Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Word travels fast in a marketplace built on desperation, and by the time Ethan returned to the settlement two days later — this time hunting for cooking oil, since Kavita’s cheese had inspired an ambitious pasta plan that his kitchen skills weren’t remotely equipped to handle — a small crowd had already started forming near the entrance the moment someone spotted his hoodie.

He ignored them, mostly, weaving through the stalls with the singular focus of a man on a mission, until a voice called out from a stall he hadn’t visited before, tucked near the back of the market where the ”serious” traders set up shop — the ones dealing in gear rather than groceries.

”You! Boy from Kavita’s stall!”

Ethan turned to find an older man with a jeweler’s loupe pushed up on his forehead and hands that looked permanently stained with polishing oil, standing behind a table lined with weapons and armor pieces arranged with the meticulous care of someone who’d spent decades appraising things for a living. A hand-painted sign above his stall read GUPTA’S APPRAISALS — FAIR PRICES, HONEST GRADES.

”I don’t have any fangs left on me,” Ethan said, mostly out of habit at this point.

”Not fangs,” Gupta said, waving that away. ”Gear. Weapons, armor — Kavita told half the market about the fangs you traded her. Perfect condition, she said. Uniform harvest. If even a fraction of your equipment matches that quality, I would very much like to see it.”

Ethan considered this. He did, technically, have an entire void inventory’s worth of gear he’d never bothered sorting through — everything his avatar had picked up and auto-stored over the past three weeks, sitting untouched because Ethan genuinely couldn’t be bothered to check what any of it actually was.

”Sure,” he said, shrugging. ”I’ve got a bunch of random stuff. Not sure what’s good, honestly.”

He pulled up his inventory, selected a chunk of items he vaguely remembered being labeled ”armor” at some point, and dumped them onto Gupta’s table without ceremony.

A dozen pieces materialized in a soft violet flash — chest plates, gauntlets, a full set of greaves, a cloak that shimmered faintly even in the flat afternoon light.

Gupta reached for the loupe on his forehead with hands that were already starting to shake, brought it to his eye, and picked up the nearest chest plate.

He went very, very still.

”This,” he said, voice unsteady, ”is Voidforged alloy.”

”Is that good?”

”Good.” Gupta let out a laugh that had no humor in it whatsoever, the sound of a man whose entire professional worldview had just been quietly demolished. ”Beta, I have appraised exactly one piece of Voidforged equipment in my entire career. One. It sold at a private auction eleven years ago for enough money to buy this entire market twice over. And you are telling me this is — what, random stuff?”

”I mean, yeah.” Ethan glanced at the piece, unimpressed. ”It was just sitting in my inventory. Didn’t even remember picking it up.”

Gupta set the chest plate down with the exaggerated care of a man handling a bomb, and reached for the next piece — the shimmering cloak — running his fingers along the hem, checking the stitching, the faint mana runes woven into the fabric barely visible unless you knew exactly where to look.

”Ashfall Weave,” he murmured, mostly to himself now. ”Enchanted for elemental resistance. This alone—” He stopped, pressed a hand briefly to his chest, and took a slow, deliberate breath, the specific breath of a man reminding his own heart to keep beating. ”Beta, please. I need you to sit down. I think I am having some kind of episode.”

”Are you okay?” Ethan asked, genuinely concerned now, glancing around for a chair.

”No,” Gupta admitted, still staring at the cloak. ”No, I don’t think I am. Do you understand what you are showing me? This single piece—” he gestured at the cloak, ”—could feed a settlement for a year. And you have brought me a dozen items of this quality like it is nothing. Like you are cleaning out a junk drawer.”

”I mean, I kind of am,” Ethan said. ”This is the stuff I didn’t even bother sorting. There’s more where that came from, but a lot of it’s just basic monster parts and stuff, I figured that wasn’t worth showing you.”

Gupta made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. ”Show me the basic stuff too.”

Ethan, seeing no reason not to, pulled up his inventory again and dumped a second batch onto the table — a random assortment this time, things he genuinely had no idea about, labels he’d never bothered reading past the item name. A short sword with faint blue veins running through the blade. A ring that pulsed with a slow internal light. A shield that looked, to Ethan’s untrained eye, mostly just heavy.

Gupta picked up the ring first, and his hands, already unsteady, began to shake outright.

”This,” he said, voice dropping to something close to a whisper, ”is a Mana-Well Signet. There are perhaps a dozen of these known to exist in the entire pre-apocalypse historical record. It doubles a caster’s mana regeneration for life. Do you understand what a hunter guild would pay for this? What a government would pay?”

”Huh.” Ethan picked it up, turned it over once, unimpressed by its lack of edibility, and set it back down. ”I don’t even have mana, I don’t think. Or if I do, the system’s never told me.”

Gupta looked up at him with the expression of a man who had, in the last five minutes, aged what felt like several years.

”Beta,” he said carefully. ”I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly. How much more of this — this — do you have?”

Ethan thought about it, genuinely trying to estimate, and gave the only answer that felt accurate.

”A lot,” he said. ”Like, I stopped counting a while ago. My phone still buzzes for the good stuff, but there’s just so much of it now.”

Gupta sat down very slowly on the small stool behind his table, staring at the pile of what he now understood, with dawning and slightly nauseating clarity, represented not a windfall but a genuine economic event.

”You have been calling this garbage,” he said, mostly to himself, gesturing weakly at the pile of Voidforged alloy and enchanted cloaks and a signet ring worth more than most people would earn in three lifetimes. ”This is not garbage, beta. This is a national treasure. Several national treasures. I don’t even know what to offer you for this — I don’t think this market has enough goods to properly compensate you.”

Ethan glanced past him at a stall two rows over selling something that smelled unmistakably like fresh cooking oil, and made his priorities clear with the same casual confidence he brought to every conversation about the apocalypse’s various miracles.

”Honestly,” he said, ”if you could just point me toward whoever’s got the oil, we can call it even. I’m trying to make pasta.”

Gupta stared at him for a long moment, then began, very quietly, to laugh — the slightly unhinged laughter of a man who had just realized that the entire economic hierarchy of the post-apocalypse world was about to be turned upside down by a boy who genuinely, sincerely, just wanted to make pasta.