The boy's crimson eyes widened into dinner plates, the street-rat bravado completely evaporating from his face.
"Wait... you're from Earth?" he whispered, his voice trembling with a mix of disbelief and sudden, desperate hope.
I gave a single, firm nod beneath the shadow of my deep canvas hood.
Betch looked between the two of us, completely oblivious to the multiversal revelation that had just occurred in his holding cell. He rolled his eyes, scratching the back of his neck dismissively.
"Well, whatever weird bounty hunter business you've got with him, keep the boy. He's out of my hair."
Realizing I wasn't an enemy… but rather a lifeline back to something familiar… the brunette boy stopped trying to pull away. His posture relaxed, and he fell into step right beside me, completely compliant now that he knew I was leading him to someone named Father Columbia who understood his true origin.
We exited the gloomy guardhouse and approached the 5th District exit barrier. I reached into my trench coat, pulled out my silver 7th-Rank Luminous Knight status card, and pulled two silver coins from my purse… one for my departure toll and one to cover the bureaucratic clearance fee for the custody transfer of the reincarnated boy. My funds officially ticked down to 1 gold and 42 silver pieces. The gatekeepers waved us through without a second glance.
With the boy following closely at my heel, we left the decaying tenements behind and proceeded directly toward the gates of the 6th District, the capital's renowned artisan and crafting sector.
As we walked, the kid wouldn't shut up. The sudden relief of finding a fellow earthling turned him into an absolute chatterbox, and he began rambling about nonsense terms I had only ever seen in the dustiest, most obscure fictional archives of my past life.
"You know, bounty hunter, in my previous life on Earth, I was a hardcore gamer, I read all those LitRPG novels, manga, isekai stories... I always thought if I got hit by a truck and reincarnated into a fantasy world with magic, I'd be some overpowered hero with a cheat system. But look at me now. I'm just a level-one loser pickpocketing bread crusts in the slums. Andromeda is brutal."
Beneath my mask, I remained perfectly mute, my single jade-green eye scanning the storefronts as his words bounced off my hood. A gamer. A loser. The universe certainly had a twisted sense of humor, placing the fate of a ninety-day cosmic countdown on a teenager who thought life was a localized tabletop simulation. But I didn't care about his self-pity; I only cared about fulfilling my contract with Nautilus and delivering him to the Church before midnight.
Before he could start explaining what a "stat allocation" was, I finally found what I was looking for.
Tucked between a high-tier armor boutique and an alchemical supply depot was a grand, soot-stained workshop. The heavy iron sign swinging above the door depicted a hammer overlapping a glowing sapphire crystal. This was the premier Artisan's Forge of the 6th District… a place where high-tier craftsmen utilized specialized localized mana matrices to manipulate artifact geometry.
I pushed the heavy oak door open, the scent of charcoal, molten gold, and refined mana vapor instantly hitting my senses. The boy followed me inside, his eyes darting around the glowing furnaces in awe. I walked straight up to the heavy obsidian counter where the master artisan stood, ready to pull the nineteen rings out of my index finger's inventory void and finally forge my ultimate accessory loadout.
The master artisan, a burly man with soot-stained forearms and a magnifying lens strapped to his leather headpiece, wiped his hands on an apron and looked down at my hooded silhouette.
"Ma'am, what can I do for you?" he asked, his voice echoing off the stone walls of the forge.
I didn't answer verbally. Moving with a fluid, deliberate motion, I raised my single right arm over the polished iron counter. I channeled a localized thread of mana into the golden band on my index finger, opening a precise, microscopic rift in the spatial matrix.
Clatter.
With a brilliant, metallic ripple, the nineteen stolen elemental rings spilled smoothly from the void, cascading across the iron surface in a vibrant heap of pulsing red, deep sapphire blue, and shimmering emerald green. Before the artisan could even process the sudden influx of raw magical energy, I slid a fresh sheet from my notepad across the table. It read simply and commandingly:
"Merge them."
The artisan's jaw dropped slightly as he picked up one of the sapphire bands, his specialized magnifying lens clicking as he evaluated the dense mana stone matrices.
"By the gods... these are high-level baseline artifacts, lass, the mana structures are incredibly pure and stable. Where did you get a haul like this? Did you systematically clear a high-tier dungeon or dismantle a rogue syndicate vault?"
I remained entirely frozen and mute beneath the shadow of my canvas hood. My analytical mind merely cataloged his reaction with cold amusement. I certainly hadn't cleared a dungeon; I had simply painted Don Anthony's deepest cartel vault with the blood of his vanguard before robbing him blind.
Beside me, the brunette boy's crimson eyes practically bulged out of his head as he stared at the glittering pile of jewelry. He slapped his hands against the counter, his voice cracking with pure, unadulterated awe.
"Woah, bounty hunter! You must have been absolutely grinding your life away for this stuff! Are you like... level 100 or something? This is literally a stash of legendary items! Did you solo a raid boss?!"
A silent, cynical sigh vibrated behind my mask. As expected, the kid was a textbook Earth gamer… someone who had clearly never touched grass or experienced the gritty reality of actual combat in his previous life. He was completely detached from reality. There was no such thing as a "leveling system," "experience points," or "raid bosses" in the brutal, evolutionary geography of Andromeda. Here, you didn't level up; you either evolved your biological strain through blood, or you ended up in a ditch.
"Shut your mouth, boy. Grown-ups are talking," the artisan snapped, glaring at the rambling teenager before turning his focused attention back to me.
He systematically sorted the rings into three precise piles: the six magic enhancement, five healing, and eight mana pool reservoirs.
"Well, compressing these down is going to take a serious amount of specialized alchemical heat and matrix weaving, lass. It's high-tier work. One royal gold coin should cover the labor and the forge catalysts. It'll take at least an hour to compress them flawlessly."
Hearing the price, I reached into my trench coat and accessed my leather purse. I pulled out my single, gleaming royal gold coin… leaving my remaining funds at exactly 42 silver pieces. I slid the heavy gold piece across the counter.
The artisan caught the coin with a nod of satisfaction, immediately sweeping the nineteen rings into a velvet-lined stone tray and marching toward the roaring, white-hot magical furnace at the back of the workshop.
With exactly one hour of downtime before my final accessory loadout was ready, I turned around, picked a sturdy wooden chair in the corner of the forge, and sat down. The brunette boy quickly scrambled over, taking the seat right next to mine, still buzzing with a million questions about my "stats." I leaned my head back into the shadows, letting my translucent blood wings rest flat against the chair frame beneath my trench coat. The countdown to midnight was ticking, my currency was depleted to silver, but within sixty minutes, my true power would be consolidated.
The heavy, rhythmic clack-whirrr of the artisan's alchemical apparatus echoed through the vaulted workshop, punctuated by the occasional hiss of pressurized ether gas as the master craftsman began the delicate process of melting down the elemental matrices. The air grew steadily warmer, vibrating with the residual energy of nineteen localized magic fields being forcibly compressed.
Beside me, the seventeen-year-old brunette boy shifted restlessly on his wooden stool, his crimson eyes tracking the flickering orange light of the forge before landing back on my completely frozen, hooded silhouette. Cut off from his digital delusions and staring at a mute vanguard who had just dropped an entire hoard of high-tier artifacts onto a counter, the urge to validate his own miserable existence completely overcame his caution. He leaned in, resting his elbows on his knees, and began unspooling his life story like a broken record.
"You know, bounty hunter... you look like someone who understands the grind, so you've gotta understand how absolutely rigged my spawn point was," he began, his voice a mix of lingering adolescent bitterness and a strange, desperate nostalgia for a world he would never see again
"When I first opened my eyes in Andromeda, I realized I had been reincarnated as a literal infant. Born in some backwater, dirt-poor farming village in the countryside. It was the absolute, textbook definition of a standard Isekai prologue. I thought, 'Okay, cool, this is where the training arc begins.'"
He scoffed, running a hand through his messy hair.
"From the age of one to three, while normal babies were eating dirt, I was hyper-focusing on learning the local regional dialect. I managed to master Alatist pretty quickly. Honestly? I count my lucky stars every single day that the universe didn't curse me with an Appraiser's affinity at birth. If I had been born a professional appraiser, the local guilds would have dragged me out of the crib and forced me to master three entirely separate, ancient linguistic structures just to read an item description… Alatist, Dalon, and formal Carianese. What an absolute, monumental bummer that would've been. Imagine spending your youth memorizing syntax instead of leveling up."
I sat perfectly still, my right hand resting casually near the edge of my crimson trench coat, my single jade-green eye locked onto him from beneath the darkness of my hood. A cold, sharp pang of memory rippled behind my mask, but I didn't let a single muscle twitch. He called it a "bummer." He spoke of it like it was a tedious chore in a strategy game. He had absolutely no conception of the reality of that path. He didn't know what it was like to be a frail, mute child, locked in a dimly lit archive for eighteen years under the cruel hand of syndicate handlers, staring at ancient, bleeding Dalon scrolls until your eyes wept from cognitive strain, just to ensure your masters didn't execute you for a single mistranslated glyph. To him, the three languages of the appraiser were a minor inconvenience; to me, they had been the very chains that defined my early existence.
"Anyway, once I hit five years old, I decided it was time to start testing the mechanics of this world. I had all this theoretical knowledge from LitRPGs and light novels back on Earth. I knew the drill. You start in the starting zone, you look for low-tier trash mobs, and you farm them. So, I snuck out into the woods behind the farm and started hunting down feral slimes with a sharpened wooden stake. And you know what happened? I popped like ten of them, and absolutely nothing popped up in my vision. No notification, no blue screen, no dinging sound. I checked my pulse, I looked at my hands… zero experience points. A massive, total bummer. That was the exact moment I realized Andromeda didn't have a standardized global UI. There was no automated stat tracking."
He leaned back, shaking his head with a grimace.
"But I wasn't gonna let a lack of a built-in system stop a professional gamer. I knew I needed to get stronger, to get out of the tutorial village. By the time I turned six, I decided it was time for my main quest. I sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night, crawled into the back of a merchant's supply carriage that was passing through the trade routes, and rode it all the way into the capital city of Caria. The moment the wheels stopped, my gamer instincts kicked in. I went straight down to the nearest sector Bureau guildhall, marched right up to the front desk, and demanded to register for a beginner's combat license so I could start taking bounty contracts."
The boy let out a dry, self-deprecating laugh.
"Man, the receptionist didn't even hesitate. She looked at a six-year-old kid covered in hay and just said 'No.' She didn't care that I technically had the tactical mind of a fully grown Earth gamer or that I had combat experience sticking slimes in the mud. She just pointed at the door. I found out the hard way that the minimum legal age for registered adventuring or mercenary work in Caria is fourteen. A six-year-old isn't allowed anywhere near a contract board. It was a massive drag. I had no money, no guild protection, and no stats."
He looked down at his calloused, dirt-stained fingers, his crimson eyes darkening slightly as he recalled the shift in his survival strategy.
"So, I had to start off completely fresh from the absolute bottom of the food chain: petty theft. I spent years in the lower districts learning how to blend into crowds, how to spot loose coin purses, and how to slide my fingers into a merchant's pocket without breaking the thread. I used the money I stole to slowly, meticulously build up my build. I'd save up copper by copper, silver by silver, grinding the streets until I could finally afford a real steel shortsword from a low-tier blacksmith. It took eight whole years of living like a stray dog."
"Then, the day I finally turned fourteen, I sprinted back to the Bureau and officially got my baseline registration, my very first official monster extermination contract was to clear a localized horde of goblins that had been raiding the storage cellars near the outer walls. And let me tell you, bounty hunter... real combat is nothing like a video game. Those things were vicious, foul-smelling, and they didn't just stand there waiting for a turn-based attack. It was a brutal mess. I managed to survive, though. I sliced out their hearts… since the Bureau required physical monster cores or organs as proof of kill… and brought them back to the counter in a bloody leather sack. Easy money, sure, but still... no level-up screen. No hidden class unlock. Just a few silver coins and a sore shoulder."
He sighed deeply, slouching forward until his forehead almost touched his knees.
"I've spent the last three years… from fourteen to seventeen.. just grinding day in and day out, trying everything to become powerful in this broken world. But the economy here is completely trash. Earlier today, I was just trying to secure some quick pocket change to pay off a bad food debt. I was wearing my newly bought, custom-fitted iron plate armor… the first decent gear I've ever managed to actually purchase with my own hard-earned money… and I was just attempting a standard, low-risk pickpocket run in the market square. But my luck finally ran out. Some high-tier Capital Knight vanguard saw my hand move. They tackled me right into the cobblestones, dragged me to the cells, and immediately confiscated my entire armor set and my sword. Betch told me I was being held because someone incredibly high up in the Bureau administrative offices had been actively searching for my specific description for weeks."
He stopped talking, turning his face toward me, his crimson eyes searching the unreadable void of my canvas hood for some semblance of sympathy or validation.
"And now... here I am. Completely broke, stripped of my gear, and being carted off to some priest named Father Columbia because of whatever weird cosmic target is painted on my back. It's just... a total bummer, man."
I remained entirely silent, the darkness beneath my hood swallowing his complaints. My analytical mind processed his long, rambling monologue with clinical efficiency, filtering out the childish video game terminology to look at the raw data underneath.
The boy was seventeen. He had survived the brutal streets of Caria for eleven years using nothing but his wits and minor street thievery. He had no unique evolutionary strain, no high-tier magical affinity, and his physical stats were thoroughly baseline. He was weak… a fragile human spark in a world populated by high-tier monsters, corrupt syndicates, and divine executioners. Yet, his crimson eyes were a perfect, undeniable match for the ancient soul markers Father Columbia had translated from the forgotten archives. He was the catalyst for the ninety-day ritual, the very pivot point upon which the Bureau and the Holy Church were balancing their apocalyptic chess game.
I didn't care about his lost iron armor or his imaginary experience points. I only cared that he was alive, intact, and securely under my control. Within the hour, my elemental rings would be fully forged into a singular weapon of absolute utility. Once my own power was consolidated, I would hand this gamer over to the Church to fulfill my administrative contract with Nautilus.
The heavy furnace doors at the back of the workshop suddenly let out a massive, pressurized hiss, and a brilliant wave of red, green, and blue light spilled across the stone floor as the artisan prepared to draw the molten alloys from the crucible. The hour was almost up.