Volume 1 – The VR World
Chapter 5 – The Gilded Assembly
Velispire didn't breathe. It pulsed.
Every lantern was gaslit chrome, every canal turned molten gold by alchemical trade barges drifting through artificial fog. Spires stretched upward like sharpened coins, each floor home to another guild hall, trading bank, or black-market lounge pretending to be legitimate.
Even the dirt here cost more than the starting regions' land deeds.
And somewhere beneath all of it, Soren was rewriting the rules again.
I moved through the central Exchange without my crown equipped, blending into the crowd. Dozens of player-run shops framed the rotunda—alchemy stalls, pet breeders, forgers selling signature steel with decorative stats. Most of them never saw the real power shifting under their feet.
Above, a glass dome tracked global market trends in real time, the chart lines etched in slow arcs of pale light. Today's trade volume had already tripled yesterday's.
Soren called it momentum logic. I called it watching him gamble with the laws of digital gravity.
He sat on a cantilevered balcony halfway up the Minister's Spire, drinking something iced with rosemary floating on top. The wind carried music from the artisan quarter, jazz riffs looped over synth percussion—one of his experiments in cross-server player tourism.
"Still refusing to use fast travel?" he asked without looking.
"I walk."
"You philosophize."
"I monitor."
That earned a slight grin. He gestured at the seat across from him, and I took it without argument.
His view spanned the entirety of Velisport's core sector. He could track cargo movement by shadow position alone. Below us, a duel broke out between two merchants—likely a legal dispute gone violent. Instead of calling guards, he logged the event with a flick of his fingers. Market arbitration. Let the system decide value through blood.
"You're letting PvP run inside a commerce dispute?" I asked.
"I'm letting consequences teach lessons."
He leaned forward, pulling up a private ledger visible only to us. A cascade of numbers rolled across it, currencies both in-game and otherwise.
"We passed twelve billion tokens in movement this cycle."
"Three percent of it yours?"
"Five. Once you include black channel holdings."
"You're proud of that?"
He tapped the side of his glass. "I'm proud they don't know."
Soren wasn't a fighter. Not in the sword-swinging, blood-in-the-dirt sense.
He was the blade you never saw coming—thin, sharp, elegant.
In the early days, while I was still trying to perfect neural layering for sensory sync, he'd already designed an investment engine that could auto-balance trade inflation across three dozen regions. It punished monopolies. Rewarded scarcity. Then rewrote the rules and did the opposite six weeks later.
Players called him "the Chancellor." Half reverently, half in fear.
The rest just tried to copy him and ended up broke.
He pulled up a map overlay of the continent, now a patchwork of guild territories, flagged zones, and trade routes drawn like veins across parchment.
"This is the game," he said. "Not dragons. Not kingdoms. This. Movement. Choice. Flow."
I watched a small province blink red. A failed auction. An economy crash.
Soren traced it with one finger. "That town will riot by morning."
"You could fix it."
"I will. For a price."
The look he gave me wasn't smug. It was patient. Like he saw the future moving in slow motion and everyone else was stuck in real time.
I leaned back in the chair. "You think the link we're missing is behavioral?"
"No. I think the link is cost."
He stood, smoothing out his coat. "Every world has a cost. This one just lets us hide it better."
He paused at the edge of the balcony, hands resting against the rail.
"I want in when you crack it."
"Darius already said the same."
"That's because Darius wants to kill it. I want to own it."