Harem Sync: Divine Edition

Chapter 122: Market

CENTRAL COURTYARD — 9:15 AM

Forty-five minutes.

That was the time it took for the central courtyard to turn into something completely different.

Haru was in the same column. He hadn’t left. He hadn’t spoken to anyone. He just stayed there with his back against the cold stone, observing what happened when you put five hundred students in a closed space with information that each one needed from the other and no real reason to trust anyone.

The result was this.

Groups of two, three, five. Forming, breaking, reforming. Students approaching with that specific posture of someone who wants to seem casual and isn’t being casual at all — shoulders slightly tilted, envelope held in a way that showed without showing, eyes scanning like someone evaluating before speaking.

Negotiation happened in whispers that weren’t as low as their owners thought.

"I have two fragments from sector E, I need D,"

"I don’t have D but I know who does, it costs,"

"How much does it cost?"

"Depends on what you have,"

"I already said I have E,"

"And E isn’t worth much, sector E is the outskirts,"

"First mistake." Haru observed. "Announcing what you have before knowing what the other person needs."

"If you have E and he has D, but he doesn’t know you have E, you can convince him that E is rare. That E is valuable. That E completes something that D alone could never complete."

"But if you open with ’I have E’ first... he has already calculated the value before you say the price."

Three students running, heading north, urgency of someone who received information others don’t have yet. Or someone who received false information and will discover it in twenty minutes.

"Sector H." Haru noted mentally. "Someone spread that the valuable crystal is in H."

"It could be true."

"It could be a planted lie to clear competition from another sector."

"It could be someone who believes it’s true but was fooled first."

"Three possibilities. Impossible to know which without more data."

"So ignore it for now."

Closer by, a first-year guy was trying to negotiate with a third-year veteran, posture of someone who hadn’t realized yet that veterans don’t participate in the test, they just observe. The veteran was clearly taking advantage of the confusion to get free information.

"And the student will tell everything because he thinks he’s negotiating with a peer."

"When he finds out he’s not, the information will already be gone."

Haru looked to the opposite side of the courtyard.

And stopped.

A figure leaning against a column on the other side, mirror of what he was doing, almost identical position, but from the opposite angle.

He wasn’t negotiating. He wasn’t searching. He was looking at the chaos with the expression of someone reading an interesting book and reaching a good part.

Haru couldn’t see the face from here, too far, wrong lighting.

But he could see what the person was doing.

"Mapping who is going where."

"Same as me."

"But unlike me, he’s looking at the people, not the space."

"I mapped the terrain. This one is mapping the players."

Someone crossed Haru’s field of vision, a hurried student, almost bumping into him.

When he looked back to the other side of the courtyard, the figure had left the column.

Disappeared into the crowd.

Haru kept staring at the empty space where it had been.

"Dangerous."

"Or ally."

"I still don’t know."

Ten additional minutes of observation confirmed what he had suspected from the beginning.

No one was talking about sector B.

Not once.

Sector A: mentioned six times.

Sector C: twelve, it was the most popular, main corridor, everyone thought it was the most valuable.

Sector D: eight times.

Sectors E, F, G, H: varied, but present.

Sector B: zero.

"Underground."

"Service area."

"Who looks at the map and sees ’service area’ and thinks ’there’s treasure here’?"

"No one who hasn’t spent weeks cleaning those corridors."

The third thing he noticed, and this was the most important:

The market was forming too quickly.

Groups solidifying before they had enough information to solidify. Alliances being closed out of urgency, not calculation. Everyone afraid of being left out, of being the last to find partners, of missing the negotiation window before the better fragments had owners.

"When people are afraid of missing an opportunity, they accept bad conditions."

"When they accept bad conditions, they get stuck in them."

"And when they get stuck..."

"...the one who stayed out of the rush is the only one with freedom of maneuver."

Haru left the column.

He didn’t go to the courtyard.

He went to the poster corridor.

It was busier than usual, new papers glued every minute, students stopping to read, some tearing down others’ posters and gluing their own on top.

Secondary market happening on paper.

"Buying D fragments, paying 500 points each."

"Information about sector C, negotiable price."

"ATTENTION: fragments from sector H are being falsified. Verify authenticity before buying."

This last one was new, ink still fresh, hurried handwriting.

Haru read it three times.

"Who writes a warning about H falsification at 10 in the morning on the first day?"

"Someone who discovered they were fooled with a fake H fragment."

"Or someone who is falsifying H fragments and wants everyone to distrust H, including the real ones."

"The second scenario is smarter."

"So it’s probably the second."

He took paper from his pocket, he had taken it from the continuous materials room before leaving in the morning, a habit he hadn’t dropped.

He wrote slowly, clean handwriting, without urgency:

"I worked for weeks as a continuous in this academy.

I know corridors that don’t appear on any student map.

I know passages, shortcuts, unregistered rooms.

This information has a price.

Whoever wants to know, Sector B, underground entrance, tomorrow at 2 PM.

Don’t come to negotiate fragments. Come to negotiate knowledge."

No name. No signature.

He glued it in the lower right corner of the middle glass, not in the center where everyone looked, in the corner where those who read with attention would reach.

He took a step back. Read it from outside.

"It looks like bait."

"It is bait."

"But honest bait. I have what I promise to have."

"And whoever comes with a B fragment will come because this poster activated something they were already thinking, that the service area may have value that isn’t obvious."

"I don’t need to convince anyone of anything."

"I just need the right people to see this and reach the right conclusion on their own."

---

Genius had mapped forty-three moves.

Not exactly, he had stopped counting at forty-three because the pattern was already clear and counting more would be a waste of processing that could go to something else.

The pattern was simple: ninety percent of the students were going north or to the center. Sectors C and H absorbing most of the traffic.

Which meant that C and H either actually had crystals, or someone had planted sufficiently convincing information to create artificial traffic.

"If it’s planted information, whoever planted it is going south while everyone goes north."

"If it’s real, everyone will find out at the same time, there will be disputes, and high-value crystals in a sector with a lot of people have returns divided among many people."

"Both scenarios have the same result for me: avoid C and H now."

He looked at his five fragments. Two from C, ironic, two from G, one from E.

"I won’t use C now. Too much noise there."

"G is laboratories. Underground two. Little traffic seen so far."

"E is outskirts but has specific value if connected with the right fragments."

He went to the poster corridor, not to glue anything, to read. Whoever glued a poster revealed what they needed. Reading posters was free information.

He walked slowly along the glass panels.

Purchases. Sales. Warnings about falsification — this one was interesting, someone was spreading disinformation about H or had been fooled.

He stopped.

He read the poster in the lower corner of the middle glass once.

Then again.

"Permanent continuous."

"Knowledge of unmapped corridors."

"Tomorrow at 2 PM. Sector B."

"Sector B."

"Underground one."

"Service area."

"Which is exactly the sector no one is talking about."

"Which means either there’s nothing there..."

"...or there’s something no one has noticed yet."

Genius kept staring at the poster.

"A permanent continuous who knows unmapped corridors and chose the least disputed sector to set up a meeting."

"This is not an accident."

"This guy found something."

He didn’t write anything down. He didn’t need to.

He continued walking down the corridor, with the expression of someone who had read twenty posters and none were interesting.

---

Golden was eating.

Not because he was hungry, he was hungry, but that wasn’t the main reason. The main reason was that the cafeteria at 11 AM was where people went when they needed a break from the courtyard. And people who needed a break were people overloaded with information they still didn’t know how to process.

And overloaded people talked more than they should.

To his left: two second-year students quietly discussing whether sector H was a trap or real.

To his right: a first-year girl with the expression of someone who had been recently fooled and was still discovering it.

At the front table: a group of three with scattered fragments trying to assemble the map and failing because they had sectors that didn’t connect.

Golden ate slowly and listened to everything.

"H is a trap." He concluded in three minutes. "The volume of speculation about H is too high to be organic. Someone planted it."

"The girl next to me was fooled with a fake fragment, by the way she holds the envelope, she already knows but doesn’t want to accept it yet."

"The group in front has fragments from four different sectors with no intersection, someone convinced them that diversity was an advantage. It’s not. They are four small problems instead of one solvable problem."

He finished eating.

He got up without haste.

He passed by the table of the group of three, dropped a napkin, bent down to pick it up, looked at their fragments for two seconds.

He got up. Continued walking.

"Sectors A, C, F and G. No useful connection between them."

"But F and G have possible intersection with what I have."

"These three will need me before the end of the day."

"And when they need me, I’ll have a price."

**ISABELA AND KIRA — 12 PM**

"Stop smelling the posters." Isabela said.

"I’m checking authenticity." Kira didn’t stop. "This one here was written by someone nervous, ink pressed too hard on the edges. Whoever writes with fear squeezes the pen more."

"That’s not checking authenticity."

"It’s checking the emotional state of whoever wrote it. Which is more useful."

Isabela stayed quiet because it was hard to argue against that.

They stopped at the poster in the lower corner of the middle glass.

Kira smelled it.

"This one is different." She said.

"Different how?"

"Whoever wrote it wasn’t nervous." She kept looking at the paper. "He was... calculating. Uniform ink, no pressure variation. He wrote slowly."

Isabela read the content.

"I worked for weeks as a continuous in this academy."

She looked at Kira.

"Permanent continuous." She said. "There’s only one in the entire academy."

"I know." Kira said. "The master."

The two stood still in the corridor.

"He set up a meeting in Sector B." Isabela said.

"At 2 PM tomorrow."

"He found something there."

"Probably."

Isabela looked at the poster for one more second.

"Useless bodyguard." She thought, but without anger, with that specific kind of admiration that appears when you discover that someone you knew well was better than you had realized.

"Shall we?" Kira asked.

"Let’s go." Isabela confirmed. "But we won’t arrive at 2 PM."

"When do we arrive?"

"1:58 PM. We want to see who else arrives before us."

**COURTYARD END OF AFTERNOON**

The sun was setting when Haru returned to the column.

The market had changed, less urgency at the beginning, more desperation at the end. Groups that had formed in the morning were already cracking by the afternoon. First betrayals happening, still small, still reversible, but the pattern was establishing itself.

"This is going to get worse tomorrow."

"When the first crystals are revealed and people realize that what they received in exchange isn’t worth what they gave..."

"...the market will go into panic."

"And panic is when the best opportunities appear."

He stayed there until the dinner bell.

Calculating.

"Tomorrow at 2 PM, Sector B."

"Who will show up?"

"Who has a B fragment and read the poster with enough attention."

"Who is looking for knowledge because they realized that fragments alone don’t solve it."

"And probably someone sent by a larger group that wants information without committing directly."

"A spy will appear. I have to decide beforehand what to do with him."

He looked one last time at the opposite side of the courtyard.

The column on the other side was empty.

It had been empty all afternoon.

"Where did he go."

"And what is he doing while I stay here standing still."

He went to dinner.

He had things to plan before sleeping.