Chapter 351: Interesting

Translator: imperfectluck Editor: Pranav

“I would like to thank everyone for their hard work. I hope our future cooperation will be ever more successful.”

After taking a glance at the thick bundle of papers she was holding, the young girl atop the stage tilted her head, thought for a moment, then nodded before tossing her speech papers to the wind. She then continued speaking off script.

“…Let’s not waste everyone’s time. Again, many thanks to everyone for their support. Cheers!”

“Ohhh, everyone’s worked hard!”

“Lolis—I mean wood spirits—banzai! The cutest one of them all, little Samantha, is truly amazing. She’s my angel.”

“Who’s your angel? Miss Samantha belongs to everyone!”

At the celebration party, the cold-faced Samantha started giving a speech before deciding to discard the long speech when she received a fervent round of applause from the adventurers. However, the way they welcomed her seemed rather strange…

“Why does it feel more and more like she’s a celebrity idol instead of the leader of her species?”

“Sister, you were the one who asked me to write a speech—you even said it was very important! You asked me to put as much effort as I could into writing it… Is this how you treat the product I came up with after pulling two all-nighters…”

Alright, let’s ignore Rosa, who had dark circles under her eyes and was glaring at her older sister, as if she held a terrible grudge against her. The thirty-page speech that she spent all night working on was discarded with a single comment of “Let’s not waste everyone’s time.” It was likely that a sibling conflict would take place later tonight. Yet what was with those strange supporters behind her shouting as well?

“Rosa’s dark form is cute as well!”

“As expected, pink on the outside, black on the inside!”

Cough, it would seem that as the wood spirits became more like humans, the number of strange individuals attracted by them would keep increasing as well.

From some unknown point in time, the wood spirits had started enjoying an abnormally high popularity. Now plenty of strange adventuring teams existed out there similar to the one Beyana had created; in fact, they could now be said to be quite common.

Of course, there were also some wicked individuals with unspeakable intentions. But with the plants watching over, they were caught before they could even put their plots into action. It was unknown whether they would be punished by thorns, roots, or something else.

Unlike most ordinary wood spirits who were very easy to approach, Samantha was typically cold-faced and never spoke a single unnecessary word. If she could answer with one word, she would never use two. And, most of the time she spoke, it was to scold. She almost never smiled. Yet it was, for some strange reason, this very way she acted that made her astonishingly popular. In fact, she had the largest fan club out of all the wood spirits… Should I be commenting here that no matter what world I was in, there would be plenty of gentlemen? This type of loli who was short, soft, and seemingly easy to push down, with a perpetual icy expression and a venomous tongue actually became the most popular of the wood spirits.

“Little Samantha worked hard as well.”

As I looked at Little Red energetically giving Samantha a bear hug, and seeing that Samantha was struggling yet unable to escape the ridiculously strong Dragon lady’s embrace, pleading with her eyes for me to help her, I didn’t know what to say.

When I heard that the leader of the “Wood Spirits Fan Club” was Little Red, I wasn’t surprised in the least. I could only sigh. This former “fake loli” was probably feeling her motherly instincts overly flow again.

I must say, sometimes one’s outer appearance was truly important. For instance, my undead armies. Even though they ended up saving Sulfur Mountain City—which helped to greatly improved their relationship with the living residents—there was still a sense of distance between them. It could only be said that the living and the undead there were neighbors with relatively good affinity.

Meanwhile, the wood spirits only needed to come out and wave their hands for a group of adventurers to follow after them like loyal dogs. In the future, the “Wood Spirits Fan Club” membership would exceed 100,000 members, and the adventurers even started organizing personal guard groups to act as the wood spirits’ free workers. I have no idea what I should even say.

And when Samantha lifted a trophy in celebration of our victory, the gentlemen started encouraging her to sing a song to liven up the atmosphere. I felt greatly relieved, and proceeded to enjoy a luxurious feast that I haven’t had in a really long time.

Last night, I stayed the night over at Samantha’s place. While the wood spirits didn’t treat me poorly, the problem was that all they ate was vegetables and fruit. Naturally, I was unable to refuse their friendly service, and I was unwilling to spend my hard-earned Justice Points on chicken or pork. And so, I could only make do with their diet. Unfortunately, their food was all-natural, with zero seasonings or additives whatsoever. While it was adequate to fill my stomach, the flavor… to quote my silly cat, “I’d rather eat a rat than any more of this grass. At least rats have some flavor to them.”

“It would seem that I need to think of some idea to earn some gold coins for myself.”

I was quite curious about just who had managed to secretly steal my money. Actually, the money I had lost from my wallet wasn’t much—just two or three hundred gold coins. The only annoying part was that some of my personal items had also disappeared from my wallet.

“…Is it that you never carry much money since you always end up losing it?”

“No, I just think it’s too bothersome to carry a lot of money. Things will get much better after the Goddess of Wealth opens up her ‘banking service.'”

Yep, while “banks” already existed in this world, they were more like safety deposit boxes rather than financial institutes. You would only be able to retrieve your money at the exact place you stored it at. You also needed to pay a fee at regular intervals; otherwise, the bank would claim whatever was stored within.

Carry money on you? Dimensional storage equipment was few and far between—not to mention expensive—and there would be limitations to both storage space and weight. It wasn’t even enough to store backup equipment, much less gold coins.

Those heroes from legends who spent several thousand gold coins at once would need to have tremendous strength as well. This was since carrying several thousand gold coins meant carrying several dozen kilograms. No ordinary person would be able to carry ten thousand gold coins. It would be impossible to casually pay over one hundred thousand gold coins unless you had a carriage filled with coins following after you.

Of course, paper money was barely used and remained largely unsuccessful. Merchant associations and mercenary guilds ended up taking on the roles of “banking services” in this world. However, not only would you only be able to do business at one place, it was both highly inconvenient and unreliable.

The members of a mercenary guild would be mercenaries, untrustworthy to begin with. Merchant associations forever held with them the danger of bankruptcy. No matter how well-off they were, any merchant association that was rich but without its own private money was akin to an ATM filled with free cash in the eyes of local domain lords. It was simple and common enough for a domain lord to use some random passable excuse to drive a merchant association bankrupt in a single night.

So the end result was that due to too many failures with previous systems, precious metals and magic metals were forever the main currency in this world. After all, these metals could be used to forge weapons and equipment and perform research on alchemy and magic. Metals were the most precious consumables.

As for the new “banking service” that Beyana was going to offer, it was basically solidifying Justice Points as a new type of currency. It would work like this: a person would be able to exchange precious metals for Justice Points, and, at certain locations, exchange Justice Points for precious metals.

In order to avoid people using large amounts of gold coins to exchange for Justice Points—thereby causing inflation in our system—Justice Points obtained using metals could only be used as a simple currency, and could not be used to exchange for special items. Although this sounded rather complex, it was actually quite simple: it was the appearance of a true universal equivalent product.

The Justice Points obtained using money were also called “Wealth Points,” yet that wouldn’t affect their fundamental nature. And since the Gods were guaranteeing the authenticity of this system, it seemed that the entire world was actually willing to accept it. If Beyana succeeded, perhaps Wealth Points would truly be able to replace clunky metal coins and become the universal currency of this world.

This wasn’t any wild or innovative concept. However, since this was a feudal generation, nobody had been able to accomplish it. Most nobles viewed their own domains as their personal property, and they were used to collecting their own taxes and forcibly conscripting their people. Even though there was the occasional open-minded, reformist noble, wars and changes in royal authority often occurred. This forced even these few nobles to concentrate all their wealth on the endless cycle of warfare instead. After all, if you weren’t even able to protect your life, who cared about ripping up a contract agreement or two?

Since nobles, royals, and merchants destroyed the credibility of any paper-money system, it was only natural for most people to not trust paper money in the end. Since Justice Points were gradually becoming accepted by everyone, Beyana wouldn’t miss this excellent opportunity for anything.

Using divine authority to guarantee a new currency had never been tried before, which meant the future was unpredictable. But as long as this succeeded… even if it only succeeded by half, it would mean a great increase in the power level of the Divine Concept of Wealth. For example, Finance, Futures, Loans, and similar financial industries would develop as Concepts under Wealth. By that time, it was likely that many things would change.

“…Perhaps the first God from the Ayer Faction who becomes a Main God won’t actually be the God of Fate or the Moonlight Goddess as most people expect. I’m betting on the originally weaker Goddess of Wealth.”

Of course, such significant societal changes wouldn’t happen overnight. No country would be willing to watch a more widely used currency become more popular than their national currency. No matter how successful Beyana became in the end, this path was destined to be filled with thorns.

Back in the present, when the Contract Heroes discovered that their Justice Points could be exchanged for actual gold and silver in addition to all those treasures, they were quite excited and felt that they had made the right choice in joining this system.

Most people didn’t think about the potential impacts of these changes. They were simply delighted at obtaining concrete benefits. Once they discovered that their own lives would be changed by certain things, they would only be able to passively accept. But some people had already seen through many matters and even viewed this as an opportunity.

“Your Highness Roland, could I speak with you in private?”

A certain ridiculously handsome magic knight contacted me. This time, his handsome face appeared far more nervous than in our previous meeting, causing me to ponder on a few things.

Actually, since the wood spirits’ primary objective had been leaked by a spy, I had suspected that there was a traitor among the highest ranked adventurers. Since Kaise was the only “outsider” directly allowed to enter the wood spirits’ core command centers, he was naturally the prime suspect.

His subordinates were the ones who had helped discover the bronze-ranked undead mage spy. This actually made Kaise seem all the more suspicious in my eyes, as it was a common tactic to sacrifice a pawn to protect the king. Kaise was treated to twenty-four seven plant surveillance at my orders.

Only when the real spy Molly jumped out near the battle’s end did that finally clear my suspicions on Kaise. Since Kaise was the highest-ranked leader of the adventurers, he naturally received a silver military achievement emblem for his contributions.

But to be honest, I never expected him to come and contact me after the battle was over.

After all, my identity was now exposed. It was well known to powerful individuals that the “Undying Roland” on the Calamity Rankings was also the Undead Emperor Yongye who brought with him death and darkness. The high-level adventurers with knowledge of my real identity had all acted quite restrained over the past few days whenever they saw me. Not only would they not come to chat with me, they would all sit up properly whenever I looked over, with pale expressions and sweat dripping down their foreheads, as if I were a man-eating tiger.

Even the novice adventurers, who didn’t really know who I was, would become rather reserved when noticing the gold military achievement emblem on my chest. The smarter ones among the novices recalled that there was a high-ranked Calamity Rankings individual who had acted to protect Oak Town in the battle, so they also knew just how to act around this “gold military achievement emblem person.”

But still, I didn’t really enjoy this type of atmosphere. Recently, I was feeling incredibly bored. Even though I didn’t pay any attention whatsoever to my image and stuffed my face at this celebration party feast, nobody had said a word about my ill manners. But this young fellow had actually come to speak to me of his own volition, which made me rather interested in him.

“I would like to talk to you about cooperating…”

Obviously, some things weren’t suitable for discussing in public. We went to an empty room, and had a good chat. The end result was that we both discovered that we could agree on mutual goals, so we ended up signing a few contracts that weren’t suitable for seeing the light of day.

“Alright then, it’s time for me to say goodbye, Your Highness. I look forward to meeting you again in the Bardi Empire’s capital.”

Kaise Elowen, the “Black Guardian” and leader of the Westwood Guardian mercenary group, left in satisfaction. Although we didn’t have the most joyous meeting the first time we met, perhaps we would have more opportunities to work together in the future.

“This Kaise fellow is no normal individual. I feel he’s going to become a great person in the future. Oh, right, I should check the game history whether he appears in it or not…”

There were far too many stories about legends, heroes, epics, the mystical, and so on. Just recording all their names alone would make a book thicker than a dictionary. Often times, when hearing the name of some great hero or villain who was quite well known and powerful, the game history might have nothing more than their name. Nor was it possible for me to remember every single name in the game’s history. But it would simply take a few minutes of my time for me to check if a person’s name appeared in my game history walkthrough.

[Kaise Elowen, page 367, line 7. By the way, he’s quite an interesting fellow.]

In a way, the moment my System spoke up, I figured that something was going on. And so, I speedily flipped to that page and looked at what was written there. And then, I immediately understood.

“Kaise Elowen… he truly is an interesting person.”

******

Red blood filled an entire pool. The strange part was, however, that although this was all obviously so bloody, there was no nauseous stench whatsoever.

This was the blood of Immemorial Red Dragons, something incredibly difficult to obtain no matter how much money you paid. But the moment I sunk myself into the pool of blood, my body’s sensory system went crazy, with numbness, soreness, swelling, and all sorts of sensations attacking me together. I itched so much all over that I wanted to cut off my own skin, but it only took a moment for me to lose all senses entirely.

[Sensory deprivation service, at a charge of 10—no—100 Justice Points.]

“…You’re taking advantage of me when I’m down! Can’t you be at least a little nicer!”

[In that case, should I cancel this service and refund your Justice Points? I shall do it in three, two…]

“…You win.”

Everything went silent again. Since I needed to soak myself in this pool of blood for the time being, I decided to focus on the harvest I had received, which I had placed in my Frigidwinter Earth. From a certain standpoint, as a victor who successfully “looted corpses,” I gained much from this battle. However, turning my harvest into concrete benefits wasn’t something nearly so easy.

I had enough of only being able to watch from the sidelines. It was quite clear what I needed to do.

“I need to get stronger. Fast.”

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