I nodded, though the "why" of it felt like another wall I couldn't quite see over. “Okay, but…”
He shook his head, cutting me off before I could ask if it was a matter of law or something worse. “You told me on day two you wanted to be a delver. And you will. This is a tier nine planet, and one gateway over, there’s a tier sixteen. Sure, the most common gates on Everna are tier four, but luckily one of our moons, Aber, is hospitable and is tier six. So it has plenty of tier one rifts for you to advance with, once you can afford a slot.”
“How much is that?”
“Currently Wren, its about eight-thousand credits for a twice monthly delving slot for a tier one rift. I believe the one currently available is goblins.”
I nodded, trying to keep my face neutral, but the number felt fake. Eight-thousand credits. I’d spent months begging for single credits just to eat. To me, a credit was a meal; eight thousand meals was a lifetime. My mind tried to stack that much bread in the alleyway and failed.
“Context,” Braum said, noticing the way I’d gone quiet. “The Earls are offering to pay you approximately five tier two mana stones per execution.”
I just stared at him as we kept walking. I knew what a credit looked like—a small, physical thing you could hide in a shoe. I had no idea what a mana stone was supposed to be, let alone a "tier two" one.
He stopped and sighed, seeing the total lack of comprehension on my face. He knelt next to me, his hands resting on his knees. “Homework time, kid. You’re moving from a world where you count coppers to a world where we count spirits. You need to understand the scale.”
He looked me straight in the eye, his voice firm but no longer reciting a story. “Go to the library. Read Credits and Mana Stones: Currency of the Empire. Then read The Rise of the Kilocredit: The Corporations Trade Everything. Don't just look at the pictures of the vaults, Wren. Look at the exchange rates. You need to know exactly what your soul is worth before you start selling pieces of it to the Earls.”
He stood back up, checking a small device on his wrist. “The Earls are offering you a salary of ten mana stones of your current tier every month until you out-tier the planet. Combined with the execution fees, you'll be able to buy that goblin slot and still have enough left over to buy any book in the library that kicked you out. But only if you know how to handle the weight of it.”
I looked down at my hands. Clean, unscarred by the day's grime, but feeling heavier by the second. "I'll go to the library," I whispered.
“Good. While we’re there, I’ll be checking out some books on skillshards that would suit you, as I’m not letting you go into a penal colony without a little extra oomph to back you up.”
The walk to the library was a blur of high ceilings and silent, climate-controlled hallways. Every step in my new leather shoes felt like a reminder that I was no longer dodging puddles in the street. Braum led the way with a purposeful stride, leaving me at a heavy wooden table that smelled faintly of lemon oil and ancient paper. He disappeared into the stacks, leaving me with a stack of volumes that looked more like bricks than books.
The library, as always, was quiet. The books I requested were quickly brought over to me. Honestly, they were thick, and the reading was beyond dull. But Mr. Braum said they were important, so I read on anyway.
I traced my finger along a chart in Credits and Mana Stones: Currency of the Empire. At first, it seemed simple. A Tier 1 mana stone was worth 100 credits—ten times what I might make on a lucky day of begging. Tier 2 was 1,000. Tier 3 was 10,000. It was a ladder I could visualize, even if the higher rungs were out of reach.
Then I hit Tier 5, and the ladder turned into a rocket.
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"Past tier three or so, the exchange rates of our Imperial Credit does not become feasible for the exchange of material cost and labor cost... At Tier 5, the scaling shifts to account for the massive jump in mana. A single Tier 5 Mana Stone is valued at 5,000,000 Credits."
I stopped. My breath hitched. Five million? I tried to remember the boy in the warm jacket who had thrown away the sandwich. If he was wealthy, his family might have a few thousand credits. But five million? That wasn't just "wealthy." That was a different species of existence.
My eyes skipped down the table, and the numbers stopped being words and started being nightmares.
- Tier 6: 250,000,000 Credits.
- Tier 7: 12,500,000,000 Credits.
- Tier 9: 31,250,000,000,000 Credits.
Thirty-one trillion.
I looked at the high-backed velvet chairs and the fine porcelain tea cups Abigail had brought earlier. I looked at my new white shirt, so pristine it felt like it had never known dust. Earls Malcom and Grahn were at least Tier 9. They weren't just men; they were walking vaults of wealth so vast that if they dropped a single Tier 9 stone, they could likely buy the entire district I had grown up in, flatten it, and turn it into a garden without noticing the expense.
The text at the bottom of the page was blunt:
"If you’re reading this, you are taking your cultivation seriously and are wondering about the economics of scale. Effectively, you’ll eventually be buying and selling mana stones at tier, not for credits, but either lower mana stones at an equal exchange value, or for goods and services."
The book was telling me that credits—the only thing I had ever known as "money"—became a rounding error before I would even reach the halfway point of the Path.
I thought about the deal they had offered: five Tier 2 stones per execution. That was five thousand credits. For an Earl, five thousand credits was less than the dirt under their fingernails. But for me, it was five thousand granola bars. It was enough to buy a delving slot twice over, with change left to spare.
The scale didn't just overwhelm me; it made me feel like I was disappearing. I was a "parasite" from the well, being offered crumbs from a table that was thirty-one trillion credits wide. To them, I was a bargain. To me, I was selling my soul for a fortune I couldn't even count. I leaned back, the leather of the chair creaking under me. The numbers from the previous table were still swimming in my vision, but curiosity—that greedy, desperate hunger for knowledge I'd developed in the well—pushed me to open the second book Braum had assigned: The Rise of the Kilocredit: The Corporations Trade Everything.
I expected more dry, academic prose. What I found was a chaotic explosion of text that looked like it had been written by someone vibrating out of their skin.
The header of the chapter didn't even have a formal title. It just had a name: MB.
Greetings! Name’s MB, Master of the Sea, outside of Duke Waters Baby! Dragon in name, Dragon in blood! It's very much my great pleasure and delight to explain the difference between our Credits and the Corporation’s Credits!
I blinked. This wasn't like the other books. The words seemed to jump off the page, loud and erratic.
To start, there’s no comparison! Credits, Kilocredits, Megacredits—yeah, you’d think we can put a mana stone value on 'em, but nope! Not even close! They are just also units of mana being bought and sold. Meaning while we could in theory sell mana stones for KC or MC, the price fluctuates constantly! One minute you're a king, the next you're trading your shoes for a spark!
In the Corporations, Money is Money. And Money is Life. Ultimately, they are cults that worship coins. Or credits. Shiny, digital, physical—doesn't matter! Coins are shiny. JR also likes coins! (Hi JR! Keep stacking!) If you're looking for a stable exchange rate here, go back to the first book and stay in the shallow end of the pool, kid! The Corporations don't play by 'Imperial Rules.' They play by the 'I-Want-That' rules!
I stared at the page, my head starting to ache. The Imperial economy was terrifying because of its scale, but this "MB" character made the Corporate economy sound like a fever dream. If our credits were the stable floor, these "Kilocredits" (KC) and "Megacredits" (MC) were a shifting sea.
I looked at the note about them being "units of mana being bought and sold." In the Empire, mana stones had a set value based on their Tier. But in the Corporations, it sounded like the money was the mana, and the value changed based on who was hungriest.
"Money is life," MB had written.
I thought about the "white-golden powder" that had governed my mother’s life. That was her currency. Her "money" was her "life," and she had traded mine for it. I realized then that the "well" wasn't just a place in the lower levels of Everna . The well was anywhere where you didn't understand the rules of the game being played above your head.
The Corporations were just a bigger well, with shinier coins at the bottom.
I closed the book, my hands feeling grimy despite being clean. I needed to see Braum. I needed to know if the "Gallows Tree" deal was an Imperial contract or a Corporate one. Because if my life was going to be measured in credits, I needed to know if those credits were going to stay still, or if they were going to vanish like a dragon’s hoard in a storm.