"I want my item back."
O'Shea turned. His eyes moved from the circlet in James's hand to James's face, and then to the worn jacket and the scuffed boots and the age, and whatever conclusion he'd already drawn about this room came apart visibly — his mouth opened and closed once and his hand came up off the table.
James held the circlet and waited.
"Wait." O'Shea's voice lost its smoothness for exactly that one word, and then he pulled it back. He took his glasses off the chain around his neck and put them on and looked at James properly and said: "I apologise. I walked past you without — that was wrong of me." He pulled out the chair directly across from James himself and sat down. "My name is Ciarán O'Shea. I'm the Director of this Bureau."
James sat down and set the circlet on the table in front of him with his hand resting beside it.
The Director. Not a floor manager, not a senior appraiser. Seán had pressed one button on that phone and the Director of the entire TRB had come down personally. James turned that over once and kept his face still.
O'Shea folded his hands. "James. I'm going to offer you one hundred million dollars for that item."
The number sat in the room. James looked at O'Shea's face and not at the circlet, because O'Shea had said it without a buildup — no qualification, no explanation, just a figure delivered flat and clean, and a man watching to see what the person across from him did with it.
He said it too calmly. You don't open with a hundred million dollars that calmly unless a hundred million is not the number you're worried about.
"You said Singapore sold for eight hundred and twenty million," James said. "And these stats are better than that one." He looked at O'Shea. "So why would I sell for a hundred?"
O'Shea didn't flinch. "Because Singapore sold to a private guild and that item hasn't been seen in eleven years. Nobody knows where it is or whether it's being used." He held James's gaze. "I'm not offering you a worse deal. I'm offering you a smarter one."
O'Shea's hand moved toward his glasses and stopped. "James—"
"I'll take it to Marcus Hale." James stood. "Emerald Spire will make an offer."
Niamh looked up from her notepad. O'Shea stood at the same time James did and the composure that had come back after the apology showed a crack along the edge — not gone, but visible, the way a wall looks before something shifts behind it.
"That item," O'Shea said, and his voice came out slower and more deliberate than it had been, "is not simply a high-value equip."
He set both hands flat on the table. "The Purify aura it carries neutralises Abyssal Miasma. Floor 45 has killed every raid team that has entered it for forty years. Not the enemies. The air itself. Every Challenger who gets within range without a Purify source active dies in under ninety seconds regardless of HP."
He leaned forward. "The Singapore circlet had a Purify aura too, but the output was capped at twenty-two percent and the range was four metres. We acquired access to it for three attempts on Floor 45. Three teams. All dead within the first minute because the aura wasn't strong enough to cover the full party and the Miasma got through the edges."
He looked at the circlet. "Yours carries forty percent output and the party aura radius is significantly wider. That is not a marginal improvement. That is the difference between a tool that fails and one that might actually work."
He sat back. "Ireland is stuck at Floor 45. The US, Japan, South Korea — their top teams are already past it. We've asked what they used to clear it and they won't share. National advantage. They keep it close and move ahead while everyone else stays behind."
"The working theory is that they found something that handles the Miasma. Something we haven't been able to replicate." He paused. "Right now the entire world is pushing against Floor 60 and nobody is through it yet. If we clear Floor 45 with this, Ireland doesn't just catch up — we're in the same race as everyone else trying to break Floor 60."
He spread his hands. "If a private guild controls it, only their teams benefit. If the Bureau manages it, every approved attempt team in Ireland gets access — and if we crack Floor 45, we find out what's on the other side before the rest of the world does."
James stood with his hand on the back of the chair and let him finish.
Then he sat back down.
O'Shea sat. He took his glasses off and set them on the table — the first time he'd done it deliberately rather than from being caught off-guard — and he looked at James without them. "I'm not asking to buy it. I'm proposing a Resource Sharing Agreement. The Bureau manages the item and contracts it to approved Floor 45 attempt teams on a usage basis." He put both hands flat on the table. "You receive a royalty payment every two weeks. A hundred thousand dollars."
$100,000. Every two weeks. Whether he cleared a floor or not, whether he was injured or between floors or grinding — the payment arrived every fourteen days.
"Terms," James said.
"Legal contract, government-enforced. The item cannot be transferred, used, or sold without your written authorisation. Every usage is logged — which team, which attempt, how long. You receive a full report with each payment." O'Shea glanced at Niamh, then back. "If the Bureau violates any term of the agreement, the contract nullifies immediately and full ownership reverts to you." He paused. "We also strongly recommend an anonymity clause. Your identity as the holder is sealed from public registry and the payment routes through a protected account." He stopped.
Niamh finished it. Her voice was even and her pen hadn't moved. "If your name gets attached to this item publicly, every major guild in Ireland will have someone outside your door before the day is over."
"I'll take the anonymity clause," James said.
O'Shea nodded once. "Niamh."
She closed her notepad, stood, and looked at James. "Sit and wait." Then she walked out without looking back.
O'Shea turned to Seán, still standing by the door. "The wolf hides — go back to appraisal and reprocess them at the highest premium rate we have. The receipt he's holding gets voided and reissued."
Seán nodded and left.
O'Shea turned back to James and for the first time since he'd walked into this room, nobody else was in it. He asked if James wanted anything while they waited.
James looked at the Tower through the window. The black spire rose out of the city and disappeared into the sky the same way it always had, visible from everywhere, answerable to nothing.
"Water," he said.
Niamh was in another room writing a contract that would put a hundred thousand dollars into a protected account every two weeks in exchange for an item James had carried out of a forest in his System inventory after a single afternoon on Floor 1. O'Shea sat across from him and kept his glasses on the table and said nothing else, because he was a man who had learned not to fill his own silences, and James was eighteen years old and sitting in a chair that probably cost more than his mother made in a month and he was not going to fill it either.