck, then laid the tube flat against the glass screen.
Item Appraised: Crude Mana Potion (Grade-E-) Volume: 10ml. Effect: Restores 1 Mana Point per second for 10 seconds (Total: 10 MP). Note: A weak, metallic-tasting potion. Barely passes basic alchemical standards.
The insult was gone. The system didn’t compliment her, but at least it stopped telling her to go die in a fire.
Ten milliliters per dose. That meant her remaining liter and a half of boiled turquoise syrup could fill roughly one hundred and fifty individual glass vials.
Except she only had one test tube.
She tapped her fingers against the rim of her wooden bucket, her brow furrowing. “Containers. I need small containers.”
She opened the [Regional Exchange] interface on her Magic Desk.
The public market was an absolute disaster zone. Thousands of panicked outcasts had dumped whatever garbage they’d opened from their supply crates onto the digital listings, hoping to trade for a single bottle of clean water or a dry piece of bread.
[Listing: 1x Used Plastic Toothbrush. Seeking: 1x Canned Meat.] [Listing: 3x Empty Glass Beer Bottles. Seeking: 10x Wood Units.] [Listing: 1x Leather Belt. Seeking: 5x Mineral Water.] [Listing: 10x 15ml Glass Test-Tubes with Cork Stoppers. Seeking: 1x Stone Unit.]
Corinne’s eyes locked onto the fourth entry.
Some poor bastard had opened a supply crate, gotten a box of lab equipment instead of a sandwich, and tossed it onto the market for dirt cheap out of pure spite.
She didn’t hesitate. She bought the ten-pack of test tubes, paying with one unit of stone from her store storage.
Before the screen could even refresh, she started scrolling through the lower sub-categories, her eyes hunting for anything related to processing liquids or holding knowledge.
She bought two ten-ounce glass wine splitters for two stone units. She bought three carved wooden scoops, a set of cheap bamboo strainers, two bars of unflavored lye soap, and a wooden funnel.
Then her hand froze over a listing near the bottom of the page.
[Listing: 1x Book: ‘Basic Glyphs’. Seeking: 10x Wood Units.] [Listing: 1x Book: ‘Basic Drafting & Diagramming’. Seeking: 10x Wood Units.]
“Ten wood?” Corinne muttered, her eyes narrowing. “They’re selling actual textbooks for ten wood?”
She clicked into the seller’s profile. The guy’s icon was a blurry selfie of a twenty-something kid with a bleached haircut, looking utterly miserable inside a muddy dirt burrow. A system note below his profile read: Item appraised as non-skill manual. Unreadable to non-practitioners.
That explained it. The system didn’t treat these books like skill scrolls. You couldn’t just click Learn and magically pop a spell into your brain. To anyone without alchemical knowledge, a book on basic glyphs was just three hundred pages of useless geometric gibberish that couldn’t even be used to light a fire without throwing thick foul-smelling smoke.
Corinne clicked Buy on both listings. Twenty units of wood vanished from her storage grid.
A second later, two heavy leather-bound volumes materialized on her small desk screen with a loud thud.
She picked up Basic Glyphs. The cover was made of stiff dark brown vellum, and when she opened it, the pages smelled faintly of dry gall ink, charcoal, and turpentine. The illustrations inside were razor-sharp, detailing the core structural symbols used to bind elemental energy into physical mediums: circles for containment, equilateral triangles for thermal acceleration, and crossed runes for internal fluid loops.
A slow cool satisfaction washed through her chest.
“Idiots,” she whispered, stroking the dry parchment. “You’re selling blueprints for firewood.”
She stacked the two volumes neatly beside Thane’s Ledger on the corner of her desk, then pulled her iron cauldron closer.
It was time to pack the goods.
Using her wooden scoop and the glass funnel, she began transferring the warm turquoise syrup from the cauldron into her newly acquired test tubes. Her lightened body hovered comfortably beside the pot, her hands steady as she measured out ten milliliters per tube, plugging each one with a cork stopper.
Ten tubes filled. Then she realized her store auto-buy feature had brought in another forty tubes while she was browsing the book section.
She kept working, her right thumb pressing corks into glass until her wrist felt stiff.
Fifty vials of Crude Mana Potion. Fifty slender glass tubes filled with shimmering pale-turquoise liquid, stacked in neat rows inside her green stasis crate to keep them from rolling off the wooden desk.
She opened her Exchange Store management screen and created a new public listing:
[Corinne’s Store – Special Inventory] [Item: Crude Mana Potion (Grade-E-) * 50] [Effect: Restores 1 MP per second for 10 seconds.] [Price: 10x Basic Material Units (Wood / Stone / Vine) per vial.]
She set the store to auto-trade, locked the price, and opened the [Regional Chat] channel on the main screen to monitor the public reaction.
For the first ten seconds, nobody noticed. The public chat was too busy drowning in a massive flame war between two rival street gangs from Chicago who were arguing over a cluster of berry bushes.
Then someone finally refreshed the market page.
[Karapo]: HOLD ON. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! [Zhao Dulai]: What happened? Did another supply crate drop near the creek? [Karapo]: Look at Corinne’s store! She just put up FIFTY BOTTLES OF MANA POTIONS! [Lin Feng]: Is today April Fool’s Day? Where the hell did someone get potions on Day Three?! [James Bellman]: It’s a scam. Don’t touch it. It’s probably colored creek water. [Karapo]: It’s NOT a scam! The system desk appraises it right on the listing screen! Restores 10 Mana Points over 10 seconds! She’s asking 10 basic materials for one tube!
The public channel exploded into an unreadable wall of scrolling text.
[Unknown User 7712]: TEN BASIC MATERIALS FOR TEN MANA?! IS SHE INSANE?! [Math-Nerd-Mike]: Everyone listen to me! DO NOT BUY THIS! Let’s do the math! One cast of basic Matter Extraction costs 20 Mana Points. Two of her potions cost 20 materials and give you 20 Mana Points. If you drink two potions to cast one extraction spell, you gain 20 wood, but you just spent 20 wood buying the potions! YOU ARE WORKING FOR HER FOR FREE! SHE IS A MONOPOLIST PARASITE! [Wu Gang]: Mike is right! She’s leeching off our hard work! Boycott Corinne’s store! [Victor Capone]: A little girl trying to run a racketeering operation in my sector. Hilarious. [Lin Feng]: Yeah, boycott her! Nobody buy it! Let her keep her boiled juice!
Corinne sat on her floating bed of straw, her cheek resting in her palm as she watched the outcasts scream on her screen. A thin cold smile touched her lips.
“Math nerds,” she murmured under her breath. “They always calculate the math, but they never calculate the wolves.”
Three seconds later, the vials began to sell, Garrett Thorne taking the first batches and buyers scattering across the region, the pings ringing fast enough to sound like a wind chime caught in a gale.
[Math-Nerd-Mike]: HEY! WHO IS BUYING IT?! I TOLD YOU NOT TO BUY IT! YOU’RE RUINING THE BOYCOTT! [Garrett Thorne]: Shut your whiny mouth, Mike. Try telling a pack of timber wolves to wait while you wait for your mana to naturally recover 1 point per minute. When you’re cornered in a hollow root at night, 10 Mana Points means one extra cast of a spell. It means staying alive. [Elodie]: Exactly. Keep your stupid math, Mike. I’ll keep my life. [Zhao Dulai]: HOLY SHIT IT’S ALREADY SOLD OUT?! [Lin Feng]: WHAT?! I WAS JUST TYPING MY BOYCOTT POST AND IT’S GONE?! [James Bellman]: @Corinne Put more up! I’ll buy 10 vials right now! Name your price! [Karapo]: @Corinne Big sister Corinne! Please sell more! I have 30 stone units waiting! [Victor Capone]: @Corinne Message me directly, girl. My organization will buy out your entire stock every day at a bulk discount rate.
Corinne watched her storage grid fill up.
Five hundred units of wood, stone, and vines flooded into her inventory slots, stacking neatly up to the 999 limit.
She leaned forward, tapped her profile setup, and edited her public Exchange Store bio. She deleted the default system greeting and replaced it with six words:
Buy it or fuck off. No discounts.
She closed the screen, picked up her wooden scoop, and looked at the empty cauldron resting on the floorboards.
“Well,” she said, her thumb rubbing against the cork of her last remaining personal vial. “At least now I know what my sweat is worth.”
Jasper’s priority ping had flashed nine times before she looked at it. Corinne set the half-carved test-tube rack aside and tapped the desk interface, already knowing what the broker wanted.
The cauldron was bone-dry. The ten-pack of test tubes she’d set to auto-buy on the exchange was completely stalled out.
Nobody had glass left to trade. The outcasts who had opened lab gear in their starter crates had already sold their meager stocks, and the ones who bought her potions were keeping the empty glass vials as trophies or makeshift water flasks instead of returning them.
Her production line was dead in the water.
Ping.
A private message notification flashed green on her desk interface.
Corinne glanced sideways at the screen. Normally, she ignored direct messages. Ninety percent of them were either net-beggars asking for a free handout, thugs throwing vague threats about finding her tree, or weirdos asking if she was really a twenty-year-old girl in a hospital gown.
This message was different. It was saved here as the single verbatim example of Jasper’s full signature block, because the same text recurs throughout the book and the briefing says keep only one:
[Private Message from: Jasper Finch] [Sender Tag: Professional Broker]
She tapped the profile icon.
The display picture showed a skinny man in his late thirties wearing a remarkably clean dark-gray wool suit with a slightly loosened silk tie. His hair was a wild curly nest that looked like it hadn’t seen a comb in three days, and a pair of thin gold-rimmed wire spectacles sat crookedly on the bridge of his narrow nose. His bio was crisp, containing only four words: Assets, Arbitrage, Absolute Discretion.
Corinne clicked open the text thread.
[Jasper Finch]: Good afternoon, Miss Mercer. I see your potion store has run out of glass containers. [Corinne]: State your business. [Jasper Finch]: I happen to possess 53 boxes of medical-grade glass test tubes, complete with rubber-sealed cork stoppers. 530 units total. All clean, all sterilized. [Corinne]: Where did you get 500 test tubes on Day Three? [Jasper Finch]: My initial shelter spawned inside the ruins of a collapsed field ambulance from the old world. While others were screaming about wolves, I spent twelve hours digging through the wreckage with my bare hands. Now, let’s talk business.
Corinne leaned back against the timber wall, her floating talent keeping her feet an inch off the floor.
“A professional scavenger,” she muttered. “Or a very smart rat.”
She typed back with one finger.
[Corinne]: Name your price. [Jasper Finch]: 5 Basic Material Units per 10 test tubes. Plus a priority reservation right on 20% of your daily potion output at market price. [Corinne]: You bought those tubes off the exchange auto-listings for 1 or 2 stone units a box. You’re trying to make a 150% markup on empty glass. [Jasper Finch]: Information and supply aggregation cost money, Miss Mercer. You have the cauldron; I have the glass. Without my glass, your cauldron is just a very heavy soup pot. [Corinne]: 3 Basic Material Units per 10 tubes. Take it or I walk. I’ll switch to hollowed-out bamboo stems by tonight. It’ll take me two hours longer to carve them, but my profit margin stays at 100%, and you sit on 530 pieces of useless glass while the outcasts realize they don’t need test tubes to drink magic.
A three-minute silence followed.
On the screen, the three little loading dots on Jasper’s chat bubble hovered, vanished, reappeared, and vanished again.
Corinne didn’t rush him. She picked up a piece of charcoal and went back to drawing containment circles on her tree bark, her strokes steady and unhurried.
[Jasper Finch]: 3.5 units per 10 tubes. But you agree to buy back empty vials returned by your customers at 1 basic unit per 10 empty tubes. I will handle the collection and cleaning logistics for a 10% processing fee.
Corinne’s eyes glinted under the amber lantern light.
A closed-loop recycling system. He was setting up a middleman pipeline to force outcasts to return their used glass to him, which he would then wash and resell back to her at a fixed margin.
It was parasitic, shameless, and brilliant.
[Corinne]: Deal. Send the first 100 tubes.
Ding!
A system trade window popped up. Corinne deposited 35 stone units from her inventory grid. A second later, ten crisp yellow cardboard boxes filled with sparkling unblemished glass test tubes materialized on her Magic Desk screen.
[Jasper Finch]: A pleasure doing business with a rational mind, Miss Mercer. Expect the next batch tomorrow morning. [Corinne]: Keep the glass coming, Finch. If you run out, I find another supplier. [Jasper Finch]: You won’t need to.
She closed the private thread and immediately began brewing her second batch of Crude Mana Potions.
With fifty new vials in hand, her production speed soared. She poured, corked, and stacked the turquoise tubes into her green stasis crate, then opened her Exchange Store backend to update her listings.
She added two new automatic barter options to her store counter:
[Listing 1: 10x Crude Mana Potions (Grade-E-) -> Seeking: 1x Grade-E Monster Core (Limit: 10)] [Listing 2: 5x Crude Mana Potions (Grade-E-) -> Seeking: 500g Canned Meat or Sealed Mineral Water (Limit: 10)]
She needed ten Grade-E Monster Cores to meet the upgrade requirement for her Tier-2 Treehole Shelter.
Hunting timber wolves herself was out of the question. She was a crippled girl hovering in a hospital gown. But she didn’t need to hunt. She had the one commodity every frontline fighter in Sector 666 desperately needed to stay alive.
She listed sixty new vials onto the public market.
The moment the store status flipped to Active, the public channel went wild again.
[Lin Feng]: SHE’S BACK! CORINNE’S STORE REFRESHED! [Wu Gang]: MONSTER CORES?! She’s asking for Monster Cores now?! Is she crazy?! Those things only drop from elite beasts! [Garrett Thorne]: Done. Sent 3 E-Rank Cores for 30 potions. Thanks for the quick trade, Corinne. [James Bellman]: WHAT?! Garrett, you idiot! You gave away Monster Cores for boiled juice?! [Garrett Thorne]: I have three cores and zero mana, James. Cores don’t stop a pack of mountain cats when your spell bar is empty. Potions do. [Asang Singh]: I traded two cans of spam for 10 potions! Hahaha! I can cast Matter Extraction five times tomorrow! I’m gonna build my wooden fence! [Math-Nerd-Mike]: YOU GUYS ARE ENABLING HER! SHE IS ACCUMULATING ALL THE SECTOR’S UPGRADE MATERIALS! SHE’LL BE TIER-2 BEFORE ANY OF US!
Corinne ignored the chaos, her fingers skimming over her inventory storage grid as three glowing fist-sized purple crystals materialized inside her storage slots.
Grade-E Monster Cores: 3/10.
Suddenly, a bold dark-red announcement banner cut directly across the top of the public chat channel.
[GLOBAL ANNOUNCEMENT – SECTOR 666] [Sender: Mickey “The Mammoth” Callahan]
[Mickey Callahan]: Attention all survivors in Sector 666. I am Mickey Callahan, former head of the Callahan Syndicate in Los Angeles. My boys and I have secured a 60-square-meter stronghold in the southern clearing. We currently have 52 armed men under my banner. [Mickey Callahan]: @Corinne. Little girl, I see you have talent. But a crippled girl running a solo business in a forest full of wolves and wolves-in-human-clothing is a dangerous proposition. Bring your brewing setup to my stronghold tomorrow morning. Hand over 50% of your daily output to the Syndicate, and my 50 boys will guarantee your tree is never touched by anyone. [Mickey Callahan]: Refuse, and once the seven-day protection period ends, my boys will find your tree. And trust me, we have plenty of men who know how to climb.
The public chatroom went dead silent for five full seconds.
[Machinegun Jack]: Hahaha! Look at old man Mickey playing Godfather in the woods! Hey Mickey, your dick even work anymore, or are your 50 boys carrying that for you too? [Victor Capone]: Callahan, stay on your side of the southern clearing. Cross the creek into my territory, and my men will gut your boys like pigs. [Mickey Callahan]: Jack, Capone, keep running your mouths. Once the barrier drops, we’ll see who owns this forest. [Zhao Dulai]: Oh man, gang war is breaking out… [Unknown User 3310]: @Corinne, sister, don’t go to him! Mickey was on the FBI’s most wanted list before the transfer! He’s a monster!
Corinne sat on her stool, staring at the bright red text bearing Mickey Callahan’s name.
Her face didn’t change. She didn’t type a response. She didn’t curse, she didn’t panic, and she didn’t post a drama message to gather sympathy.
She simply hovered her cursor over Mickey Callahan’s profile icon, tapped the settings dropdown, and clicked [Block User].
A small system notification popped up: User Mickey Callahan has been permanently blocked. You will no longer receive messages or alerts from this individual.
“Fifty boys,” she whispered, her thumb tracing the transparent razor-sharp edge of her Moonstone Carver. “Fifty men who need food, water, and potions to survive the night.”
She looked at her storage grid.
Wood: 1,820 / 2,500. Stone: 95 / 100. Vines: 420 / 500. Grade-E Monster Cores: 7 / 10.
She was three cores and a few hundred logs away from upgrading her shelter to Tier-2.
Outside, a heavy quiet rain began to fall against the glass window, the drops clicking rhythmically against the dark oak frame.
Corinne reached out, grabbed Basic Glyphs from the corner of her desk, opened page fourteen, and began studying the internal fluid loops of a Grade-E containment array.
Let the mobsters talk. She had work to do.
— Origin Witch —