Rich people really did have the strangest habits.
All those NPC points, and it was just so he could sculpt out every single class and race that existed.
Was he insane?
The lead designer’s brain crashed on the spot.
Roy added:
“Use the best AI available for all these NPCs.
I’ll cover the upkeep costs myself.”
“Boss, we already thought that through.”
The lead designer thumped his chest and said:
“Boss has the World Merchant class, and that special class lets you trade for literally anything, including other guilds’ stronghold points.”
“You can buy up points from other guild players who aren’t using them.”
“World City’s overall cap is 300,000 points, the theoretical design maximum.”
“Does that satisfy you, Boss?”
Satisfied.
Extremely satisfied.
Roy praised the lead designer again, though this time a smile crept onto the man’s face.
Because he’d planted a little seed.
Once Roy bought up those points, other players wiping out and reclaiming those guilds would eventually notice the point totals had dropped.
The trail would eventually surface, and it would ultimately leak the World King quest.
That was part of his plan too.
Matsuno Hideaki was determined to get his own ultimate quest out into the world one way or another.
Instead, what he saw left him stunned.
Roy’s solution was dead simple.
He negotiated individually with every guild, first spending 15 million yen to help each one push their stronghold up by 300 points, then spending another 500,000 yen to buy that same NPC-level allotment back off them.
As for anyone who thought about scamming Roy and running off with the money, they were in for a taste of the World Merchant class’s special effect.
The World Merchant class came with a special skill called God of Contracts, letting him set business terms and lock in a binding agreement once both sides accepted.
If the other party broke the deal, God of Contracts would transform into the Debt-Collecting Devil, freezing every relevant asset, up to and including a full account ban.
Not just an in-game ban, either.
Roy could pay to have someone banned in the real world too.
So nobody dared take his money and then not deliver.
And every time a deal was carried out, it was always someone Roy personally designated who joined the guild and handled the spending, so the other guild never even got the chance to slip up.
Plenty of guilds got to know Roy this way, and would grovel:
“Lord Joshua, we could sell you a bit more, if you want.”
“No.
That’s all I need.”
Since he’d paid for the extra allotment in the first place, even if a guild later got conquered and sold off, most players never bothered spending real money to push their point totals up again, so there was never any real loss, it was basically free stronghold points.
Matsuno Hideaki watched all of this, stunned.
Was he just burning through his money for the fun of it?
Why not just buy the points outright?
Why bother upgrading everyone else’s stronghold first?
Because Roy didn’t want to disturb the game’s natural development, or let some accident throw history off course.
Even something as small as NPC points.
Interestingly enough, this was actually how Roy ended up crossing paths with Ainz.
The members of the Ainz Ooal Gown guild were all debating whether to cash in on it.
“Spending real money on stronghold points is way too expensive.”
“Almost nobody actually pays for it.
This Joshua guy’s loaded and not too bright about it, he’ll upgrade us first and then buy back the 300 points.
We lose nothing, and we get 500,000 yen out of it for free.”
500,000 yen wasn’t a small sum, even for the working adults of the Great Tomb.
Suzuki Satoru only made 150,000 yen a month.
That was more than three months’ salary.
Split forty-one ways among the guild’s players, though, it didn’t actually amount to much.
Barely enough for some gacha pulls.
In the end, it was Ainz himself who talked everyone into it:
“Keep the paid points.
Down the line, we might be able to squeeze out a few more NPCs with them.”
“At the very least, it’ll give Tabula-san more room to work with.”
So Roy let that particular deal go.
If they wouldn’t sell, plenty of others would.
Yggdrasil was at its peak back then, with over 3000 active guilds.
At 300 points per guild, finding 900 willing sellers was more than enough.
The game company, stunned, discovered that Roy had single-handedly bought up the entire market for point-boosting purchases.
Helping every guild pay their way to 300 extra stronghold points cost him 12.5 billion yen alone, plus another 500 million yen to buy the points back, 13 billion yen total.
No wonder he was the platonic ideal of a whale.
If it hadn’t been for the game’s underlying logic, the company would have handed him an unlimited NPC point cap ages ago.
All that clean, shining money, scattered out to ordinary players.
What a waste.
And just like that, the full 300,000 NPC points were secured.
If Roy made every one of them level 100, that would be enough for three thousand NPCs.
And that wasn’t even counting private NPCs, summoned mercenary monsters, and the like.
If the cash-out succeeded, even with zero combat ability of his own, Roy could still turn to Ainz with three thousand level-100 NPCs behind him and say:
“Ainz, shine my shoes.”
Except Roy wasn’t quite that petty.
He wasn’t building NPCs for combat power.
It was about comprehensive, wide-ranging skills, exploring what could be cashed in on later, and laying the groundwork for whatever came next.
The lead designer couldn’t help but ask:
“Boss, 3000 max-level NPCs, how long is this supposed to take?”
“Who said I was making them?”
“You’re the ones building them, obviously.
I’m just reviewing and signing off on the final product.”
Roy wasn’t some obsessive world-builder.
He had zero interest in doing the work himself.
He’d rather just pay professionals to craft every NPC for him.
“Hire a whole team.
Every single NPC gets polished properly.”
“Study every class build players have discovered, and combine them properly.”
“And every NPC’s appearance needs the best modeling team available.”
“In the end, only make a thousand of them max-level.
Spend the remaining 200,000 points on nine thousand more NPCs.
Ten thousand NPCs total.”
Matsuno Hideaki sucked in a sharp breath.
A normal MMORPG never had anywhere near that many characters.
“Boss, that’s an enormous undertaking.”
“Isn’t that better for you, though?”
“The money’s all coming from me anyway.”
So Roy really was playing a completely different game from everyone else.
Just finalizing and confirming ten thousand NPCs alone took roughly five years.
As the World King, Roy made sure to memorize every NPC’s name and abilities, all organized into a proper reference book.
That reference book was an artifact too, one of Roy’s own exclusive artifacts, built to help him manage his NPCs.
With ten thousand original NPCs, Roy could’ve assembled a harem of three thousand beauties without breaking a sweat.
Swapping one a day, it would take him about eight years to get through them all, and factoring in every possible combination, the options were basically endless.
Ahem.
Of course, Roy hadn’t built that many NPCs to satisfy some harem fantasy.
It was about pushing the limits.
He used all sorts of NPCs as experiments.
Mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and more.
They made up a huge chunk of the roster.
Even though the game itself didn’t technically have a Physicist class, only adjacent ones like Scholar or Alchemist.
Didn’t matter.
That was exactly what Roy wanted.
And he didn’t just write in some generic math genius, either.
He wrote it like this.
The Math Queen, Vera.
She proved the Riemann Hypothesis and solved every unsolved century-old math problem there was.
The Physics Goddess, Celia.
She cracked the Grand Unified Theory and worked out the secrets of time travel.
The Computer God, Matilda.
She held true artificial intelligence, capable of designing AI that bordered on omniscience.
The Energy Empress, Freya.
She held the blueprint for building a Dyson sphere, and every energy technology that came with it.
Raw stats meant nothing across the countless worlds out there.
There was always something stronger.
Take the Chimera Ant King from Hunter x Hunter, for instance, absurdly strong on paper, and a single nuke still took him out.
If the Ant King had had a fourth-dimensional teleport, he could’ve just ducked into another space and walked away fine.
Only strong mechanics could guarantee you’d last for the long haul.
Roy built ten thousand NPCs, and beyond preserving every skill and race the game had, he also deliberately assembled an all-star research team.
They could research any scientific field imaginable, and also dig into the underlying nature of magic, alchemy, and everything like it.
Even if the scientists weren’t much for combat, they’d still hold enormous value no matter what world he ended up in.
Roy could hardly wait to see the moment all of that finally paid off.
There were plenty more experiments like that.
Roy wanted to squeeze the absolute maximum cash-out value out of every one of his NPCs.
As for the lead designer, there was one thing he really wanted to say:
Rich people really did have the strangest habits!
Game companies loved to torment their players.
Roy loved to torment the game company.
For five straight years, Roy used his position as the client to rip apart character designs on a daily basis, driving who knows how many overworked employees half insane.
He personally, carefully reviewed all ten thousand NPCs, bringing in top-tier AI to cross-check them again and again.
He never let a single loose thread slide.
With standards that strict, there was no room for cutting corners or sneaking in shortcuts.
The staff were under enormous pressure.
That included Tabula Smaragdina of the Ainz Ooal Gown guild, the designer behind Albedo and others in the original story.
That’s right, his actual profession was character design, and it was exactly that talent that got him picked.
When he eventually quit the game, it was largely because Roy had wrung him completely dry through the work.
Literally wrung dry.
Every time he logged in, Tabula looked like a man who’d lost all will to live.
“Tabula-san, why do you look like that lately?”
“A devil.
That man is a real devil!”
“He’s basically Cthulhu.
Kill him.
Somebody has to kill him!”
In reality, Tabula had no idea who he was actually working for.
All he knew was that someone had commissioned game characters from him.
And every day, whatever he designed got sent right back for another round of revisions.
Redone until it nearly broke him.
But he kept at it anyway, because Roy was paying him far too well to quit.
Suzuki Satoru couldn’t help but say:
“With your talent, Tabula-san, you could easily find other work.”
“No, it’s fine.”
Tabula stood up, resolute:
“He pays that well.
We can finally unlock 300 more points of NPC levels because of it.”
“15 million yen!
That’s a seriously generous payout!”
“Heh heh, I’m going to design three brand new characters next.”
Tabula said it with his mouth practically watering.
Even though Roy kept his influence on the wider game isolated, focused entirely on his own custom-tailored corner of it, the sheer amount of money he poured in inevitably rippled out into small changes across the world.
Who could’ve guessed that Tabula would end up making a fortune off him, enough to go all-in on his own spending.
Not that Roy had any time to spare thinking about that.
Because while all this was going on, he still had to overhaul the entire guild base from the ground up.
Ten thousand original NPCs only counted as a mid-tier cheat.
The guild itself was the real hack.
There was no stopping the cheat-building now.
****
u know, the OG author could’ve explained/sprinkled all this as the story continues…..heavy info dumps in the first chapters is not ideal.