Jenny had been cautious at first, but by the end she nearly burst out laughing. Soul? Please—this was the twenty-first century. Aliens had already made contact with Earth. Who still believed in that kind of nonsense? Was this breathtakingly beautiful woman actually an idiot?
Or maybe she wasn't an idiot at all. Maybe she was someone from Hollywood. This lavishly decorated room—could it be a reality show stage?
Intelligent beings instinctively interpret the world through their own lens, and Jenny had fallen into exactly that trap. She'd filed away every unsettling detail under one comfortable label: acting.
The house belonged to a production crew. The carpets, the sculptures—all props, all fake. This enchanting woman was just an aspiring actress. That meal they'd served her earlier was probably some kind of trick—a magic-show illusion, payment in kind for whatever this was. And behind the hidden cameras, countless viewers were watching every second of her performance.
Once she thought about it that way, everything made sense. This was just an elaborate reality show set.
The realization hit her: all those viewers had watched her wolf down that meal like she hadn't eaten in days. Jenny cringed inwardly. She had to recover some dignity.
"Can you really get me anything?" She decided to play along, summoning every ounce of bravado she had.
The Siren blinked. This human had been trembling like a leaf not five minutes ago. What had gotten into her?
It didn't matter. A deal was a deal. She nodded smoothly. "Whatever the client asks for."
Jenny tilted her head, thinking. Asking for something absurd like world domination would make her look shallow on camera—terrible optics. She settled on something grounded.
"One million dollars," she said, keeping her voice deliberately casual. "Can you do that?"
The Siren nodded. She reached into a drawer, pulled a check from a thick stack, glanced at the amount, and set it on the table.
Jenny reached for it. The Siren's hand pressed down on hers. "I'll need your payment first."
What do I even have that's worth a million dollars? Jenny almost laughed. The crew must have gone all out on this one—big-budget production. Anyone without inside knowledge would be completely taken in.
Playing along, she said, "You mentioned souls earlier, right? How much soul does a million dollars cost?"
Something shifted in the Siren's eyes. "Your soul is the source of your life. To complete this transaction, I would need to extract a fragment of its essence—the equivalent of ten years of your lifespan."
Jenny's skin prickled despite herself. The atmosphere was deeply unsettling—she could feel her hair stand on end—but she pushed the feeling down and chalked it all up to good set design.
She raised an eyebrow and said, in the tone of someone who's seen it all, "Do I need to sign something? Parchment, maybe? A contract written in blood?"
A flicker of contempt crossed the Siren's expression. My master is the God of Trade and Souls. Comparing her methods to bargain-bin demon tricks is almost insulting.
"No paperwork needed. I state the terms, and if you raise no objections..." She slid the check across the table. "It's yours."
Jenny felt something pull loose inside her—a strange, hollow sensation she couldn't quite name. Before she could dwell on it, the check caught her eye and held it.
She'd seen checks before, flashed by "young hotshots" in clubs who threw money around like water. She snatched it up and studied it carefully.
It looked real.
But that was impossible.
"Will there be anything else, ma'am?"
"No—no, I'm fine. Thanks." Jenny was already backing toward the door. The crew must have mixed up their props and handed her an actual check by mistake. She bolted.
She didn't stop until she was a full block away. Only then did she look back. No one was following her. She clutched the check tightly against her chest and took the long way home.
In a place Jenny's eyes would never reach, the Siren bowed to the empty air. "Master."
Thea stepped out of the shadows and accepted the wisp of soul essence the Siren passed to her. It was clean, vibrant, alive with an almost floral clarity—nothing like the stagnant, reeking shades that drifted through Charon's river. Those were the dead. This was the real thing.
By combining the Commerce domain with the Soul domain, she could use souls as a medium of trade—harvesting fragments of living essence in exchange for fair value—and witness the arc of a soul from life toward death. A way to peek through the curtain at the Death domain.
There was a secondary purpose, too: she was testing the Spectre's limits. As it turned out, the old Spectre had no objection whatsoever. Thea's principle of fair trade was itself a rule, and the Spectre—a being bound by rules—wouldn't interfere with rules being followed.
"Choose a hundred of your kin," Thea told the Siren. "Send them across the world to collect souls on my behalf."
She was precise about this. Thirty years was the absolute maximum she would take from any one person. The degradation of a soul only became visible at the very end of life—there would be no mass deaths, no sudden waves of illness. Not in the short term.
In her mind, this was a fair exchange. Take Jenny, for example: she might never earn that million dollars in a decade of hard work. By a certain logic, Jenny had come out ahead.
Still, to prevent any meddlesome superheroes from shutting down the operation, she cast an enchantment on every trading house: only those in genuine despair could see them at all.
She turned the soul essence over in her fingers. A delicate, crystalline mist curled around her hand, pulsing with life—saturated with memory, emotion, thought, every fragment of the person it had been taken from. Everything a human being was lived inside their soul.
But this was an ordinary person's soul. Under her gaze, it dissolved into dust in under three seconds.
Thea sighed. She would need purer, more potent souls if she wanted to truly understand the domain she was reaching for.
With her orders given, the Siren threw herself into the work. She selected a hundred of her people and dispatched them to every corner of the world.
In just three days, they brought back ninety-two soul fragments. Most were ten years. Some were twenty. One exceptional case came in at thirty.
The clients ranged from total skeptics who dismissed the whole thing as theater, to true believers who tried to pry for extra details—and paid with erased memories for their curiosity. The Siren's kin were no ordinary creatures; even dropped into the middle of a city, any one of them could hold her own against a top-tier villain. Ordinary humans didn't pose much of a challenge.
The requests were all over the map. Most wanted money. A few asked for weapons. Some wanted health. And one man—years deep in the Hollywood grind, convinced he simply lacked the talent to make it—paid thirty years of his life for artistic ability.
The trading houses fulfilled every request without question.
Word spread quickly. Whispers filtered into underground channels: somewhere out there was a place that could get you anything, buy anything, sell anything. For months afterward, it became the hottest topic among information brokers in the shadow world.
As the soul fragments accumulated, Thea settled into a new rhythm: whenever a fresh idea struck her, she would draw out a soul and use it to test her theories. The Life and Death domains were twin peaks—crack open even one of them, and both her power and her understanding would undergo a fundamental transformation.