Returning to the station, I let Amber sort through our loot while I made us some food.

She intentionally took the box with her into the room just so that she could sort through it while I was cooking at the same time.

“Oh nice, there’s quite a lot of Credit Chips here. We got quite a nice sum of extra Credits from this stash. Seems like this really was his emergency stash after all,” Amber whistled.

I paused in my food preparation to see Amber laying all the chips out on the floor, categorising them into three distinct sections.

The largest section were the Credit Chips with roughly twenty or so of them gathered in a neat pile.

The next pile had slightly fewer at around ten chips and the last pile only had two chips.

Amber gestured to the Credit Chip pile, “There’s about two million worth of Credits here on these chips. Probably for him to equip himself with a new ship should he need to run away and start anew.”

“I’ve always wondered… Why would people use Credit Chips if you can just store the money in your personal terminal?”

Amber gave me a look, “Wait… Don’t tell me you have been storing all your money in your personal terminal all this while?”

I blinked at her, “Umm… Yes? Is that a problem?”

“How much did you even store there?!”

I tapped on my Codex to bring up the screen, “About… Seven million now.”

“Oh my gods!! Hurry up and transfer them up into Credit Chips!! It’s a miracle that you haven’t lost any money yet!”

I raised an eyebrow, “How would I lose money if it’s stored inside my Co-- I mean, my personal terminal?”

“Because personal terminals are designed to be easily accessible by external machines, hackers can easily break into your personal terminal remotely to steal the Credits you have stored inside there!”

“Eh?! Then what about the Credit Chips?”

“These can only be accessed if you plug them into a terminal of sorts so unless someone physically steals them from you, they won’t be able to take your Credits remotely. That’s why we usually store some of our Credits on Credit Chips and then transfer them to our personal terminal before making any transactions.”

“That sounds… Quite inconvenient… Storing several millions Credits on a Credit Chip also sounds rather risky…”

“Ugh… I should have known that you’re not familiar with Credit Chips too… Come here, I’ll show you something.”

I put down the knife in my hands and went to her side, watching Amber pick up two Credit Chips from the pile.

“Here, see this? Notice anything different?”

I was about to say that they look the same when I noticed that the part that connects to the personal terminal was different in colour.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

One of them was a copper brown while the other was silver in colour.

“The colour of that?” I pointed.

She nodded, “Each one has a different capacity for how much Credits it can store. Incidentally, they have the same ranking system as our Merc Ranks as well. This bronze one can store up to a thousand Credits, this silver one can store up to a million. There’s gold ones that can store up to a billion Credits and so on, each rank increasing by a thousand.”

“Right… And where do you get these Credit Chips?”

“Pretty much anywhere that sells electronics or miscellaneous goods really. It’s just a basic Credit storage device. Although I would say you need to be careful when purchasing them from more shady places as those shops might sell spiked Credit Chips that are open to being hacked.”

“Isn’t there like a galactic bank or something?”

She nodded, “There used to be one giant one actually… People could store their Credits with the bank and used them as an intermediary to do Credit transactions.”

I noted the past tense in her words, “Used to? What happened then?”

“Well… Rather long story… But the summarised version is that the AI rebellion happened and they crashed the entire market. A lot of people lost their Credits since the AI literally deleted their Credits from the bank records which ended up dissolving the bank. Now, there’s smaller banks but none have been able to rise up to replace that one till this date, since people have learned that these places aren’t fully safe to store their money.”

“Interesting… So people normally store their Credits in these chips and keep them somewhere else. And when they go out, they bring along one or two Credit Chips that they will use to transfer into their personal terminal to make Credit transactions?”

“Yep. I have a few spare Credit Chips back in my ship if you want to start transferring your Credits out of your terminal, Tera. Want one?”

I was about to say yes when a thought came to me.

“Could anyone be able to hack into my personal terminal and steal my Credits? Or is it limited to people with specific hacking knowledge?” I asked.

I mean… Considering the fact that the Codex basically simplified any hacking attempts for me into some trivial minigame, I was wondering if this was universal or special to me.

Additionally, this stealing thing was not possible in the game and the players’ Codex could not be stolen from even in a PvP setting, so I’m wondering if this applies to my Codex in this universe as well.

Amber pulled out her own personal terminal, “It’s actually pretty easy if you know who your target is, have the right program and what to look out for. I’ll even do it right now. Here…”

She started tapping on her personal terminal and I went to look over her shoulder to see the process.

She first established a link with my personal terminal and seemed to request a transfer of funds from it before inputting in a random number as the amount to be transferred.

She then tapped on another program that booted up at the side of the screen which caused the transaction window to glitch out for a moment before returning back to normal.

“That’s the program?” I asked.

“Yep. Could get one pretty easily off the black market too.”

“And you have one because…?”

“My mentor. Long story. Actually, not really. I just stole money for them, that’s all. And well, I was in a pretty bad place after that and I needed a way to earn money without sponging off Mara, so I went to use this again. Err… You don’t hate thieves, do you? I don’t actually use this anymore and I just kept it around from those days…”

“Amber, we just stole from some pirates and looted their dead bodies. No, I can’t care less, really. And I think you’re hot as a thief.”

Amber giggled, “Hehe~ But I think you’re sexier though~ Oh look, here we go.”

A progress bar appeared on her screen with the words “Transferring Funds” on it. Was it really that easy?

As soon as that thought crossed my mind, the progress bar disappeared and the words were replaced with “Error, Unable to Connect”.

Amber blinked at her screen before tapping it to try again.

I watched silently as she did the same thing and inputted a different number this time, only to get the same result as before.

“Wait… Does this mean… Tera? Where did you get your personal terminal?” She asked.

I shrugged, “Memory loss remember? I had it on me when I woke up so I don’t know.”

“Huh… This is interesting… Your personal terminal actually can’t be hacked… Yet you are able to transfer funds with it too… You don’t need to use Credit Chips at all.”

Well… Considering that the Codex was something that I seemed to have brought over from the game World, I would say that that was the main reason why.

Amber was looking at my Codex with interest, “I wonder… This is really something though… I’ve never heard of a personal terminal like this… I wonder if I could get one for myself?”

I shrugged, “Maybe… But I wouldn’t know how to get one for you either… Speaking of which… What about the other chips?”

“Oh, you’re going to like this. This pile over here is going to get us even more money, but this depends on how you want to deal with it~” She grinned, gesturing to the second pile.

I raised an eyebrow at her, “What do you mean?”

“These chips contain blackmail material. Stuff that the pirate lord was definitely using to get leverage against some people in the government sectors, probably how he got his hands on a battlecruiser too. There’s some pretty nasty stuff in there from just a couple that I’ve screened through just now, so we can either use them to blackmail those people ourselves or just turn them in to the authorities for them to get rid of and get some Credits in return for that.”

“And what about the last two?”

“That… That one I have no idea actually… I tried to plug them into my personal terminal but I realised that they weren’t even designed to be connected to personal terminals… The connector is an entirely different shape altogether.”

Huh…

Could my Codex connect to them then? Worth a shot I guess…