Divorced on Monday, Bought the City on Tuesday: The Infinite

The Obsidian Ring

Chapter 59

The silence in the presidential boardroom was absolute. The hurricane winds had vanished the exact second Arthur Vance dissolved into golden light.

Serena Sterling remained on her knees on the shattered glass. She stared at the empty space where the man who had bought her world and then sacrificed himself to save it had stood. The glowing blue interface of the Infinite Wealth System hovered in her vision, a cold, digital ghost.

Victoria stepped forward, her heels crunching softly against the debris. She placed a trembling hand on Serena’s shoulder.

"Is he...?" Victoria couldn't finish the sentence. The Ice Queen of the Capital City was weeping.

Serena didn't cry. The tears had stopped, replaced by a profound, agonizing clarity. She swiped her hand through the air, accessing the System’s internal ledger. She scrolled past the three million System Points sitting in her account. She bypassed the territorial deeds and the orbital infrastructure.

She dug into the Void Market transaction history.

"He isn't dead," Serena whispered. Her voice was raspy, but it carried an undeniable steel.

Nyx scrambled over, dragging her laptop. Vera stood completely still, her crimson eyes locked on Serena’s screen.

"Look at the ledger," Serena said, pointing at the glowing text. "He wasn't deleted. The Architects didn't execute him. The System explicitly stated it was a liquidation. He was sold as physical hardware to cover the margin call."

Nyx’s fingers flew across her keyboard, syncing with Serena’s interface. "She's right. I see the routing data. Asset 410 was transferred to an extra-dimensional holding facility. A place called the Obsidian Ring."

"Can we bring him back?" Vera asked. It was the first time the assassin had ever sounded desperate.

Serena tapped the screen, opening the Repurchase tab on the Void Market. A string of numbers populated the interface.

[Target: Asset 410 (Arthur Vance).]

[Current Owner: The Void Exchange.]

[Repurchase Price: 1,000,000,000 SP.]

One billion System Points.

Victoria let out a shaky breath. "Arthur spent tens of billions of earthly dollars just to generate a fraction of that. A billion SP... we would have to conquer the entire solar system to generate that kind of capital."

"Then we better get to work," Serena said. She stood up, brushing the glass off her knees. The hesitation was gone. She was the CEO of Vance Corp now. "Nyx. Boot up the Genesis Protocol. We need starships."

Consciousness returned to Arthur Vance like a sledgehammer to the skull.

He didn't gasp for air. His Grandmaster-tier biology regulated his heart rate instantly, pulling him from the dark abyss of spatial relocation into sharp, agonizing reality.

He opened his eyes.

He was lying on a freezing, metallic floor. The air smelled of burnt ozone and copper. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He was still wearing his bespoke charcoal trousers and white dress shirt, though the fabric was scorched and stiff.

He touched his neck. A heavy, smooth collar of dark metal was locked tightly around his throat. It hummed with a faint, suppressive vibration.

"I wouldn't touch that."

Arthur turned his head. Sitting in the corner of the dim, square cell was a figure. It was vaguely humanoid, but its skin was an iridescent, scaled blue, and it possessed four multi-jointed arms. The alien was wrapped in tattered gray rags, a matching suppressive collar locked around its neck.

"It reads biometric spikes," the alien rasped, speaking flawless English through some sort of universal translation matrix embedded in the cell walls. "If your heart rate indicates aggression, it injects a paralytic neurotoxin directly into your spinal column. You are merchandise now. Act like it."

Arthur stood up slowly. He ignored the alien. He closed his eyes and reached inward, searching for the golden light of the Infinite Wealth System.

Nothing.

The familiar interface was gone. The endless trillions of dollars, the System Store, the orbital ledgers it had all been stripped away. He had sold it all to Serena to pay the debt. He was completely, utterly bankrupt.

But as Arthur clenched his fists, he felt the heavy, undeniable density of his muscles. The Leviathan Marrow Serum was still in his bones. The Advanced Cognitive Processing still fired in his brain. The System had sold him as hardware, which meant he retained the physical upgrades he had purchased.

He wasn't a god anymore. But he was still a monster.

"Where am I?" Arthur asked, his voice a low, vibrating rumble that made the blue-scaled alien flinch.

"You're in the holding pens of the Obsidian Ring," the alien answered, pulling its knees to its chest. "The central auction house of the Architects' empire. They brought you in ten cycles ago. You’re the new stock."

Arthur walked toward the heavy, energy-shielded door of the cell. He looked out through the translucent barrier.

Thousands of identical cells lined a massive, cylindrical chasm that stretched infinitely upward and downward. Drones the size of semi-trucks floated through the abyss, scanning the merchandise.

He was back at the bottom of the food chain. He was the mud again.

A dark, terrifying smile curved Arthur’s lips. The last time someone threw him in the gutter, he ended up buying their entire world.

"Tell me," Arthur whispered, turning back to his alien cellmate. "How does the economy work here?"