After the selection, Hermes studied what information the system interface could give right away.
[WORLDS COLLIDE SERIES]
[Next Event – 07:14:07:23]
[World Collide Points: 0]
[Current Rank: Null]
[1. Status Window]
[2. Chatting]
[3. Shops]
Hermes clicked on the status window first, wanting to know where he stood.
[STATUS WINDOW]
[Username: Assign now?]
[Age: 21] [Level: 1]
[Race: Register species now?]
[Class: (Rank-F) Trash Peddler]
[Constitution Rating: 0.46]
[Strength: 0.4]
[Agility: 0.5]
[Dexterity: 0.4]
[Reflex: 0.5]
[Tenacity: 0.5]
[Intelligence Rating: 5.33]
[Processing speed: 4.0]
[Comprehension: 5.9]
[Analytical Logic: 6.1]
[Karmic Rating: 22]
[Luck: 88]
[Faith: 0]
[Fame: 0]
[Enmity: 0]
[Peddler Skills]
[Summon Peddling Tool]
[Make a Loan]
[Sell Personal Assets]
There was no information on how these numbers came to be but one thing certain, staring at the status window is the best time waster if he wanted to be left by the others. So, he exited the Status Window and opened the Chatting tab.
[CHATTING]
[1. Interspecies World Chat]
[2. Registered World Chat] (Register species now?)
[3. Private Chat] (Purchase a Chat Room – 10 WCP) (Enter Chatroom Code)
Hermes was sharp enough to notice just how much freedom the system was offering. It kept asking him to register his species.
What does that mean? More importantly, what does it allow?
To Hermes, it sounded less like a formality and more like a seam left loose on purpose, the sort of opening a clever man might pry wider if he had the nerve.
Still, speculation could wait. Hermes opened the interspecies world chat and tried to gauge the situation through what looked like a group chat, not so different from the messaging apps back on Earth.
[INTERSPECIES WORLD CHAT]
[Giant Godfather: We of the Giant Race are seeking a collaborator species.]
[Insectoid Ant Queen: Send your terrain coordinates. Soft-bodied creatures preferred.]
[Future Dragon King: Currently hunting hairless primates at my location.]
[Rat Emperor: How does one purchase water and grain?]
[Rise of the Reich: Fellow men, do not chatter here. These foreign races do not share our hearts.]
Hermes saw all manner of scripts flashing past, each one paired with an automatic translation. Clearly, these creatures possessed native languages of their own. He closed the tab soon after, finding nothing there that would help him advance. Then he turned to the shop, intending to plan his spending in advance.
[SHOPPING]
[Balance: 0 Cosmic Coins] [Top-up with WCP]
[1. Manual Keyword Search]
[2. Browse by Category]
[3. Browse by Brand]
[4. WCP Exclusives]
[5. Upgrade Shop Interface]
[6. Submit Genetic Makeup]
Even Hermes, who had built an overlord like conglomerate on Earth, felt a flicker of awe at one part of the selection.
Brands.
The word alone made him pause.
It meant he had spent his whole life staring up from the bottom of a well, never once imagining how far commerce could truly reach when it stretched into space.
With a fresh spark of excitement, he clicked it first.
[COSMIC BRANDS LEADERBOARD]
1.) Hyperion – Technology
2.) Mags & Hex – Arcane
3.) Atlas – Divinity
4.) Xinn – Cultivation
5.) Xenos – Eldritch
6.) Badgers – Beast
7.) Scavz – Most Affordable
Hermes cared about saving money, so he chose Scavz. Even then, the sheer range of goods nearly dazzled him.
There were essentials such as vehicles, housing, and crates of food. There were wares from magical worlds too, healing potions, magic scrolls, and meditation methods for mana.
Elsewhere, even technological ships capable of crossing light years in an hour were displayed as casually as common merchandise.
Since he had no Cosmic Coins on hand, Hermes let himself indulge his curiosity for a few minutes before moving on to his skills. Then he tested them at once.
"Summon Peddling Tool," he said aloud.
At once, a simple wooden handcart appeared before him, with a box shaped bed, two large spoked wheels, and long shafts meant for pulling. The wood looked lacquered and new, clean enough that it might have just come from a craftsman's hands.
He tried moving it around and found it a little heavy. Clearly, the class expected its user to have a capable body and enough muscle to haul the thing properly.
"Unsummon Peddling Tool."
The handcart vanished. Hermes narrowed his eyes and tried again, this time with thought alone. It worked. He scratched the wood with a stone, dismissed it, then summoned it once more.
The scratch remained. After that, he tested its limits and found he could call it into existence as high as five meters above the ground, but never beneath it.
Only then did Hermes open another function and press on Make a Loan.
A list of lending institutions appeared before him, one after another, each ready to accept an application.
[Make A Loan]
[Brief records of local world transactions received by these institutions.]
[Claim] [Hyperion Reserves] [100 CC] [Pay in 7 Days] [Interest Rate Starts at 10%]
[Claim] [Mags & Hex Credit Union] [100 CC] [Pay in 7 Days] [Interest Rate Starts at 10%]
[Claim] [Atlas Treasury] [100 CC] [Pay in 7 Days] [Interest Rate Starts at 10%]
[Claim] [Scavz Vaults] [300 CC] [Pay in 3 Days] [Interest Rate Starts at 5%]
Hermes gave a wry smile. There were thousands of pages of institutions offering to lend him money, which told him all he needed to know.
Even here, with the world broken open around him, his credibility still had weight enough to make lenders rush forward with open hands.
Still, he did not take a single one. Hermes had always kept a simple rule where money was concerned.
If he was not yet desperate, he did not borrow.
At his level, a loan was never just money. It was a small favor wrapped in courtesy, the sort that began with numbers and ended in quiet conversations he would rather not owe.
To most men, that was business. To Hermes, it was vulnerability.
So he closed the loan page and moved to the last skill, the option to sell a personal asset.
This time, Hermes froze.
His body trembled so hard it almost shamed him. For a moment he could not tell whether what he was seeing was real, or whether his mind had finally begun to crack.
[Sell Personal Assets]
[Sell Now] [Raw-AI Shares] [40,000 CC]
[Sell Now] [Shop America Shares] [30,000 CC]
[Sell Now] [Premier Oil Shares] [72,000 CC]
[Sell Now] [Health Plus Shares] [44,000 CC]
[Sell Now] [Alphabet Search Shares] [61,000 CC]
[Sell Now] [Volks Automobiles Shares] [78,000 CC]
...
Hermes stumbled to the ground and squeezed his eyes shut. This had to be a dream. He needed to wake up. Something was clearly wrong.
The system was not merely sparing him. They were all but dropping a winning ticket into his hands.
Fifteen minutes later, the alien sky was still there.
So was the desert. So was the scrape in his throat and the dust under his palms.
Then Hermes Laurent laughed. He laughed harder than he ever had in his life, with such raw ecstasy that he rolled in the dust clutching his stomach like a madman.
Money really did make a man happy.
When he finally caught his breath, he sold everything without an ounce of hesitation.
He did not even know whether returning to Earth was possible.
This place was his life now, and Hermes had no reason to leave his money rotting in a world he could no longer reach.
Back on Earth, in Silicon Valley and far beyond it, governments had already begun advising people to remain indoors and await military evacuation.
Borders were in lockdown. Nuclear weapons were being aimed skyward.
Scientists filled broadcasts with desperate pleas to the extraterrestrial power that had taken a portion of humanity's finest minds, workers, athletes, and businessmen from every field.
Then the disappearances began.
Buildings vanished one after another across the world. Offices. Warehouses. Supercomputers. Hospitals. Cars. Entire stores of oil.
They simply disappeared.
All people were left physically unharmed, as though some invisible force had gently lifted them aside because they were not part of the transaction.
Early estimates placed the value of the missing property at roughly a trillion dollars.
The damage from halted operations threatened to climb to two and a half trillion more if critical services were not restored within a month.
Hermes did not care.
Those things had been his. The fruit of his blood, sweat, and years. Now they had been converted into something he could actually use.
At last, it was time to spend. He checked his balance, saw the number waiting for him, and kissed the empty air.
[Balance: 1,003,700 Cosmic Coins]
The first thing Hermes did was open the shop again and submit his genetic makeup. The system offered different depths of analysis, but he paid a thousand at once for the highest one.
Hesitation had no place in him now. The moment the purchase went through, the option grayed out and vanished entirely.
Then he bought the upgraded shop interface for ten thousand Cosmic Coins, which removed that option as well.
Only then did the shop show him its true face.
Vague, low quality images sharpened into something so clear it felt as if he could reach out and touch the goods themselves.
Even a sack of ordinary flour now came with a report hundreds of pages long, detailing how the seeds had been cultivated, how they had been watered, how they were harvested, and how compatible the final product would be with his stomach.
It was worlds apart from the crude version of the shop he had first seen, where an item had simply been labeled flour, with not even the grain itself named.
Hermes did not reach for power at once. That was never his way.
What he needed first was study, because knowledge was power, power was money, and money was the kind of weapon that could make even the universe turn.
[Purchased] [Extreme Focus Juice - Primate Edition] [5 CC]
[Purchased] [Immovable Mental Endurance Bar - Primate Edition] [5 CC]
[Purchased] [Extreme Satiety Pill - Primate Edition] [5 CC]
[Purchased] [Cosmic Linguistics Beginner Learning Pill] [1,000 CC]
[Purchased] [Shop Introduction and Catalogues Learning Pill] [500 CC]
[Purchased] [Peddler Class For Dummies Learning Pill] [2,000 CC]
[Purchased] [How to Survive Worlds Collide Series Learning Pill] [10,000 CC]
The Immovable Mental Endurance Bar looked like chocolate and was no bigger than half his palm, yet by the time Hermes finished it, the mental fatigue weighing on him felt like a bad dream already slipping out of reach.
What followed was so clean and sudden that it rivaled the finest waking moments of his life.
Then he drank the Extreme Focus Juice, and the effect stacked on top of the first with such ruthless efficiency that he felt sharpened tenfold.
After that came the pill, a simple precaution to kill hunger before it could rise and distract him.
Once more, Hermes returned to the silent movie theater behind his eyes.
There, he began to study.
The last thing he wanted was to walk blind into a world built by beings who priced information like treasure.
If knowledge this basic cost so much, then survival would not come cheaply, and any fool who assumed the key to living here was easy to grasp deserved whatever death found him.
Hermes moved first through the logic of language. It was not some crude package that dumped words into his head.
It was deeper than that. It taught him how to read structure, how to trace meaning through lines, patterns, rhythm, and sound, how to approach a language like a puzzle that could be solved if one was patient enough to see how it breathed.
Then came the introduction to the shop itself. That lesson was uglier.
He learned that many sellers, though legitimate, would still leave the worst side effects buried where careless buyers would never think to look.
He also learned that some races, for all their intelligence, were hopeless when it came to making instructions clear to more primitive species.
They understood their craft well enough, but not the minds of those beneath them.
The system, unsurprisingly, had no interest in helping bridge that gap.
Which meant the burden would fall on him.
Next came the crash course on peddling.
A peddler, it said, could summon a peddling tool as large as a planet, provided he had the ability and capacity to support it.
Hermes lingered on that line for a moment. Then came the second revelation. A peddler could claim ownership over an unattended item simply by taking hold of it and naming it.
He tested the idea at once. Hermes picked up a rock and held it for a full minute.
"Amazing Rock," he said.
The result came instantly. The stone appeared in his inventory under that exact name, even though it had not been storable there before.
Hermes stared. Then he laughed.
"Insane, this class is broken," Hermes said, openly thrilled.
The third lesson pleased him almost as much. A peddler had no true prerequisite when replacing his peddling tool. So long as he could physically drag it around, and so long as it did not become a stationary shop, the system allowed it.
Wheels solved one problem. A ship solved the rest.
Better still, peddlers did not need to pass licensure exams the way merchants did.
All they needed was the right to distribute a specific category of goods, along with the fee required to secure it.
That alone was enough to make Hermes, the richest man on Earth, giggle like a child.
Then came the final detail, and it nearly made him love the class.
A peddler could water down, tamper with, open, or even modify almost any item. Even if it no longer worked as intended, he could still sell it under whatever description he pleased.
With all those advantages, there was a drawback, of course.
Peddlers were not protected by law as firmly as fully recognized merchants.
On a planet where death might come before sundown, legal protection felt like a distant joke.
Lastly, he turned to the survival guide.
There he learned that attributes were not measured against some fixed universal standard. They were based on the combined average of all ten participating species, and that measure would remain in place so the contestants could clearly see their growth and stay driven by it.
The second lesson mattered even more. No Worlds Collide Series ever repeated itself exactly. The events changed from one series to the next, always altered in ways large or small, which meant the whole thing could not simply be cheated by memorizing the past.
The third lesson interested Hermes most of all because it revealed an opening others often ignored. Species burdened by pride, honor, or rigid cultural instincts tended to overlook one profitable path entirely.
They did not like performing for others. They did not like turning struggle into spectacle. Yet the guide made it plain that entertainment and live streaming could earn thousands of cosmic coins in a single day.
'Guess, I better invest on a great camera then,' he thought.
Lastly, it offered a list of the ten thousand most anticipated events that might appear.
None of them were guaranteed, but the knowledge gave shape to the chaos.
Still, the purchase had been worth it.
[Balance: 979,185 Cosmic Coins]
Hermes, of all men, had mastered the art of making money. Wealth was not built by clutching coin until the fingers cramped.
A man had to spend if he meant to earn more. What he had done so far was nothing but preparation.
The real spending spree was only just beginning.