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

Chapter 7: The Global Produce Wholesaler

It took him about five minutes to talk himself off the ceiling.

Nobody has fresh vegetables, he thought. Chefs get ingredient packs. Those are calorie bricks with a buff glued on. Fresh dirt-on-the-root? That doesn't exist. The first one ever is a museum piece.

Which also meant the price was a honeymoon. The novelty was why some idiot—a fat one, probably—had dropped a million on a vegetable. The second head wouldn't go for a million. The tenth wouldn't go for a tenth of that.

In his head, a cabbage was worth three to five thousand on a normal day. The million was a once-in-a-century fluke.

He logged back in and listed five more cabbages.

He didn't dump the rest of the storage out. Scarcity did the heavy lifting; flood the market and he'd crater his own price before he'd even understood it. He had more than a million in the bank already. He could wait.

He looked at his balance—one point one seven million—and tried to remember that six years of scraping and scholarship money had gotten him to two hundred and seventy thousand. One cabbage had just added nine hundred. It didn't feel real.

He changed his display name.

Global Vegetable Wholesaler.

He uploaded half a jin of snow peas alongside the cabbages, logged off, and went to sleep.

Du's cabbage arrived within the hour.

The Exchange had its own sealed delivery—sellers just listed the item, it teleported into the platform's vaults, and a courier hand-delivered it in a case lined with something that looked like hammered silver. Du took the case with both hands. He could feel the cold through the metal.

He popped the latches. White mist curled out, carrying a smell that made his mouth water. Inside, nestled in the vapor, sat the cabbage.

Root and all.

He was not, as a rule, an emotional man. He was, however, this close to crying again. He had a dozen clients back in Magic City—people who ran entire quarters, people who paid him five figures for a single meal, people who would burn a favor to taste real food again. He could have flipped this cabbage for two million by dinner.

He stood there with the case open for a long time.

Then he shut it.

Nobody was eating this but him. It was the first real vegetable in a hundred and twenty years. He was going to cook it himself, and he was going to enjoy every bite.

He drew a bath. Put on clean clothes. Treated the kitchen like a shrine. There were no fresh aromatics in this world—no garlic, no ginger, no scallion—and the powdered spice substitutes tasted like cardboard with seasoning, but he wasn't going to let that ruin it. He boiled water. He seasoned the cabbage with the cheapest, simplest treatment he knew: a clean boil, a light dusting, nothing to cover what the thing was.

He had no idea that while he was doing it, the Exchange had just listed five more cabbages.

They went up one at a time. One auction an hour. And by the time the first one hit the block, the whole platform had already learned the taste of blood.

Some of the people watching were rich. Some were connected. Some were both, and they started asking the question Du had been lucky not to be able to ask: what if this seller knows how to grow the stuff?

Not buy the cabbage. Lock the farmer up. Put him in a room with soil and lights and never let him leave. The first Chef in history had been pulled out of a slum, too. She'd vanished for six months and come back a corporation's mascot, and nobody had ever asked where she'd been.

A few of the people watching that night were already making those calls.

In a research institute in the Capital, a girl in her early twenties slammed open an office door without knocking.

"Director Titus Lu—get on the Exchange. Right now. Cabbage. Real cabbage. Fresh."

The man behind the desk was unshaven, his hair a nest, his complexion the kind of gray that came from three nights without sleep. He looked up with the weary expression of a man who had been told to be calm roughly four hundred times.

"How many times," he said, "have I told you to knock? To conduct yourself with composure? To be mature, like me?"

"It's alive, Director. Pulled out of the ground. Look." She held out her comms and shared her screen.

He took it. He'd been expecting a hoax. Maybe a clever fake prop.

He saw five heads of fresh cabbage, still rooted, sitting in a row.

He was on his feet so fast the chair went over backward.

"What?" he yelped. "Alive produce. Five of them. Five—"

Composure. Gone. Mature. Gone.

"Bid on them. All of them. Whatever it costs. The institute will cover it."

"Director." Cici was already on the auction screen, thumb hovering. "Do we have that kind of research money left? Because last quarter you told me my equipment purchase was 'a theoretical aspiration.' And if you make me charge this to my personal card, I will know."

"Details, details." He coughed. "We are scientists. We sacrifice for the work. Didn't you know that at your own Awakening ceremony?"

She eyed him. She had a very strong feeling she was being lied to. This was not the time to push it.

The news reached Director Tang's office late that night.

He read the report on his screen—five heads of wild cabbage, listed anonymously, bidding already into the hundreds of thousands—and he went still.

The first person he thought of was the E-rank Farmer from David Guo's recommendation.

Then he relaxed. A cabbage was a cabbage. Even if the boy could grow vegetables, it changed nothing about the strategic picture. Aberrations kept coming. The wall kept holding. The Federation didn't win a war because an orphan had a green thumb.

He picked up his comms and called the Exchange's liaison.

"Classify that seller's information at the highest level. Nobody touches it. Nobody traces it. And I mean nobody."

A Farmer who could actually grow food was a once-a-century event. He wasn't going to let a pack of vultures chew through the boy before anyone figured out what he was.