👁️ Chapter 38: Minting Eyes & Illuminati
🌍 June 18th, 97 BCE — Early Summer ☀️
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The wall was finished. For the first time since the raid, the valley felt truly safe.
That's when Nano's voice came through Junjie's bracer, calm but insistent.
Nano had Junjie fetch a bag of coins from the storage chest in his quarters and bring it to the Batcave — spoils taken from the slavers after the raid, kept more as trophies than currency.
"Tip them onto the bench," Nano said.
A dozen foreign coins were scattered across the work surface. In the bright workshop light, their flaws were plain: blackened silver that barely caught the glow, a "silver" piece with greenish patina, a gold coin flaking to reveal dull lead beneath.
"These," Nano explained, "are what passes for currency outside. Different weights, inconsistent purities, no standard marks. Some are barely worth the metal in them. You want the village economy built on this junk?"
Junjie shook his head. "We've been fine running things as a communal effort. You work, you help build the valley, you get what you need. But now we've got surplus, and some people work a lot harder than others."
"Exactly," Nano said. "We can't keep expanding if everyone gets the same no matter their effort. We need a real currency — stable, internal, and ours alone. Two systems: inside, we mint our own alloy coins — pure, uniform, impossible to fake — for wages, trades, and rents. Outside, we take gold and silver from trade runs, handled only by the Village treasury, to buy what we can't make ourselves. That way, the internal economy stays stable, no matter how filthy or debased the outside coins are."
The decision was made.
⚒️ The Minting
Nano provided the recipe for the new alloy — a blend of abundant local metals, soft enough for stamping but engineered to harden all the way through during final treatment. It was easy to source, nearly impossible to counterfeit without knowing the exact ratios, and was designed for long-term durability.
From there, the villagers took over — but under a tightly controlled system.
At the forges, a general crew melted the alloy in Batcave-forged crucibles, pouring it into bar molds. Once cooled, the bars were rolled into thin sheets and punched into smooth, round blanks using hardened cutters Nano had made. This work required no knowledge of the coin designs, so the blank crew never saw the dies or finished coins. They delivered the blanks to the minting workshop under guard.
Only two or three trusted villagers worked in the secured minting workshop. Using nanobot-crafted dies of super-alloy, they struck each blank into a finished coin. The designs were intricate beyond anything human hands could carve:
Eyes – Small coins stamped with a single eye, in 1, 5, 10, and 25-unit denominations, 1–2.5 cm across.
Illuminati – Larger coins with an eye inside a triangle, in 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 units, 3–5.5 cm across with enough heft to make a satisfying clink.
The reverse bore only plain numbers — "1 Eye," "10 Illuminati," and so on. No monarchs. No slogans. No confusion.
Stamping was manual labor, each strike echoing in the minting room. At the end of every shift, the dies were locked away in a secure vault, and no one outside the stamping crew ever handled them.
Once minted, coins were loaded into large ceramic trays and sealed inside kilns lined with heat-reactive salts and mineral powders that Nano had sourced locally. The heat treatment penetrated the entire coin, while the salts bonded with the surface, giving a faint blue-steel shimmer. The process was simple enough for the stamping crew to run without Nano's direct supervision — every step timed, measured, and memorized until it became routine.
By the end of the first month, the vault held a modest but growing reserve.
📣 The Assembly
The entire village gathered in the central courtyard. Before speaking, Junjie reached into a pouch and tossed a handful of outside gold and silver coins onto a nearby table for all to see.
"Look at them," he said, picking one up and turning it in the light. A "silver" coin showed a sickly green patina. A gold piece had flaking edges, revealing dull lead beneath. Others were warped, scratched, or mismatched in weight.
"This," he said, holding the coin high, "is what passes for money out there — inconsistent, filthy, and often worth less than the metal it pretends to be."
He set it down and raised one of the new coins, the polished surface catching the late sun.
"From today forward, we run on Eyes and Illuminati. You work, you earn. You buy, you spend. You want more? Do more."
Nano's algorithms had already set starting prices, factoring scarcity, labor, and demand. Every villager received a starting allotment of coins based on their role — farmers, builders, potters, smiths, cooks, and even the children. Especially the children, who immediately began running errands for spare Eyes.
Labor was ranked Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master, with payouts scaled accordingly. Bonuses went to excellence and innovation; slackers earned little.
Shops and workbenches still belonged to the Village. Workers were paid in coin, goods were sold at set prices, and the profits — the margin between pay and sale price — funded roads, forges, kilns, and extra housing. Even rent for workshops and courtyards was collected, all cycling back into public works.
When asked about the symbol on the coins, Junjie explained, "It's the Eye of Providence — divine awareness, knowledge as light. Some link it to the Illuminati." The name stuck.
It wasn't perfect — some griped, others tried to cheat — but within weeks, the system worked. People could save. Plan. Invest. And efficiency, quality, and reputation began to matter.
The Hidden Valley now had its own economy — a conspiracy-themed currency, a secret alloy hardened for generations of use, and an AI in the shadows, quietly running price checks. And no one outside its walls had a clue it existed.