Over the next six months, sales of Cloud Sea Technology's headsets continued to climb, while the number of players online in Home kept rising steadily.
Breaking seven million online players was only the beginning.
With the backing of global capital, the number of online players surged ever higher.
Ten million. Fifteen million.
By year's end, peak concurrent players had reached another unprecedented milestone: twenty million.
This was no ordinary twenty million—it meant twenty million people truly inhabiting a virtual world at the same time. A population of twenty million was enough to form an immensely vast social system within the game.
The wealthy, the middle class, the lower class, laborers, pleasure-seekers, those obsessed with competitive games... all kinds of gaming organizations, large and small, sprang up within the game like mushrooms after rain.
No matter how many gaming organizations there were, or how many players, Zhang Yang saw only one thing they had in common.
They were all paying users on a per-capita basis.
For every player to survive in Home, from their daily basic meals to every kind of spending that branched out from it, small and large alike, revenue flowed in continuously, creating wealth for Zhang Yang.
For him now, income could truly be calculated by the second.
His wealth had already become a vast ocean.
Cloud Sea Technology had yet to go public, but one of Zhang Yang's companies, after years of development, had finally embarked on the path to listing.
It was Soup King Hotpot.
As a company under the Cloud Sea Group, bolstered by the Group's immense capital, expansion had never been a problem. Soup King Hotpot now had over a thousand outlets nationwide, as well as nearly five hundred stores across countries around the world.
At the end of the year, Soup King