So, I've got 29 days to make 500 essence or my boss is going to take my soul for rent. I don't even know how much 500 essence is! Is it a lot is it a little fuck if I know and I still have to clean the store, repair the shelves, and try to find something to stock them in the first place.

Luckily, despite not being a "Gamer" in the traditional sense I still have a system to help me so I didn't spend too much time freaking out. Mostly.

"Okay let's try this! Menu!" quickly the screen pops up and I check the tabs available. None were greyed out so that was a plus the tabs were Status, inventory, recipes, warehouse, quests, and upgrade.

I first pressed status to see what stats and skils were

Health 100/100

Mana 100/100

Level 1 0/100

Stats

Strength: 5

Vitality: 5

Agility: 5

Intelligence: 5

Wisdom: 5

Charisma: 5

Luck: 5

Skill points 10

Special skills:

None

Perks

Active affects

None

I quickly dumped all my stat points into luck. Im going to need it im im going to pull off keeping my soul. I didn't bother with the perks since I just saw them but it looks like im just a basic level 1. I checked inventory and it turns out that I actually had 100 essences in my inventory. All the other inventory spots are blank but beside the inventory boxes theres two other little buttons on says recycle and the other says sell, recycle give me all the materials the item was made up of and destroys the item, while sell gives me a certain amount of essence in exchange for the item. As for the warehouse it seems the any items, I sell from the inventory go to the warehouse, also the warehouse is stocked by abyssal buying from the auction house. Any item put up by a gamer has a chance of being bought by the abyss and as a result either someone from one of the franchise shops like me can buy them or they can be put back up on the auction page and sold at a premium. Next tab was recipes and it was pretty self-explanatory, basically with this tab I can take the materials gained by converting inventory items into their base components and use them to craft the recipe.

I clicked on the upgrade tab and just like I thought it lets me buy upgrades to the store with essence, but everything was way to expensive to even think about!

So with a heavy heart I decided to leave upgrades to far in the future. My dreams of running an interdimensional tavern stamped out right away.

Last thing to check was

"quest!"

Active quests

In essence.
You have 29 days to make 500 essence or else your soul will be taken in exchange for rent. Unfortunately, humans cant survive without their souls so this will inevitably kill you. Better make that 500-essence quick.

Objective 1. Clean up the store!
You cant sell anything to anyone with a trashed storefront abyssal corp. has higher standards. Make the store shine like your life depends on it! After all it kind of does!
Well that seems simple enough, seems this is a chain quest to so that's convenient. I close out the screen, take a deep breath, and scream at the top of my lungs. For a good five minutes. See if theres one thing I hate more than anything in this universe, or apparently multiverse. Its cleaning messes that aren't fucking mine! After raging, and cursing, kicking a table, breaking the table making even more of a mess for myself, and calming the hell down. I take a deep breath and try to focus.

"Lets see if I cant get around this." I hold my hand out and try to focus on a large circle on the ground swallowing everything that falls into it into my inventory, I move the circle over to the broken table, and like a sinkhole the table falls in.

"Yes thank God!" and so with a bit more calm I go about sucking up everything in the store into my inventory, and I mean everything, the cash register, the counter, the rugs, the broken shelves, the unbroken shelves, the dirt on the floor, the muddy foot prints, the coolers, when I'm done there's nothing left in the store. Its just a big empty square with a broom closet. I head to the broom closet and see a few cleaning supplies, a vacuum, a mop, a broom, a bucket, bleach, Lysol, a few mr clean sponges, I swallow all of it into my inventory. Looking around the store its clean enough that the floors and walls are sparkling white. And it only took 2 minutes. A screen pops up in front of me the quest in essence has a big exclamation mark next to it. I click the quest and the worlds collect reward are highlighted in bold taping them another screen pops up.

Objective reward: 10xp, appraisal skill, conversion chart, shelve recipe, Table recipe, counter recipe, 20,000 essence warehouse voucher.Automatic cleaning upgrade.
That's pretty damn good. The voucher alone will speed things up by a good bit, but with the table, shelve, and counter recipes I don't have to buy new ones.

Clicking into my inventory I recycle the 6 shelves, 2 tables, and the counter. And use the raw material to rebuild them now instead of the grainy oak they're a dark mahogany, I set the shelves up lining the walls of the square store, a cooler in between each, I keep one table in my inventory and set the other up in the center of the store so if I need it to make a display it will be dead center, setting up the counter directly opposing the door makes it so I can see customers when they come in. I put a dark red rug by the door, and one in front of the counter. The store is starting to look more and more like my mom's old convenience store. Which I guess makes sense I was basically raised there. I sell the dirt mud and dust from my inventory for 0 essence, which isn't a surprise since its dirt I just wanted to get rid of it. The cleaning supplies can stay in my inventory since even if I do have auto cleaning, I don't know what that means it might just be for dust and dirt, and I have to handle the bigger messes. I start to ponder whether or not I should put it back into the broom closet, but quickly decide against it. I might need the space for something. next thing I check out is the appraisal skill. Looking at one of the mahogany shelves I call out

"appraisal"

Mahogany shelf

Formerly a broken oak shelf, through magical means this shelf was transformed into mahogany, for both the aesthetic and the meme.

Current value 5 essence

Huh weird that it can tell I made it mahogany because of a team four-star reference. Eh what can you do. Next, I checked out the conversion chart because I still wasn't quite sure how much an essence was even worth. However, I quickly found out that I was deeply screwed. 1 essence is the equivalent of 5 us dollars. Which means I owe 2,500 USD for rent alone every month, even if I sold every bit of furniture in the store id still owe 2,245.

However, before I could go fully insane. Another screen pops up to interrupt my thoughts.

Quest updated! In essence.
Objective 2. Buy some product!
You can't sell anything to anyone if you have nothing to sell! Abyssal corp. has provided you with a handy little voucher that will help you stock your store try not to waste this opportunity by buying porn like the last guy.

That's right the voucher, I just have to use it in a smart way! I quickly open up the warehouse tab. While I originally thought it would be organized by priceits instead organized by object categories. Skill Books, magic tomes, potions, weapons, anime objects, movie objects, tv objects, cartoon objects, game objects, and misc.

The first four were pretty self-explanatory, however the last 6 were a bit more difficult to explain mostly because each category was just an endless horde of items so overpowered that I feel like I should need a license to sell them all classified only as whether they came from an anime, movie, tv, cartoon, or game. Just to name a few items I saw that were way above my price range right now, a set of dragon balls, blueprints for an arc reactor and instructions on how to create badassium, a Tardis, the omnitrix, and the little power key bord from that one regular show episode, a cache of eezo and a couple biotic implants. And then final things that don't fit in any category, like cleaning supplies and a pair of soiled panties for some reason. I closed the out. It didn't matter if I could buy items from all these different worlds anyways each one was well over the 20,000 dollars have to spend in the first place. What I needed right now was cheap utility. First, I started with skill books, for 5,200 I bought 10 copies of 8 skill books in beginner worth 5 essence each I'm going to mark them up to 10, intermediate worth 10 I'm going to mark them up to 50, and advanced worth 50 I'm going to mark it up to 100. The books I bought were martial arts, ki control, chakra control, mana control, alchemy, sword fighting, black smithing, and cooking. i picked up one of the beginner books and analyzed it. What I found was pretty shocking. According to the book. If i absorb the book ill gain the skill at level 1, and won't be able to absorb the higher-grade books until I max out the beginner version of the skill. However, if I just tried to use my mana instead of the skill book

Skill unlocked!
beginner mana manipulation lvl 1
use this skill to consciously draw on the mana In your body for spells.

Where as it would take a customer months to figure out the skill but buying the book would allow them to skip straight to the advanced rank of the skill. It seems that the system trades pay to win, for a monstrous progression rate…. well at least with skills. Unfortunately, when it comes to stats it would take almost a year to raise my strength a single digit via physical training, but in exchange every level up I gain 10 stat points, it might have been dumb to put them all into luck….eh whatever I need luck to survive. Anyways after I finished setting up all the books, and unlocking martial arts myself with a few punches and kicks. I opened the warehouse page back up. I have 14,800 essences left and I intend to make the most of it. I clicked onto the magic tomes, and I needed a lot more types of tomes if I wanted get broad market interest, so I only bought 1 of each tome in each rank beginner intermediate and advanced, there were 40 books, beginners cost 10, intermediate cost 20, and advanced cost 30 spending a total of 2400 I set them out and marked them up by 50 for beginners spending 100 for intermediate, and 200 for advanced. Its magic doesn't want to pay that much go someone else oh wait it doesn't exist in your world give me my money!

Holy crap I'm already starting to turn into one of them…damn it my souls on the line I don't care!

So next I go into potions and see something strange, all of the basic potions like minor, and major healing, mana, and stamina potions are on sale for 10 essence each and that's a steal, I ended up filling up on way more potions that I needed 40 of each minor and major potion for each category it seems mana restorative potions restore mana and chakra while the stamina potion restores ki, health is self-explanatory, I'll sell minor health potions for 50 essence and since major health potions can restore even fatal wounds ill sell those for 200 essence, however for the mana and stamina potions ill sell them for 20 and 50 respectively.

I place the potion bottles on the table and stack them up in a tower with a sign that like the skill books says you can request different potions and a list of such potions, ill even sell love potions, however at an extreme premium.

Now I have a difficult decision to make, I click into the misc. section. And see that there's a lot of things that aren't even 1 essence. Getting into fractions of an essence. I could use the rest of my essence to buy some thing from other special categories, or I could save it and use my own 100 essence to buy some mundane groceries and fill out the rest of the shelves put some drinks in the coolers, and only buy those things on special request from customers.

After thinking it over for a few minutes I decided that it would be best to just buy some mundane groceries, and save the voucher for incase I really need it.

So I quickly scroll through the misc. section buying anything that looks even remotely good, grabbing sodas, candy, cup ramen, canned foods, chips, I even bought a machine that dispenses nacho cheese and chili onto corn chips. That's more or less for me. After I finish setting it all up in the shelves and filling the coolers, I have to admit the store looks great I managed to spread the magic items, books, and potions around so despite all the mundane groceries, the store still looks to be fully magical, I even bought some harry potter candy and some of the gag items as well. Despite this though I was now officially broke and with a sigh I saw a new screen pop up.

Objective reward: 20xp, new world package unlocked, bedroom upgrade, deal with the devil unique skill unlocked.

Huh well that's cool