“Look at all this stuff.” Seymour stood with his hands on his hips, gold reflecting in his eyes. The spoils they’d frantically stolen from the treasure room were strewn about on both of the sleeping cabin’s benches, leaving him and Penny momentarily without any place to sit. “We gotta be talking thousands of chits here.”

  “Tens of thousands,” she calmly corrected. “We must find a bazaar at which we can sell it all off. Prudence would likely dictate that it be our very first priority upon reaching Earth.”

  “Uh, yeah. I hate to break it to you, but—”

  “And I can only imagine what riches remain to be discovered inside the chest, once we are able to unlock it.” The fancy treasure chest they’d risked—and temporarily lost—their lives to steal was sitting on the floor, still shut up tight. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that it would be magically locked, but Seymour felt disappointed all the same. Penny remained optimistic. “Perhaps we shall find a qualified locksmith at the bazaar – someone skilled with magical locks.”

  “So that’s the thing,” Seymour explained, “we aren’t going to find a locksmith like that. Because there legit aren’t any magical bazaars on Earth. Like, not even one. Same as there aren’t any magic shops or adventure depots or whatever else.”

  “I see. Where then, I hesitate to ask, do Earthlings buy and sell magical objects?”

  “We don’t,” Seymour explained, “because there are no magic objects on Earth. Haven’t we been over this? Where I come from, magic isn’t real. It’s all fake, just tricks and whatnot. Anyway, I think we’d probably better just keep all this stuff in your familiar for now.”

  “Glory,” Penny corrected. “Her name is Glory. And I suppose the existence of a magical economy on Earth was simply wishful thinking on my part. I understood that your people don’t manifest Virtue Sigils and therefore cannot gain innate powers, but nevertheless I assumed your civilization had at least progressed to the point where magical technologies had become widely available. I mean, surely your society is at least as advanced as that of the gnomes.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. Like I literally just don’t know much about gnomish society and whatnot. But regardless – none of this stuff we swiped from that big ass treasure room is actually magical, right? It just all looks fancy as hell.” Seymour waved his hand over the treasure piled up on the benches. Even without knowing the contents of the chest, the haul remained substantial, consisting of 312 loose gold coins, a trio of crazy-ornate scepters, the weird, mana-filled wakizashi, multiple jewel-encrusted figurines of dragons and other exotic creatures, a golden rope that measured over twenty feet long, and an array of fist-sized gems. “So on Earth we could probably hit a pawn shop or something if we end up needing cash, but that does seem sort of crazy; pawning gems and statuettes and shit from another universe. And really, it’s only been a couple months since I woke up on Heschia, anyway, so my bank account should still be right where I left it, if we need money.”

  “The scepters and the wakizashi will definitely need to be sold in Xallem if we are to receive anything close to their true value,” she replied, now speaking as if their eventual return to Heschia was inevitable. “I have no doubt we could find a fence in Ghizo’s Crossing, but the real, moneyed collectors all reside in the imperial capital, so that is where our spoils should go, too. Our mutual friend Ermin will likely have useful connections there.”

  “I’ll talk to him. I mean, assuming we ever get back to Heschia, right? And assuming that as soon as we do, Dan doesn’t just fire me on the spot and then turn me to ashes.” He sighed. “I mean, I’d bet he’s probably gonna be pretty pissed about me using the Ressurectory to raise my own little zombie army.”

  Penny didn’t so much as even acknowledge his work anxiety. “You should take all of these gold coins for yourself, and use them without delay to progress your powers. And I will take my cut once we return to Heschia and Ermin finds buyers for the rest of the spoils. I would only end up exchanging these coins for chits, after all, while you can put them to much better use at the moment by leveling your sigil powers.”

  He sure wasn’t going to argue with her on this one. The 312 coins they’d managed to chuck inside Glory now represented the potential to advance Seymour’s sigil powers by a total of about sixty-two percent.

  But there was more.

  After Thornton had left them back in the hedge maze, Penny and Seymour had battled a total of thirteen more topiary monsters while trudging along on the course which eventually brought them to the treasure room. With each victory, his Cash Out power had rewarded them with a sack containing gold, and when it was all said and done they had earned an additional 192 coins. That meant Seymour actually had 504 gold to work with at the moment – enough to rank up even a brand new sigil power all the way to Adept.

  He examined his internal progress meter to get a better idea of where he stood at that moment:

  With the coins he now possessed, Seymour could potentially push both Infringement and Cash Out up to Adept. That seemed like the course he should obviously take, since any other route would result in at-best only a single adept-ranked power. Cash Out, in particular, seemed like a no-brainer since it might produce a snowball effect, if ranking it up were to enhance it to reward even more gold coins per kill, as Seymour had a hunch it might.

  He’d found that he could only feed a maximum of 20 coins into his Sigil of Greed in one go. Any more than that and the stack of coins would simply become too unwieldy for the whole exercise to be mechanically efficient. Fortunately, he could take his time as it seemed they still had plenty of it to kill, since they’d yet to receive any indication that the Midnight Express would ever reach its destination – let alone that it would be doing so any time soon.

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  So Seymour sat down and got to work, feeding stacks of twenty coins at a time to the pig-face on his right palm, until finally his Cash Out Growth Account reached the ceiling of Neophyte:

  He mentally affirmed that he wished for Cash Out to rank up, and fresh power circulated throughout his entire body, finally gathering solely within his Sigil of Greed. The sensation wasn’t quite as intense as when first adding a catalyst to manifest a new power, but his head still swam with a surge of euphoria. The blissful feeling faded quickly, after which Seymour examined how his power had changed before projecting that portion of his status panel so Penny could see, too:

  She let out a long sigh. “You’re a soul eater now, in addition to everything else.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what it sounds like: you eat souls and crap gold.”

  “No, I mean ‘in addition to everything else’. What exactly are you trying to say?”

  “Truly, Seymour. If you have to ask.”

  He laughed and nodded at the status panel. “Anyway, ignoring that first weird ass bit about exchanging souls for gold, which doesn’t really matter right now because I don’t know how to get my hands on any souls in the first place, the rest of it looks pretty much perfect, right? I mean all I really wanted from Cash Out was for it to give me more gold to level all my other spells up even quicker – and I got exactly that. Plus, it sounds like we’ll get some bonus crafting goodies now, too. Which could be cool.”

  “While I commend your ability to selectively view the positive, we would be remiss to ignore the fact that you’ve so recently sold your soul to Rivulon the Unraveler and now your magical repertoire appears determined to evolve in such a way as to dictate your future involvement in more soul-based…. fuckery. For lack of more precise terminology.”

  “Whatever, I can see you’re hellbent on being a bummer but you can’t rain on my parade right now. I’m just gonna keep thinking happy thoughts while I feed some more coins to my pig-hand and see what cool new powers leveling up good ol’ Infringement will give me.”

  “I never expected anything else.”

  Seymour smiled and set himself to the task of feeding more stacks of coins into his palm, this time using Blood Money to make deposits into a Growth Account for Infringement:

  Once again he silently affirmed his desire for his power to rank up and it did, accompanied by the corresponding surge of power. When the sensation faded, he checked the description of Infringement and could only laugh.

  “You are going to love this.”

  He projected the adept-ranked evolution for Penny to read:

  “It is precisely as I predicted: more soul-fuckery.”

  Seymour snorted a laugh. “Have you been drinking?”

  “What? No, of course not. Do you see any spirits at hand? Why would you even ask such a question?”

  “I mean, you’re dropping f-bombs left-and-right like you’ve been guzzling goblets of velvetberry wine again.”

  “Perhaps,” she paused, a mischievous grin spreading across her cheeks, “I am simply a bit tipsy on adventure.”

  He understood that feeling. As bad as their hedge maze expedition had gone, and as awful as it had been witnessing Jerome’s murder of Oscar Rusk, and as confused as he was by his recent death and the subsequent selling of his soul – Seymour couldn’t deny that he was kinda having a great time. Seeing Penny react in kind to recent and currently occurring events struck him as oddly comforting, like he couldn’t be some sort of crazed adrenaline junkie because it would mean she was, too.

  And surely that couldn't be the case.

  All told, ranking up both Cash Out and Infringement had eaten up a total of 449 coins, leaving him with a remaining sum of only 55, enough to advance one more of his neophyte-ranked powers by eleven percent. But Seymour had another idea. Instead of investing any more gold into one of his lower-ranked powers, he built another twenty-stack of coins and fed it into his palm, using it to progress Cash Out toward Master. The results surprised him:

  “Oof,” he said out loud.

  “What is it now?”

  “I just tested out how much gold Blood Money is gonna need to push my powers up to Master, and it’s a shit ton.”

  If his head math was correct, each gold coin would only grant him five-thousandths of one-percent’s worth of progress toward master-rank. Whereas each neophyte-ranked power could be advanced to Adept for only 500 gold, pushing up to Master was going to cost—

  “Twenty thousand each,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

  It stood as such an exorbitant sum that Seymour suddenly felt let down by Blood Money – like after ranking his powers up to adept it would become functionally pointless as a class trait. But then a thought occurred to him:

  What if it’s just a sign of things to come? What if I’m destined to earn hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions—of gold coins on Heschia?

  And just then, he and Penny both received an unexpected notification: