Vita Kingdom was bustling. 

Following the end of the First Inter-Player International Competition, many things had occured. A third giant wave of players joined, raising the player count to a whopping 700 million concurrent players! 

700 million players meant that things had gotten vamped up. First of all, prices of everything had increased. After all, hundreds of millions of new people were in need of gold, equipment, items, skills, and experience! 

Not everyone was a broke college student or a brave youth who wanted to grow their own power, experiencing hardship to go from zero to hero. Many wanted to taste power without putting in the work, so where did they turn to? 

Naturally, they opened the Intermediary Trade Center and check between the two tabs there. One tab was listed as 'Currency Auction' and the other as 'Equipment and Item Auction'. 

The Currency Exchange listed hundreds of bids of various in game currencies from buyers at various prices, and also listed many offers from sellers using their own unit price. 

The AI then matched those with similar prices and bids together. If you input your desire to purchase 300 silver worth at a price point of $295.5 per coin, and the closest to that would be someone offering to sell 500 silver at a price point of $298.0, after a given period of time had passed, the AI would automatically redeem it for you. 

This was also helped by the fact that both the seller and the buyer had to attach a bid range for their items, even going as for as to offer an instant buy price. The market price was decided by the average of all auctions within a certain range, so while some sold (for example) 1 bronze at $2.8-2.95, others might end up lucky to sell them at $3.1-3.5. 

Hence, factoring in rounding up and the average, the price of a single Bronze Coin continued to be listed as $3 as a baseline for others to follow. Naturally, as this auction market was fully supplied by players, players were also the ones to decide the final price at the end. 

Naturally when influxes like this happened, the price of currency would spike because people wanted to buy currency after seeing how hard it was to kill monsters and how little they got for their efforts. 

So, as they say in West Africa, it's cashout season! 

The price of bronze had risen to $6 for a single coin on average after the First Inter-Player International Competition, and it was still rising by the day. People were posting bids for coins so much that the list for bids was almost giving the AI a headache to sort them out, and it could dilate fucking time! 

The sellers, rather, seemed to be scarce. Most of the new players had watched reruns of the competition and witnessed the power of Umbra, making them motivated to reach the same height to join the top stage by the time the next International Competition would begin. 

Huh? What was that? Sell some of my coins to those buyers? 

Brother, have you been slapped while getting suplexed into concrete from 300 miles up? 

Who would do such a foolish thing? There were a few sellers, but for those people, that was their occupation. They sold off their currency in bits to hike up the price and made profit, and it worked because everyone else was too conscious of what they could do with money. 

It was only the occasional bloke who struck it rich and wanted to exchange for some comfort money in reality to alleviate their situation who sold, and even then, they were cruel enough to overprice compared to the merchants, yet the number of willing buyers had seemingly no end. 

This naturally made the merchants happy as it promoted and stabilized their business, and they had a tacit understanding with those one time sellers. 

Things were not so smooth and clear-cut in the previous timeline. The Intermediary Trade Center had been a chaotic land for the first two years in the game, until the playerbase eventually settled due to basically all of humanity having joined in 

By then, a system had been worked out and everyone knew what to do and how to do it, as well as the unspoken rules behind everything. 

However, due to the actions of the Evil Duo enlightening the players through various events in this timeline, the playerbase today were far more coherent and driven than those of the same time period in the previous era. 

So how were all those buyers getting their orders? Who was supplying them if the players who had joined beforehand were hoarding their coins like Gollums? 

Of course - cue Avenger's theme - it was Umbra! 

Sublime and Akainu had already discussed it back during the final day of the tournament, but this was the time to fleece the public. Umbra was drowning in cash and goods ever since the sea route had been opened by them, to the point where they didn't even know what to do with all of it. 

Apart from those expensive Class Ups, there were few things in the Main Plane that required more than 1,000 platinum to buy. As such, they decided to dump a lot of money into the Trade Center at high prices, which were all continually swept up instantly. 

Look, the backlog of bids was such that Umbra's dumps were cleared the instant it launched, and the AI sorted out the prices. Umbra were also dumping in batches so that bidders stayed on their toes and hoped they would be chosen next. 

But what was Umbra doing? Even if you had so much money, selling it to newbies is not the way! If you do this, they will have far better starts than you veterans and following the footsteps of you all, they will climb faster and maybe even higher than you in the future! 

It was better to starve the newbies and let them suffer the same way you did so that their future accomplishments were stifled and could not pass yours, so that you can maintain your grip on power and prestige! 

In West Africa, we call fellows who think like this 'enemies of progress'. 

What was the biggest issue that plagued Draco in regard to the Main Plane? It was their weakness and their poverty! 

Money had been hoarded for so long that the economies worldwide had been stifled greatly, and the flow of cash was stringent. People could not afford to buy anything above Epic, so people who made Epic stuff or could mass-produce them had nowhere to sell. 

Whereas with Epic goods, more people could kill more monsters and complete more quests, thereby earning more money on average for themselves which they would spend on more expensive items to further increase their income, which formed a virtuous cycle of economic beauty... which was stifled because of the greed of the Hidden Powers. 

Now, you want Umbra to squeeze the players too? If they did that, how could the Main Plane progress as a whole?! 

60% of the reason players had been trash in the previous timeline was due to this. The reason Draco and co had been capped at Rank 6 and could not inch further, be it in terms of Combat or Tradeskill, was because of that. 

The game being difficult only accounted for 10% of the reason at most. 

Why worry about newbies climbing easily and making more progress than the pioneer players? Let them become stronger and stronger! The stronger they were the more money they could make, and the more expensive Umbra could make things. 

They had Vita Kingdom, the heaven of produced goods thanks to the buffs, and they had the strongest powerhouses in the game. It was practically impossible for Umbra or its affiliates to be surpassed in this timeline. 

As for the others, it was their own problem. The world was survival of the fittest, so if you couldn't maintain your advantage and fell, that was on you. 

You'd be narrow-minded to think older players would be easily surpassed. They were old foxes who had sat through Draco's original achievements, the Dragon Slaying Event, the First Guild War, the Emergency Quest, The First Player Auction, and the Abyss Event. 

The kind of things they had come into contact with, the kind of experiences they had, and the kind of things they had gained, was something these newbies would forever lack. 

Just having money could not make up for that kind of experience, even if used well. Given how few of them were selling their currency and rather digesting these experiences to grow, it was clear that the newbies would not have it as easy as they dreamed. 

Right now, Umbra was suffering from success. They had so much in-game money that they couldn't spend it all and now, the Purgatory Group had so much IRL money they were helpless. 

Their bank, the Foljeslagare Bank, which was a minor Switzerland bank where their off-shore account was kept, was not one of the top 10 richest banks in their country. 

Purgatory Group were their number 1 client and they even allowed the company to buy out some decision-making shares in the bank to further tie them together. They had also sent their best talents to join Umbra as accountants and auditors, who assisted Sublime with managing the money flow in the game. 

Purgatory had 3 companies. 

One was the security group where the 10,000 Supernatural lads were listed as employees and mercenaries, including Tunder and AP. 

One was the gaming group, where they had a building equipped with prototype pods that all members of Umbra could use. Then they had the R&D group, which was supposed to be a front for the AI to sell pods in case the World Council stifled them. 

However, that was no longer necessary thanks to Supernatural's involvement in Boundless vs The World. 

As such, the company had been idle until Armonia recently received the blood of the Monkey King and needed a place to vent his inspirations. So he took the R&D department, hired his own set of workers and researchers, and took out a budget of $3.3 billion to work on various new things adapted from Boundless. 

He was using such big money to research only 3 things. 

1. How the digital world could affect the real through the pod and careful use of the nanobots. 

2. How to create a special drug that could influence the recovery of Bloodline Energy in real life. 

3. How to create a drug that could increase bloodline purity or purify bloodlines in both Lineage members and gene holders. 

Most of the money was spent on buying power, because the AI had lent Armonia a few of its subroutines to help. Just one subroutine was equivalent to a Pseudo-Quantum Computer, so the kind of computing power Armonia had at his disposal was more than most top companies and even governments in the world. 

However, as you could imagine, powering such a thing was terrible. Amber and co were lucky that they had a special realm below the GloryGore Labs that seemed magically removed from the real world, so they could quietly generate the necessary power for the AI to operate down there. 

Up here though, Armonia didn't have that benefit. He initially considered researching nuclear power and finally creating the version that the world needed, but gave up when he spoke to Draco's Avatar. 

Apparently, there was no point since they were soon going to max out here and head over to the Sci-fi world, which had far better tech than they could develop through decades of research. 

Armonia was still indignant, but was left defeated when Draco told him that once they got to the sci-fi world, there would be hundreds of thousands of new technologies that he would have to port into the real world. 

Come that time, even if he wanted to sleep, he would have to do so while standing up, so he should treasure his current free time. 

After that, how could Armonia continue to make a fuss? 

He simply pinched his nose and left speechlessly. 

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