13:27, Rotation 264 / 365, 232 AE, -67.569970, -68.128228, Reath

  After they escaped the ruckus that was once a game of footie, they came upon a beggar slumped on the side of a market booth. Poor olog seemed to be paid no mind by the hustle and bustle of orcans peddling their wares and fresh produce. He was so starved that sprouts had grown out all along his skin, bearing little leaves, to better maximize the surface area of sunlight he received. He was so skinny it seemed like his loose hanging skin had been sucked in below his ribcage, all his ribs poked out and were visible. The sprouts were longest from the top of his head, and they billowed out like the branches of the forest’s running bamboo.

  “Oh, spare some change for Harold, young zuggie?”

  Githarie’s stride became brisker, and she strode right past the beggar – skai off, he wasn’t getting any of her birth-rote nazge – but within a few steps she realized she had lost Zhak. She looked behind her. Zhak was standing still, staring at Harold. He clutched his fried rat skewer in his hand, he had only managed a few nibbles.

  Gods know Da was stingy with her proper wages as the Defiant’s designated diver, and she knew Zhak was still young and unemployed and favored enough to get an allowance. Don’t do it. He was just too young to understand just how much work it took to scratch together every little coin, she thought. If he gave Harold a copper, she was going to smack him.

  Zhak handed Harold the deep fried ratsie on a skewer.

  “Oh, terima kasih, young master!” Harold took a big grateful bite out of it, teeth crunching through crackling skin and into the stringy, greasy meat. “Magosh sha!” Oil dribbled down to his sprout-choked chin.

  “Sama sama, Harold.”

  If he was going to pull this again, she wasn’t going to buy him another ratsie!

  “Leeroy, Zhak!”

  Zhak jogged up behind her.

  “Sorry Gith, I just felt bad for old Harold.”

  “It’s bub, Zhak. It was a nice thing sha did.” At least it was just some leftovers and not cold hard coins! She couldn’t criticize kindheartedness, especially at the sacrifice of one’s own snacks. Zhak’s heart shone brightly, she hoped it would never be tarnished.

  And so, she pulled out a silver from her nazge and dropped it into Zhak’s hands. “Buy sha own ratsie next time, Zhakkathan.”

  “Tha-anks, Rie Rie!”

  The most basic physical coins used were copper, silver, gold, and platinum. There were no markings to mint, for they were simply used as a commodity, as easily melted and reforged as they were banged back into uneven little pieces roughly the size of an orcan thumbnail. Their rate of exchange was roughly commensurate with their rarity on Reath, as most of it had already been extracted from Reath’s crust.

  A silver piece traded for roughly seven hundred copper pieces- a price frequently haggled over. Copper was obsoleted by the fall of the industry of the Godlike Beings, replaced by better conductors, like gryphantene.

  A gold piece was equivalent to roughly twenty silver pieces. While this ratio was much higher before the Catastrophe, since the Lost Age, the dearth of arcana made gold lose its luster. Even if everyone agreed that gold was much prettier than silver, not to mention its malleability, and the fact that gold never tarnished.

  A platinum piece was about the same value to a gold piece. While platinum was in slightly greater abundance, it was one of the few metals in the Reathean crust that had not been thoroughly scoured, although not for too much longer.

  And then there was the empyreal bit of the ethereal chains. This so-called ‘coin’ could neither be held, nor seen, nor used for much else than exchange value.

  Before the Eucatastrophe, there were many ethereal coins, all of which were priced relative to the mighty Morquarran Dollar, but afterwards, when the mighty arcane conclaves known as the Validators succumbed to elvan rule, only one ethereal coin remained of any real worth- the empyreal bit, even as the chains together wove a web, wrapping the sacred and empyreal coin, so that the bit could be more easily transmitted. And when the Morquarran Empire too had fallen, so did the Morquarran Dollar, leaving only the empyreal bit as the coin to rule them all, and now priced to the commodity metals of copper, silver, and gold.

  The Morquarran Empire fielded the strongest military and weapons of war in the Lost Age. Through their dragonlances which could orbit Reath itself to reach their target, their machine raptors that could rain fire upon the earth, and the steel leviathans upon which the raptors nested, the Morquarrans enforced their rule with brutality and an iron fist, and yet, it was this ruthlessness which gave the Lost Age its most prosperous zenith, known to scholars now as Pax Morquarra, or the Peace of the Morquarrans.

  The Morquarrans, who had bent all other states to accept their hegemony, thus indirectly ruling the rest of the Godlike Beings after the Greatest War of the Lost Age using the primacy of the Morquarran Dollar as the reserve currency of Reath, preached the freedom of the individual. The Morquarran Imperium protected the Dominium of the Godlike Elite, the ultrawealthy.

  But alas, even the Morquarran Empire eventually fell, torn apart by the divisions sowed deep within, and by their hubris towards the states caught in their hegemon, which they believed would never end. For the Morquarrans, believing so deeply in the freedom of the individual, could not help but eventually turn against themselves.

  It was the Morquarran Leader known as the Condemner who led the Morquarran invasion of Tuneden, and the Morquarran invasion of Vyredia. The Condemner, raised by a tide of hate, shattered the rule that the Morquarran Empire held over the Godlike Beings. And this was only after instigating a dire crisis of wellbeing for every single Godlike Being through a series of truly idiotic tariffs, isolating the Morquarrans from the rest of Reath. It was the destruction of the Peace of the Morquarrans that ushered in the Million Wars. And it was the Million Wars which unleashed the Catastrophe, when once the Godlike Beings had succeeded at holding the Catastrophe at bay.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Even as the Catastrophe ravaged the Lost Lands, and the Lost Age came to its end, the oligarchs of the three remaining superstates, Morquarra, Jhirya, and Tuneden, held bitterly onto power. It was not until the Eucatastrophe, the advent of the elvans, that the three superstates began to slowly disintegrate into elvan clan fiefdoms with their mutant slave castes, while all Lower Reath became anarchic, a wild land with no rule of law, where mutants fled, and where in Protorca the Horde first rose. When Morquarra, Jhirya, and Tuneden finally unraveled with the perishing of the last of the Godlike Beings, only the Orcan Horde and the Elvan Clans remained.

  While the rogue traders cared deeply about the value of the empyreal bit, the bit being their chief means of conducting exchange, Clan Amallark did not. For Clan Amallark was already a singular hierarchy. No trade was conducted within Clan Amallark, for no trade was needed, as all resources of the Clan ultimately belonged to the God Empress anyway.

  At its core, runes were all that chained the empyreal bit, runes that could only be bound once the link between them was found. The arcana had to sort through the endless possibilities, with each transaction the magickal energy necessary growing ever greater, before the next link in the chain could be forged. No bits were ever created anymore, there were only ever twenty-one million in existence, instead the arcana that produced them would absorb a fraction of each bit flowing across all the arcana. Through this chain of energy, an immutable ledger guaranteed that an owner of the bit would never have it taken from them. And thus, the bit was truly no less than exchangeable expended energy itself.

  The empyreal bit was used most often as part of village treasuries, only used when the orcan villages were to export or import great amounts of commodity between villages. It was also the chief means of trade with rogue traders, whether by wealthy individual orcan households, or with village chiefs.

  In Reath, the empyreal bit was the equivalent of true wealth. It was the only easily exchangeable asset respected by both orcans and elvans.

  In 232 Revolutions AE, a bit traded for roughly fourteen thousand gold pieces. And this price was trending up, as prices began to inflate relative to platinum, gold, silver, and copper.

  This was because of the simple law of supply and demand. As the orcans continued to accrue bits through trade with the rogue traders – who ultimately scrounged what goods they could by the grace of Clan Amallark in return for what Clan Amallark needed – more and more bits would be dispersed among orcan hands, which in turn was conducive to even more trade between villages, unburdened by the need to heave heavy chests of gold bars across distance. And this meant fewer bits held by elvans, including Clan Amallark, which did not really need the ethereal chains but for extraction of the wealth of Orca through the rogue traders. This led to the current prosperity of the Horde, for not only as the Horde gathered more bits for themselves, these bits could be traded for even more goods, more commodities, more necessities needed by the orcans, but held by the elvans. It made the empyreal bit ever more desired, but at the expense of the value of copper, silver, and gold coins.

  If the Horde continued to expand trade with the rogue traders, the Horde would continue to flourish, acquiring the materials and capital necessary to cultivate the untapped potential of Orca.

  But economics remained of no import to young Githarie and Zhakkathan, and so they continued their way, innocent to the systems that kept a tenuous peace between orcan and elvan.

  She used his full name when condescending to him.

  But the ploy had worked, Zhak thought, cackling silently to himself, and how! A ratsie for a silver! He quickly calculated his profit. Three coppers to a silver, three to seven hundred. He had just pulled a two hundred and thirty-three bagger! He scarcely believed it and had to run the math again. Two hundred and thirty-three… point three. Repeating of course. 2,333% gain in less than a second. Oh, Rie Rie, sha just played yourself.

  Any less and the coin would be considered clipped, and the trade refused.

  This property was due to gold’s revered status as a noble metal.

  Enterprising orcans would take advantage of the fluctuating price of platinum relative to gold all across the different geographies of Orca. The inefficient markets could easily be turned to profit by buying something arbitrarily low in one place, to sell it where it was arbitrarily high in another- arbitrage.

  Solana, Ethereum, Stellar, Tezos, Tron, Avalanche, Hedera, Polkadot, Cardano, Monero

  In the end, everything else was all just a circus for degenerate gambling. All that was truly needed was merely a permissionless ledger.

  The Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.

  Fighter Jets and Bombers.

  Aircraft Carriers.

  What I’m about to tell you is top secret. There’s a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I’m talking about the guys no one knows about, the guys who are invisible. The top 1% of the top 1%.

  ‘Reciprocal’. That means, they do it to us? We do it to them. Very simple. Can’t get simpler than that.

  His name was struck from the psionic legacy to disgrace him, so that this malignant narcissist would be forgotten to the annals of time. But this moniker represented what the eschatologists who followed the Redeemer came to see him as- the antithesis of all that is holy, and of grace, and virtue. Anti-Christ. That is, except for those who followed that uniquely Morquarran corruption to the faith, the Gospel Against Empathy.

  Also known as ‘bitcoin’.

  Known as the nonce.

  A magick known as the Proof of Work algorithm.

  Unless an entity possessed more than half of all bit in existence, what was known as a 51% attack, but this was impossible for before the War of the Clans, and the elvans still knew trade, each clan had contested their own partition of bits, impossible to be moved even with the death of a Queen. What bits belonged to the clan remained in the clan, even if all their members were vassalized, as only Queens ever knew the private keys.

  And since this expended energy had no real use other than as a means of exchange, it could be argued that the bit was, in part, responsible for the Catastrophe.

  It was this very trend that had the Empress worried about Amefrid’s competence.

  For now.

  Even as it would vex their father in an unfathomable degree, even more than it already did.

  A system which the Princess Senjya would soon disrupt.