Detroit was a city of iron ghosts. The sky was the color of a bruised plum, and the wind carried the scent of ozone and oxidized metal. Marcus worked in the belly of the city, a scavenger in the Great Scrap-Heaps, pulling copper and circuitry from the carcasses of a dead industrial empire.

The Sight arrived like a stroke—a sudden, searing flash of clarity. Marcus discovered he could see the "Value-Veins" of the world. He could look at a mountain of rusted girders and see the one piece of aerospace-grade titanium hidden inside. He could look at a discarded motherboard and see the trace of a forgotten encryption key.

Within a year, Marcus was no longer a scavenger; he was the Rust King.

He built an empire on the ruins of the city. He didn't just find scrap; he found leverage. He bought the debts of the desperate, using his Sight to identify exactly which assets were undervalued and which were liabilities. He played the neighborhood against itself, offering "salvage loans" that were designed to fail, eventually owning every block of the district.

He lived in a penthouse made of reclaimed glass and steel, looking down at the city he had effectively colonized. He was surrounded by people who feared him and sycophants who worshipped him. He had everything—wealth, power, and the absolute certainty of his own superiority.

But Marcus had forgotten the first rule of the scrap-heap: everything eventually rusts.

The cost of his empire was a slow, systemic erosion of his humanity. He stopped seeing people as humans; he saw them as "assets" or "waste." He viewed his employees as components in a machine and his lovers as ornaments for his ego. He had optimized his life for profit, stripping away every "inefficient" emotion—empathy, loyalty, love.

The collapse began with a flicker.

One afternoon, while inspecting a new acquisition—a massive, pre-war bunker—Marcus's Sight failed. For three seconds, the world went grey. He panicked, pushing his power harder, but the flicker returned, longer this time. The "Value-Veins" were disappearing.

The panic spread. Without the Sight, Marcus was just a man who didn't know how to actually work, who had forgotten how to negotiate without cheating, and who had no one left to trust. His empire, built on the precision of his异能, began to wobble. His creditors, sensing the weakness, descended like vultures.

The very people he had exploited—the neighbors he had cheated, the workers he had discarded—realized the King was blind.

In a single week, the lawsuits, the betrayals, and the bankruptcies stripped him bare. His penthouse was seized, his accounts frozen, and his "friends" vanished into the fog.

Marcus found himself back in the Great Scrap-Heaps, standing in the rain. He looked at the mountain of rust around him. He tried to use the Sight, but there was nothing but grey.

He reached down and picked up a piece of twisted iron. He didn't know if it was valuable or worthless. For the first time in years, he didn't know the answer.

He began to laugh, a dry, hacking sound that echoed through the ruins. He was finally just like everyone else. He was scrap.

*** OTMES_v2_Code: [V-04]-[T4-07]-[M3:8.0, M1:7.0, N1:0.4, K2:0.7, I:0.8, R:0.2, theta:180deg]