Stat Crusher - Sniping the Auction and Awakening the Mind

Dust clung to the plastic housing of the ancient desktop terminal, smelling faintly of warm copper and scorched wiring every time the cooling fan kicked on. It took four full minutes for the operating system to load. In a world where the orbital grid was nothing more than dead iron spinning in the dark, the Citadel relied on ground-based signal towers.

Local area network only. Thirty million people in Fort Sterling, maybe eight million logged on at any given hour, all crammed into the same regional network hubs. Garrett leaned back in his squeaky wooden chair, his knees almost bumping the underside of the narrow folding desk. He opened his account dashboard. Five thousand five hundred credits.

That was his entire net worth—accumulated over three years of top-tier academic performance grants and municipal exam rewards. It was a fortune for a slum kid, but in the upper districts, five grand wouldn’t even buy you a clean table at a high-end steakhouse. He pulled up the local trade boards, his calloused index finger tapping the mechanical mouse with a fast, restless click.

Threads bumped past in a steady stream of text and low-res attachments. Someone had posted blurry telephoto shots of a Rank-D Golden-Eye Eagle circling Wall Bastion 4. A thread below that warned about a mutated dire-bear spotted near the southern oil pipelines. Further down, some vendor was complaining about Tempest Lodge apprentices shaking down fruit stands near the district border.

Garrett ignored the chatter, his eyes glued to the real-time trade feed. He was waiting for a specific ghost from his memory. Back in his past life, a bizarre scandal had rocked High School No. 6 right before finals. Julian Drake, desperate to win over Serena Sterling, had spent five million credits on a bottle of high-purity cerebral awakening fluid—a rare extract pulled from telepathic mutated beasts.

He’d handed it to her in the main hallway like a piece of cheap candy. Serena hadn’t even stopped walking. She’d stepped right around him without a second glance. Drunk on bruised ego and rich-kid spite, Julian had logged onto the local board that very night under his alt handle, ShootingStar. He’d posted a dramatic rant, claiming five million was pocket change to the Drake family, and put the sealed serum up for auction at a starting bid of a hundred credits just to prove a point.

In Garrett’s first life, nobody had taken the listing seriously. Everyone assumed it was a troll post or a faked screenshot, and by the time people realized the trade link was live, some lucky anonymous scrapper had already sniped it. It was tonight. Garrett couldn’t remember the exact minute, but he knew the date. He hit refresh.

The fan whined louder. The green-and-white interface flickered. Refresh. Nothing. Just a thread about broken water mains in District 3 and someone trying to trade a rusted combat knife for three cans of synthetic beef. Garrett rubbed his face, the skin around his eyes tight with fatigue. His mother was washing dishes out in the tiny living room, the clatter of tin against porcelain a quiet, steady background noise.

If his memory was off by a day, or if Julian had changed his mind in this timeline… He hit refresh a third time. There it was. To my Sterling Goddess! If you won’t look at this, then let some random bottom-feeder take it. Five million means nothing when my heart is broken! Posted seven seconds ago by ShootingStar. Garrett’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.

He didn’t waste time reading Julian’s pathetic poetry. Citadel trade regulations enforced a strict sixty-second lock on new public listings—sellers couldn’t cancel or pull an item down for sixty full seconds once published, a measure designed to stop market manipulation. Most users spending their evening on the trade boards would take at least forty seconds just to figure out if the link was a virus.

Garrett already had Julian’s shop sub-ID memorized from his past life. He bypassed the main forum thread, pasted the sub-ID directly into the network directory, and slammed the enter key. A hidden stall inventory popped up. Amidst a row of useless health drinks and vanity profile banners sat a slender blue glass vial with a silver tamper-proof seal.

Price: $100. Click. Buy now. A prompt flashed across the screen: Select Delivery Method. Garrett didn’t hesitate. He checked the box for Citadel Cyber-Inspector Escort. It cost an extra thirty credits—a steep fee for slum delivery—but the CCI was a independent enforcement wing co-funded by the military and the big martial lodges.

Once you paid the fee, a armed courier capsule would pick up the item from the seller’s local automated drop-box and deliver it to the buyer’s doorstep within ten minutes, guaranteed. No seller cancellation, no take-backs, no excuses. Payment confirmed. Remaining balance: $5,370. Total elapsed time: twenty-nine seconds. Garrett let out a long, ragged breath and slumped back into his chair.

The plastic mouse was slick with sweat from his palm. On the screen, the listing suddenly vanished as Julian realized someone had actually clicked the link and tried to pull it down—too late. The transaction was already locked into the municipal ledger.

“Stupid rich bastard,” Garrett muttered under his breath, a cold, dark grin breaking across his face.

Eight minutes later, a heavy, rhythmic knock echoed against the iron door of Apartment 2804. Arthur Cole started to get up from his stool, but Garrett was already out of his room, sliding past his father. He cracked the door open. Standing in the dim, flickering light of the hallway was a courier wearing grey tactical armor, a padded transit box locked beneath his arm.

“Garrett Cole?” the courier asked, his voice flat through his helmet speaker.

“That’s me.”

“Thumbprint here. Confirming CCI Escort delivery from North District Hub 12.” Garrett pressed his thumb against the digital pad.

The courier’s transit box hissed, its pneumatic seals releasing with a puff of cold nitrogen. He lifted the small, velvet-lined inner case, handed it to Garrett, gave a brief nod, and turned toward the stairs without another word.

“Who was that at the door, Garrett?” Mary called out from the stove, drying her hands on a rag.

“Just a school delivery, Mom,” Garrett called back, slipping back into his bedroom and latching the door shut.

He sat at his desk, his fingers slightly unsteady as he popped the latch on the velvet case. Inside lay the blue glass bottle, cold to the touch, its vacuum-sealed cap stamped with the official Sterling Bio-Tech crest and a official municipal batch number. High-purity Mind-Weaver awakening serum. Extract of Rank-B telepathic fauna.

In three days, this tiny bottle of liquid would be worth seven million on the open market after the Citadel announced the upcoming Outland expedition. Right now, it was his ticket out of the dirt. Garrett picked up the glass vial, turning it in the dim light of his desk lamp. He could hear his father’s soy-grinder starting up again out in the front room, the belt slapping rhythmically against the housing.

He didn’t celebrate. He just set the bottle carefully next to his keyboard, pulled a clean towel out of his drawer, and laid it out on the mattress. Tomorrow morning, he’d drink it.

A bitter chill bled through the thin mortar around the window frame long before the morning sirens blared from the boundary bastions. Garrett sat up on his narrow frame bed, his lower back aching from the sagging springs. Out in the kitchen, the old soy-mill was already silent, replaced by the faint sizzle of oat-cakes on the gas ring.

He stepped out into the living room, swallowed a bowl of lukewarm water, and ate two dry oat-cakes while his mother adjusted his jacket collar.

“I’m locking my door for the next couple days,” Garrett told them, wiping crumbs from his mouth.

“Need to push my breathing drills before Friday. Don’t worry if you don’t hear me moving around in there.” Arthur looked up from his ledger, his red-rimmed eyes narrowing slightly through his thick lenses.

“Don’t go tearing your muscles apart trying to match those rich kids, son. Pushing too hard right before the physicals just leaves you tight when you hit the strike pads.”

“I know my limits, Dad.”

“Alright. Just… don’t starve yourself in there.” Garrett nodded, walked back into his tiny bedroom, and slid the iron bolt home.

The heavy snapping thud of the tumbler sounded absurdly final in the cramped space. He didn’t sit on the bed this time; the mattress was too soft, too forgiving. Instead, he pulled a worn wool blanket onto the bare floorboards and sat cross-legged facing the blank plaster wall. He picked up the Sterling bottle. The silver tamper-proof seal cracked under his thumb with a sharp pop.

It didn’t smell like chemicals. It smelled like ozone and bitter peppermint, cold enough to make his nostrils sting. Garrett didn’t hesitate or pause for a dramatic breath. He tilted his head back and dumped the blue fluid down his throat in one swallow. It went down like thick liquid ice, pooling in his stomach for four seconds.

Then it ignited. Heat didn’t spread outward through his gut—it shot straight up his carotid arteries like boiled lead, rushing into his cranium with a deafening, iron roar that muted the distant sounds of the tenement hallway. Garrett’s jaw clamped shut so hard his molars creaked. His eyes rolled back, white showing beneath the lids as a jagged spike of agony slammed into the center of his brain.

Central nervous system forced ignition. It wasn’t the kind of pain you got from a torn muscle or a broken rib. This was microscopic tearing inside the dura mater, cold copper needles driving through dormant neural pathways, forcibly prying open cerebral channels that nature had sealed off. In his past life, when he’d taken a dirt-cheap black-market stimulant at age twenty-five, this exact process had dragged out for forty-eight agonizing hours because his latent brainwaves were weak, thin, and scattered.

He had ended up barely scraping into the bottom rung of Bronze-1, an embarrassment among Mind-Weavers. This time was different. His body was seventeen, but his soul—his mental imprint—carried eighty years of spatial survival, cosmic wind pressure, and life-and-death reflexes. The neural pathways weren’t just being pried open by the liquid; they were being smashed open by his own reborn willpower, forcing the serum’s energy down into his cerebral node like a pressurized press.

Sweat poured off his forehead, dripping onto the wool blanket between his crossed shins. His fingers dug into his knees until his nails cut through his trousers, drawing small beads of dark blood. Compress it. He gritted his teeth, his breathing ragged and shallow. He didn’t let the cerebral energy dissipate across his skull.

He clamped down on it with his instincts, dragging the wild, volatile blue heat into his lower brainstem, packing it tight into a single, dense point. Two hours passed. Then four. Outside his window, the grey morning light shifted into the flat, brassy glare of noon. A radiator pipe somewhere in the wall began to bang rhythmically—clank, clank, clank—a sound that usually drove him crazy when he was trying to study.

Now, every strike of the metal sounded ten times louder, echoing through his skull like a sledgehammer hitting a anvil. He could hear the dust motes scraping against the windowpane. He could hear his own heartbeat, a slow, heavy thudding that sounded like wet leather dropping onto concrete. Seven hours. The heat in his head stopped burning and began to harden.

In his mind’s eye, where there had once been only dark, stagnant gray, a spinning sphere of light slowly materialized. thick, heavy bronze, solid as cast iron, pulsing with a steady, deep rhythm that made his vision flicker, plain and simple, not the pale, watery amber of a low-grade Bronze initiate. And around the edges of that bronze core, thin, razor-sharp tendrils of brilliant silver energy were already spinning out like spider silk, whipping through his neural network.

Bronze-Peak. He hadn’t just unlocked his cerebral domain; he’d compressed the serum’s raw power so densely that he was sitting right on the absolute threshold of Silver-Tier before he’d even taken a single gene-optimization shot. By the ninth hour, the roaring in his ears faded into a vast, unnatural quiet. Garrett opened his eyes.

The dim storage-closet room looked violently clear. Every crack in the yellowed plaster wall, every rust spot on his desk legs, every fraying thread on his blanket stood out with absurd, three-dimensional sharpness. He didn’t move his hand. He just focused his gaze on a small, rusted steel screw sitting near his broken keyboard.

The screw twitched. A tiny clink sounded as it rolled an inch across the wood, lifted two millimeters off the surface, wobbled in mid-air for a fraction of a second, and dropped back down. Garrett closed his eyes and let out a long, ragged exhale that smelled faintly of iron and burnt sugar. His back was soaked, his muscles were trembling from exhaustion, and his stomach felt like it was digesting itself.

He stood up unsteadily, his knees popping in the quiet room, and wiped his face with the hem of his shirt. He was starving, his head throbbed with a dull ache, but his hands were perfectly still.