Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK
Chapter 22: The Local Trading Hub

Chapter 22: The Local Trading Hub

The eggs problem had not resolved itself.

Three weeks into the apocalypse, Ethan’s grocery mart runs had grown steadily less productive — shelves that had once held at least the illusion of a functioning economy were now bare concrete, and the last time he’d gone looking for anything resembling fresh food, he’d come home with pickled onions and regret. What he needed, he’d decided over a breakfast of void-preserved rice for the fourth day running, was an actual marketplace. A place where things got traded, not just scavenged.

It was Suresh who finally told him one existed.

"There is a settlement, beta," the old janitor said, finding Ethan in the lobby examining the sliced vending machine wreckage with the fond nostalgia of a man revisiting an old crime scene. "Three kilometers east. Survivors set it up in the old sports complex — big open field, easy to defend. They trade there. Food, tools, salvage. Real market, real barter."

"They take monster parts?" Ethan asked, already thinking about the mountain of teeth cluttering his void inventory, an entire category of loot he’d been too lazy to figure out a use for.

Suresh’s eyebrows went up slightly. "Monster parts are the entire economy now, beta. Cores, fangs, hides — that is currency. Real money means nothing anymore." He paused, then added, with the particular caution of a man who’d learned not to underestimate what Ethan was casually sitting on, "How many parts do you have?"

Ethan pulled up his inventory and scrolled for a genuinely embarrassing amount of time.

"...a lot," he admitted.

The settlement, when Ethan arrived an hour later, sprawled across what used to be a sports complex — a wide, fenced field ringed by makeshift stalls built from salvaged tarps, shipping containers, and repurposed shop signage. Hundreds of people moved between the stalls, trading in a low, constant murmur of haggling voices, the closest thing to normal commerce the district had seen since the sky turned red.

Ethan wandered in wearing his usual hoodie, hands in his pockets, entirely unaware that several heads turned the moment he crossed the perimeter — word of the Sleeping Guardian had reached even here, embellished past all recognition, and more than a few traders quietly nudged their neighbors and pointed as he passed.

He found a stall near the center advertising "FOOD — FRESH, TRADE ONLY" in hand-painted letters, run by a broad-shouldered woman named Kavita who eyed him with the practiced suspicion of someone who’d been burned by bad trades one too many times since the world ended.

"What are you offering?" she asked, arms crossed over a table stacked with small crates — actual, honest-to-god eggs, a few glass jars of milk that had clearly come from someone’s carefully maintained goat herd, and bundles of dried greens.

"Monster teeth," Ethan said. "Fangs. I’ve got, uh." He pulled out his phone and checked. "A lot of them."

Kavita’s expression didn’t change. "Everyone’s got fangs, kid. Common-grade monster teeth trade about twenty to a dozen eggs, if you’re lucky and I’m feeling generous. What tier?"

Ethan opened his inventory, found the largest stack — the endless pile of "Monster Fang (Common)" that had been cluttering his storage since week one — and, without really thinking about scale, dumped a portion of it onto her table.

Three hundred and twelve fangs materialized in a soft violet flash, spilling off the edges of the table and clattering onto the dirt in small ivory-white piles.

Kavita’s arms uncrossed very slowly.

She picked one up, turned it over, checked the base where it had been broken from the jaw, and her professional haggling face cracked for just a second into something closer to disbelief. "This isn’t common grade," she said quietly. "This is — where did you even—" She picked up another, checking it against the first. "These are uniform. Perfectly harvested. No fracturing. I haven’t seen a batch this clean since before the apocalypse started."

"They came from a rat cave," Ethan offered, unhelpfully. "There were a lot of rats."

Kavita stared at the pile, then at him, doing rapid mental math that clearly wasn’t landing anywhere reasonable. "Three hundred of these — kid, this is worth more than my entire stall’s monthly stock. I can’t— I don’t have enough eggs to cover this."

"That’s fine," Ethan said, already losing interest in the negotiation, glancing past her stall toward one selling what looked suspiciously like fresh bread. "I just want eggs and milk. Whatever that’s actually worth, just, y’know. Give me what feels fair."

A crowd had started gathering by this point — traders and shoppers alike drawn by the sight of a boy casually unloading a small fortune in perfectly preserved monster parts like he was emptying pocket lint. Kavita, hands trembling slightly, began filling a crate with eggs, a jug of fresh milk, a bundle of the dried greens, and, after a long moment of visible internal debate, a small wheel of hard cheese she’d clearly been saving for a better offer than this.

"Take it," she said, pushing the crate toward him. "Take all of it. This isn’t even close to fair, but I don’t have anything else to give you."

"That’s plenty," Ethan said, genuinely pleased, hefting the crate under one arm. "Seriously, thank you. My noodle situation has been dire."

He turned to leave, and that was when a man’s voice cut through the murmuring crowd, sharp with a kind of desperate excitement.

"Wait — you’re the one from the residential block. Room 404, right? The Sleeping Guardian?"

Ethan paused, glancing back at a thin, nervous-looking man who’d pushed his way to the front of the gathered crowd. "The what?"

"That’s what people call you," the man said, eyes wide. "Please — I have a proposal. Trade rights. Exclusive access to whatever you’re willing to part with, first pick, before anyone else in the settlement even sees it. I can offer you—"

"I’m good," Ethan said, already walking, crate balanced on one hip. "But hey, if you ever get chips in stock, let Kavita know to hold some for me."

He walked off through the parting crowd, utterly indifferent to the small commotion he’d left behind him — Kavita staring at a pile of monster fangs worth a genuine fortune, the nervous trader scribbling something furiously in a notebook, dozens of onlookers whispering amongst themselves about the boy who’d just casually made an entire stall owner reconsider her life choices in exchange for eggs.

By the time Ethan made it back to his building, humming to himself with a crate of fresh food tucked under one arm, the story of the Sleeping Guardian’s trading hub visit had already started its journey through the settlement’s gossip network — growing, as these things always did, considerably larger and stranger with every retelling.

Ethan, for his part, was simply looking forward to finally having eggs for breakfast.