Chapter 3: THE DEAD MAN'S SHOP
Vance & Sons Antiquities occupied a narrow storefront on a street that had seen better decades. The paint peeled from its window frames. The display glass was so dirty the objects behind it were barely visible. A bell chimed weakly as I pushed through the door, announcing my arrival to a shop that smelled of mildew and broken dreams.
"We're closed." The voice came from behind a cluttered counter. "Come back next—"
"Mr. Vance." I stepped forward, letting the weak November light catch my face. "I'm here about a piece my father purchased. Caldwell. Jameson Caldwell Senior."
The old man who emerged from the shadows was seventy if he was a day. White hair thin as cobwebs. Cataracts clouding both eyes. His hands shook as they gripped the counter's edge.
"Caldwell." The name came out strangled. "The scarab."
"You remember it."
"I remember everything that's passed through this shop, young man." Vance's jaw tightened. "Your father bought that piece in twenty-four. Paid me well above market. I assumed he knew what he was getting."
"What was he getting?"
Silence. The clock on the wall ticked. Somewhere outside, a car backfired.
"Things that move when they shouldn't." Vance's voice dropped. "Things that don't follow the rules. I've been in this business fifty years, Mr. Caldwell. I've seen fakes and forgeries and clever tricks designed to separate fools from their money. That scarab wasn't a trick."
My pulse quickened. "Where is it now?"
The old man's face went pale.
"Sold. Yesterday. A buyer came in—Chinese fellow, well-dressed, paid triple what I was asking." His hands shook harder. "Maurice Chen. Staying at the Roosevelt Hotel. Room 847. He wanted it for some kind of demonstration."
"Demonstration."
"Private showing. Rich collectors looking for... unusual pieces." Vance shook his head. "I wanted nothing to do with it. Some things shouldn't be demonstrated. Some things should stay locked in the dark."
I was out the door before he finished speaking.
The Roosevelt Hotel rose fourteen stories above Madison Avenue, a monument to money and ambition in a city still reeling from the crash. I talked my way past the front desk using Caldwell's name and implied wealth, took the elevator to the eighth floor, and followed the numbers until I found 847.
Voices from inside. Multiple speakers, tones low and eager. The sound of money waiting to be spent on something extraordinary.
I knocked.
The door opened six inches, blocked by a chain. A face appeared in the gap—Chinese, middle-aged, sharply dressed. Eyes that calculated my net worth in seconds.
"Private function."
"I'm Jameson Caldwell. Steel money. I'm here for the demonstration."
The eyes calculated again. The chain dropped.
"Mr. Chen is always pleased to meet fellow enthusiasts." The door swung wide. "Please, join us."
The suite was larger than my father's study. Twelve people occupied various seats and standing positions—men in expensive suits, one woman dripping diamonds, all of them radiating the particular hunger of collectors who'd grown bored with ordinary treasures.
Maurice Chen stood at the room's center. Fifty years old. Tailored silk suit. The bearing of someone accustomed to controlling situations. In his hands, he held a piece of tarnished bronze.
The scarab.
I positioned myself near the back, keeping clear sightlines to the door.
"Ladies and gentlemen." Chen raised the scarab. "What I hold is proof that our ancestors understood forces we have forgotten. Egyptian, approximately three thousand years old, recovered from a tomb near Luxor. But age is not its value."
He set the scarab on a small table at the room's center.
"Watch."
His fingers pressed specific points along the scarab's edge—a sequence, I realized, like a combination lock. The hieroglyphs glowed faint blue. The collectors leaned forward.
Then the screaming started.
Chen's hand was still touching the scarab when light erupted from its surface—not the gentle glow from before, but a pulse of energy that made my eyes water. His skin darkened. Cracked. Split along lines that spread from his fingers up his arm to his face.
He screamed for three seconds.
Then he collapsed, and the smell of burnt flesh filled the room.
The collectors fled. Chairs overturned. The woman lost a diamond earring. Bodyguards who'd been standing by the walls shouted and drew weapons and had no idea what to shoot.
I stood frozen, staring at the corpse of a man who'd been alive seconds ago. The scarab sat on its table, inert, waiting.
Blue text flickered at the edge of my vision.
I blinked. The text remained.
[ANOMALY WITNESSED. SYSTEM INITIALIZING.]
My knees buckled. I caught myself on a chair, stomach heaving, hands shaking harder than Henderson's ever had.
[HOST IDENTIFIED: JAMESON H. CALDWELL (TRANSMIGRATED SOUL: DAVID WEBB)]
The text was inside my head. Not my imagination. Not fever dreams. Actual words forming in my field of vision, crisp and blue and impossible.
[WELCOME, HOST.]
"What—" My voice cracked.
[THE ANTIQUITY DEFENSE GUILD SYSTEM IS NOW ACTIVE.]
[TUTORIAL QUEST AVAILABLE: FIRST ACQUISITION]
[OBJECTIVE: RECOVER ARTIFACT WITHIN 48 HOURS]
[REWARD: 100 EXP, 50 SP]
The room had emptied. I was alone with a corpse and a supernatural artifact and words that appeared inside my skull like they belonged there.
The System was real. The artifacts were real. Everything I'd theorized, everything I'd hoped and feared since waking in this body—all of it was true.
I stumbled toward the door. My legs weren't working properly. Shock, probably. Or the reasonable response to watching a man burn from the inside out while blue text announced the impossible.
The hallway stretched forever. The elevator took a thousand years. The lobby was chaos—guests fleeing, staff shouting, no one paying attention to the disheveled man walking toward the front doors like he'd forgotten how stairs worked.
Outside. Cold air hit my face. November wind cut through my coat.
I leaned against a lamppost and waited for my hands to stop shaking.
The blue text pulsed again.
[TUTORIAL QUEST: FIRST ACQUISITION]
[TIME REMAINING: 47:58:23]
[THE SCARAB OF ANUBIS REMAINS AT SCENE]
[RECOVERY WILL GRANT: 100 EXP, 50 SP]
[FAILURE WILL RESULT IN: ARTIFACT FALLING INTO HOSTILE HANDS]
The artifact that had just killed a man was still up there. In a hotel room with a corpse. Waiting for someone to claim it.
The smart move was to walk away. Let the police handle it. Let someone else deal with supernatural objects that burned people alive.
But I was the only one who'd seen what really happened. And if I walked away now, someone else would find it. Someone who might not understand. Someone who might use it wrong.
"Sir?" A woman's voice. Concerned. "Sir, are you ill?"
I looked up. A passing pedestrian—middle-aged, matronly, the kind of person who stopped to help strangers on the street.
"Fine," I managed. "Just... fine."
She gave me the look people reserve for drunks and madmen, then continued on her way.
I straightened. Took a breath. Then another.
Blue text waited patiently in my peripheral vision.
Forty-seven hours and fifty-six minutes. The body upstairs was already cold. The cops would be here soon. And after that, someone would start asking questions about bronze scarabs and Egyptian curses and a buyer named Chen who'd died screaming in a luxury hotel suite.
I had two days to figure out how to get back into that room.
Two days to claim an artifact that had just committed murder.
Two days to start building whatever this System expected me to build.
My hands weren't shaking anymore. The cold had settled into something else—determination, maybe, or the particular clarity that comes after watching impossible things happen to ordinary people.
I turned away from the Roosevelt Hotel and walked north.
First, I needed information. The System had called itself the Antiquity Defense Guild. Defense implied protection. Guild implied organization. Whatever this was, it wanted me to do more than just collect dangerous objects.
Second, I needed a plan. Getting back into that suite meant avoiding police, avoiding witnesses, avoiding any connection between Jameson Caldwell and a dead Chinese artifact dealer.
Third, I needed answers. What was the System? Why had it chosen me? What did it expect me to do with forty-seven hours and fifty-six minutes of countdown timer?
The scarab waited. Chen's body cooled. And somewhere in my head, blue text tracked the seconds until I either claimed my first artifact or watched it fall into hands that might burn the world.
I walked faster.
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