Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

The convoy returned to Celestial City in the early evening.

Most students went directly back to the academy. The transit vehicles pulled through the main gate of the campus and students disembarked with the particular tiredness of people who had spent six hours doing genuinely demanding physical work, moving immediately toward the residential block, the dining hall, or the medical station depending on how the expedition had treated them.

Lin Yi disembarked with everyone else. Then he turned left instead of right and walked toward the city.

Wang Hao, who had been moving toward the residential block on autopilot, noticed the direction change and stopped. "Where are you going?"

"The hunter market," Lin Yi said.

Wang Hao looked at him for a moment. He was tired enough that his reaction time was slightly slower than usual. "Right now? After six hours in Grade 6 wilderness?"

"The market is open for another three hours."

"Brother Lin." Wang Hao said it the way someone says a name when they want to express an entire paragraph using only two syllables. "You look like you didn’t exert yourself at all today, which is genuinely aggravating, but the rest of us are exhausted. Can it wait until tomorrow?"

"The cores depreciate if I hold them past the weekly market cycle," Lin Yi said. "High-grade beast cores have a registered value that peaks within forty-eight hours of extraction from the wilderness. After that the quality assessment drops a tier."

Wang Hao stared at him. "You know the market depreciation schedule for beast cores." 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"Yes."

"Of course you do." Wang Hao rubbed his face. "Fine. Go. I’ll see you tomorrow." He turned back toward the residential block, then stopped again. "How much are you expecting to get?"

Lin Yi had not run the full calculation, but he had a working estimate based on the quantity and grade of what was inside. "Enough," he said.

Wang Hao looked at him with the expression of someone who had learned that "enough" from Lin Yi covered a range considerably wider than the word suggested in most contexts. He said nothing further and walked away.

....

Celestial City’s hunter market occupied a designated district in the commercial quarter, three city blocks of registered trading houses, independent assessment counters, bulk material exchanges, and specialty equipment dealers. The district ran late on expedition return days because the market had learned through decades of operation that hunters coming back from wilderness zones were carrying things they wanted to convert to currency while the grade assessments were still favorable.

Lin Yi entered through the main thoroughfare. The district was busy. He could see other hunters from earlier expeditions, not from the academy, independent contractors and guild-affiliated teams who operated in the wilderness on their own schedules, moving between stalls and trading houses with their own hauls.

He had been to market before. Jianghe had its own version of this, smaller in scale but operating on the same principles. The dynamics were familiar. Sellers wanted the highest grade assessment possible. Buyers wanted the lowest price achievable. The space between those two positions was where the negotiation happened, and the outcome depended on which side had better information about what the goods were actually worth.

He went to the main assessment desk first.

The assessor was a middle-aged man with the practiced eyes of someone who had graded wilderness drops for years and had developed the ability to read quality accurately at a glance. He looked at Lin Yi, looked at the Spatial Storage Token, and said, "Storage token. How much are you pulling?"

"Several categories," Lin Yi said. "I’ll need full assessment, not bulk rate."

The assessor looked at him more carefully. "Full assessment takes longer. I charge per item category assessed, not per item."

"I know. I want it done properly."

The assessor set up the assessment interface, a scanning unit connected to a quality grading system that cross-referenced the assessed item against the registered market standards for the current week. Lin Yi opened the Spatial Storage Token and began withdrawing by category.

The first category was beast cores. What came out of the storage space and onto the assessment counter stopped the assessor mid-reach.

The volume was not what he had prepared for.

Beast cores from level 25 through level 70 monsters, amplified a thousand times by Lin Yi’s system, each stack containing numbers that represented the output of what should have been months of collective effort by a full hunting team. The assessor’s scanning unit registered the grade assessments automatically, the readout scrolling faster than it typically did because the quantity was feeding through the system faster than single-item assessments usually required.

"How long were you in the wilderness?" the assessor said, not stopping the scan.

"Six hours," Lin Yi said.

The assessor looked at him. Then looked at the cores. Then looked back at him with the specific expression of someone who had assessed wilderness drops for years and had just encountered something that didn’t fit the patterns they had built those years on. "Six hours," he repeated.

"Yes."

The assessor didn’t ask the follow-up question. He returned to the scan.

The second category was the weapon fragments and material bundles. High Energy Cores stacked in quantities that the counter had to extend its display to accommodate. Superior Recovery Elixirs, rarer than anything a solo hunter typically extracted in a single expedition, assessed at the premium grade because the amplification hadn’t just multiplied the quantity, it had in several cases elevated the grade tier of the drop itself, a mid-grade material becoming a high-grade material when multiplied through the system.

Lin Yi waited while the assessor worked through the categories methodically. He didn’t rush it. The accurate assessment was worth the time.

The final grade calculation took approximately twenty minutes.

The assessor looked at the total on his readout screen, and then he looked at Lin Yi, and there was a quality to the silence that preceded what he said next that communicated he was choosing his words carefully. "I can’t buy this volume myself," he said. "My trading house doesn’t hold enough liquid capital to purchase this at fair grade price."

"I know," Lin Yi said. "I’m not selling to you."

"Then what did you want the assessment for?"