Chapter 46 The New System

"Lord Sharlock, it's time."

"What?! The surface adventurers are here ALREADY? I haven't even finished my treasure hall..."

Sharlock's fingers were flying, mouse going absolutely ham.

"No, my lord — not the game. It's time for the players' gear auction."

At the sound of Bru's voice, Sharlock jolted:

"What? A whole DAY went by?"

Sharlock checked the time — sure enough, the one-day loot preview period was over, and it was nearly noon. Auction o'clock.

He hadn't expected time could fly that fast.

Outside, the players were already gathering around the core hall, waiting for the auction to start.

Naturally, the auction wasn't players yelling out bids — Bru, as the system, collected all one hundred players' offers and auctioned the six pieces of loot simultaneously over ten minutes; highest bid wins. And the players crowding outside the core hall were there, naturally, to see who'd walk away with the six pieces of loot on display outside it.

Every single piece was god-tier gear with stats that blew current equipment out of the water — legendary affixes, unique looks. Imagine strutting around in THAT. Plus the gear could be soulbound! And you could put drop-protection insurance on it!

Best of all, this stuff was one-of-a-kind. There was exactly one kobold chief Kramo in the entire Underworld, and he was not respawning a second time.

Didn't take a genius to know this auction would swallow most of the currency the beta testers had earned from nearly a month of questing and material farming — and after the 30% tax got skimmed off the top, the rest would be split among everyone who'd fought the boss, by contribution.

As for how "by contribution" worked, that was Bru's call based on the actual numbers; the players collected their copper at the core themselves. Nothing for Sharlock to manage.

And with that many players packed into one place, the chat went nuclear — the chirping and squawking nearly blew the roof off the area outside the core hall.

Off in the distance, the carpenter Ironmane — two days into his stay — still couldn't quite adjust to a dungeon that radiated madness and impossibility from every corner. Mostly it was the goblins. The goblins were the crazy part.

"Brother, they're not working — they're all bunched up outside the core hall having a group chat. What's that about? Won't Lord Sharlock fire them?"

Ironmane held the ladle while the blacksmith Goldmane dumped dirt into the soup pot — chow that, once roasted down and dehydrated, would sell at a premium to the players as meals.

"Lord Sharlock won't fire them. Group-chatting is just one of their hobbies. Like I told you before: don't be surprised by anything these goblins do. Keep that one rule in mind and you're fine."

Goldmane said it like it was nothing.

Ironmane still needed time to get used to life in the Eternal Kingdom — and meanwhile, the players' auction was hitting its crescendo.

One minute left on the clock, and all six pieces were sitting at a measly 200 to 400 copper apiece, with bidders Sharlock had barely ever heard of — random no-name beta testers.

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Not that the other players couldn't afford it. The people who actually wanted this gear were saving their bids for the final stretch.

The moment the countdown started, all six prices began refreshing at once — from a few hundred copper they went vertical, blowing past 10,000 in no time; at the thirty-second mark every piece had broken 50,000 and was still climbing by the thousands.

In the last ten seconds, each piece pushed past the eighty-thousand mark — and then, in the final three seconds, shot up all over again at breakneck speed.

And through it all, the players maintained a steady wall of high-decibel screaming:

"Daaamn——! The whale money is OFF THE CHARTS——!"

"What even IS this? One MMO item bidding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars?!"

"Did these whales just buy out the entire server's gold supply?!"

"A hundred people in CBT and prices are already this stupid — what happens at open beta?!"

"We're rich, RICH! The second open beta hits, I'm opening a RMT sweatshop — who's even gonna work a job after that?!"

And so, amid the players' endless chatter, the six pieces went for right around ninety thousand apiece.

Who'd end up with the gear had really been decided from the start. Out of the hundred, the ones with the clout to fight for it had been settled back during the Spider Nest push — five names: 【Arthur】【xX_ShadowBlade_Xx】【BurningChestHair】【Sylvana】【ShrineNeko】. Those were the five biggest whales among the beta testers. The five of them split five pieces, and the last of them — the sword, and the breastplate — likewise ended up in Arthur's hands. All told, Arthur burned close to two hundred thousand copper.

The rest of the players, watching the whales throw money around like confetti, loudly wondered what exactly had blinded their eyes.

The five whales collected their five pieces under a storm of envious stares — and then xX_ShadowBlade_Xx immediately started hollering:

"Anyone want greaves?! Real money — USD only!"

The second he hollered, nearly ten people around him started bidding.

And just like that, the whole scene plunged into a brand-new auction.

Sharlock had no time for xX_ShadowBlade_Xx's little side hustle — how much profit that flip would net him — nor for how whale-tier these players could get out there in the other world. He was busy pondering a much more practical problem.

Roughly six hundred thousand copper in total — most of it settled in coins stamped with a 100, meaning each coin carried a face value of 100, plus silver and the like.

Even so, it piled up in front of Sharlock like a small mountain, and he felt a headache coming on. A hundred players, less than a month, and already this much currency stacked up? If the so-called CBT2 and CBT3 ever happened — and per Bru, a billion players were waiting in the wings...

Granted, no way all one billion players were getting in; the dungeon core's server didn't have that kind of capacity. He'd need to upgrade the core to keep raising the connection cap. One thought of the metal-currency consumption ballooning all over again as player counts grew...

It wasn't that Sharlock couldn't afford the metal currency — it was just a hassle. He was planning to dangle those coins in front of surface adventurers and use said adventurers to manufacture magic stones. If the players stuffed every last coin into their own pockets, what was that supposed to be?

Sharlock looked at his magic-stone card, thought a moment, and asked:

"Bru, could you build a banking system?"

"What?" Bru was startled.

"Like the magic-stone card — a system where you can swipe stones straight to the other party in a transaction, and pull them back out whenever you need them," Sharlock went on. "These players lug metal coins around in their pockets, and death-drop losses alone have already eaten a ton. Once the numbers swell — hundreds of thousands, millions of players pouring in — how much currency am I supposed to stock for them?"

"Quite true. If we don't solve this, just warehousing the coins will take vault after vault of storage space. A hundred players stacked up this much wealth in a month; if the player count explodes, there'll be that much more of it," Bru said. "My lord, the workload is a little heavy, but I'll work around the clock to get this banking system done. I'll just need more of your mana support along the way."

Any problem that mana can solve is no problem at all. Sharlock told Bru to get cranking — nothing else on the agenda for a while; get the banking system out the door ASAP. Earlier launch, better player experience, more polished game mechanics — and above all, SAVING HIM MONEY!

A hundred players' currency had already cost him a dozen-plus magic stones. If tens or hundreds of thousands of players came flooding in, how many stones would THAT take?

Outside, the players were happily gawking at the whales and picking up their cuts of the post-auction coin split, while Sharlock funneled most of his mana into Bru for charging — banking system development in progress.

With nothing better to do, Sharlock opened his computer and muttered:

"Just half an hour more..."

The day of the Dungeon Lord Experience-Sharing Conference arrived in no time. Only three short days, yet Sharlock had been dragged outside again and again — help me resurrect, help me patch up my corpse, sell me a private plot, sell me a bed, and so on.

The players hadn't slacked off after the auction, either. To get picked for the hidden quest, they'd been grinding quests like maniacs — killing spiders, trading materials for rep — and some casualties were inevitable.

Back when it didn't interrupt anything, whatever. But now it kept cutting into his research on Dungeons, the game — and THAT stung.

Sharlock briefly swore to go find a wizard who could patch up corpses, but he thought better of it. Never mind that corpse-repair duty had to go to someone absolutely trusted — a wizard's monthly salary alone would be a very pretty number. That money, wasted on gaming?!

Sharlock is a demon lord with DREAMS. Neglect his ideals for a game? What even IS a game? Never liked the things.

"My lord, it appears you've cleared Dungeons — twice now, is it?"

Bru said from the sidelines, congratulations in his tone.

"Heh. It's a game. Moving on. Are my servants for the conference lined up?" Sharlock took an elegant sip of strong tea and asked.

"Selected, my lord," Bru said. Outside the dungeon, three extremely hyped goblins were already waiting:

"We can depart right now."