Chapter 349: Getting Ready for the Celebration (02)
"Oh... Lord Ethan!" A man with golden hair—the leader of the guild the players were planning to found in Goldenveil—called out excitedly, waving toward Ethan with a vibrant gleam in his eyes.
"Here are all the crossbows you requested! We managed to gather fifty of them in total!"
Ethan let his eyes sweep over the crossbows laid out before him, clearly satisfied with the result.
"You’ve done well. At the beginning of next month, I’ll have your guild’s headquarters built, and I’ll also grant you an initial budget of two hundred thousand gold coins. That’s enough, isn’t it?"
"T-two hundred thousand?" The eyes of the golden-haired player, named Mike, sparkled as if he’d just won the lottery.
At that time, a single gold coin was trading for fifty dollars on the black market.
Gold coins weren’t easy to come by, and most players were failing in their attempts to advance to the third stage—the point at which acquiring them would become considerably more feasible.
Because of this, the price of gold remained absurdly high for what was, in the end, just an in-game currency.
A third-stage specialist employed by an NPC, for example, could easily pocket an annual salary equivalent to seventy or eighty thousand dollars after dumping all that gold on the black market.
Once bonuses and extra missions were factored in, there were people pulling in as much as two hundred thousand dollars a month from this type of work alone.
At that very moment, the Tales of Estria market had already reached the four point seven trillion dollar mark, with projections to hit ten trillion in just five years.
Adding to this was the fact that all of Earth’s major powers—China, the U.S., Russia, and the European Union, from Asia to Europe and from Africa to the Americas—had joined forces to support Tales of Estria, causing the market to inflate even further.
In the highly virtualized world of the 2060s, markets valued at hundreds of billions or even trillions weren’t exactly uncommon, but every last one of them was being drained relentlessly.
Everyone wanted to play Tales of Estria. Everyone saw it as their future, and the number of players had already surpassed the staggering mark of four billion.
For those players, those two hundred thousand gold coins represented far more than the ten million dollars they would be worth on Earth.
That was their future!
Kim Seo-ah was an extremely wealthy chaebol, but the other guild members, for the most part, came from middle- or lower-class families.
Since she hadn’t asked her father for a single cent to fund the guild, and the rest were too proud to ask her to do it for them, Ethan had ended up becoming practically their savior.
With those two hundred thousand gold coins, they could invest heavily in the guild’s infrastructure, hire new specialists and high-level players, and even build an official guild headquarters on Earth, complete with its own talent-scouting system.
"Now, focus on training. Tomorrow is the day I’ll announce that my primary wife is pregnant with my heir. You need to be prepared to put on a great show for the public."
"Once your guild is officially founded, we’ll sign a formal contract for its operation here in Goldenveil," Ethan added, flashing a friendly smile at the group.
He knew exactly what was going through those players’ minds.
Investing, recruiting new specialists, scouting for talent in every corner.
All of this, in the end, would flow directly into Goldenveil.
All those talented players, once they reached the final stages of integration, would be required to become citizens of Goldenveil just like anyone else.
Considering the absurd number of players already scattered across Estria at that very moment, Ethan could only smile to himself.
He wanted absolutely all the top talent among these players directly under his wing.
"Of course, my lord! We’ll do our best!" Mike declared, pounding his chest with a powerful fist. His armored knuckles struck the steel plate with a sharp metallic clang that echoed through the room.
His face lit up even more when he realized he’d received a new mission from the system—one that would reward him with exactly the funds needed to found his guild.
"Where’s Seo-ah?" Ethan asked, more out of curiosity than anything else.
He still had a mission to complete involving her. A somewhat embarrassing one, it was true, but well... if he already intended to have goddesses in his harem, why not add a few female players as well?
The five players exchanged complicated glances with one another, expressions that quickly dissolved into broad, mischievous smiles.
"Well... Lord Ethan, she won’t be participating in the battle—just watching!" one of them quickly added.
"You know, she’s a truly beautiful woman... she could accompany you and your family as a sign of friendship between our future guild and the Goldenveil family!"
"Yes, yes! I’m absolutely certain she’d be very happy about that!" the only female player in the group chimed in eagerly, practically bouncing on her heels with excitement.
In that world, it was perfectly possible to form relationships and even marry NPCs.
If Seo-ah could become Ethan’s wife, they would all share an even stronger bond with the lord, and Ethan, in turn, would be far more likely to invest heavily in their guild.
"Hmm... that would be nice," Ethan agreed, flashing a slight, thoughtful smile. "Have her go see my wife, Elena. She’ll be in charge of preparing a suitable dress."
"We certainly will, Lord Ethan!" Mike nodded vigorously.
Seo-ah would be furious to discover that her own companions had sold her out like that, but well... after all, he was just a game NPC, right?
Ethan didn’t linger for long after that conversation.
After saying his goodbyes to the players, he left to attend to the other matters still hanging over his head.
The first thing he did was hand over another three thousand newly conscripted soldiers to Doran.
Next, he visited various buildings across Goldenveil, making countless improvements and expanding the number of residences in the city to fifteen thousand.
It was more than enough to accommodate a population of sixty to seventy thousand inhabitants, considering the absurdly large families that were common in that world.
After that, he sent the thirty cookbooks in his possession to Alice and Amelia’s mages, tasking them with reading through everything and carefully setting aside any recipes that should remain state secrets, while selecting some of the more basic ones to be served the following day.
All the others would be copied by the Goldenveil city government and then published in every library, with future plans for mass production, so that every household would eventually have at least one copy in its care.
In the end, after sorting through all that mess, Ethan was left with only five hundred thousand gold coins in the vault, but he certainly wasn’t in a position to complain.
It was time to find the elven matriarch.