Chapter 321: Shop and Trade

Moreover, this was a quantity limit rather than a purchase limit. In other words, if the players who unlocked the shop earlier bought up all of the limited-quantity products, then the players who came later would have no way to purchase them anymore.

Joo Joowon was not sure whether the shop would restock them. But even if it did restock them, there probably would not be many replacements, and even if they were replenished, players might still not be able to grab them in time.

After all, anything that was limited in quantity was a precious item. At the very least, such things were useful to players. Because of this, it was very likely that some people would specifically wait for the right time to snatch up these products. Players who needed them might only be able to obtain them later by purchasing them at a high price.

As for the other types of products, apart from construction blueprints and profession advancement books, the only things left were products in the fashion category. This was far from the kind of shop Joo Joowon had expected, where there would be all kinds of things available, and it greatly disappointed him.

Profession advancement books were prepared for NPCs and for players who were dissatisfied with the profession type assigned to them by the game.

Unlike players, who could automatically change professions in the game after reaching a certain level, NPCs had to have a teacher first if they wanted to step into the supernatural realm. Unless they had an inherited master-disciple tradition, they needed someone to teach them. Without a teacher, they at least needed a cultivation manual. It was impossible to enter the supernatural realm with absolutely no foundation or preparation.

Fashion was a major category in the shop. It contained distinctive clothing from various worlds and had no attribute bonuses. Its only effect was to conceal the colorful equipment underneath and display only the fashion item that had been equipped.

This would make players look like normal people when they appeared in front of NPCs, rather than looking like those "fashionable trendsetters" wearing a cotton coat on top and shorts underneath.

When players wore equipment, they only cared about its attributes and did not care about how attractive the equipment looked. But if they had the conditions to make themselves look clean and neat, then naturally, there would be people willing to spend the money if they had some extra wealth.

However, Joo Joowon did not spend this money.

It was not because he was stingy, but because the prices in this game were genuinely unreasonable.

A piece of clothing that had no special use other than looking good actually had a minimum price of one silver coin. That was practically the price of luxury goods before the apocalypse.

Joo Joowon had never bought clothes that expensive before the apocalypse, so after the apocalypse, it was even more impossible for him to spend his precious wealth on something like this.

Was it not just a little shabby-looking? The world had already ended, so who still cared about that?

Therefore, after looking through the shop once, Joo Joowon never opened it again.

Apart from fashion, the shop only sold some important resources. It was essentially equivalent to having official prices set by the game. If something circulating on the market was priced far below the official price, then there was definitely something wrong with it.

Therefore, the main trading channels for players still had to be the trading house, faction forums, and trading posts on the Lord Forum.

Of course, this did not mean that the shop was useless.

At the very least, everything in the shop was absolutely safe. Transactions between players would inevitably involve things like scams, deception, and fraud. On the other hand, there was also the issue of "monopoly."

The resources that could circulate on the market were usually not that important. Even so, there would still be factions that specifically assigned people to keep watch. Whenever an individual player put something up for sale, they would immediately go over and buy it. Unless ordinary players specifically waited around and watched the market, it was very difficult for them to buy the things they needed.

This situation had already been extremely common when the trading house had previously been opened for a limited time. If players had not all been so poor, giving some of those items a chance to be seen by others, many independent players probably would not even have known that another player had ever put such a product up for sale.

If even a newly opened game zone that had only been running for a short time was already like this, then it was even less possible for the old game zones that the Age of Apocalypse had descended upon in the past to avoid such a situation. For newly entering players, this was truly unfriendly.

No one knew how long the Age of Apocalypse had already been running before it descended upon Gaia. In other words, among many of those "old servers," there might already be players who were not just second generation players, but perhaps even players who were several generations removed from the original players.

At present, it seemed that the descent of Otherworld NPCs onto Gaia was still subject to certain restrictions. However, once the Age of Apocalypse entered its proper operating stage, there was no guarantee that it would not open Gaia, this newly opened game zone, to other players. By then, it would be difficult for the local player factions to resist their locust-like invasion.

For this kind of situation, Joo Joowon could only think of one word: colonization.

At least for now, although the game did not appear to encourage it, it also did not stop it.

The situation with Seong Seungmin and the others was enough to show that this seemed to have already become an unspoken rule that the game tacitly accepted.

However, the game had not completely left new players without a way to survive. The factions that players automatically joined when changing professions represented the fact that new players did have backing behind them.