God-Tier Enhancement: My Upgrades Never Fail-Chapter 70: Episode 14 _ My Lord, You Know Best (1)

1.

The Specialists spent 30 days in 22-hour sessions without a single day off. It was enough time to cram a year’s worth of labor into a single month.

On top of that, Simin’s hourly wage was $1,500. The total amount he was due came to a staggering $990,000.

“This is insane. Completely insane.”

On his way to meet Gongheon, his jaw dropped as the deposit amount popped up in his hologram.

Nine hundred ninety thousand dollars was one thing to say, but seeing the actual digits was so overwhelming it stopped feeling real.

$990,000.

And if he sold off the materials they had collected while hunting and the extra loot they had stripped from the Kenji Guild, the total would come to nearly a million dollars.

’My net worth is $1.4 million...’

That was just what he had sitting in his bank account.

To be precise, it was $1.37 million, but who cared about a measly $30,000 at that point?

What mattered was that he had earned this much money from a game in just a few months. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

So he made up his mind: he would buy a place while he had the cash.

He had already signed a one-year lease on his studio apartment, so he didn’t need to move in right away, but Simin knew himself better than anyone. A sudden fear crept up on him.

’How long is that money really going to stay in my account?’

It wasn’t money that was easily earned, but it was the first time in his life he had ever handled a sum this large.

He was at an age where he wanted to spend it on this and that, and since his day-to-day life lacked for nothing, blowing a big chunk of it once wouldn’t ruin him.

But he knew that the only emotion waiting for him after a spending spree like that was regret.

He’d better convert it into assets while he had the chance.

’If I blew it on booze and women, that’d actually be the best-case scenario.’

He wanted to live a debauched life before he hit thirty and to experience the kind of splurging that made people point fingers.

He was fully prepared to live with that kind of regret.

But before he could choose that path, the moment his mind shifted to ’I’m going to spend this money,’ it would start leaking into all the wrong places.

’I might even go nuts and dump it all into FW.’

If he were honest, that was the biggest reason he wanted to buy a house. If he didn’t have the cash, he couldn’t blow it. And he wasn’t stupid enough to sell a house he had bought just to invest in the game.

’I’ll leave about $100,000 in cash...’

While sketching out a plan to keep himself from wasting money, he arrived at the meeting spot with Gongheon: a café that had opened inside the city.

A player had naturally bought the building and opened it, and it was one of the more popular spots, with a steady stream of customers. For Simin, who was in the middle of agonizing over what kinds of buildings to construct once his territory developed, it was a good reference point.

“You’re here.”

Gongheon waved when he saw him. His expression wasn’t good.

Even at a glance, it was clear something serious was going on, and Simin’s expression hardened.

Had something happened to the territory?

’That would be bad.’

He didn’t care what happened to the originally barren land itself, but it was still his land. If the expensive, enhanced magic circle he had invested in had been destroyed, that would be pure despair.

It had cost $160,000.

He couldn’t exactly take it back and resell it, so the only way to recoup his investment was to stand there for the rest of his life, defending the territory from monsters until the game shut down.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s about funding for the territory.”

The topic made Simin swallow hard.

It was tied to the condition he had proposed in his deal with Gongheon: sell him gold at a discount.

Naturally, it wasn’t for free.

Once the territory developed and stabilized, he would give Gongheon a prime plot of land with a large building on it. From Gongheon’s perspective, there had been no reason to accept.

The discount he was being asked for wasn’t small change, either; it was $10,000 per thousand gold coins.

In a world where the price of gold was shooting up with no ceiling in sight, he was being asked to knock $10,000 off per thousand.

And the deal was for life!

Gongheon still regretted having more than a thousand gold coins on hand at the time.

In any case, he had been half-forced into signing the contract and, gritting his teeth, had agreed to sell the gold. So when a problem arose, he had every intention of immediately informing the one with all the power—Simin—and asking him to fix it.

It was the only leverage Gongheon had.

“What is it?”

That was why Simin had given up his rest and come running.

“I’ve secured about two thousand gold so far. But from here on, the pace is going to slow down.”

“...Why?”

“Do you know the route to your territory, Boss?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“The workshop bastards have started operating there.”

“What kind of operation?”

“Gold acquisition.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? What did that have to do with Gongheon gathering gold?

“Weren’t you making money through business?”

Gongheon explained, “Yes, which is why my employees and I aren’t that high-level. But the guys running workshops in places like China and India are running hundreds of characters and just grinding. Of course, in Fantastic World, that kind of business barely turns a profit, so lately they’ve switched to acquiring gold through banditry.”

“You mean like mountain bandits?”

“Yes.”

Wow. Simin couldn’t help but be impressed.

He had known since the PC gaming days that macros and workshops never disappeared, but to think they existed in Fantastic World too.

It was definitely a market worth trying, and given the scale, if you played it right, you could make money on a level that made the PC era look like child’s play.

“They really are cockroaches.”

“Well, I’m not much different. The issue is the method. In a game with this much freedom, you can’t use macros, so they’ve been experimenting and found that this is the most efficient way.”

“...So you want me to take care of them for you?” Simin asked.

“Yes.”

In the end, the point was that they were interfering with his business, so if Simin wanted to keep buying gold coins cheaply, he needed to help.

Normally, he would have shaken his head without a second thought. But right now, he couldn’t.

’Shit. I do need to buy gold coins...’

He had decided to buy a house, but he wasn’t planning to spend everything. He was going to invest at least $200,000, maybe up to $400,000, into the territory. He had a chance to buy gold at $10,000 per thousand, whether he liked it or not. There was no way he could pass that up.

Even with simple math, he would save $40,000.

’Think of it as taking on a part-time job.’

It would be exhausting and annoying, and what he really wanted was to log out and sleep for twelve hours straight.

“Phew.”

But what could he do?

“They really are doing that on the road to my territory, right?”

“Of course. I don’t think they picked it on purpose, but from what I can tell, they’ve been roaming around, and that area’s just less heavily patrolled.”

Simin sighed. ’Those sons of bitches.’

His territory was already nothing but NPCs living off grass, and they were pulling that crap on the only road in?

“Let’s go.”

He had been planning to pass through there anyway once he got some rest, and the Specialists moved out to clear the main quest.

He just moved the schedule up a bit and set off with heavy steps.

2.

The era of running hundreds of PCs with macros to grind gold and sell it for cash was over.

This was the dark age of the workshops.

Depending on what they did now, they would either live large in this new world or give up the work they had done their whole lives and end up doing manual labor. Of course, if they liquidated everything and settled their accounts, they would have enough to support themselves for life.

But how were people who were used to making easy money supposed to suddenly start living frugally? Most workshops had bought VR capsules and hired a ton of employees. They had never even considered doing something as stupid as modifying capsules to run macros.

BetaGo had already demonstrated that it would shut down any capsule that tried to tamper with the system.

At first, they hunted in a slapdash way.

’We’re not going to lose when it comes to hunting!’

Most of them had used macros, but there had always been plenty of tasks that required human hands, like power-leveling services or item farming.

They hired employees who were good at that kind of work and skipped all the quests, heading straight out to slaughter rabbits. Not one or two, but hundreds.

There was no auto-hunt, no auto-loot, but when they worked together, even monsters considered “high difficulty” were not that hard to kill.

Naturally, the EXP gain was low, but they weren’t after experience. They hunted for hides and items to sell.

At first, it was pretty decent. The game was new, competition was low, and they could sell gold at a high price. But that didn’t last.

Given the amount they had invested, this wasn’t going to work. Even if they hunted their asses off for days, they were only making about one gold coin, so how long would it take just to pay off a single capsule?

On top of that, their levels were creeping up, but they were converting everything they earned into cash, so there was no way they could move on to stronger monsters.

At best, they could handle wolves.

Their income improved a little, but even ignoring the initial investment, it was barely enough to keep food on the table.

At the same time, they realized something: you couldn’t treat Fantastic World like a cookie-cutter online game.

Like Gongheon, most of the workshops started to worry. Quitting was out of the question.

There might be people who had never tried Fantastic World, but there was no one who had only played it once. That applied to them, too. The scale of the money flowing through the game was on a completely different level from PC games.

It was better to rack their brains for a solution than walk away from such a sweet gig.

They agonized for a long time, and eventually, with someone’s actions as a catalyst, a new trend emerged: a job where your gear didn’t have to be that good, and as long as you had enough people, you could make money.

PK bandits. No one knew who had started it. But as workshops quietly shared information with each other, they all started doing it.

The results were on a completely different level from hunting.

Only then did they admit that Fantastic World was nothing like the old, formulaic online games.

It was the opening salvo announcing that the world had become a lawless land. Unlike in reality, killing an adventurer carried no penalty unless the victim personally put a bounty on you.

The same went for NPCs. Enforcement was strict, but as long as you didn’t get caught, you were golden. What a perfect world for banditry. They roamed the less-traveled roads, attacking any players they met and stealing their items.

If they found a village in the mountains, they went in, looted the NPCs, and attacked them, too. Not every NPC was high-level or good in a fight, so attacking a small village was often easier than robbing players.

And NPCs were settled residents. They dropped far more than a brand-new player with minimal item-drop protection.

The first time was hard, but the second and third were easy.

Workshops that got a taste for it went all-in, even gearing up for it.

That was the situation by the time Simin heard about it from Gongheon, and right now, three different groups were gathered in front of the Rich Territory.

“This place is really a gold mine, huh? It’s bigger than I thought.”

“Told you. I’ve been scouting it for two weeks. It’s like a town that just started developing. There’s a ton of stuff inside you can loot and sell, and since they’ve started building, there are lots of materials, too. Plus, there are plenty of women,” one of the bandits explained.

“Oh. Where the hell did you find a place like this?”

“What, you think I just sit around? I was roaming around doing bandit work, followed some player I was going to rob, and stumbled on it. There are a few guards, but they don’t look that high-level. If we push with numbers, we can strip it clean.”

“Hm. It looks good, but we’re not going to choke on it, right? I don’t want to get some bounty on my head for nothing.”

“Hey, hey! If you’re scared, back out. I’m already pissed I can’t have this all to myself, and here I am offering to share, but you just want to take the prize and run.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry. We’ll just go in, loot everything, have our fun, and kill them all. Fine, let’s go.”

It was a conversation straight out of a crime drama. In a game that guaranteed realism, human nature was bursting out. Around two hundred players marched forward brazenly, toward the Rich Territory.

* * *

Episode 71