World Online

The next instant, Jake was taken to the place where he was when he last logged out.

The store. The top of the store, to be precise.

Glancing at his friends list and the guild list, he could see that not many were online. It was just seven hours since he told everyone to log out.

There was still a whole hour left, and that was an hour that the guild members could not afford to just let go. Rest was hard to come by with the game taking so much of their time.

Once it became their livelihood, the game no longer felt like a game, and more like a job. That was the terrible circumstance that everyone had to live through.

Jake stretched his hands as he went down to the second and first floors of the store. Traffic was slowing down, just like he expected. With the new update, everyone was probably wondering what they had to do about that.

But now was also going to be a time when guilds would become much more relevant. Guilds were going to compete with each other, trying to get expeditions done faster.

Jake knew where the portal that led to the Western World was, but he couldn't exactly go ahead and take control of it. He needed time. The path to the portal was going to be arduous, and even if he knew what path to take, the number of obstacles that would come in between would be too many.

And more importantly, he didn't have enough people to go on expeditions. Three hundred and change guild members seemed like a lot, but not in perspective. This was the entire world now. And expeditions needed at least a thousand people to even stand a chance.

As for Jake, he wanted to balloon up to ten thousand guild members before he stared working on expeditions, and to sustain those many members, he would need an incredible infrastructure that he did not have right now.

"I will need to rush things up. Guess I have no choice but to do this." Jake sighed as he opened his chats.

[I am willing to buy your company's Guild Management System for a hundred gold. No more, no less. There are many companies that are willing to give me their systems for ingame currency that no one else can get their hands on.] Jake typed out.

He didn't expect a reply right now though.

The person that he messaged was Phoenix. The daughter of an established company. Money controlled everything, and she did not need to stay in the game all the time. The military gave big companies a pass.

Jake sighed as he stopped at the counter on the first floor.

It had been almost a week since he put up the store, and he wanted to see what the return on his investment was.

"How much did I get back?" Jake asked. "How much were sales?"

Keep in mind that not only did the building cost him around fifteen hundred gold, hiring all those blacksmith NPCs that numbered in the hundreds were costing him the same amount in gold a month!

That meant that he needed at least a thousand a month to keep the store afloat, and also earn some profit from it.

"A thousand sixty nine gold coins sir. This week has been better than most." the woman behind the counter smiled.

She was also a hire from the city hall, which happened to have multiple NPCs wanting to be hired.

"A thousand gold on the first week? That is shocking. But the first week is bound to have much more pomp than the other weeks. It is good to know that I got back the money I put in the land though." Jake smiled.

Of course, he was the winner no matter what happened. Land was land, and it was not going to lose its value. He could always sell it to get back the money.

But now that he got his hands on the gold, he was going to have an easy time when he was shopping.

He strolled around the streets, but he could find absolutely nothing of interest.

"Damn it. I wanted to wait till the month passed so that I can attend the auction in the Flying Pavilion. But this sudden update messed everything up." Jake cursed.

But then, a sudden thought struck him.

"What if the date of the auction was moved up as well?"

He ran across the streets and finally approached the large crowd in front of the forbidden street.

One by one, people were trying to get in. The two guards in front were adamant, not letting a single person through this time.

Jake slipped through the cracks, passing by everyone and reaching the front with relative ease.

"Who the hell are you? I have been waiting an hour for my turn. Go to the back of the line, you punk!" someone shouted at him, but Jake could not care less. He was not afraid of any player within the game.

It was outside the game that was the problem.

​ He walked up to the two guards, the same ones since the beginning.

"Good day today?"

"As busy as always." the guard on the right nodded and moved aside, letting Jake pass without any incident.

And as usual, everyone from the crowd was shocked, their eyeballs popping out.

"That guy already had entry? That is so unfair!"

And the face of the person who cursed at him was as ugly as it could get.

Jake was relieved that the sound finally ceased. Looking around, the same shops bored him. There was nothing interesting here, and he only felt pity for the crowd outside that was wasting their time trying to come in here, instead of grinding.

He walked up to the end of the street, and looked at the store that he wanted to enter.

The Flying Pavilion.

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