The golden "7" burned in the back of his mind, a constant, quiet sun. For two days, Rajendra moved through the rhythms of the bungalow like a ghost. He drank his mother's chai, listened to the market reports Ganesh sent, spoke the necessary, sparse words to Huilan. But his focus was turned inward, orbiting that new gravitational center.
Level 7 wasn't just new features. It was a new permission. The most tantalizing, the most dangerous: Fragment Hall Projection.
The System's description was clinical. A sub-reality nexus. For direct negotiation. Psychic feedback risk: HIGH.
He waited for the house to settle into the deep silence of the Pune night. Huilan's light was off. His mother's soft snores whispered through the hall. The looms were still.
In his room, he didn't lie down. He sat on the floor, cross-legged, his back against the cool wall. He wasn't going to sleep. He was going to travel.
He focused on the new command structure in his mind. It felt less like a menu and more like a muscle he'd just discovered. He flexed it.
> Initiate Fragment Hall Projection.
> Consciousness anchor: Stable.
> Avatar integrity: Nominal.
> Warning: Psychic safeguards at minimum. Proceed?
He breathed out, a slow, controlled release of air. He was a merchant. He assessed risk. The risk was annihilation, or corruption, or being trapped as a ghost in a machine. The reward was knowledge. The true shape of the market.
He proceeded.
The world did not dissolve. It peeled back.
There was no rush of light, no tunnel. One moment he was aware of the rough cement floor beneath him, the smell of old wood and jasmine. The next, those sensations became distant, faint echoes, like a radio station fading into static. His body became a data point—biological anchor: secure—reported by the System, not felt by him.
He was elsewhere.
He expected darkness. A void. A digital conference room.
He was wrong.
The Fragment Hall was architecture. Impossible, non-Euclidean, but undeniably real. He stood—or his consciousness-perception of standing—on a platform that seemed made of solidified twilight, shimmering with embedded constellations that pulsed with transaction histories. Vast, translucent pillars that might have been data streams or frozen light rose into a "sky" that was a cascading fractal of market tickers, asset flows, and shifting contractual language in a thousand alien scripts.
The scale was vertiginous. It wasn't infinite; it was curated. A cathedral built to house deals that could birth or strangle civilizations.
And it was not empty.
His avatar, a simplified, glowing silhouette of a human form he recognized as his own, was not alone.
To his left, a transaction was concluding. The entities involved were not usernames. A being of iridescent, shifting gas-clouds, held in a loose containment field, pulsed in a rhythm that felt like amused satisfaction. Across from it, a sleek, chromium-armored insectoid form, four mandibles clicking silently, received a shimmering data-orb into a slot on its chest-plate. They did not speak. A complex exchange of light-patterns and sub-space resonances passed between them—the closing of a deal. The gas-cloud rippled and vanished. The insectoid turned, its faceted eyes sweeping the hall, passing over Rajendra's nascent form without a flicker of interest, before striding away on jointed legs that clicked against the not-floor.
He saw more. A collective intelligence represented as a swirling vortex of crystalline shards. A trader that looked like a walking, ancient tree, its bark etched with living gold circuitry, roots trailing into the platform where they drank from flows of luminous data. A thing of pure shadow and sharp angles that hurt the mind to look at directly.
They were real. Their presence carried weight, history, a terrifying substantiality. These were not chatbots or proxies. These were the merchants. The players for whom planets were portfolio items.
Rajendra's projected self instinctively drew in, making his form less luminous, more muted. The awe was immediate, but it was instantly crushed by a colder, sharper emotion: a profound and exhilarating humiliation.
He had thought himself a king of a hidden world. The master of a secret game.
He was a street vendor who had just wandered into the intergalactic stock exchange.
The "Enhanced Virtual Interface" came alive, not as a screen, but as an augmented layer over his perception. He looked at a floating, slow-moving orb of liquid light that was a listed commodity. Tags resolved in his understanding:
Asset: [Singularity Core - Stable]
*Origin: [Forge-System K-7]*
Grade: [Alpha]
Market Value: [17,500 Sovereign Credits]
*Bid/Availability: [Auction - 3 Cycles Remaining]*
Sovereign Credits. Not Void-Coins. The currency here was of a different order of magnitude. He checked his own balance, automatically converted. His impressive hoard of Void-Coins was a rounding error.
He began to move, his avatar gliding silently. He passed listings that were not for objects, but for services, for concepts:
*[Mercenary Legion - The Shattered Blade: 50,000 units. Specialization: Planetary Pacification. Contract Duration: Standard Century. Payment: [REDACTED] Periphery System Sovereignty.]*
*[Genetic Enhancement Package: [Phoenix-Fire] Metabolic Overhaul. Complete cellular regeneration capability. Price: 12 Astral Marks or equivalent psionic resonance.]*
[Conceptual Weapon: [The Un-Rumor]. Infects target information network with self-corroding paradox. Escrow held in [Neutral Chrono-Bank].
[Asset: [Tamed Psyche-Vampire Nest]. Harvests sentient emotional resonance. Compliant. Includes customized feeding enclosures.]
He saw slaves. Not "indentured personnel." Beings of light, of stone, of twisted biology, catalogued like furniture, their attributes—obedient, psionically dampened, decorative—listed with cold efficiency.
He saw a listing that froze his perception:
*[Civilizational Assessment & Liquidation Package: Tier-0, Pre-Consolidation World (Designation: [REDACTED]). Full biodiversity, nascent psychosphere, undeveloped orbital assets. Estimated yield: High. Bidding for harvest rights to open upon confirmation of system instability.]*
Earth. It had to be. A farm, waiting for the harvest call.
The perspective shift was total, and it was instantaneous. The grandiose plans for Zashchita, the dance with the General, the Sovereign Accord—it all shriveled into petty, local squabbles. Insignificant rearrangements of deck chairs on a ship these entities wouldn't even notice passing by.
He wasn't a big merchant.
He was a regional supplier in a cosmic slum.
And his slum was on the clearance rack.
A low thrum, not a sound but a vibration in the fabric of the Hall itself, passed through him. It was a notification. A major auction was beginning in a deeper chamber. The entities around him began to flow in that direction, a silent, purposeful migration.
Rajendra's avatar remained still. The initial shock had crystallized into a diamond-hard point of understanding in the center of his being.
Panic was a luxury he could not afford. Panic was for prey.
He was a merchant.
And he had just seen the true scale of the market.
He looked from the departing backs of god-like traders to the glowing, terrifying listings around him. The humiliation burned away, leaving behind a residue of pure, undiluted ambition.
I don't need alien soldiers, the thought formed, clean and sharp as a monomolecular blade.
I need alien methods.
He had come to observe. To see the Fragment Hall.
Now he had seen it.
It was time to learn how to break it.