Chương 49: Chapter 50: The Outcast’s Edge

The dry, dust-heavy draft of the Jordan Rift Valley wilderness periphery rattled the low thorns of the acacia scrub with a flat, repetitive thwack. Ethan sat on a cracked limestone boulder thirty metres outside a makeshift refugee bottleneck. This wasn't a fortified city gate. It was a natural canyon choke-point—a narrow silt pass wedged between two un-rendered mudbrick outposts where the free-to-play migrants had been forced to halt because corporate tolls blocked the easier mountain paths to Beth Shean.

His legs were tucked beneath a tattered linen tunic. He hadn't paid for a vanity cloak. Before walking out of the database fault lines, he had simply reached into Emmett-02_Choresh's kiln, grabbing a handful of the spent black charcoal. He smeared the heavy carbon ash directly across his face and his shoulders until his character profile was entirely buried beneath a layer of grey soot. The disguise was crude, but it was functional.

Up on the surface, Pixel Rex and Merlion Holdings were scanning the major regional trade hubs for a rich trader dressed in indigo. They weren't looking for a silent, soot-covered scrapper sitting in the dirt outside a wilderness canyon bottleneck. Topside, the landscape was a drab sea of thousands of migrating F2P players. Heavy infantrymen in corroded arsenic-bronze scalemail leaned against the rock walls, their armor plating rattling with loose, cracked rivets.

Specialized Levant Skirmishers paced the dirt perimeter with notched, porous bronze daggers that had warped under the heat. Foragers and gatherers dragged wooden sickle frames that had been completely stripped of their copper teeth because re-forge costs at the corporate foundries had spiked by forty percent. The players stared blankly at their breaking gear, their shoulders slouched under the weight of an unpayable economy. The syndicates were letting the baseline players rot in the dust.

Ethan didn't open a high-visibility merchant kiosk. He reached into his canvas tool-bag, pulled out a single, jagged fragment of dark limestone, and used the flat edge of his oxidised bronze trowel to scrape a bare, uniform grid onto the dirt floor between his boots. He reached back into his pouch and laid out his entire test inventory. Exactly ten modular blade inserts.

They were a dense, lustrous, unnatural mahogany red—synthetic obsidian glass structured with the precise, aggressive curve of an ancient Egyptian khopesh cutting edge. Against the dull gray silt of the Jordan Valley, the glass faces caught the fractured server sunlight like pooled, un-cleansed blood on the Adama. [System Prompt: Local Trade Protocol Active] Slag-Glass Khopesh Blade Insert. Quantity Staged: 10 Units. Asking Price: 3 Coppers. Net Profit Margin: 100%.

A passing Level 32 F2P Skirmisher stopped dead in the dirt. He was dragging a standard corporate-issue bronze khopesh. The upper radial edge of the blade had completely fractured during a raid, leaving a rough, jagged stump of copper. His eyes locked onto the deep crimson sheen of the glass shards. He scoffed, looking at Ethan's soot-covered mask, then spat into the dust right next to the three-copper price tag.

"Three coppers for a piece of glass?" the Skirmisher asked, crossing his arms.

"The corporate shops are charging fifty silver for a real metal re-forge, and you think we're desperate enough to glue red glass onto our hilts? It'll shatter on the first parry." Ethan didn't change his posture. His inner clock synchronised with the Skirmisher's broken weapon durability metrics, running a cold calculation on the player's remaining asset depth.

"Fifty silver is a steal if you want to buy back your own corpse," Ethan rasped, his voice dropping into a flat, dry register.

"But look behind you. The pass is packed, the corporate smithies down in the valley have a twelve-hour queue, and Pixel Rex just raised the entry fee for the lower territories by ten percent. You can either walk into the next canyon with three coppers less, or you can walk in with a dull stick and let a pack of Level 30 mobs split your health pool down the middle. The respawn penalty doesn't accept coppers." The Skirmisher spat again, his face tight with anger.

"Scrapper trash. Keep your red glass." He shoved his way back into the crowd, muttering curses. Ethan didn't blink. He didn't chase him. He simply sat still, watching the river of players move past the mud-brick toll outposts.

"You're a Kharash Even, aren't you?" a voice called out from the gathering periphery. A young Level 28 F2P Vanguard stepped out of the transit line. His armor was cheap, dented leather, and his hands were trembling as he held a standard-issue bronze khopesh. The sword's tip was gone, and the remaining metal was warped and notched down to a useless, blunt leaf. He didn't look angry; he looked absolutely exhausted. He stepped up to the limestone boulder, squinting at the soot layered over Ethan's diagnostic harness.

To the crowd beginning to murmur around them, Ethan was just another low-value stonemason —a non-combat Kharash Even (חָרַשׁ אֶבֶן) who had starved out of the Hazor quarries and was now trying to scrape coppers by chipping decorative quartz for regional vanity sets. They looked on with the easy contempt of players who prioritized raw metal item-levels over stone and glass. But the young Vanguard was too desperate to care about class tiers. He bowed his head slightly to Ethan, his voice polite and quiet.

"Excuse me, sir," the Vanguard said, gesturing toward his broken weapon.

"I only have six coppers left to my name, and the corporate foundries won't even look at my blade without silver. Is... is it true these glass shards can fix a hilt slot?" Ethan looked up from beneath his soot-stained cowl. His gaze tracked the polite player's hard-coded status bar: [Durability: 3/120 — Weapon Performance Penalty: -90% Critical Output].

"Pass me the frame," Ethan flatly commanded. The young Vanguard nodded quickly, placing the ruined bronze sword onto the dirt grid between Ethan's boots. The upper half of the leaf-shaped blade was entirely missing, leaving an empty, recessed structural channel where the brittle corporate metal had fractured along its un-fluxed impurities. Ethan didn't use an artisan's hammer.

He simply picked up the first deep-red obsidian segment from the ground, his high-tier class dexterity parameters stabilising the angle down to the exact millimetre grain. Clink. The synthetic slag-glass insert slid into the broken bronze channel with a tight, seamless mechanical snap. The curved geometry of the obsidian tooth locked perfectly against the copper housing. The vitreous red face lined up with the hilt like a jagged tooth inside a fractured jaw.

It was a flawless architectural fit, an intentional easter egg of pure structural symmetry derived straight from his manual tool trials. The Vanguard blinked. His weapon's interface refreshed. [System Notification: Weapon Modification Registered] Composite Hybrid Khopesh (Red Obsidian). Durability: 45/45. Note: Base durability limited by brittle glass core, but structural sharpness improved by 14%.

"Woah..." The Vanguard lunged forward, snatching up the modified hilt. He stared at the deep mahogany glass catching the purple Gilead twilight. The edge was impossibly fine, completely lacking the porous irregularities of standard corporate bronze.

"Test the edge," Ethan rasped from behind his soot-caked wrap.

"Strike that broken bronze blade left in the dirt over there." The Vanguard hesitated, then gripped the hilt tightly. He stepped toward a discarded, heavy bronze shield-boss that had been thrown away by the refugees—a thick chunk of dull, warped corporate metal. He raised the hybrid weapon and brought it down in a swift, vertical chop. Sliiiice. There was no fragile crunch, no shattering glass. The deep-red obsidian blade sheared straight through the thick bronze slag with a clean, frictionless zip.

The molecular sharpness of the glass vitrification edge bypassed the metal's defensive index entirely, partitioning the heavy bronze scrap cleanly in half. The cut face of the bronze looked as smooth as butter, while the red glass edge remained completely flawless, without a single scratch or chip. The Vanguard's eyes went wide. He stumbled back, staring at the split bronze on the ground. The wilderness crossroad went absolutely dead silent.

The surrounding crowd of F2P refugees—including the arrogant Skirmisher who had stayed nearby to watch—stared at the sliced bronze, their collective math engines instantly crashing against the reality of what they had just witnessed. A 3-copper piece of glass had just partitioned high-tier bronze scrap with zero durability loss. The Vanguard didn't say a word. He frantically reached into his pouch, grabbed three copper coins, and slammed them onto the limestone boulder, bowing deeply to Ethan.

"Thank you, sir! Thank you!" The crowd erupted. The absolute friction of the regional bronze starvation broke like a dam. Hands clawed at resource bags as heavy infantrymen and skirmishers alike surged forward, shoving their broken, notched tools toward Ethan's feet. The non-combat Kharash Even they had just ignored was sitting on the only viable commodity left on the pass.

"Give me three!"

"I have four coppers! Sell me the curved ones!"

"Hey, friend! Sell to me next! I was standing right here!" Ethan didn't look up at their shouting faces. His fingers moved with cold, mechanical speed. He collected the copper coins and slid the remaining nine obsidian pieces into their desperate hands down to the final unit. Within twelve seconds, all Ethan's stock was cleared. Ethan stood up from the limestone boulder, slinging his canvas tool-bag over his shoulder as the frantic crowd began to scramble over each other to inspect the buyers' weapons.

They thought they were dealing with a simple Kharash Even who had found a lucky vein of red stone.