Kai sat on a rusted folding chair at the top of Ridge Line, overlooking rows of merged coops, lettuce beds, and stacked crate pallets.
Everything he built so far had lived in the shadows—cash deals, unmarked deliveries, anonymous crate drops. It kept him safe, kept him ahead. But it also kept him limited.
Now the world was starting to whisper. Buyers were chasing crates. Blackmarket forums listed his lettuce for $300 a head. Knockoff eggs were popping up in markets he'd never touched. One post read: "Get Crown-style eggs here."
There was no stopping it. Only one move left.
It was time to scale.
Kai didn't rent a billboard. He didn't hire influencers. He launched Merge Grown with a two-sentence press release posted in a forgotten agricultural blog:
"Food is broken. We're fixing it the old way—with hands, land, and merge."
By morning, twenty farm influencers were reposting it. By noon, ten independent food review channels were begging for crate samples. By midnight, orders crashed the contact form.
Kai responded with one action: he merged everything again.
Chickens—merged into Tier 4 breeds, laying eggs that could sit for two weeks without refrigeration.
Lettuce beds—merged again, flavor profile so strong it made store-bought greens taste like plastic.
The soil itself—merged and mixed with mineralized compost aura that kept pests away naturally.
He didn't just grow food. He engineered yield loops.
A week later, Kai held the first Merge Market Day on the southern edge of Crown District 1.
No banners. No music. Just stacked crates, farmhands with blank aprons, and a single sign:
MERGE GROWN – NO HYPE. JUST TASTE.
People showed up in waves. Chefs, food truck owners, old heads from failed farms, even two former USDA guys in civilian clothes pretending not to be impressed.
They bought everything.
One guy ate a raw lettuce leaf and offered to buy a quarter-acre lease just to grow more of it. Another demanded a monthly egg contract—cash up front, no questions.
Kai kept calm, spoke little, and watched how people reacted to the taste.
They didn't just want food. They wanted power through food.
The kind of strength and vitality that only Merge Grown gave them.
By the end of the day, Merge Grown was trending locally. People called it "the rebirth of American soil." One blog wrote, "This isn't just farming. This is sovereignty."
Kai went home, pulled out a paper map, and circled twelve more parcels of land around the ridge. He wasn't just thinking about next week. He was thinking about what animals would come next. Cows. Racing horses. Feed-grade pigs. Every one of them ready to be merged and optimized.
He didn't say a word to his crew.
But that night, he opened a fresh page in the merge ledger and wrote:
"The Crown is no longer hidden.
It's time they see what royalty tastes like."