A few minutes later, I felt his eyes and head become heavier so I let him sleep in peace and went back to the kitchen to clean up the mess I’d made before Louie walked on a fragment and hurt his paws. As I started picking up the biggest of them, my mind drifted to how I would be able to afford to pay for the hospital expenses. I was making good progress on my student loans, especially since I didn’t travel or do anything fun really, but was still down eighty thousand.
I wasn’t being pressured as I’d never missed any of my payments but this additional cost would definitely change things. Maybe I could ask for some kind of loan from work.
No, I’d rather sell my kidney than ask them for money upfront. I wouldn’t mind selling my department lead’s kidney though…
“Fuck!” I almost shouted as a piece of glass pierced my palm. It began to bleed all over the kitchen tiles.
I washed it quickly with water and wrapped it in a cloth I used for rinsing the dishes. The white cloth immediately became red but soon the colored stain stopped expanding as the wound ceased bleeding.
I needed to keep my head together and figure out a solution.
That was when my eyes fell on the DEM tablet lying on the table. Leo did say that there was a lot of money to be made and I had always been good at making a profit on the marketplace of Guild Wars 2. Perhaps I could take a look. I didn’t need to enjoy it, and I wouldn’t. But I could really use the money right now.
I picked up the tablet and started browsing the Dark Energy Marketplace.
4
A man with a plan
I spent several hours on the tablet, researching how everything worked. Shopping on the market turned out to be ridiculously easy. In fact, it was easier to shop there than it was on Amazon since most of the regular items could be delivered to you before you even paid. The promise of payment within a certain number of days was enough. The price, of course, got higher the further out the payment date was set, and I guessed that this enabled any poor fucker with bad financial management to become indebted to the DEM pretty easily. I didn’t know much about this world or this company in particular, but I had a pretty good idea of what would happen to anyone who didn’t meet their payment dates.
Selling things on the DEM, on the other hand, was a bit more complicated and required more careful planning—even if somebody just wanted to use it to flip items for profit, which was exactly what I intended to do. The best information I managed to find was in the Apocosmos’s equivalent of the world wide web, called The Source. Its video section—unimaginatively called The Source - Videos—which was eerily similar to YouTube, had a multitude of videos with people explaining how to flip items for profit. Most of them looked very much like the fuckboy working-from-Bali day trader Youtubers, but the information in there was quite useful for a “DEM flipping virgin” like me, according to one of the video’s titles.
I subscribed to a couple of them and to my surprise I saw that the numbers of their followers were in the millions. Taking a slight detour from my research, I looked at some of the other channels and found quite a few with billions of subscribers. There was a channel with a couple of dark elf women traveling through worlds I had never seen before, their video thumbnails featuring fantastic forest landscapes, exploding volcanoes, and swimming in luminescent purple waters. Another channel resembled the Discovery Channel, though some of the featured beasts were straight from the imagination. The last one I checked before putting an end to my procrastination was full of tutorials for languages I didn’t even know existed.
I dragged myself out of the rabbit hole that I knew online videos were and got back to my research on making cash. Flipping items for profit didn’t require months of research and could generate profit quite fast. But it seemed that no matter how great the amount of money earned this way would be for someone like me, with regular obligations in the Cosmos, it was meager when you took into account Apocosmos inflation, which was why not many people appeared to have bothered with it.
My research showed that the DEM took a 15% fee for every transaction from the side of the seller. And since the marketplaces were segmented by realm, country, and area, each customer had to filter the place they wanted to buy from. Checking the New York State section, I found a lot of people selling the same items at different prices, which was a very good sign. It meant that there was a lot of traffic and fluctuations in pricing over time. It was exactly like trading in online games, which started to make me hopeful about the whole thing. My train of thought was derailed yet again as my phone started vibrating and I picked it up to see Leo calling me.
“Hey, man. Everything alright? Did I wake you up? Did you watch our stream?”
I thought of telling him that I wasn’t alright, that my insurance company was a piece-of-shit money-grabbing corporate conglomerate and that I had to pay almost thirty thousand dollars for my little trip to the ER. But with Leo coming from a wealthy family, he would most definitely not have understood my predicament and might have done something extremely stupid and offensive like offering to help me with the money. I wasn’t looking for pity. And so I steadied my voice and replied calmly.
“Everything’s fine here. I watched it for a bit before falling asleep, and
