NOVEL NEXT WORLD chapter 22
Chapter 22. Gamchi
Ecosystem consulting business. In other words, a business where I give advice to other players and receive points in return, just like I did for Sesaisa.
If I raise someone else’s ecosystem score by 22,437 points at 4 points per contribution point, I can get the points. In the case of Sesaisa, it was easy to raise because it was so low, but let’s consider that I raised Sesaisa’s score by 10,000 points. Given that the world has doubled in size, I can either extract 20,000 points = 80,000 points from one person, 40,000 points from two people, 20,000 points from four people, or 10,000 points from eight people.
“Since 4 points per contribution point is the current fixed rate, it’s not unfair, and if the recipients can definitely increase their scores, it’s not a big problem.”
That’s right. The problem is whether I can raise it that much, whether I can build trust, and whether others will readily entrust me with the work.
I’m confident in the first. The second is also not a problem since contracts through the organizers seem absolute. The third is the issue.
I turned on the community and looked around for a moment.
The situation in the trait shop event was largely divided into two categories.
First, people trying to earn points somehow.
「Title: Selling Slave Race.
Content: Selling all 2,500 slaves obtained from the last war. Life score about 700 points. Increase your population significantly for 2000 points.」
「Player: Danwoojung
Item: Law Book
Price: 5,000 points (negotiable)
Description: A law book written by Danwoojung himself. As it is a book by the top legal expert in his world, it provides a basic understanding of the law and practical application methods. If Player Bini reads it, their understanding of ＜Politics＞ will greatly increase.」
On the other hand, people trying to sell points.
「Title: Trying to sell 3,000 points, anyone willing to share knowledge?
Content: Is there a ＜Culture＞ expert? I don’t know much about ＜Culture＞, so it doesn’t increase at all. Please make an offer.」
「Title: Selling Points.
Content: 4 points per contribution. Please save my world devastated by war.」
This is just a few because the war ended relatively early. Probably, hundreds of thousands will pour out soon.
Currently, the ‘General’ grade trait is 1,680 points. Almost no one can’t afford this, but if you want to be a decent person, you need to pay 7,409 points for the ‘Elite’ grade trait or 15,559 for the ‘Hero’ grade trait.
In other words, a player with around 10,000 points can give 3,000 points to someone else and still get the ‘Elite’ trait. Or if they somehow get 5,000 points, they can get the ‘Hero’ grade trait.
Considering that ‘points only increase at the end of the conflict’ and ‘there are some players with extremely high points due to cooperation among the remaining players’, and that ‘I’ and ‘Sesaisa’ are top-tier players despite having almost no interaction…
Roughly, each person would have gained 15,000 to 20,000 points from this conflict, and the total points a player gained before that would be about that much?
It’s a bit ambiguous. It’s almost impossible to extract 20,000 points from one person… They would also want to buy traits worth 30,000 points.
However, on the flip side, you can extract about 10,000 points from a player with 40,000 points. At this point, an ‘Epic’ trait costs 32,000, a ‘Legendary’ costs 68,000, and a ‘Mythic’ costs 144,000.
I see. Then let’s aim to extract 10,000 or 20,000 points from players with 40,000 to 50,000 points.
There are currently 67 million players left. Can’t we find 10 players that meet the criteria?
Thinking that, I thought I should raise my credit first.
First, I need to increase my life points.
“Why does credit = life equation come up? Even now, my standard score of 926 is far surpassed at 12,328 points. I’m undoubtedly number one among 67 million people.”
Anyway, since I finished the collision too early, it doesn’t make sense to raise it now. When people gather to some extent, I should reveal the highest score to enhance my credibility.
Ah. But before that. I need to respond first.
[Bein: Sesaisa, I don’t think I have time to look at your world because I need to earn some points (bows)]
[Sesaisa: Oh, is that so? I’m in the same situation.]
[Bein: Yeah. I also wanted to get some advice from you, haha. But while we’re looking at each other’s worlds, others might take all the points, haha. So, how about we just focus on the trait shop event in this stage?]
[Sesaisa: Regrettable! But fine. The meat players here seem to have a poor understanding of mysticism, so it might be good for me to sell my abilities in that area. By the way, what level are you aiming for?]
[Bein: Mythic level, haha. Did I set my goal too high, haha.]
[Sesaisa: Me too. I’m aiming for the win. See you later then.]
End of conversation.
I need to maintain a long-term exchange with Sesaisa. But that guy won’t die in the next collision, right?
First, I need to work on appealing myself. I need to massively tune my world and develop the ecosystem.
To firmly establish the newly acquired land as part of the Dessert Corps, and furthermore, I need to make extensive edits to the existing terrain.
“The choice itself is rational. So, what will you do?”
First, I need to get rid of the freshwater oasis that merged with the Nectar Spring.
I couldn’t do it while taking care of Sesaisa’s world because the collision was approaching, but it’s a problem if the divine fragment keeps producing freshwater.
This freshwater layer also shares magic and levels up, and as it levels up, it stores more freshwater, diluting the Nectar Spring.
But, maybe that’s why. Sesaisa already moved that freshwater layer. Perhaps the increased density of the Nectar Spring is also due to this.
Although it’s a bit far, it seems to have a positive effect on the world.
Indeed, Sesaisa’s understanding of divine fragments and magic is far beyond mine. No, even saying ‘far beyond’ is an understatement. It’s immensely higher.
Maybe it was the most appropriate location to enhance magic in his opinion.
However, I think the ecosystem is more important. Magic through feng shui can go to hell.
“Wow. That’s too much…”
Anyway, there was an oasis in the newly acquired world as well. It was quite a large oasis. In other words, there was a freshwater layer, so I combined it with my existing freshwater layer.
「The level of the ‘Freshwater Layer’ increases.」
Good. But perhaps because the aquifer has grown so large, about half of the newly acquired world has almost been submerged, encroaching and sinking the areas where civilization once existed.
The water, which has expanded immensely, overflows. The other world had originally been well cultivated, combining oases and rivers to create vast fields and paddies, but all of that is now submerged.
It’s a good thing. Originally, whether it was fields or paddies… Farming only has a negative impact on the ecosystem. To explain farming a bit, it means ‘removing all species from an ecosystem except for one specific species, and then artificially modifying that species so that it would die without human intervention.’
It can’t be healthy. The vast plains and fertile forests of Mesopotamia. The wetlands were completely ruined by thousands of years of human farming, turning into desert regions.
This can be excused as the limitations of agricultural technology at the time or unavoidable environmental issues, but fundamentally, if humans hadn’t interfered, it would have been fine.
More fundamentally, humans didn’t need to increase their population so much by engaging in agriculture.
Driven mad by reproduction and population growth, they destroyed the natural environment with agriculture and hunting, built civilizations, and then suddenly decided they didn’t want to have children anymore, ruining even the civilized world…
“Hey. How far are you going to go? Stop it.”
Anyway, the ones who ruined the environment of Soon’s world the most were my man-eating candies.
“Why did you even bother with civilization?”
This is what happens when foreign species are introduced. But now that it’s my land, I need to make some adjustments.
First of all, the opponent’s life score wasn’t that low. Most of the score came from agriculture and population, but there were also quite a few wild animals and livestock.
Most importantly, the enemy’s land had ‘mountain’ and ‘hill’ terrains, and even though it was a desert, it had ‘plains’ terrain with decent vegetation rather than just bare sand and gravel. There was also one terrain purely specialized in magic.
Maybe the next opponent will be nomads we meet in the plains rather than the desert.
And birds? There were an incredible number of them. Are those really birds? They had membranes instead of feathers, so they looked more like bats or pterosaurs. Are they creatures of another world? Anyway, they had their own flying abilities and occupied the ecological niche of birds, so I’ll just call them bat-birds.
“The players of that game have given them a different name. They are quite a thriving species in their world’s ecosystem…”
Bat. Birds.
Do I have to care about the names given by extinct creatures? In academia, it’s customary to use the scientific name given by researchers, not the names used by natives.
“Oh. Okay.”
Ecological niches are extremely important in an ecosystem.
Those bat-birds thrived in the abundant environment, eating grains and insects, some becoming livestock, and others performing roles similar to hunting hawks, reproducing in various ways.
The reason I’m explaining this in such detail is that they were the only animals in the other world that survived the great offensive of the man-eating candies.
Because they could fly… The man-eating candies’ ultimate hunting method is a final body slam, but since the bat-birds were small and could jump up, the candies, which were not very effective against small targets, couldn’t hunt them.
And those bat-birds seemed to have evolved as a last resort to eat the candies.
Oh. Wait, that’s not it. The candies evolved to concentrate all their mineral components into their shells, so the jelly-like muscles could be digested normally.
So, it’s like storks that eat clams, leaving only the shells. Some of the birds even learned to attract the candies to charge at them, then tear apart the candies with severed muscles.
They even passed on this hunting method to their kin, so the birds quickly reduced the number of candies. The smaller, immature candies were eaten by the birds.
“Interesting. If the enemy had held out a little longer, or if they had intentionally used divine power to evolve, maybe…”
“Yog-Tosos might have had to step in.”
“Oh well. That’s true. That was a possibility.”
From this, I could understand two things.
First, the biodiversity of the enemy world was already increasing, and they had begun to find their own countermeasures against my ecosystem.
Second, at least the bat-birds, despite not forming a civilization, had the potential to hunt the Dessert Legion with their high intelligence.
Could we make the bat-birds part of the Dessert Legion? If we could actively utilize those bat-birds to dominate the airspace and create a flying corps to support the Yogurt-Sauce…
“Ah.”
“What’s the matter?”
A more interesting idea came to mind.
Those guys, the Dessert Legion. Those things that are neither bats nor birds don’t have a very good name.
“Shameless.”
You are now Sweet Tooth (甘齒). The nemesis of this Dessert Legion that devours desserts.
Let’s make them their natural enemy.
“Huh?”
Those things are not bat-birds, but they will become the strongest evolutionary pressure of this era.