I Awakened the World's Worst Class, Then Became Unstoppable

Chapter 6: The Harvest, and a Pair of Wild Cards

At 5:43, the progress bars above the plot hit zero.

Ethan dropped to his knees and started pulling. The tenfold yield kicked in immediately—ten plants didn't look like much when you'd planted them, but when he was done, his arms were full. The cabbage heads came loose with a soft pop of roots. The cucumber vines gave up their fruit in handfuls. Even the scallions, which he'd half-expected to come up as a thin clump, came up as a rope of green.

The system dumped his rewards.

Harvest complete.

Yield bonus applied: ×10.

Seeds recovered: Common Vegetable Seeds ×20, Mysterious Seed ×2, Spirit Potato Seeds ×1, Spirit Peanut Seeds ×1.

Ethan stared at the last two lines.

Mysterious Seeds were a gamble. You planted one and you got whatever the system decided—sometimes a useful item, sometimes a crop with a buff attached. You never knew until it broke soil. He'd had no idea the harvest itself could hand him those. And the Spirit seeds? He didn't even know what a Spirit Potato looked like yet.

He pulled the vegetables into his inventory space. Every Class came with one. Chefs got a small storage pocket; Farmers got a real one. At E-rank his was already a hundred cubic meters—room to store a farm, cold and dark and untouched by time.

He planted the twenty common seeds and the two Mysterious Seeds, left the Spirit seeds in storage, poured a Growth Nutrient across the bed, and went inside to audit what he'd actually grown.

Ten jin of snow peas. Ten jin of cucumber. Ten jin each of sweet potato, ginger, and scallion. Twenty heads of cabbage, twenty of lettuce, ten of napa.

He didn't have a Chef Class and he didn't have a single spice between him and a raw carrot, so cooking was out. But there was the Exchange—the national platform. It had everything, if you had the credits.

He logged on and searched.

Spices existed. Of course they did. They were also, by any sane standard, insane.

One hundred grams of salt: three thousand dollars. One hundred grams of sugar: five thousand. A hundred milliliters of soy sauce: eight thousand.

Ethan read those prices twice.

He searched for fresh vegetables.

Nothing. Not a single listing.

He thought for a minute, then pulled one cabbage out of storage. No idea what it was worth, so he went with auction: reserve five hundred, minimum bid increments a hundred, one hour long. The Exchange was government-run, identity-hidden, and charged ten percent on auction sales against five percent on buy-it-now. If he priced it wrong he'd learn fast.

He listed it, then went back to staring at the spice prices.

Eight hundred klicks east, in a walled city the old maps had called Shanghai, a fat man sank into his sofa with a bored sigh and opened the Exchange.

His name was Dudley Du. He was a Chef—A-rank, lucky enough to draw it—and every day his Class spit twenty pre-portioned ingredient packs into his storage. He'd parlayed that into a mansion, a name, and a seven-figure income before he turned twenty-five.

A ping popped up. New listing in the auction house.

"Bored enough to look," he muttered, and opened it.

The listing showed a single head of cabbage.

His body went rigid. Then he was on his feet, knocking over a throw pillow, because the cabbage had roots. Dirt still clinging to them. It had been pulled out of the ground that morning.

Wild produce. Actual wild produce.

As a Chef, the food his Class manufactured was fine. It was sterile, nutrient-light, and existed to be warmed up. He could tack a permanent stat buff onto whatever he cooked—constitution, usually—but the base material was never alive. This thing on his screen was alive.

He stabbed in a bid of three thousand before he'd thought it through.

Nobody else see it. Nobody else see it. Don't let another Chef spot it—

The price jumped to five thousand.

"Which son of a—" He slammed the armrest. "You bidding against me? You really bidding against me?"

Sixteen hundred klicks north, in the Capital, an old man watched the same cabbage on his comms and actually cried.

He was old enough to remember green things from his childhood. Barely. He was one of the last people alive who had ever tasted a tomato that had grown on a vine instead of being extruded from a Chef's storage. The books said vegetables had once been common. The books said you could walk into a market and buy a whole basket of them for loose change.

He wiped his face on his sleeve and leaned in closer to the listing, like he could press his face through the screen and smell it.

He was not the only one who'd seen the listing. Word was spreading through the Chef network at the speed of a shared link. One head of wild cabbage, on the public Exchange, had every high-ranked chef in the Federation opening their wallets at once.

By the time the auction clock hit zero, the cabbage was stuck at six hundred thousand.

Du's eyes were bloodshot. "Are these people insane? It's a cabbage."

He punched in eight hundred thousand. Frowned. Changed it to a million.

He hit confirm on the last possible second.

Congratulations. You are the winning bidder for: Cabbage ×1.

Du dropped onto his couch and made a noise that was half sob, half laugh. He'd done it. He had actually done it.

While he was celebrating, a dozen very powerful people in a dozen very powerful rooms were already picking up their comms and asking a quiet question: Who is selling wild produce?

They didn't find out. The Exchange was national. A few years back, someone had sold a high-grade item, a buyer had used connections to dig up the seller's name, and then had the seller jumped on the street for it. The resulting scandal had scared the government so badly that the platform was rebuilt by an Awakened SS-rank programmer specifically so that nobody—not even the people running the site—could read the seller's data.

The walls held.

Ethan was halfway through his evening workout when his wrist comms chimed.

Incoming transfer: $900,000.00. Account ending 3344.

He stopped mid-push-up.

Nine hundred thousand?

The follow-up notification arrived two seconds later. Auction complete. Cabbage sold for $1,000,000.00. Seller f*e deducted: 10%.

Ethan lay there on the floor, staring at the ceiling.

He pulled up the bidding history. Twelve bidders. Hundreds of incremental raises. A war. Over a head of cabbage.

He said the first thing that came to mind. "What the actual hell."