There were not many players left in the city, but every one of them was a handful.
Take Li Yuan, the Magical Girl, for example.
Besides clearing out Iron Wall City's Dream Space at scheduled times every day, she spent the rest of her time contacting distributors everywhere and opening up sales channels for monster materials.
Quite a few players were doing the same.
At first, the Transcendence Merchant Guild had wanted to monopolize the players' output, but Li Li had only promised them operating rights in the New Outpost.
That gave the players an opening.
They brought in other merchant guilds and had those major guilds arrange for strong fighters to forcibly set up shops outside the outpost's monster-farming spots, enduring the harassment of minor monsters.
As a result, with several major merchant guilds competing against one another, the players made a fortune.
But good times did not last. In less than a few days, the major merchant guilds had already reached a preliminary consensus.
They still scrambled to buy goods, but the prices they offered were remarkably uniform.
These major merchant guilds were joining forces to seize control over the pricing of monster drops.
If they ultimately succeeded, the profits would undoubtedly exceed all imagination.
Take the Centaur Heart, which could extend an ordinary person's lifespan by ten years.
Monster drops of that caliber would be cheap even at several hundred million Alliance Coins apiece.
But the players could bring out ten or twenty to sell every day.
And some players had revealed that centaurs were not primarily found on the Bountiful Continent. If they could go to the wastelands of the Dragon Ridge Continent, they could casually farm tens of thousands of Centaur Hearts in a single day.
This had originally been idle chatter among "players," but