Copper Rat

The contract was eleven pages and Wes Marrick read every one. Seventeen years old. Four hundred Marks in debt at four percent a week. Fifteen months to earn enough to keep his younger sister. And the system gives him Assayer—a class everyone in Ledgerfall considers worthless. Wes can’t fight. He has no combat scaling. He can only see what things are made of, where they came from, and what they’re really worth. Then he discovers that the cheapest garbage in the city can be refined into Writs—the same source of levels every fighter and guild is desperate to buy. So Wes starts buying. Soon the skinny kid at the bottom of the stairs has a nickname—the Copper Rat—and a business nobody understands until it’s too late. But markets fight back. What follows is a corner, a collapse, four hundred and eleven chalk marks Wes can’t honor, and the discovery that the market was never full. It was just too expensive for the poor. Copper Rat is an economic LitRPG and progression fantasy about debt, crafting, arbitrage, and building power without swinging a sword.