Reincarnated Grandmaster

Chapter 7: The Economy of the Classroom

The D-Class pavilion was freezing, but the hunger was sharper than the wind. For three days, the high noble factions had maintained a flawless economic blockade around the sunless ravine. The Academy’s central bazaar was run under a strict student guild system, and the Alpha faction had issued a flat decree: anyone caught selling food, salves, or low-grade mana stones to the D-Class failures would have their trading permits permanently revoked. Inside the damp lecture hall, the other six students sat huddled around a single, dying ember in the hearth.

"We won't last until the weekend," Karen rasped, dropping an empty potion vial onto the stone floor, where it shattered with a hollow click. "The dining hall turned us away again. They said our rations were diverted to the upper-tier dormitories. They want us to drop out or starve in this ditch." Christian sat in the furthest corner, his back straight against the rotting bench, his hands tucked inside his coarse white sleeves.

He didn't look hungry, his breathing remaining at a rhythmic sixty-four beats per minute. To a grandmaster, a blockade wasn't a tragedy; it was a simple resource puzzle with predictable vulnerabilities. He stood up, his bare feet hitting the cold stone. "Follow me," he said, his voice flat and devoid of desperation. Karen looked up, her eyes narrowing. "Follow you where, slave? To beg at the A-Class gates?"

"Begging is an inefficient strategy," Christian replied, walking toward the exit. "We are going to collect our interest." Ten minutes later, Christian entered the bustling courtyard of the Resource Pavilion. At the center stood Cedric Vance, a cousin of the corrupt Professor Vance and a high-ranking member of the elite student faction. He was currently supervising the distribution of Crimson Ember-Grass—a rare, fiery herb vital for purging labyrinth frost-curses.

The Alpha faction had used their fortunes to buy up eighty percent of the market stock, creating a monopoly. They sold the leaves to commoner students at quadruple the original price, denying a single leaf to the D-Class ravine. "Look what crawled out of the gutter," Cedric sneered as Christian approached. A dozen noble students burst into mocking laughter. "Come to sniff the scraps, 704? Clean the mud off my boots with your tunic."

Christian didn't stop or acknowledge the insults. His vacant eyes locked onto the massive runic teleportation platform built into the floor. The Academy utilized this localized spatial array to transfer heavy crates of imported goods from the outer gatehouse directly to the market vaults. To the average student, the glowing blue lines were incomprehensible ancient magic. But to Christian, whose soul was bound to the spatial laws of Kaelostra, the array was laughingly primitive.

He immediately noticed a microscopic flaw in the third alignment node—a two-millimeter variance in the rune's depth caused by decades of friction. Sliding his hands deeper into his sleeves, Christian aligned his fingers into a precise geometric angle. He projected a needle-thin thread of lightless void mana into the flawed node. He didn't destroy the circle; he merely bent the space passing through that single point, altering the destination coordinates of the incoming warehouse array by less than half a degree.

He calmly turned around and walked back down into the fog-covered ravine.

The catastrophe struck at dawn. The merchant caravans from the southern valleys arrived, delivering three hundred heavy crates of pristine Crimson Ember-Grass—the final shipment of the season. The warehouse master activated the main spatial array to send the bulk inventory into the secure vaults of the Alpha faction. But the tiny spatial deviation Christian had introduced acted like a misaligned rail switch.

Instead of appearing in the upper vaults, the three hundred crates vanished into a localized fold, sliding straight down the mountain's drainage system and dropping into the cellars beneath D-Class. Even worse, the sudden spatial friction caused a pressure leak that back-surged into the Alpha faction's existing storehouse. The protective barrier seals on their hoarded inventory ruptured instantly, exposing thousands of gold-credits worth of delicate herbs to the mountain's ambient moisture.

Within six hours, the high nobles' entire monopoly turned into a pile of black, liquefying rot. By noon, the entire Academy was in absolute panic. Hundreds of elite students were writhing in their luxury dorms, their skin turning a sickly, calcified blue as the labyrinth's residual frost curse froze their mana channels. Cedric Vance was frantic. His faction had spent their entire seasonal budget on that monopoly, and now they had nothing but useless sludge.

Then, a rumor rippled through the campus. A massive supply of perfectly preserved, glowing Crimson Ember-Grass was currently available for trade in the dilapidated courtyard of the D-Class pavilion. Cedric stormed into the sunless ravine with thirty armored enforcers, his face twisted in a mask of pure, humiliated rage. He skidded to a halt in the muddy courtyard, his breath catching sharply in his throat at the sight before him.

Christian was sitting calmly on a broken stone bench, using a short iron knife to neatly trim the glowing red leaves of a pristine Ember-Grass stalk. Behind him, the other six D-Class students stood guard, their pockets overflowing with food vouchers, potion tokens, and gold credits they had already collected from desperate commoners. "You hijacked our shipments!" Cedric roared, drawing his sword. "You filthy piece of livestock! The guards will flay you alive for smuggling our goods!"

Christian didn't look up from his trimming. "The gatehouse ledgers indicate that all three hundred crates were successfully processed through the main array. Your vaults were unlocked and signed for by your own guards. If your inventory vanished due to structural rot or systemic incompetence within your own facility, that is an internal management failure. It has nothing to do with me." Christian raised a single, vibrant red leaf, the fiery mana casting an amber glow over his vacant face.

"I discovered these abandoned in the unmapped public drainage sectors beneath the mountain. According to Academy Bylaw forty-four, salvage found in common zones belongs entirely to the finder. If you wish to purchase them to save your faction's mana cores from permanent calcification, the price is fifty gold pieces per leaf. Ten times the standard market value." Cedric’s hand shook violently. He looked at the noble students behind him; their fingers were already stiffening with agony.

If they didn't receive the medicine within the hour, their cultivation bases would permanently degrade. With a choked, humiliated sob, Cedric slammed his faction’s golden treasury token into the mud. "We'll take everything you have left," Cedric hissed. Christian calmly picked up the heavy gold token, checking its magical weight before gesturing to the crates. The face-slap was absolute. The elite nobles had been financially broken, forced to buy their own redirected property at an exorbitant premium.

The victory lasted less than an hour. The heavy wooden doors of the D-Class lecture hall were violently kicked off their hinges. Professor Vance strode into the room, his pale face dark with venomous, lethal intent. He had just received an emergency transmission from Lord Byron Erat—the slave's intellectual manipulations were becoming too dangerous to tolerate, and he needed to be erased completely without leaving a trace for investigators.

Vance slammed his heavy wooden staff onto the podium, the dark mana cracking the ancient stone structure. "Pack your rags, vermin," Vance murmured, his yellowing teeth bared in a sinister grimace. "The Academy council has just approved a mandatory Night Training Simulation in the Whispering Woods. Let us see how your mind calculates coordinates when the predators come for your throat."