Berserker: A LitRPG Urban Fantasy Adventure (Apocosmos Book 1)

by Dimitrios Gkirgkiris

“Fuck!” I almost shouted as a piece of glass pierced my palm. It began to bleed all over the kitchen tiles.

  I washed it quickly with water and wrapped it in a cloth I used for rinsing the dishes. The white cloth immediately became red but soon the colored stain stopped expanding as the wound ceased bleeding.

  I needed to keep my head together and figure out a solution.

  That was when my eyes fell on the DEM tablet lying on the table. Leo did say that there was a lot of money to be made and I had always been good at making a profit on the marketplace of Guild Wars 2. Perhaps I could take a look. I didn’t need to enjoy it, and I wouldn’t. But I could really use the money right now.

  I picked up the tablet and started browsing the Dark Energy Marketplace.

  4

  A man with a plan

  I spent several hours on the tablet, researching how everything worked. Shopping on the market turned out to be ridiculously easy. In fact, it was easier to shop there than it was on Amazon since most of the regular items could be delivered to you before you even paid. The promise of payment within a certain number of days was enough. The price, of course, got higher the further out the payment date was set, and I guessed that this enabled any poor fucker with bad financial management to become indebted to the DEM pretty easily. I didn’t know much about this world or this company in particular, but I had a pretty good idea of what would happen to anyone who didn’t meet their payment dates.

  Selling things on the DEM, on the other hand, was a bit more complicated and required more careful planning—even if somebody just wanted to use it to flip items for profit, which was exactly what I intended to do. The best information I managed to find was in the Apocosmos’s equivalent of the world wide web, called The Source. Its video section—unimaginatively called The Source - Videos—which was eerily similar to YouTube, had a multitude of videos with people explaining how to flip items for profit. Most of them looked very much like the fuckboy working-from-Bali day trader Youtubers, but the information in there was quite useful for a “DEM flipping virgin” like me, according to one of the video’s titles.

  I subscribed to a couple of them and to my surprise I saw that the numbers of their followers were in the millions. Taking a slight detour from my research, I looked at some of the other channels and found quite a few with billions of subscribers. There was a channel with a couple of dark elf women traveling through worlds I had never seen before, their video thumbnails featuring fantastic forest landscapes, exploding volcanoes, and swimming in luminescent purple waters. Another channel resembled the Discovery Channel, though some of the featured beasts were straight from the imagination. The last one I checked before putting an end to my procrastination was full of tutorials for languages I didn’t even know existed.

  I dragged myself out of the rabbit hole that I knew online videos were and got back to my research on making cash. Flipping items for profit didn’t require months of research and could generate profit quite fast. But it seemed that no matter how great the amount of money earned this way would be for someone like me, with regular obligations in the Cosmos, it was meager when you took into account Apocosmos inflation, which was why not many people appeared to have bothered with it.

  My research showed that the DEM took a 15% fee for every transaction from the side of the seller. And since the marketplaces were segmented by realm, country, and area, each customer had to filter the place they wanted to buy from. Checking the New York State section, I found a lot of people selling the same items at different prices, which was a very good sign. It meant that there was a lot of traffic and fluctuations in pricing over time. It was exactly like trading in online games, which started to make me hopeful about the whole thing. My train of thought was derailed yet again as my phone started vibrating and I picked it up to see Leo calling me.

  “Hey, man. Everything alright? Did I wake you up? Did you watch our stream?”

  I thought of telling him that I wasn’t alright, that my insurance company was a piece-of-shit money-grabbing corporate conglomerate and that I had to pay almost thirty thousand dollars for my little trip to the ER. But with Leo coming from a wealthy family, he would most definitely not have understood my predicament and might have done something extremely stupid and offensive like offering to help me with the money. I wasn’t looking for pity. And so I steadied my voice and replied calmly.

  “Everything’s fine here. I watched it for a bit before falling asleep, and I just woke up a minute ago.”

  “I see. Well, I hope you liked it?” He paused for a moment but resumed talking a few seconds later, once he’d understood he wasn’t getting a response. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I’ve already informed the office that you had a bit of an accident and that you won’t be coming into work tomorrow.”

  “But tomorrow the next season of Hot N Spicy Digital’s never-ending crunch-time begins,” I said, genuinely weirded out that he would do such a thing.

  “And you had an accident with a taxi driver and the doctor ordered you to stay home,” he replied seriously.

  “I see. Thank you,” I said, already coming round to the idea that this might be a good opportunity to do some more research on the DEM.

  “Also, you’re welcome to come over to mine tomorrow after work if you want to train and gain your first levels in—”

  “No, Leo,” I cut him off. “I don’t want anything to do with leveling or the Apocosmos, to be honest. I think I’ll be just fine with the taste I had today.”

  “As you wish, man. But I’m here if you change your mind.”

  “Thanks. Goodnight, Leo.”

  “Bye, man.”

  As soon as we hung up, I picked up the DEM tablet again and started browsing The Source. As I expected, there were multiple pages with historic line charts of price fluctuations for many of the products on the marketplace. I took my time identifying patterns and relative fluctuations until I had a good grasp on how prices and demands changed over the course of the day, during the week, and over the month.

  It looked like a lot of raw materials were sold at higher prices during the weekdays while their prices lower over the weekend, and I found out that in many cases this was because of storage fees imposed by the DEM. On the other hand, items connected to fighting and adventuring saw a rise in demand and therefore a rise in price over the weekend.

  As for the time of day, the highest prices tended to be at lunchtime and at midnight. Seeing that people would pay three times the lower end amounts for certain items didn’t make much sense to me, but then again the cost was probably negligible to regular delvers into the Apocosmos. I could understand how people would buy more things at lunch but was puzzled over the price peaks at midnight until I found an article that mentioned several farming areas resetting at midnight. I was unsure how a whole area could reset as if it was an actual video game, but there were so many things I was unsure of about this new world that I took it at face value and didn’t spend more time researching it for the time being.

  Finally, the demand for items was bigger as the end of each month drew nearer, presumably because people were getting paid around that time and could purchase more things. The conclusions I came to from my research were remarkably similar to what I would have guessed for a marketplace operating in our Cosmos. Either the Apocosmos operated pretty much in the same way as our world when it came to businesses, or our world operated in line with the example of the Apocosmos. Not that it really mattered.

  Louie’s whimpering brought me out of my thoughts. I must have spent so long surfing The Source and looking at listings in the Dark Energy Marketplace that I completely forgot about taking Louie out before going to bed. Needing the money was no excuse for neglecting him, so I put him on his leash, grabbed my keys, and headed out.

  We did our usual walk, making a round of our block, stopping every so often for him to sniff the streetlights and occasional patches of grass. I, however, couldn’t take my mind off the listings and how I could create a
regular income stream out of it. The more I thought about it, the more apparent it became. The only way to understand if something would work and whether it would be scalable was to actually try it.

  With renewed determination, I led Louie back into our building’s elevator, ready to run my first test. I quickly wiped Louie’s paws and gave him a small dental treat before I grabbed the tablet and threw myself down on the couch. I transferred $1,000, a significant chunk of my savings, to my DEM account and looked for an item that was still low in price but seemed to jump on Fridays. My list of candidates wasn’t very extensive, so I went through them quickly.

  Name : Animal Skin (Cattle)

  Type : Crafting Component

  Durability : 20/20

  Grade : E Grade

  Weight : 2st.

  Description : The skin of a cow, ox, calf, or bull. This is a material used in crafting items.

  Name: Animal Bones (Horse)

  Type: Crafting Component

  Durability : 20/20

  Grade: E Grade

  Weight: 2st.

  Description : The bones of a mare or stallion. This is a material used in crafting items.

  The Animal Skin looked like a decent choice in terms of margin. Each piece would cost me around $40 if I bought it from another small seller, or as low as $33 if I waited enough with a purchasing order. With prices reaching peaks of up to $62, in the best-case scenario each piece would net me $19.70 in profit. If I considered putting all of my thousand dollars into skins, I might be able to buy 30 pieces, which would translate to more than 50% return on my investment. That would be a huge deal, especially if it could go on in increments.

  However, this was in the absolute best-case scenario, and in one that would need testing first. What’s more, if the prices shifted due to a sudden influx of animal skins, or if someone else was taking advantage of this exact same scenario but in larger quantities, I might end up stuck with items I wouldn’t be able to sell. For this reason, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk at the moment.

  The same was true for the Animal Bones, though their margins were even lower since I could buy them for a bit less than Animal Skin, but they would also sell for a lot less. As I looked down the list at the next candidate though, I knew I had found the perfect product for my test.

  Name: Greater Haste Potion

  Type: Consumable - Potion

  Durability : 50/50

  Grade: E Grade

  Weight: 4st.

  Description : A magic potion, which—upon consumption—will increase Speed by 33. The effect of the potion lasts 30 minutes.

  The cheapest one I could find at the moment cost a whopping $750, though considering my 126 Speed, perhaps the bonus would be worth it. I could have put on a buying order for less than that, but I didn’t want to have to wait before setting up shop. I went ahead and purchased the potion and a new prompt appeared asking me if I wanted the item to be delivered to my address or if it should be transferred to a DEM warehousing facility. For a moment, I was excited by the idea of drinking the potion myself and running around Brooklyn like an Olympic sprinter. But, with my mind on the money, I quickly brushed off the idea and decided that the Olympus feta cheese in my fridge would have to suffice for my taste of all things Olympic for now.

  I selected the option to store the potion in a DEM facility after making sure its small size and weight incurred no additional costs. The only downside to this option was that my item would not be available for sale until it was picked up and cataloged, but this didn’t stop me from preparing my sale entry. I quickly created a seller profile, leaving most of the information at their default, and selected the potion from a list that hosted the items I had available for sale in DEM warehouses—a list that only included this one item for now. The next step was setting a price for it.

  According to my research, the prices would start hiking on Friday, reaching a peak of around one and a half grand at midnight on Saturday. I didn’t really want to wait all that time, so I decided to put a rather conservative reserve price of $1,000 on it. It still seemed completely crazy to me that something like this might work, but having seen prices of billions of dollars for single listings, I hoped that enough people would be willing to pay this much more reasonable price for the potion. I pressed the virtual button to set up shop and navigated back to the list of available Greater Haste Potions in the state of New York.

  There were quite a few listings that were cheaper than mine but flipping items for profit was always a waiting game. I lay back on the couch, voice-commanded my lights to dim to their minimum brightness, and continued watching the other listings sell while my item was still grayed out in the queue. In no more than ten minutes, my potion became available, and soon after that, I fell asleep, the tablet still on my chest.

  The device vibrated softly but this was enough to pull me out of my slumber. I rubbed my eyes and looked at my phone. It was two in the morning. I had no idea how to turn off sounds and vibrations on the tablet, but I needed to find out. I tapped on the screen and the first thing I saw was the notification that had caused it to wake me up.

  Your item (Greater Haste Potion) has been sold to Andrea DiMazzio. Icon015

  Your listing is now inactive.

  Your selling price was $1,000.00.

  The Dark Energy Marketplace’s fee of $150.00 has been automatically deducted.

  A grand total of $850.00 has been added to your account.

  Your new account balance is: $1,100.00

  That was insane. I had just made one hundred dollars in about three hours. While sleeping! The thrill of the easy money quickly made my head spin with anticipation and excitement over the possibilities. If I did this systematically and if I could find better margins, I’d be able to pay back the hospital soon. Hell, I might even be able to pay back my student loan before my hair went gray.

  I launched myself off the sofa and picked up my keys as a sleepy Louie barely raised his head to see what all the commotion was about. I knelt down and kissed him gently on his snout before rushing out of the apartment, down the stairs, and across the road to the liquor store.

  “That’s gonna be twenty-four dollars,” said the stoner good-for-nothing cashier as I put the six-pack of Red Bulls on the counter.

  “Keep the change,” I said as I handed him five five-dollar bills and immediately turned my back to leave so I wouldn’t have to watch the painful process of him trying to do simple multiplication and subtraction again.

  It’s going to be a long night!

  5

  I will build you a Rome

  Time blurred over the next couple of days. I set reminders so that I wouldn’t forget to walk Louie, but most of my time was spent in front of the tablet downing energy drinks. I think I slept a few hours. Or did I? If I was being honest with myself, it didn’t matter to me at all, since I had made more than two thousand dollars in profit in that time. Working through just one small device was creating a bit of a bottleneck, but ultimately I decided to continue running my tests before I pulled the trigger on a bigger trading setup.

  Having a greater cash flow meant that I could ramp up the quality of items I’d purchase so that I could achieve larger margins. I also planned to start doing longer transactions, since I wouldn’t be able to be as active on weekdays. The DEM was very flexible in enabling this, as I could place a purchasing order for a specific item and I would receive it whenever someone saw my order and sold it to me. This way, I would be able to put buying orders for Greater Haste Potions at $500, the lowest price they would go for the week, and all this without needing to bind the money to this transaction. The right amount would just be pulled from my DEM account whenever the transaction took place.

  I would need to keep track of purchases so that I could sell them again, which might introduce a potentially significant problem. Though I had some more money to move in the market now, it wasn’t anywhere near a safe amount. If, for example, I bought six Greate
r Haste Potions, I would have spent all of my available funds. Considering that each of these might sell for $1,000 or more, the profit margin was great. If, however, the prices remained low—or even worse, dropped even lower—I would soon have all my money stuck in products that would neither sell nor make me any profit. In a situation like this, I would either have to sit back and wait, hoping the price would hike again, or sell them at their new price and absorb the losses.

  Longer term, I needed to figure out a strategy that included a diversified trading portfolio. First, however, I had to take care of my body. Getting involved with trading had sucked up all of my free time. My daily routine normally consisted of work, training at the gym, and streaming a single-player game or two. This routine had been completely destroyed over the past two days and I could already see that I was getting irritated much more easily. The sounds of cars honking would agitate me much more than usual and whenever I walked Louie, I would get mild headaches.

  I definitely couldn’t afford to play any video games before figuring out my next move on the DEM, and perhaps I couldn’t afford to go to the gym either. But my body was aching for a workout so I got into my running shoes, put Louie on a leash, and left the apartment with only my phone on a case strapped to my arm, my headphones around my neck, and my keys. Louie had never been a great runner since his legs were a bit too short, but he always enjoyed it a lot as I never let him fall behind.

  I tied his leash around my waist and put on my headphones with my power metal playlist on shuffle. No better way to start a run at six in the morning than by listening to great Mongolian metal by the HU. When we returned home some fifty minutes later, I was feeling revitalized and Louie was ready for a nap that would last at least until the afternoon. I took a quick shower and was promptly back on the DEM tablet, searching The Source - Videos for the next step of my plan: gaining bigger margins by utilizing the crafting services provided by the DEM.