Even All the Players Together Couldn't Breach This Defensive Fortress-and That Was Only One Insignificant Aspect

Guild NPCs were important, of course, but guild buildings were Roy's real treasures.

Because NPCs burned through money.

Roy didn't have the Throne of Kings, yet he had to support ten thousand NPCs, along with their attendant servant NPCs.

What did that mean?

It meant Roy spent ten billion gold coins every day.

Yes, keeping a single NPC unit-including its subordinates-online cost roughly one million gold coins per day on average.

The larger their bodies and the higher their levels, the more they consumed.

Supporting ten thousand NPCs, including supplying them with magical beasts and subordinates, came with staggering expenses.

The game company wasn't about to let players use AI computing power for free.

That was also why the Great Tomb of Nazarick had managed to rank as high as ninth.

The Throne of Kings was one of the rare exceptions that could reduce upkeep costs.

A day or two made little difference, but over ten years, the gold saved would reach astronomical figures.

In the original story, the Bone King of the Great Tomb of Nazarick had joked about finding a base with a three-thousand-level allowance, only for everyone else to object.

Because they would go bankrupt.

Roy was interested in the Great Tomb of Nazarick's World Items, but he didn't exactly crave them.

The Throne of Kings alone was something he desperately wanted, precisely because it reduced expenses.

If the Throne of Kings' effect became public knowledge, the Great Tomb of Nazarick would most likely be destroyed.

All the top-ranking guilds would besiege it together, which would be enough to wipe it out.

Even though the Great Tomb of Nazarick had once achieved the glorious feat of annihilating a combined assault of fifteen hundred players and NPCs.

The top-ranking guilds hadn't participated in that attack. They had merely watched from the sidelines.

The Great Tomb of Nazarick undeniably possessed the strength of a top-tier guild, but that didn't mean it could withstand a joint assault by the other top-ranking guilds.

Without the [Throne of Kings], the Great Tomb of Nazarick would suffer an economic collapse a little over a decade after crossing over.

Its NPC upkeep alone reached one hundred million gold coins per day, enough to bankrupt it after a little over ten years.

Even if the Bone King dug up every inch of ground, he couldn't find that much gold in the New World.

Of course, players could order their NPCs into dormancy to reduce their operating costs.

Put bluntly, the game company was forcing players to pay up or switch off the AI.

It wanted to have its cake and eat it too.

Roy's forces were far more formidable than the Great Tomb of Nazarick's, and their upkeep was even more staggering: a hundred times as much.

Even his stockpile of tens of quadrillions of gold coins would eventually run dry.

Roy had once calculated:

"At ten billion a day, if I don't use the Treasure Basin, I'll go bankrupt in another thousand years."

Under those circumstances, Roy had to plan the construction of the Ten Cities carefully.

Every city needed enough economic capacity to sustain itself.

Gold coins, food, items, materials, minerals, and other resources.

He wanted to construct a world grand enough and rich enough.

"World City needs to be as large as the permitted limits allow."

"It doesn't necessarily need to look that big from the outside, but its interior must have folded space to make it enormous."

"Only then can it accommodate over ten thousand original NPCs and their associated subordinates."

"Once all of World City is operating, its population will be at least a million."

"Second, it must be self-sufficient in every resource."

"You handle designing the paid features. I'll take care of the rest."

The game company dared not object after hearing that.

Pops had money anyway. If he wanted to go wild, the company would go along with him.

Roy's arrival had brought windfalls to quite a few game designers and operations staff.

Although a megacorporation held a controlling stake in the game company, and it also had military backing.

The people running it could still profit from the arrangement. That was why they helped Roy.

In any case, they had never expected players to beat this new World City they were designing.

As long as the big spender was happy.

After all, Roy had invested over one hundred billion yen in World City.

Converted into banknotes, one hundred billion yen could bury everyone in the company together.

What else was there to say?

As long as they didn't exceed the limits of the underlying logic, they piled on every kind of overpowered feature.

Just as Roy had always argued.

He wanted mechanics, not arbitrarily inflated stats.

For example, suppose a million max-level players attacked in wave after wave and actually breached the Nine Great Guilds. That still wouldn't mean victory.

Because there was a time limit.

World City's concealment effect would disappear only if all Nine Great Guilds were breached within a single day.

Otherwise, the guild artifacts would activate.

All damage would reset.

Dead NPCs and placed traps would all be restored.

Even World Items couldn't accomplish something like that. It was purely an exploitation of dungeon mechanics.

Each of the Nine Great Guilds designed corresponding artifacts, enough to drive every player mad.

Not that any players would be running this stage anyway.

That was only one of the mechanics.

What if a powerful enemy appeared?

Teleport them straight out!

Yes, Roy had also arranged special teleportation spaces.

If Saitama from One-Punch Man arrived, they would send him straight into the sun so he couldn't get back.

If they couldn't teleport him away, the entire room would turn into a rocket, launch, and fly toward the sun.

There were countless other dirty tricks like that.

One of the game designers responsible for the guilds couldn't help asking:

"Lead designer, are we really supposed to let players clear something designed like this?"

The lead designer answered with a straight face:

"It's fine if they can't clear it. None of these roadblocks rely on stats."

This was even more obnoxious than a stat monster.

But Roy liked it, so everyone else had to do it.

To test World City's defensive mechanics, the game company even used a dedicated testing simulator.

They copied the data of a million max-level players to form a raid force, then used AI command and human adjustments to organize teams for the assault.

Roy, meanwhile, took on these challenges as the King of the World.

A war between AIs broke out on the test server.

Roy hadn't run dungeons, fought monsters, or done similar things in the actual game.

But he knew most of its dungeons and monsters inside out.

Because he played on the test server.

The test server called upon the most advanced AI, [Eve], to help calculate tactics.

[Eve] consumed as much electricity each day as ten gigantic ecological cities.

Its daily electricity bill alone came to seven hundred million dollars, easily exceeding two hundred fifty billion dollars a year.

That was only electricity. Including replacement graphics cards and hard drives, the Eve AI cost one trillion dollars a year.

Eve could burn through the Higuma Family's entire assets in just two years.

That was the true power wielded by a megacorporation.

The Eve Group was reportedly developing a new generation of artificial intelligence, [Adam].

According to intelligence obtained by the Higuma Family, this AI was infinitely close to Laplace's demon-in other words, omniscience.

The Higuma Family controlled a portion of the world's food supply, leaving corporate drones like Suzuki Satoru to subsist on [liquid food] and pills.

The Eve Group, meanwhile, drained the world's energy to power its various AIs.

Who truly ruled this world was obvious.

Unless Roy dipped into his capital, he couldn't afford to use an AI of that caliber.

Extended use was beyond his means, but short bursts were acceptable.

He borrowed the AI [Eve] briefly, needing only a minute to identify gaps, revise tactics, and then test the defensive system.

He allocated and adjusted everything around three main modules: living areas, production areas, and combat areas.

Every guild had to be capable of holding off tens of thousands of players.

Roy first spent five years creating NPCs, then another five years refining this defensive system.

By the time the final adjustments were complete, even with [Eve] planning tactics and a million of the very strongest players attacking, the raiders could at most take the first nine cities. The final [World City] could just barely hold out using its own systems.

But that still wasn't enough.

Roy also used the test server to generate players holding every World Item for combat, and specifically generated One-Punch Man for destructive testing.

Finally, he distilled and refined those combat experiences and stored them in his own NPCs.

Countless combat experiences would hone and train his NPCs. Once equipped with top-tier AI, they would make players look intellectually outmatched.

For five years, Roy kept refining things, continuously improving World City's setup and his NPCs' equipment.

World City could still be breached by One-Punch Man or planet-level powerhouses.

That was simply overwhelming force.

But Yggdrasil's top players had no chance of even seeing Roy unless they united completely and knew about those obnoxious mechanics beforehand.

Compared with it, the game's final boss, the [Nine Luminaries World Devourer], seemed downright adorable.

Did Roy then start waiting to cross over?

Not yet.

The defensive mechanics of his guild strongholds were only one part of it.

Defense wasn't what Roy truly valued, nor was he someone who liked causing trouble.

What he truly needed was to use the instant of crossing over to turn more possibilities into reality.

For example, golden rice yielding three thousand kilograms per mu, or a Super Hen laying a thousand eggs a year.

Yes, these super crops, impossible to produce in reality, might all become real by crossing over through the game.

They seemed ordinary, but the technology behind them was astonishing.

And that was only a small exploration of crafting professions.

Roy had never lacked imagination.

He also wanted to construct all kinds of marvelous buildings inside World City.

Such as the legendary [Paradise Lost], a [Clone Base], and so on.

In Paradise Lost, golden rice could yield three thousand kilograms per mu, with three harvests a year, totaling nine thousand kilograms per mu-enough to keep the people of both his past and present lives well fed and clothed.

That would undoubtedly make helping the humans of the New World much easier.

Besides super crops, he could also add all kinds of fantasy crops.

Such as Golden Apples that restored youth, and Peaches of Immortality and Ginseng Fruits that extended people's lives.

Whatever he wanted, he could have.

When the game became reality, immensely powerful artifacts would merely be a bonus.

As long as Roy tried enough things, he didn't need every attempt to succeed. Even a fraction would be enough to support his future exploration of the world.

That was the truly inexhaustible treasure.

He even had all kinds of little ideas, such as designing devices in the fields that sped up time.

"Pops, you mean equipment that speeds up crop production when you put gold coins into it?"

"Exactly."

"It's like playing a little farming game. You can't possibly wait through all four seasons before things flower and bear fruit."

"We need different paid features, including equipment that speeds up the flow of time."

"One second outside, a whole year in the fields."

Roy certainly wasn't asking for this treasure just to farm.

It was for the Peaches of Immortality and Ginseng Fruits.

He didn't believe he could obtain fully grown Peaches of Immortality as soon as he crossed over, but he could cultivate them himself.

He merely needed something to accelerate time a little.

Naturally, the lead game designer wouldn't refuse:

"Pops' request is perfectly reasonable."

"Our farming already has an acceleration feature. We just need to improve it a little."

That was how painstakingly Roy planned, preparing for every possibility.

And so, Roy's World City came to contain tens of thousands of crops, with an astonishing abundance of everyday goods.

There were fruits, staple crops, fantasy plants, and countless others.

Even with so many treasures, Roy still wasn't satisfied.

Was there anything else he hadn't taken along?

Of course there was: modern technology.