Kael’s eyes caught on two lines of green text hovering under the widow’s name tag.
[Tamable]
[Bond Success Rate: 1%]
He blinked, genuinely caught off guard.
He knew exactly what that tag meant.
Every monster, every boss he’d fought since logging in had carried that same prompt it meant the God Control Contract could be used to force a bond, turning the target into a companion.
Seeing it hang under an NPC’s name was something else entirely.
Wait.
It clicked a second later this had to be the class’s first passive in action. Establish a bond with any eligible target.
He’d read that line a dozen times without fully registering what "any" actually covered.
Not just monsters. Not just bosses.
NPCs too.
And Ascension’s NPCs weren’t set dressing. The important ones sat on real resources quest chains, hidden shops, information networks that ordinary players would never get access to.
Bond with the right one, and an entire slice of the game’s economy opened up under his control.
Filing that away for later.
The widow’s expression had already shifted, eyes sweeping over him with the kind of amusement that came from decades of reading strangers at her own doorstep.
"Bit early in the day for a young man to be knocking on a widow’s door, isn’t it?"
She’d aged into her role gracefully soft where it counted, sharp-eyed, carrying herself like someone who’d survived a lot longer than she looked.
Kael filed away a flicker of curiosity about testing the contract on her directly, purely out of professional interest.
Then he remembered he only had one companion slot open, and the Husk wasn’t going anywhere. Not for this. Not for anyone.
He kept his expression perfectly level.
"Not what you’re thinking. I’m here about something else."
Her face shut like a door.
"Don’t know what you’re talking about. If that’s all, I’ll ask you to leave."
She started swinging the door closed. Kael’s palm hit the wood first, holding it open, voice dropping low and pleasant.
"The village chief know about you and the militia captain?"The color drained out of her face."How how could you possibly"
"I know a lot of things." He let the smile carry the rest of the sentence. "Now. Can we talk?"
She yanked him inside before he’d finished the sentence, checked the street twice, and shut the door hard behind them.
"Fine. Talk." She folded her arms, all business now. "But you don’t get anything for free. Prove yourself first."
Kael already knew roughly where this was headed a version of this exact conversation had played out in his last life too, secondhand, from a player who’d bragged about it on the forums for weeks.
The full quest chain officially required a small novel’s worth of favors first finding some kid’s missing cat, fetching a bottle of wine for her grandfather, half a dozen other errands stacked end to end before she’d even consider trusting a stranger with the real request.
He had zero interest in the scenic route.
"How do I prove it?"
"Simple. Bronze-tier boss, three Iron-tier.
Bring me the heads, and I’ll know you’re not wasting my time."Kael’s mouth twitched.
"Funny you should mention that."
He swung his pack off his shoulder and dumped it out across her table four heads, still dark with dried blood, landing with a series of wet thuds.
The widow’s composure cracked clean in half."You. you already had these? Prepared?"
She didn’t wait for an answer. She turned on her heel and disappeared into the back room, and came out a minute later holding a small silver token between two fingers.
"Take this. Ten miles east Graystone Ridge. There’s a sealed passage there. Inside, a Skeleton General guards an iron strongbox. Bring that box back to me, and I’ll open it for you myself."
"Quest Accepted: The Widow’s Treasure. Travel to Graystone Ridge, ten miles east of the village. Enter the sealed passage, defeat the Skeleton General, and return with the iron strongbox he guards."
Kael pocketed the token, thanked her, and left before she could change her mind.
First stop was the general store potions, arrows, whatever consumables were cheap enough to stock in bulk.
Then, instead of heading straight for the ridge, he detoured to the village square and started laying out gear across a stall.
Everything he’d outgrown or had no use for went on display, price tags scrawled beside each piece.
[Premium gear gold only. Ten minutes, then it’s gone.]
Equipment lost value fast this early. A piece worth ten gold now might not fetch one gold by evening, once the server had leveled past it. And once the merge hit and gold started buying real-world skill extraction, every coin left on the table now was money he’d wish he’d banked.
He wasn’t leaving anything behind.
A handful of other players had stalls set up nearby mostly junk, starter drops, nothing worth a second look. The second Kael’s gear hit the ground, every set of eyes in the square swung toward him.
"Whoa check that stall out!"
"That’s an Iron-tier staff. Level 7, over twenty points of magic power on it!"
"There’s a skill book too area damage, mage-line!"
"...Five gold. Of course it’s five gold. Nobody here’s got that."
He wasn’t wrong. Four hours into launch, most of the server was surviving on copper and barely scraping together potion money, let alone gold.
The crowd thickened fast, but the actual sales trickled in slow three cheap pieces changed hands in the first five minutes, everyone else stuck staring at gear they couldn’t afford.
Kael almost missed it at first a detail buried under all the noise.
Every single player crowding his stall had that same green tag hovering beneath their name.
[Tamable]
His pulse ticked up half a beat.
If it works on players too, the ceiling on this class just went somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
Before he could chase that thought any further, someone shoved through the crowd toward his stall, breathless.
"Hey can I pay real money for this?"
The kid didn’t wait for an answer.
"Ten thousand gold, real currency, straight to your account. I’ll take everything."