The Cat Re-Estize Kingdom's Disguise, the Resistance's Struggle, and the Truth of the World

Cat Re-Estize Kingdom, Cat Castle.

Most gamers played for power.

The Cat Re-Estize Kingdom was an exception.

After acquiring their castle base, they had a full 700 NPC points, yet they had not used them to create valuable combat NPCs.

The six guild members had spent every point on creating cats to give the place the atmosphere of a kingdom of cats.

That had made their guild famous across the server.

You might not know who its members were, but you had definitely heard the name Cat Re-Estize Kingdom.

Plenty of players came to sightsee and pet the cats while they were there.

What no one knew was that this guild actually had a World Item hidden away.

Clearly, even a small, charming guild could accomplish something.

Of course, Roy knew that the Cat Re-Estize Kingdom's creation of cat NPCs was essentially a cover.

In private, they were a criminal group spreading all kinds of information about [slacking off].

All six were members of the Resistance.

They tried to launch a [nonviolent noncooperation movement], encouraging employees to [slack off] and let the quality of their work deteriorate, forcing companies to compromise and grant them more time off and higher wages.

As for more aggressive forms of resistance, they had none.

The Resistance could hardly be blamed for being weak.

With tens of millions of robots suppressing dissent and a Skynet-like surveillance network watching everything, any impulsive act was tantamount to suicide.

It was difficult to expect individuals to fix structural problems in a society like this.

Take Touch Me, a member of Bone King's guild and a champion of justice.

He was not a bad person at heart, but his job was to arrest criminals like Surshana.

His work was so repulsive, yet he needed it to maintain his happy life. In the end, Touch Me had clearly developed an obsession, proclaiming the arrival of justice in the game to comfort himself.

Society turned people into monsters. There was truth in that saying.

Slacking off, resistance, and cats.

Those three things combined made the Cat Re-Estize Kingdom.

Surshana had once explained it this way:

"Cats laze around all day and never work seriously. That fits our mission of slacking off."

"Second, cats hiss and scratch people, which shows that they resist too."

"Finally, cats are adorable. We have to fight this miserable world with cuteness."

After hearing that string of twisted logic, Roy had become their friend.

Unfortunately, friendship was one thing.

While he was alive, Roy would never heavily fund the Resistance.

Though he was the eighth son of the Higuma Family, he was at the bottom of the entire elite circle.

Since all he did was play games, he was especially excluded from that circle.

Apart from having a little money, Roy did not hold much status in this world.

In the game, he could move mountains. In reality, he was merely the aristocracy's wastrel son.

Surshana, meanwhile, had tried to treat Roy as a guiding light.

After all, Roy knew more than he did, and had offered a little guidance along the way:

"The Cat Re-Estize Kingdom is great, and the cats are adorable."

"Get players to come play with the cats, and sell them things while they're here."

"At the very least, you could try making money through livestreaming. The Cat Re-Estize Kingdom is so famous now that you'd be fools not to profit from it."

"Don't you know how to monetize traffic?"

You could do that?

They had listened, dumbfounded.

But they were the Resistance. Was it really right for them to do business like that?

Roy had answered bluntly:

"How can you run a resistance without money?"

"If the Resistance wants employees to slack off, it needs to shoulder the financial risks they might face."

"You could easily set up an insurance company and compensate your members through legal means."

"Only with enough financial resources can you mount a bigger resistance."

Roy's ideas had undeniably opened a new window for Surshana and the others.

Originally, their goal had been to spread their creed.

The Six Great Gods had later gone to the New World and founded the Slane Theocracy, which showed that they had some talent for it.

Under Roy's guidance, they had spent money to establish an insurance company, compensating employees through unemployment insurance so they could afford to slack off and fight.

That effort had not brought them a sweeping victory, but they had at least achieved minor successes at a few small companies.

Amusingly, one of those companies actually had a connection to Bone King.

Bone King had complained about his exploitative employer because he worked at a small company. A monthly salary of only 150,000 yen was bad enough, but he also got just three days off for New Year's.

Thanks to Surshana and the others' efforts, Bone King's New Year's holiday had successfully increased to five days.

That gave Bone King more time to play games-a small butterfly effect.

To be fair, this world was dark, but not in the way most people understood.

For example, Bone King had once said that employees of the megacorporations in the ecological cities got summer vacations.

Bone King ate nutritional paste costing 220 yen per meal not because his income could not cover normal food, but because he disliked any wasteful spending.

Even with his frantic spending on the game, Bone King still had savings. Judging by his daily expenses, saving a million yen would be no problem.

His home even had a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, and so on.

The truly dark part was that this world's productivity and technological level were more than sufficient to repair the environmental damage and implement a universal welfare system.

It would not even cost much.

But the megacorporate alliance refused.

To keep the people at the bottom striving, they deliberately maintained this poverty.

If the poor did not need to struggle, the ruling class would practically want to step in personally and give them a few lashes with a whip.

That was all there was to it.

Surely no one thought that a world which had mastered nanobots and could cheaply use them in free online games somehow could not solve the minor problem of environmental pollution.

Cheap nanobots were a godlike technology capable of propelling human civilization to its next stage.

The simplest application-taking nanobots to clear impurities from the body-would be enough to let everyone live to 150 without illness or calamity. Even 200 would not be a pipe dream.

As for using nanobots to break down all kinds of matter and eliminate sources of pollution, that would be effortless.

It was only because Suzuki Satoru and the others had no education beyond elementary school and had no idea how powerful this technology was that they obediently kept toiling away.

Thus, the megacorporations' crime was deliberately preserving this social structure when their productive capacity could have brought heaven on earth within immediate reach.

They could have done it, but chose not to.

Roy had been a good student in both his past and present lives, so naturally he knew enough to explain matters of social structure.

That had successfully inspired Surshana and the others, allowing them to accumulate some experience in their struggle.

They had simply run out of money.

"So that's what happened."

"You successfully launched nonviolent noncooperation movements at a few small companies."

"But the employees were fired, and once you'd paid their compensation, your company was practically bankrupt."

"So you couldn't launch any more operations."

Surshana blushed.

"We've made fools of ourselves in front of you, Lord Joshua."

"There's only 500,000 yen left in our account now."

"If Downfall of Castle and Country isn't to your liking, we'll ask the other Resistance members. We'll definitely find something you like, Lord Joshua."

Having understood the situation, Roy did not stand on ceremony. He smiled.

"Come on, let's sit down and talk."

"I won't buy your item, but I do have something I need your help with."

Another Resistance member, [Glorious Angel Cat], hurriedly said:

"Lord Joshua, please give us your orders whenever you wish."

The speaker was a blue-haired young man dressed as a paladin.

One look at his name made it obvious where the Cat Re-Estize Kingdom's guild name had come from.

Roy smiled.

"I have some top-secret information. You absolutely must not leak it."

"If you do, I'll make sure to cause you as much trouble as I possibly can."

"Only the six of you may know about this. Understood?"

Surshana's expression grew serious, and he hurriedly replied:

"Rest assured, Lord Joshua. If we leak even a word, let Touch Me arrest every last one of us."

There, that was more like it.

Roy was about to start deceiving them. He had decided to dress up a lie to ensure that they stayed in the game when the servers shut down.