The gun pressed against Marcus Chen's temple was worth forty-seven dollars.
He knew this with absolute certainty, the same way he'd known the exact value of the lottery ticket in the robber's pocket ($0), the worthless gold watch on the clerk's wrist ($12,500), and the genuine fear in his own racing heart (priceless, apparently—no number appeared).
Numbers floated in his vision like augmented reality overlays, except Marcus had never owned VR equipment. Hell, he couldn't even afford his phone bill this month. Three dollars and forty-seven cents sat in his checking account. His credit card had been maxed out for two months. And his student loan payment was overdue by nineteen days.
He knew all these numbers by heart. Had them memorized like a prayer, or a curse.
But these new numbers? These glowing, impossible tags that hovered over everything and everyone? Those were something else entirely.
"Wallet. Now." The robber's voice shook. Amateur. First time, probably. Marcus had worked enough late-night shifts in sketchy neighborhoods to recognize the difference between a professional and someone desperate enough to try. The gun trembled against Marcus's skull, and he could feel the unnatural cold of the metal even through his skin.
That should have been his first clue that something was wrong with the weapon. Metal didn't get that cold, not in a stuffy convenience store in the middle of August in Elysium City. The air conditioning had been broken for a week, and Marcus's shirt was plastered to his back with sweat.
But the gun? The gun was ice.
Forty-seven dollars for a weapon that could end his life. The absurdity almost made him laugh. Almost. Because beneath the gun's price tag, another number glowed in sickly green text that seemed to pulse with its own malevolent light:
*Death Curse: $8,900*
*Warning: Class-3 Supernatural Artifact*
*Threat Level: Moderate*
Marcus had been seeing the numbers for exactly four minutes and thirty-seven seconds—ever since he'd walked into this convenience store for a two-dollar energy drink he couldn't afford but desperately needed for his overnight shift at the campus library. After this, he had to be at the coffee shop by six AM, then his actual classes at noon, then back to the library until midnight.
Sleep was a luxury for people who weren't drowning in debt.
The robber had burst in thirty seconds after Marcus entered, and something in Marcus had... cracked open. Like a door he'd never known existed suddenly swinging wide, flooding his senses with information he had no context for but somehow understood anyway.
At first, he'd thought he was having a stroke. His mother had died of an aneurysm when he was sixteen—suddenly, without warning, just gone. Marcus had spent the next year terrified that every headache, every moment of dizziness was the beginning of his own end.
But this wasn't pain. This was clarity. Impossible, overwhelming clarity.
Now he saw prices on everything. The fluorescent lights overhead ($127 each, lifespan 2,847 hours remaining). The security camera in the corner ($850 retail, but currently broken—actual value $0, last functional recording three days ago). The clerk's life insurance policy ($250,000, which his wife and two daughters would collect when he died—hopefully not tonight). The energy drinks in the cooler behind him ($2.49 retail, actual production cost $0.31, nutritional value effectively $0, short-term energy boost valued at $4.27 to someone in Marcus's current state of exhaustion).
The information was precise, detailed, and completely insane.
"I said wallet!" The gun jabbed harder against his temple, and Marcus felt his skin break. A warm trickle of blood ran down his face.
*Minor Wound: $23 to treat in emergency room, $847 if you're uninsured like Marcus, $2.50 if you have a first aid kit, $0 if you ignore it and hope for the best*
Marcus slowly reached for his back pocket, fingers closing on worn leather that contained three dollars in cash, a maxed-out Visa with a $500 limit that might as well be infinite, and his student ID showing a photo from freshman year where he'd still had hope in his eyes.
That Marcus looked like a different person. That Marcus hadn't worked three jobs simultaneously. That Marcus hadn't chosen between groceries and textbooks (groceries won—you could pirate textbooks). That Marcus hadn't been alone in the world since his aunt died two years ago, taking with her the last connection to the family he'd barely known.
But his eyes stayed fixed on that green text hovering below the gun, pulsing like a heartbeat.
*Death Curse: $8,900*
*Warning: Class-3 Supernatural Artifact*
"What the hell is a death curse?" Marcus heard himself ask.
The question came out calm, almost conversational, like he was asking about the weather or asking for directions. His psychology professor would probably say it was shock, the mind's way of protecting itself from trauma by creating emotional distance.
Marcus thought it might be something else. The same instinct that let him see the numbers was also whispering that he wasn't in immediate danger. The gun wouldn't fire. Couldn't fire. Not at him.
Why he knew this, he had no idea. But he knew it the same way he knew his own name.
The robber froze. "What?"
"The gun. It's cursed. Someone died by it, and that death... stuck." The words came from somewhere deep, some new instinct that had awakened with the numbers. Marcus could feel the knowledge flowing into him, like accessing a database he'd never known he had. "You fire it, the curse transfers. You'll be dead within a week. Probably the same way as the original victim."
The information kept coming, faster now, details crystallizing in his mind: *The gun belonged to the robber's father. Single shot to the temple. Suicide recorded as accident by police but wasn't. Financial troubles. Depression. The despair soaked into the metal like blood into cloth. Anyone who fires the weapon with intent to kill becomes the curse's next host.*
How did Marcus know this? He had no idea. But he could see it, clear as the price tags, written in the language of value and consequence that his eyes now spoke fluently.
Silence. The robber's hand shook harder, and the gun pulled back slightly from Marcus's temple. Progress.
"You're insane," the man whispered, but his voice cracked on the last word. He knew. Maybe he didn't understand it, couldn't articulate it, but some part of him had felt the wrongness in that weapon from the moment he'd picked it up from his father's effects.
"Then shoot me." Marcus surprised himself with his own calm. Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was exhaustion from eighteen-hour days working three jobs to pay for a degree he'd probably never finish, crushed under debt for an education that felt increasingly pointless. Maybe it was the strange certainty that he could *see* truth now, written in the language of value, and the truth said the gun wouldn't fire. "But you know I'm right. Deep down. That's why your hand is shaking. That's why you've been carrying it for three weeks without using it. That's why you chose a convenience store at 2 AM instead of somewhere with real money."
The robber's eyes widened. "How do you—"
"Because I can see it," Marcus said simply. "All of it. I don't understand how or why, but I can see the truth of things now. Their value. Their history. Their purpose."
The gun pulled back from his temple entirely, and Marcus slowly turned around, finally seeing the man's face. Young, maybe twenty-five. Dark circles under his eyes suggesting weeks of poor sleep. Thin frame suggesting missed meals. Hands calloused from manual labor. A fading tattoo on his forearm—*Maria*—done in clumsy script that suggested amateur work or a very old piece.
And above his head, hovering in blue text, a different kind of price tag:
*Name: Rafael Santos*
*Supernatural Potential: $0 (Inactive/Latent)*
*Human Life Value: $2,847,392 (actuarial calculation)*
*Current Net Worth: -$47,892 (medical debt)*
*Desperation Index: 94%*
*Threat to Marcus: 2%*
*Likelihood of Violence: 8%*
More information flooded in: *Sister with leukemia. Treatment costs. Lost job. Inheritance from father: one cursed gun and nothing else. No criminal record until tonight. Good man pushed to desperate measures.*
"I'm nobody," Marcus said quietly, truthfully. Until four and a half minutes ago, he'd been exactly that: nobody special, nobody important, just another struggling student in a city full of them. "But that gun? That's something. Someone wants it. Someone who knows what it really is."
"It was my dad's. He..." Rafael's eyes glistened, and the gun lowered further. "He killed himself with it. I found it in his things after the funeral. I just needed money for my sister's treatment. The hospital won't do the next round of chemo until I pay off what I already owe. I thought if I just..."
His voice broke, and Marcus felt something twist in his chest. He knew that desperation intimately. Had lived with it for years. The kind of desperation that made you consider things you'd never imagined you were capable of.
"It's worth eight thousand nine hundred dollars to the right buyer," Marcus interrupted, his voice gentle. "Supernatural collector would pay that for a genuine death curse. Probably more at auction. Maybe ten thousand if you find someone who really wants it."
The words felt right, natural, though Marcus had no idea how he knew any of this. But the numbers didn't lie. They couldn't. They were objective truth made visible, value stripped of all pretense and social construction.
"Supernatural?" Rafael laughed, bitter and broken. "That's not real. That's... that's horror movies and fantasy novels. That's not the real world."
"Isn't it?" Marcus gestured at the gun, at the unnatural cold still emanating from it. The air around the weapon actually shimmered slightly, like heat waves in reverse. "You felt it, didn't you? The weight. The cold. The way it seems to whisper when you hold it. That's not normal metal you're holding. That's not just a gun anymore."
Rafael stared at the weapon in his hand like he was seeing it for the first time. The barrel was old, worn, the grip wrapped in electrical tape. Nothing special to look at. But the feeling...
"I thought I was going crazy," Rafael whispered.