It had been about twelve hours since Murphy inherited the "Will of the Underworld" from "That Lord" and acquired the cool titles "Hades" and "Lady of the Underworld"—it had happened around midnight last night.
The manpower feedback from the cycle of life and death was settled once every twenty-four hours. However, Murphy could check the real-time changes in the numbers with a chart resembling the ups and downs of a stock.
Half a day had passed. In the past twelve hours, the cycle of life and death had been completed 1,000 times in the Sangha Empire. In the more populous ancient kingdom of Kallum, it had been completed 1,500 times. At a rate of one percent, Murphy now had twenty-five more player slots.
If things continued at this rate, the cycles of life and death completed by just these two underworlds would be enough to earn him fifty slots in a day.
Of course, the Sangha Empire had a population of sixty million, so it surely had more than a few thousand births and deaths every day. The problem was that the Underworld's laws only counted a cycle after one birth and one death had canceled each other out. That meant Murphy could only round down, and the numbers were bound to fluctuate. Still, by a rough estimate, earning forty helmets a day wouldn't be a problem.
More importantly, the Underworld's laws calculated cycles of life and death by region.
"That Lord" had made it very clear: as the underworld expanded, different underworld systems would eventually take shape in every densely populated area of the world. When that happened, the number of helmets Murphy earned each day would only increase, never decrease—unless a region experienced a drastic population change.
For example, a plague on the scale of the Black Death,