Intelligence Market

When Sherlock followed John Wick to this so-called Intelligence Market, the sight before him left Sherlock—who had never experienced anything like this in both his lives combined—completely dumbfounded.

In the open space at the very center of the town, a full circle of simple folding rooms had been set up against the ruined walls. Almost every room was spaced apart, with Continental Hotel attendants standing guard, and only a single entrance and exit left for people to enter and leave.

At the center of that circle of rooms stood a counter. Inside it, Sherlock saw the kind of "administrators" he had only ever seen in movies in his previous life.

Aside from those so-called administrators, there were several bar-like establishments around the outside of the counter.

Naturally, they were all makeshift, the sort that could be easily destroyed or hauled away.

Countless figures in cloaks queued before that sole entrance, entering the small rooms one after another before leaving them and stepping into the open space.

Rather than an Intelligence Market, Sherlock would have preferred to call this scene a cult ritual!

As John Wick pulled Sherlock over to join the queue, he began explaining how this so-called Intelligence Market operated.

First, the small room by the entrance was staffed by Continental Hotel personnel. The reason people had to enter one at a time instead of all together was that anyone entering the Intelligence Market had to reveal their identity inside that room.

And it was mandatory. There was no option to refuse unless you did not want to enter the market at all.

After proving your identity in the small room, the Continental Hotel officials would issue you a bracelet bound to your identity.

At the same time, it ensured that the bracelet could not be removed before you left the market.

Only then could you enter this so-called Intelligence Market.

As for the trading rules within the Intelligence Market, everyone who entered had to register their "request" with the administrators at the counter. It could be intelligence, money, gold coins, or even a favor.

Anything you could think of could be registered at the counter, including someone else's life or your own!

Based on the request you registered, the counter would arrange a place for a "meeting"—namely, one of those small rooms. The bracelet would notify everyone where they needed to go, when they needed to go, and which room they needed to enter.

Once both parties entered the small room, it would be locked, and the Continental Hotel bore no responsibility for anything that happened inside.

Whether it was the price of the trade or the reward, it all depended on the confidence of you and the other party during negotiations.

Of course, if you wanted to resort to force for interrogation or robbery, that was also possible. But if you did, you could only pray that you were the last person to use that room, or that the next person to enter would not make a big fuss and report you.

Otherwise, once that happened, while the killer would not be immediately executed or have a kill order issued against them like in the movies, their identity beneath the cloak would be revealed at once, and their cloak would be confiscated!

This was a Continental Hotel operating under wartime rules. Its ability to enforce its rules was nowhere near as rigorous as that of a normal Continental Hotel. Once your identity was exposed, as a professional intelligence operative, there were countless ways for people to ensure you died after the sun came up—or simply died in the room itself.

Of course, that only applied to those without the protection of a cloak and who were not hotel staff.

To put it bluntly, here, only the cloak on your body served as the shield that allowed you to enjoy the Continental Hotel's safe-zone protections. Once you lost it, it was like a hacker publicly revealing their identity. There was basically no chance of a good ending.

After all, this Continental Hotel changed locations almost every day. There were simply too many abandoned towns like this across the Middle East.

After hearing John Wick's explanation, Sherlock could only exclaim inwardly, Damn. He had to admit that the Continental Hotel was insanely good at business.

By its rules, this was essentially a Dark Forest System artificially constructed by the Continental Hotel.

And this so-called Intelligence Market was, at its core, a game of deception and being deceived. After all, the Intelligence Market had never said that selling false intelligence was forbidden!

Meanwhile, as the force that built and maintained these rules, the Continental Hotel could gather the most genuine "intelligence" of everyone present with almost no effort at all.

After all, "requests" themselves were an extremely important form of intelligence!

By combining a person's "request" with their identity, it was often easy to deduce a great deal of useful intelligence. All of that intelligence would then support the Continental Hotel's operations and become part of the gold coin circulation.

As for whether anyone worried that the Continental Hotel would abuse the intelligence it acquired?

Of course they did. Anyone capable of working with intelligence was no fool, and they could naturally see through the true nature of the Continental Hotel's Intelligence Market at a glance.

Since they could see through it, why would they willingly hand over their own intelligence?

Simple: trust and security!

The Continental Hotel's reputation, built over several centuries, guaranteed that intelligence would not easily spread. More importantly, the Continental Hotel upheld its rules.

Under the protection of those rules, intelligence transactions could be safer. That was the most important point.

It was much like the method the United States had used to establish Dollar Hegemony: relying on the credibility accumulated over a century as endorsement and its own strength as support. Only then could such a system be built.

Sherlock could only give it a six. This method of getting something for nothing was truly impressive, and most crucially, this almost open scheme gave you no right to refuse.

It was just like Nine-Turn Large Intestine: if you did not eat it, you had no right to judge the dish; if you ate it, then you were eating shit in public!

It had to be said that, as a shut-in—and a standard corporate drone shut-in in his previous life—the Continental Hotel's way of operating was truly eye-opening to Sherlock.

Standing in the queue with John Wick, Sherlock moved forward bit by bit with the line. Before long, it was his turn to enter the small room.

The so-called identity verification process was not as troublesome as Sherlock had imagined. He only needed to enter the room, make sure the door was shut, verify his fingerprints, then remove his cloak and have a photograph taken.

After all that was done, the fingerprint-verification machine automatically fitted him with a bracelet that looked like an iron band.

Afterward, he could put his cloak back on and enter this so-called Intelligence Market.