“I’ve gotten hold of a top-secret piece of information.”
“Any veteran level-100 player who stays logged in at server shutdown, and has spent over 10,000 Sacred Crystals recently, is going to get a gift.”
“That gift is an invite code for the new game, plus a special starter package.”
“Word is there’s something like an artifact-tier item bundled in, handed out when the new game launches.”
“I’ll spot you enough Sacred Crystals to hit that threshold.
The package itself goes to me once you get it.”
“Just remember, stay logged in.”
“The payment for this is 500,000 yen each.”
“Lord Joshua, isn’t that a bit much?”
Surshana blurted out before he could stop himself.
He didn’t even think to question where this insider information had come from.
After all, this was Lord Joshua, the man the entire company groveled to.
His insider intel had to be a hundred percent accurate.
Kikotenshin Nekonyan couldn’t help but pat Surshana on the shoulder.
Why be this honest with the man!
Lord Joshua had money to burn.
Six people, 500,000 yen each, that came out to 3 million yen total, more than enough to fund another small slowdown campaign.
Roy said with a smile:
“It’s fine.
That 500,000 yen isn’t just for this one thing.
I also need you to farm a few special dungeons for me on top of it, and pick up some special items.”
“Word is those can carry over to the new server too.”
“Oh, right.
At the very last moment, you need to be at the guild hall, sitting in the guild’s chair, holding a World-tier item.
Understood?”
“That’s the condition for actually receiving the package.”
Every word of it was a lie.
Ever since Roy had gotten his hands on the World Tree Sapling, he’d had a certain feeling.
He was absolutely going to succeed at crossing over.
More than that, Roy was less worried about causing some butterfly effect by helping them, and far more worried about the impact of these six people simply not being online in time.
So handing over a few items and inventing a fake event to guarantee they’d be logged in at shutdown mattered far more than anything else right now.
Six hundred years still to go.
Just live well until then.
After all, Roy didn’t want to arrive after the crossing only to find humanity already extinct.
Roy honestly didn’t care how many other players successfully crossed over.
He just didn’t want his own crossing to fail.
“Whatever you say, Lord Joshua!”
Surshana thumped his chest, swearing to it.
Roy nodded:
“Alright, I’ll send the money over first.
Get started right away.”
“Oh, and take these too.
Should help you clear mobs a bit faster.”
The contents were genuinely solid gear and items by max-level player standards, but to Roy, they were basically junk.
Revival items, elixirs, even a few information crystals.
The information crystals held a broad stockpile of agricultural knowledge, industrial knowledge, biology, medicine, and more, all fairly basic material.
Anything more advanced would’ve been out of reach for people at their level of education anyway.
He hoped they’d use all of it to properly protect humanity, right up until the moment he himself arrived in that world.
Humanity, after all, was a genuinely valuable race.
Sure, humans in this New World were weak, but dropped into most other worlds, they still counted as something like a chosen race.
One in every two hundred was born with some kind of innate special ability, more than enough to be worth serious study.
Even from a pure genetic-preservation standpoint, Roy wanted the humans there to have decent lives.
With that thought, Roy added:
“I’ve already sent over the quest list.
Get to work.”
“If you don’t land the package, I’m docking your pay.”
The two of them thumped their chests together, in unison:
“Rest easy, Lord Joshua.”
“I’ll get the rest of them online and working right now.”
Roy was satisfied with that.
Surshana was, without question, the guild’s strongest member.
His class build ran surprisingly close to Ainz’s, sharing the same special class: Solar Eclipse.
The rest of them were noticeably weaker, since playing the game was really just a cover for them anyway.
They’d never taken it very seriously, and Surshana had a ready explanation for it, delivered with total conviction:
“If we ourselves worked ourselves to the bone every day instead of playing games, how are we supposed to convince the rest of the workers to slack off with us?”
He said it with enough conviction that there was really nothing to argue with.
With Roy now having them work hard through these last seven days, powering up, and with the elixirs on top of it, they should be able to survive long enough to see each other again.
Having given his instructions, Roy turned to leave, only for Surshana’s companion, a short-tailed red cat, to come rubbing up against him.
“Meow!”
A level-100 NPC cat, destined to become the final guardian of the future Slane Theocracy.
Roy gave it a couple of scratches, and the cat’s face melted into pure contentment, rubbing hard against his hand and giving its fur a shake.
Surshana had deliberately set this cat to warm up to Roy specifically, hoping to mooch a few items off him.
Roy petted the cat for a while, thought it over for a moment, then pulled a storage bag out of his own inventory.
“This is for the cat.
Don’t you dare skim off the top.”
Generally speaking, NPCs had equipment slots too, same as players.
A player’s standard slots covered head (helmet), face (mask), neck (necklace), torso (armor), shoulders (cloak), arms (gauntlets), hands (two weapon slots), waist (belt), legs (greaves), feet (boots), and two ring slots, thirteen slots total.
Except the game also had eight cash-shop-only ring slots, which could push the total up to twenty-one.
Even though the original author, Maruyama, had claimed this wasn’t a pay-to-win game.
That was a flat-out lie.
What non-predatory online game docked non-paying players eight whole equipment slots?
Not even the shadiest big-name MMOs would dare pull something like that.
Even the cheapest cash-grab browser game fakes a couple of secondary slots just to keep up appearances.
A certified pay-to-win nightmare, through and through.
In an MMORPG, missing even a single equipment slot could mean a massive gap in combat power.
Missing eight was something else entirely.
Crafting an artifact was brutal work.
Even with the game about to shut down, it still wasn’t something an ordinary player could just casually pick up.
A normal level-100 player grinding nonstop for three years to piece together a single artifact, that was basically considered graduating.
Even at the game’s peak, with over a million max-level players, the total stockpile of artifacts across the entire server never exceeded a hundred thousand.
Even a top-tier guild like the Great Tomb could only really afford to hand out one or two artifacts per NPC.
What Roy was handing over now counted as an extravagant gift.
Surshana actually tried to turn it down, only for Roy to shoot him a flat look:
“The game’s about to shut down.
None of this has any real value left anyway.”
“Here.
Gear up the cat.”
This level-100 cat could shift into a catgirl form, and magic equipment automatically adjusted to fit whatever body it was worn on.
Yes, even a piece of armor forged the size of a fingernail could still be worn by a giant.
Magic gear came with built-in adaptability, though scaling it that far would tank its actual defensive value down to almost nothing.
Which meant that whatever the cat wore, any of the others could technically wear too.
That solved that.
Roy gave the cat a couple more pats, and only then, thoroughly satisfied, took his leave.
“Get to work.
Look at the state of you all, starving the poor cat until it can’t even afford its own artifacts.”
Kikotenshin Nekonyan and Surshana were, for a moment, left completely speechless.
Between the two of them, they barely had one artifact to their name, and had to make do with Legendary-tier gear for everything else.
Same game, same server.
How was the gap this enormous?
Roy dusted off his hands and went right back to collecting World-tier items.
But once Roy was gone, Kikotenshin Nekonyan’s expression turned thoughtful:
“Shana, did you notice?”
“Notice what?”
“Lord Joshua had all of this ready ahead of time.”
“There’s no way he could’ve pulled it out that fast otherwise.”
“He’s wanted to help us this whole time.
He just needed an excuse.”
Surshana’s eyes widened with realization:
“Lord Joshua really is one of the rare good-hearted ones.”
“Then let’s get moving.
Even if it means not sleeping for the rest of these seven days, we’re finishing this quest!”
“Right, get the other four in on it too!”
“We can’t let Lord Joshua down!”
And with that, the Great Cat Kingdom threw itself into work with everything it had.
Meanwhile, Roy went right on collecting the rest of the World-tier items, full speed ahead.
The twentieth item: the Forbidden Fruit of Eden.