Dr. Kenfield had grown up believing in human dignity and moral values. He had studied hard to become a doctor to help people and to make the world a slightly less dark place. He had, of course, been woefully ignorant of just how nasty things were.

Archhuman society was rotten to the very core. Once he realized that the rot would claim him too one day, he knew had to make a choice.

And he had decided to join the maggots.

He had nothing to be proud of given what he’d done. At first, his life had been a miserable hell, full of sleepless nights and guilt that ate him away to the core. But it was truly miraculous what humans could get used to if given enough time, and, well…

Enough money.

Located in his private laboratory, he worked on examining the organs “Skull” had given him. Before he could sell them, he needed to properly certify their quality.

With smooth, efficient movements, he collected samples and tested the organs, one by one. Each step of the way to completion, his hands got shakier and his back got sweatier.

He had done this same thing hundreds of times.

Usually, it was considered best if the organs were extracted from someone who was generally healthy and had no problems with substance abuse. Naturally, if they were a one-star archhuman, that would make their organs even more prized, but archhumans had a tendency to push their endurance and longevity, which often resulted in organs even worse than those of common mortals.

An “ideal” scenario would be to find a one-star who had cared for their health and hadn’t endured any severe injuries.

But the organs he was looking for were a different kind of ideal.

This was basically a fantasy, a type of idle daydream a curious mind would conjure while exploring the extremes of what a set of organs could theoretically look like.

By the time he was done with his examination, he collapsed into his chair and shook his head. “I can’t sell this…” he realized. Thus, he waited patiently.

It didn’t take long for the little skeleton to appear. The sight of the thing made the doctor’s heart speed up and his throat tighten. “Hello, Mr. Skull…”

“Are you done with the examination?”

“Yes… and I have some bad news for you.” The doctor gulped. “These organs… they were artificially created, weren’t they?”

The skeleton paused, remaining still for a long few moments. Then, it slowly nodded its head. “Yes.”

“I see… So I was right…” He chuckled. “To put it simply, whatever method you’ve used is truly marvelous. Too marvelous. These organs are priceless—and I mean that quite literally. There is no price that can be put on them. Let alone me selling it to the adjudicator, not even the adjudicator could sell it to a potential buyer without getting kidnapped and having the information on the organs’ origins tortured out of him.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I can’t sell these organs, Mr. Skull.” He smirked with self-derision. “Threatening my life won’t change my mind, either. I’m a dead man anyway if I try to sell this, and with all due respect, you might very well not be safe, either.”

The skeleton’s head dropped slightly. “I see.” Then it raised a clawed hand threateningly.

The doctor flinched, but a smirk still snuck onto his face. “Well then… I predicted this might happen.” His smirk vanished. “I’ve really done what I could…”

But to his surprise, the skeleton lowered its hand. “Would you be willing to sell organs of lesser quality?”

He perked up. “Lesser…? They would have to be much worse than this to be sold safely.”

“How much worse?”

“I… Well… These organs, they’re pretty much perfect, almost as if they had been bathed in supreme-quality healing. Even those without illness would be willing to swap their organs for these, because these are just that much better. Never mind that they’re undead, they’re also incredibly tough and even seem to have adapted to handling an extreme burden, despite having no signs that they had ever been put through harsh treatment.

“Perhaps if you could artificially create a few flaws or to somehow deteriorate the quality of the tissue, we wouldn’t raise enough eyebrows to get into trouble. There are plenty of artificial organ farms in the empire—as long as we provide goods that won’t be sought after by four-stars, we can get away with it.”

“And if I produced organs with this ‘reduced value,’ how much would they be worth?”

The doctor paused. “Well… Hmm… Hard to say, really. They could be sold for all sorts of prices depending on where they were being sold, but wholesale, from my hands to the adjudicator’s… a whole set would likely go from fifty to sixty million dollars.”

“Thank you for the information,” the skeleton said.

And then, it leaped forward, clawing the doctor’s throat out.

***

After telling Bloodshed to kill the doctor, Freddy commanded it to shred the organs into bits and to wreck the whole lab.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

If what the doctor had said was true, then letting the man live would be a horrible mistake.

That being said, he wasn’t done trying to sell his organs. But he would have to adjust his approach, and, well… he’d have to look for another proxy.

He slowly got up and left the abandoned building he was hiding in. For the time being, he headed home to get some rest. There were still a few days left until his vacation was over. He’d use that time well.

He sent Bloodshed away to continue spying on more doctors in hope that he could find another crooked bastard. Meanwhile, he followed the doctor’s advice and got to work.

His approach was quite simple—he extracted the set of his perfect organs and started healing. Then, way before the healing approached anywhere near supreme quality, he took the new set of organs out. Not only did this drastically reduce the quality of the goods, but it allowed him to produce a much greater number of organs.

That being said, he would also have these organs tested first to ensure that they wouldn’t be problematic to sell.

Within less than a day, Bloodshed’s efforts beared fruit. Not only did Bloodshed find a rotten doctor, it found a whole other organ harvesting operation.

This one, however, seemed to be much more humble in scale, and from what they gathered, it was privately owned by the doctor doing the operations.

When he realized who this doctor was, Freddy was quite shocked.

It was Dr. Keith Orland—the son of the current owner of Strata.

The operation itself was also quite different in nature from the one Valhalla discovered. Here, it appeared that they were considerably more specialized. They actually gave primes to their patients to turn them into archhumans first, and then ran a number of experiments on them, feeding them substances and administering a slew of treatments to try to enhance the quality of the organs.

While they sold far fewer organs than their ruined counterpart, they created products of much higher quality.

It would likely be far easier to sell his product through this person than the previous doctor. But there was a problem.

This was the son of one of the richest men in the whole city—he wasn’t some nobody.

This was reflected in the quality of the guards keeping watch over this place. It was all two-stars, and many were close to the peak, too.

While Freddy could easily send Bloodshed to kill the doctor, could he actually control him? Threats like those he directed at the other doctor likely wouldn’t work, since this guy was under much stricter watch and was far better protected.

Of course, he always had the option of just selling the organs directly to them.

At first, he completely rejected this notion. He didn’t want to do business with them. He didn’t want to enrich them by giving them such an opportunity.

But as he had this thought, he knew that it was more than a little hypocritical.

He had already intended to sell his organs to the adjudicator. And the man wasn’t going to use them all himself, he was obviously going to sell them up the supply chain and get wealthy off it. Given the adjudicator was willing to deal with such business, he clearly wasn’t the most upright stalk in the bean garden.

And taking a step back, he realized that he was already doing plenty of business with the local factions, wasn’t he? Sophia’s treatment, the purchase of his apartment, selling stuff he gathered on delves—basically anything that wasn’t dealt directly through Valhalla was already benefiting these bastards in one way or another, and he knew that even Valhalla was often forced to do business with the other factions because they couldn’t realistically supply every single thing they needed to keep things running.

This was just the reality of living in a capitalist society. Everyone who did business benefited from the system, and whether individuals liked it or not, the value they produced could end up serving shitty people, and the goods they purchased often came from unethical sources.

Now, Freddy was far from delusional. He had literally worked in a death camp deep in Faralethal. He knew exactly where many, if not most, of the valuable resources came from, resources that ordinary folk relied on in their day to day lives.

But he also wasn’t an ideologue. Trying to protest this system was laughably naive and only served to hinder his goals in the long run. If he ever wanted to actually make a difference in a meaningful way, he could only do so if he had enough power to directly change things.

And he doubted he could get that far by avoiding buying and selling stuff.

That being said, he naturally had his bottom line. He wanted nothing to do with directly exploiting others and would try his best to always do more good than bad.

And of course, he still had to worry about his own safety, and the safety of Valhalla.

And finally, he wouldn’t exactly be doing Strata a favour here. Every red cent he earned off them would be converted into power he’d use to eventually bring them down.

The first thing he did was follow one of the guards that worked there to his home. Then, he used Bloodshed to intimidate the man and let him know his life was being held in Freddy’s, or, well “Skull’s” hands.

He made sure to have Bloodshed disguise itself this time. It simply put on a black trash bag so that their target couldn’t see exactly what it looked like.

This man then served as a messenger and conveyed Freddy’s deal to Dr. Orland. Things went smoothly once the man delivered two identical organs as a sample—two left kidneys, which proved that Freddy was indeed capable of delivering on his offer.

After going back and forth a few times, they managed to hash out a deal—Freddy would provide them with organs by leaving them inside of storage rings at secret locations and then informing them about where he’d hidden them.

In turn, they would pay him for every set of organs he sold. He managed to negotiate fifty million dollars per set. This was perhaps not the best deal he could get, but it was good enough. It wouldn’t take long to collect the money Freddy needed for his purposes.

As for how they paid him, that was simple.

They just sent the money to his bank account. Well, he gave them an anonymous proxy account that he opened at the bank specifically for this purpose.

While this seemed like a possible privacy risk, it wasn’t. Nobody, not even the adjudicator—hell, not even an Overlord had the qualifications to discover who owned a bank account.

It was hard to encapsulate just how sacred imperial banks were in the world of archhumans. And it made sense. How many people in power were trying to privately do business? Too many to count, really. If their privacy wasn’t absolutely safe, nobody would trust imperial banks. And for the privacy of the few to be truly safe, everyone’s privacy had to be sacred.

And at any rate, this method was certainly safer than trying to recover the money through a physical exchange. Sure, he could send Bloodshed to get it, but Bloodshed couldn’t take physical objects with it to the Netherecho.

If someone competent enough staked out the money, it could endanger both Freddy and Bloodshed.

This was simply a better option. Well, it did force him to pay 5% in taxes and a pittance in banking fees, but that was an acceptable sacrifice.

For the first trade, Freddy sold five pairs of organs.

Only once the immense amount of money landed in his bank account did he realize just how much money he was going to earn.

His vacation finally reached its end, and as soon as it did, he was invited to have a conversation with Thor.