The journey from the foothills took twelve days. Matheo wasn't in a carriage; he was in an iron cage bolted to the back of a merchant's wagon. He was naked save for a loincloth, exposed to the biting wind, but his body didn't tremble. The six months of Star-Moss and 1.5x gravity had turned his skin into a leathery shell.
When the wagon finally rolled through the gates of Onyx Reach, the capital of the provincial territory, the sheer scale of the world hit him again.
The walls were fifty feet high, reinforced with mana-conductive steel. Inside, the "City" was a chaotic nightmare. Buildings were piled on top of each other like jagged teeth. The streets were packed with people, but the air was heavy with the smell of coal, expensive perfume, and the rotting scent of the slave pens.
The Merchant, a fat man named Garen who treated Matheo like a piece of prize beef, led him to the Central Trade Plaza.
"Step up, Thirty-Silver," Garen grunted, pulling the chain so hard Matheo's neck snapped forward.
Matheo stood on the stone pedestal. Around him, other slaves were being sold. Most were broken, weeping, or half-dead. But Matheo stood still. His "Cold Mind" wasn't looking for a savior; it was observing the guards' weapons, the flow of currency, and the architecture of the city.
He noticed the Magic Indicators on the streetlights—this city ran on high-grade mana. That meant there were cores everywhere.
"Look at this one!" Garen shouted to the crowd of wealthy buyers. "Six months in the Black-Iron Mines and not a single cough! Look at the density of the muscle. He's been eating Star-Moss and lived! He's got the constitution of a Rank-F, even without a mana-core. A perfect guard-dog or a deep-pit miner!"
A man in a silk robe stepped forward. He reached up and shoved his fingers into Matheo's mouth to check his teeth. Matheo felt the urge to bite the man's hand off, but he stayed motionless.
"He's quiet," the man noted. "Too quiet. Is he broken?"
"He's better than broken," Garen laughed. "He's obedient. He doesn't waste breath on screaming."
The bidding started. In the village, he was worth 30 Silver. Here, in the city where labor was the engine of the economy, his price climbed.
"50 Silver!"
"70 Silver!"
"1 Gold!"
Matheo's heart cold-shifted. 1 Gold. 100 Silver. In six months of torture, his "Value" had tripled. He was being sold to a high-ranking official of the City Infrastructure Guild.
The New Reality
The official, a cold woman with a mana-lens over one eye, handed over a heavy gold coin. "I need him for the Sewer-Core maintenance. The mana radiation down there kills normal slaves in a week. If he's as durable as you say, he might last a month."
She didn't look Matheo in the eye. She just handed the chain to a guard.
As Matheo was led through the "shitty" part of the city—the slums where the poor lived in cardboard-thin shacks while the rich lived in floating towers—he realized the "Village" was just a playground. This was the real world.
A world where "Civilized" people sat in cafes drinking tea while men like him were sent to die in radioactive sewers to keep the lights on.
He passed a group of children playing with a "Training Golem." The golem was programmed to act like a slave. The children were taking turns hitting it with sticks, laughing when the golem mimicked a cry of pain.
Matheo's "Cold Mind" recorded it all. The geography, the cruelty, the magic systems.
1 Gold, Matheo thought as he was led down a dark staircase into the bowels of the city. They think they bought a laborer. They don't realize they just bought the man who is going to study how to tear this city down brick by brick.
The underground mana-radiation hit him. It felt like his skin was being pricked by millions of hot needles. His Regenerative Constitution flared to life, feeding on the very radiation that was supposed to kill him.
He wasn't dying. He was adapting.