Roy only spent money, never played the game

[System announcement]: Supreme Being [Joshua] has logged in. All players, welcome him and bow!

The moment Roy logged in, an announcement went out across the entire game.

Every player online could see it.

"Lord Joshua is online!"

"The mega-whale is here! Yggdrasil finally has someone looking out for us."

"Every day Lord Joshua spends money keeps Yggdrasil alive for another day."

"A day? More like a year."

"Lord Joshua, I have a World Item, [Downfall of Castle and Country]. Are you buying?"

"Lord Joshua, I want to have your babies."

Every time Roy logged in, the entire server erupted, and countless players tried to trade with him.

Not because he spent a lot, but because he spent an absurd amount.

So much that it exceeded anything poor people could imagine. He had even showered the entire server with money.

Only he would give every player on the server gacha pulls.

Roy's words that shook the world:

"Don't pit your annual salary against my pocket money. There's no point."

"If you're playing a game, don't spend money on it. It's a waste."

Yggdrasil was a game for commoners, though some citizens of higher standing played it too, including university professors.

But that did not change its overall standing. Scions of the elite like Roy were not allowed to play; doing so would mark them as low-class.

That made Roy the only true mega-whale.

His spending, measured in yen, had to be counted in hundreds of millions.

To him, it really was not much money. His monthly allowance was ten million US dollars, after all-over 1.6 billion yen.

So there was no question of Roy bankrupting himself on a game.

That would have attracted far too much attention.

Sorry, I really am just playing casually.

Even more astonishingly, he only spent money. He never played the game.

Running dungeons, building guilds, fighting bosses-he did none of it.

At least, he had never done any of it openly.

A puzzled player had once asked Roy why he played that way.

Roy answered as though it were obvious:

"I already spent money. Why do I still have to play the game?"

The player forums recorded that line in [Lord Joshua's World-Shaking Quotes].

It ranked second on the shock index.

Yes, Roy only spent money and barely played.

The reason was simple.

What if he ran wild in the game, wiped out the Great Tomb of Nazarick, stopped the Six Great Gods from crossing over, or drove the Eight Greed Kings into seclusion?

History could not deviate. It had to follow its original course for him to gain the greatest possible benefit at the moment of crossing over.

Roy had arrived in this world thirty years ahead of time.

That had its advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage, naturally, was that he could plan ahead and maximize his gains.

The disadvantage was the potentially severe butterfly effect.

For that reason, he did not even compete for rare materials. He simply stayed quiet and served as a cash cow.

He spent madly every year, paying tribute to the game company-the finest cash cow of them all.

The player every game company dreamed of.

Did that mean all his spending was wasted, earning him nothing but cash-shop items?

Of course not.

Spend enough, and the game company would come groveling.

Roy had never been playing a game. He was commissioning a bespoke service.

In Yggdrasil's first year, Roy spent a modest little sum.

Sixteen billion yen, roughly the cash gifts he had received for his coming-of-age celebration.

The company behind Yggdrasil thought the number was wrong, that its entire payment system had malfunctioned.

After verifying it repeatedly, the company's boss and lead designer both contacted Roy by email. Their first words were:

"Dad!"

"Whatever you need, your sons are here!"

They had no choice. In this universally impoverished world, the game existed primarily to squeeze the last scraps of energy and money out of the poor.

The company's real returns came from serving the megacorporations' strategic objectives. That was why it could be so indulgent and create a game with limitless freedom.

The players had no money anyway.

But Roy's spending could only be described as outrageous. It shattered all their expectations.

Had a megacorporation not been watching, the boss could have made an official cheat and given it to Roy for free.

For the next ten years, Roy maintained the same annual spending.

Sixteen billion yen a year, totaling over 160 billion.

As for why the game was shutting down...

Naturally, it was because Roy's spending had plummeted.

You need to shut down on the original schedule.

Roy had funded it for ten years precisely so that it would close its doors in the twelfth.

Not a single bit of history could change.

So Roy left his principal untouched and spent only his allowance.

Of course, that left him rather strapped for cash, with just twenty million US dollars a year to live on.

Life was as hard as his third brother's. He could not even afford a villa anymore.

With spending like that, Roy was naturally the whale keeping the servers afloat.

The game company established an entire customer service team to attend exclusively to him around the clock.

There was originally a World Item hailed as the strongest: the [Eternal Serpent Ring].

It allowed its holder to ask the game company to change the system.

But Roy did not need that item.

He could contact his dedicated support team directly and make unlimited requests whenever he liked.

As long as a request did not interfere with the principles of the game's original design, it could be fulfilled.

As it happened, Roy did not want to damage the original game either, lest its underlying logic collapse and make crossing over impossible.

So his real effort in the game went into satisfying his need for cheats without jeopardizing his crossing.

First came classes.

The company created the special class [World's Richest Man] for him, matching [World Champion] and [World Calamity].

However, there was only one World's Richest Man, while there were nine World Champions.

Only someone who spent more than Roy could take the title from him.

This was both the easiest and the hardest task in the game. Spend a billion-plus US dollars, and you too could become the World's Richest Man.

The World's Richest Man class granted him an exceptionally unusual skill, [Silver Bullets of Allure].

This skill bombarded enemies over a wide area, with its power determined by the money spent.

At its maximum cost of one billion gold coins, it matched the game's strongest Super-Tier Magic and could be used up to ten times a day.

Was it cheating?

Absolutely.

A normal level-100 player could cast Super-Tier Magic no more than four times a day.

Roy could easily use his skill ten times without consuming any MP.

In a group battle, he could annihilate every opponent as long as he was willing to throw money around.

Considering the number of gold coins it consumed, though, it was not overpowered.

After all, the gold Bone King's guild had accumulated over twelve years totaled around 410 billion-only enough for Roy to use it 410 times.

For comparison, reviving a max-level guild NPC cost 500 million gold coins.

Roy spent one billion gold coins on a single use of his skill, without even a guarantee of killing a max-level NPC.

This was crushing people with capital. Pure money power.

World's Richest Man was one of Roy's special classes, but that did not mean it was his only one.

The lead designer thumped his chest and declared:

"Whatever Dad wants, we can create and unlock the corresponding special classes."

Roy's sons were so devoted that he felt a little embarrassed.

But he knew very well that raw power was not really what he wanted.

So Roy had the lead designer lay out every sort of class, including scrapped concepts, and finally pieced together a peculiar build.

Name: Roy

Race: Human

Class levels-

Armed Merchant: LV15

Gold Ruler: LV10

World Merchant: LV5

World's Richest Man: LV5

Recorder: LV15

Observer: LV15

Space Traveler: LV10

Fate Aria Singer: LV10

Time Observer: LV10

Immortal: LV5

Humans had no racial levels. His class levels totaled 100.

No stats, all mechanics.

In the game, a class build like this could only be called-

Utter garbage.

The merchant classes' combat ability went without saying. They were essentially noncombat classes and offered no fighting power.

The classes taken afterward to build toward Immortal were even more absurdly bad.

Despite all the mentions of fate, time, and space, it was mostly empty talk.

For example, Space Traveler's actual effects were merely immunity to spatial restraints such as [Dimensional Lock] and [Delayed Teleportation], the ability to move through most restricted areas, and the fastest possible activation of teleportation magic and large Gates.

Its class description was full of extravagant claims about being beloved by space, unafraid of temporal and spatial turbulence, and traveling freely through space.

But its strength in the game could only be described as pitiful.

After all, magic and items could replicate all those traits.

Bone King, for example, knew spells such as [Greater Teleportation] and [Gate]. In the game, there was practically no difference.

Fate Aria Singer was much the same. Like a bard, it could gain buffs such as [Super Luck] and [Fortune's Favor] through singing.

Its class description mentioned divining fate, glimpsing danger, and so on.

But in the game, these were merely support skills with no offensive power.

Finally, Time Observer had a useless skill that could foresee the future.

The game actually used AI and player data to estimate which moves an opponent might make.

In actual combat, given most players' reaction times, those advance predictions were damn near useless.

Being able to predict Tyson's moves three seconds in advance did not mean you could beat Tyson.

As for [Time Stop], a spell like that already existed at the tenth tier.

All those special classes looked impressive but were useless in practice.

The only special class that provided substantial stats was Immortal.

Immortal greatly increased vitality and defense while maxing out every resistance, including high-tier physical nullification and the like.

But even with Immortal's stat boosts, his stats were only [upper-middle tier].

Against a top player specializing in combat, Roy could not match their attributes.

Assuming both fought without equipment, Roy used neither [Silver Bullets of Allure] nor spatial teleportation to escape, and they simply stood there trading damage, his opponent would generally win.

Though Immortal gave him terrifyingly tenacious vitality, he simply lacked damage output.

That was Roy's approach.

Mechanics, not stats.

Just as Sage-type Classes were weak in Yggdrasil, but when carried over into the New World, a sage could live forever without aging.

For instance, [Fluder], the Empire's chief magic caster in the New World, had [Sage-type Classes]. (Note that he was not a sage.)

That allowed him to use rituals to cast the forbidden spell [Senjutsu], leaving him hale and hearty at 272 years old.

Likewise, Roy cared about the mechanics that would be most valuable in the real world.

Fate, time, and space were top-tier powers in any setting.

Where else could he cash in game mechanics this wonderfully-not in Naruto or One Piece!