Zeph climbed the stairs to his eighth-floor apartment with the careful, measured steps of someone who'd just committed financial suicide and was still processing the implications.
The storage ring on his finger, capable of holding about ten cubic meters now contained six skill tomes and manuals that represented nearly every credit he'd owned. Plus a few pills he had plans for.
Six items. 44,000 credits. Gone.
'I'm broke,' he thought, not for the first time in the last twenty minutes. 'Actually, genuinely, properly broke. 4,120 credits to my name. That's… that's less than some people spend on a single dinner.'
His Enhanced Hearing picked up the sounds of life behind closed doors as he climbed—a crying baby, someone's audio drama playing too loud, the sizzle of cooking food that smelled infinitely better than his burnt breakfast attempt.
Normal people doing normal things with money they probably earned through normal jobs.
