[System Announcement]: The Almighty Joshua has logged in!
All servers, rise and pay tribute!
The moment Roy logged in, the entire game broadcast a server-wide announcement.
Every player online could see it.
“Lord Joshua is online!”
“The whale’s here.
Yggdrasil’s in the clear now.”
“Every day Lord Joshua spends, Yggdrasil lives one more day.”
“One day?
Try one more year.”
“Lord Joshua, I’ve got a World Item here, Ruinous Beauty.
You buying?”
“Lord Joshua, I’ll have your kids!”
Every time Roy logged in, it caused a server-wide stir, with countless players scrambling to trade with him.
Not because he spent a lot.
Because he spent an obscene amount.
So much that it was beyond what any regular person could imagine.
He’d even thrown money at the entire server before, just to do it.
Handing out free gacha pulls to every player on the server at once?
Only he would actually do that.
One of Roy’s world-shaking quotes:
“Don’t try to challenge my allowance with your annual salary.
There’s no point.”
“The rest of you should just play the game and skip the spending.
It’s a waste of money.”
Yggdrasil was a game for commoners.
Sure, some higher-status citizens played too, university professors included.
But the overall culture never changed.
Someone from a family like Roy’s simply wasn’t supposed to play it.
Doing so marked you as lower-class.
Which made Roy the only genuine whale in the entire game.
His spending, converted to yen, had to be measured in the hundreds of millions.
To him, it barely counted as spending money at all.
His monthly allowance alone was ten million dollars, which converted to over 1.6 billion yen.
So there was never any real risk of Roy bankrupting himself over the game.
That would draw way too much attention.
Sorry, but I really am just messing around.
What was even more astonishing was that he only spent money, and never actually played.
Dungeon runs, building a guild, boss fights, none of that.
He just didn’t bother.
At least not openly.
Not once.
A player once asked Roy, confused, why he played the game this way.
Roy answered like it was obvious:
“I already paid for it.
Why would I still need to play it?”
That line got recorded on the player forums under “Lord Joshua’s World-Shaking Quotes.”
It ranked second on the shock scale.
Yes, Roy only spent money.
He barely played.
The reason was simple enough.
If he went and ran wild in the game and, say, wiped out the Great Tomb entirely, or made sure the Six Great Gods never crossed over, or drove the Eight-Greed King into a corner, then what?
History couldn’t be allowed to deviate.
It had to run its original course, or he wouldn’t get the maximum payoff the instant he crossed over.
Roy had crossed over into this world thirty years ahead of schedule.
That cut both ways.
The upside, obviously, was that he could position himself early and maximize the payoff.
The downside was the risk of a serious butterfly effect.
So he didn’t even bother grabbing rare materials.
He just quietly played the role of a whale, and nothing else.
Dumping money into the game every year like clockwork, feeding the game company, he was basically the platonic ideal of a whale.
The kind of player every game company dreamed of.
So did that mean all that spending went to waste, just for a pile of cash-shop items?
Of course not.
Spend enough, and the game company would come groveling on its own.
Roy was never really playing the game.
He was buying a personalized, custom-tailored experience.
In Yggdrasil’s very first year, Roy spent a modest amount, just to test the waters.
16 billion yen, roughly what he’d received as gifts at his coming-of-age ceremony.
Yggdrasil’s parent company thought there’d been a data error, that the entire payment system had glitched.
After double and triple checking, the company’s CEO and the lead designer both added Roy’s email, and their first message read:
“Boss!”
“Whatever you need, we’re right here for you!”
No way around it.
In a world this broadly poor, the game’s entire purpose was to harvest the last of the poor’s energy and money.
The company’s real profit came from serving the mega-corporations’ strategic goals, which was exactly why they could afford to be so reckless, building a game with virtually unlimited freedom.
The players never had any real money to lose anyway.
But the amount Roy spent could only be called absurd.
It blew every expectation they had out of the water.
If the mega-corporations hadn’t been watching, they’d have just built Roy an official cheat client and handed it over for free.
Over the following ten years, Roy kept his annual spending steady at the same level.
16 billion yen a year, over 160 billion yen in total.
As for why the game was about to shut down.
That was obviously because Roy’s spending had just crashed.
The plan was for it to shut down right on the original schedule.
Roy had spent ten years keeping it alive, all so it could go under, right on cue, in its twelfth year.
Not one bit of history could be tampered with.
So Roy never touched his principal.
He only ever spent his allowance.
Which meant his own life had gotten a little tight, living on just twenty million dollars a year.
About as rough as Third Brother’s situation.
He couldn’t even afford a villa anymore.
With spending on that scale, Roy was naturally treated as the game’s patron saint.
The company set up an entire customer service team just for him, on call twenty-four hours a day.
There was a World-tier item, supposedly the strongest one in the game, called the Eternal Serpent Ring.
It came with the right to request system changes directly from the developers.
But Roy didn’t need it.
He just went straight through his dedicated support line, with unlimited requests, any time he wanted.
As long as a request didn’t interfere with the game’s founding principles, anything that fit within those principles got approved.
Which suited Roy fine anyway.
He didn’t want to break the original game either, not if it risked collapsing the game’s internal logic and ruining his crossing.
So the real work he put into this game was building himself a cheat setup that wouldn’t jeopardize the crossing.
First, his class.
The company created a special class for him called World’s Richest Man, a counterpart to classes like World Champion and World Calamity.
Except there could only ever be one World’s Richest Man, while World Champion had nine slots.
The only way to steal the title was to out-spend Roy.
It was, arguably, the easiest and hardest task in the entire game at once.
Just spend a few billion dollars, and you too could be World’s Richest Man.
Even the elite kids who weren’t barred from playing rarely spent that kind of money on a game.
The World’s Richest Man class granted an extremely special skill: Kingdom-Toppling Silver Bullet.
The skill scaled its area-of-effect damage directly to however much money he burned.
At its maximum cost of one billion gold coins, the skill hit as hard as the game’s top-tier Super-tier Magic, and could be used up to ten times a day.
Cheating, right?
Extremely.
A normal level-100 player was capped at four uses of Super-tier Magic a day.
Roy could casually use it ten times, without burning a single point of MP.
In large-scale fights, as long as he was willing to throw money around, he could wipe out anyone in his way.
That said, given how much gold it burned through, it wasn’t actually overtuned.
After all, Ainz’s guild had spent twelve years accumulating roughly 410 billion gold coins total.
That would only cover 410 uses for Roy.
In terms of raw value, reviving a single max-level NPC cost the guild 500 million gold.
One use of Roy’s skill burned a full billion gold, and it still might not be enough to kill a max-level NPC.
This was overwhelming people with sheer capital.
Pure, unfiltered cash power.
World’s Richest Man was one special class Roy had picked up, but it wasn’t the only one.
The lead designer thumped his own chest and said:
“Whatever the boss wants, we can build and unlock a matching special class for it.”
Roy’s team was almost too devoted to him.
It nearly embarrassed him.
But he knew perfectly well that raw power wasn’t what he was actually after.
So Roy had the lead designer pull up every class in the system, scrapped drafts included, and pieced together one bizarre build.
Name: Roy
Race: Human
Class levels:
Armed Merchant: LV15
Gold Dominator: LV10
World Merchant: LV5
World’s Richest Man: LV5
Chronicler: LV15
Observer: LV15
Space Traveler: LV10
Fate Chanter: LV10
Time Observer: LV10
Immortal: LV5
Humans had no race levels, only job levels, which added up to 100 total.
No raw stats.
All mechanics.
A build like that could be described, in the game’s own terms, as-
trash-tier.
Off the charts.
The merchant classes obviously weren’t combat-oriented, they were basically life skill classes, offering zero combat strength.
And the rest of the build, stacked purely to unlock the Immortal class, was even more absurdly bad.
Don’t be fooled by all the flavor text about fate, time, and space.
It was all smoke and mirrors.
Take Space Traveler, for instance.
Its actual effects were just immunity to spatial locks like Dimensional Lockdown and Delayed Teleport, the ability to move freely through most restricted zones, and the fastest possible cast time for teleportation magic and large-scale portals.
Sure, the class description called him a favored child of space, immune to spacetime turbulence, free to travel through the dimensions at will, all sorts of over-the-top flavor text.
But in terms of actual in-game power, the word was pathetic.
After all, every one of those effects could be replicated with ordinary magic or items.
Ainz himself knew spells like High-Tier Teleportation and Gate, for example.
In-game, there was almost no functional difference.
Fate Chanter was the same story.
It played like a bard class, letting him chant his way into buffs like Super Luck or Fate’s Favor.
The class description promised things like divining fate and glimpsing danger ahead of time.
But in actual gameplay, it only counted as a support skill, with no real damage output.
Last was Time Observer, a supposedly future-predicting class that was, in practice, useless.
In theory, the game used AI and player data to help forecast an opponent’s likely next move.
But in real combat, given how most players actually reacted, that kind of advance warning was useless.
Knowing three seconds ahead of time what punch Tyson was about to throw didn’t mean you could actually beat him.
If you wanted actual Time Stop, that already existed as tenth-tier magic.
All those special classes, and every single one of them looked good on paper and did nothing in practice.
The only special class that actually offered real stats was Immortal.
Immortal massively boosted HP and defense, and stacked every resistance available, including things like high-tier physical damage nullification.
But even with everything Immortal added, his overall stats only landed at upper-middle tier.
After all, he only had the one special class actually adding to his numbers.
Even a dog would shake its head at that build.
If he ever ran into a top-tier player who’d specced purely into combat, Roy simply couldn’t compete on raw stats.
If the two of them fought bare, no gear, and Roy didn’t use Kingdom-Toppling Silver Bullet or teleport away, and they just traded hits standing still, the other guy would win, basically every time.
Sure, Immortal’s HP pool was frighteningly tough, but he just didn’t have the damage to back it up.
That was Roy’s whole approach.
Chase mechanics, not stats.
Take the Forbidden Arts User class in Yggdrasil, for instance, weak in-game, but cash it in on the other side, and it meant literal eternal life.
Fluder Paradyne, the Empire’s Court Mage on the other side, for instance, has a Forbidden Arts User class.
Note, not literally an “Immortal” class.
Which meant he could perform a ritual to cast the forbidden art, and he was still alive and kicking at 272 years old.
In the same way, what Roy actually cared about were the mechanics that would carry the most value once cashed in on the other side.
Fate and spacetime were T0-tier power, no matter what universe you dropped them into.
Naruto and One Piece?
Nowhere close to a cash-out this satisfying!