Guild NPCs mattered, sure, but the guild’s architecture was Roy’s real pride and joy.
Because NPCs cost money to keep around.
Roy didn’t have the Throne of Kings, and yet he still had to support ten thousand NPCs, plus all their attendant servant NPCs.
What did that mean?
It meant Roy’s daily upkeep ran to 10 billion gold coins.
Yes, on average, keeping a single NPC unit online, including its subordinates, cost around 1 million gold a day.
The bigger the body, the higher the level, the more it drained.
Supporting ten thousand NPCs, complete with beast mounts and subordinates, cost an absolutely staggering amount.
The game company wasn’t about to let players freeload off its AI computing power.
That was also exactly why the Great Tomb only ever ranked as high as ninth.
The Throne of Kings was one of the rare exceptions that could actually cut those upkeep costs.
One or two days, it hardly mattered.
Stretch that out over ten years, and the gold saved became an astronomical figure.
In the original story, Ainz joked about grabbing a full 3000-point stronghold for the Great Tomb, and everyone else shot the idea down.
Because it would’ve bankrupted them.
Roy was interested in the Great Tomb’s World-tier items, sure, but not exactly desperate for any of them.
The one exception was the Throne of Kings.
He wanted it badly, purely because of how much it cut costs.
If the Throne of Kings’ effect ever got made public, the Great Tomb would almost certainly get wiped out.
Every top-tier guild would band together and swarm it, more than enough to bring it down.
Sure, the Great Tomb had a glorious track record, wiping out a joint siege of 1500 players and NPCs before.
But that was with none of the top-tier guilds actually involved.
They’d just watched the show from the sidelines.
The Great Tomb genuinely had top-tier guild strength, no denying that, but that didn’t mean it could survive a coordinated attack from every other top guild combined.
Without the Throne of Kings, the Great Tomb would have spiraled into economic collapse within a decade or so of crossing over.
Their NPC upkeep alone ran as high as 100 million gold a day, enough to bankrupt them within ten-odd years.
Even if Ainz dug three feet into the ground everywhere he went, he still couldn’t have mined that much gold in the New World.
Of course, a player could always order NPCs into dormancy to cut down on upkeep.
Which, bluntly put, was just the company forcing players to either pay up or shut their AI off.
Talk about having it both ways.
Roy’s operation dwarfed the Great Tomb’s.
His upkeep costs were even more monstrous, a full hundred times higher.
Even stockpiling several quadrillion gold, he’d still burn through it eventually.
Roy had actually run the numbers once:
“At 10 billion a day, without the Treasure Basin, I’d be bankrupt in about a thousand years.”
Given that, Roy had to plan the construction of his ten cities with real care.
Every city needed enough economic output to sustain itself.
Gold, food, items, materials, minerals, every kind of resource.
He wanted to build a world grand enough, rich enough to actually hold together.
“Push World City’s scale to the absolute maximum the system allows.”
“It doesn’t need to look huge on the outside, but fold the interior space so it’s massive on the inside.”
“That’s the only way it holds tens of thousands of original NPCs, plus everyone under them.”
“Running at full capacity, the whole city should support at least a million people.”
“And every resource needs to be fully self-sufficient.”
“You handle the cash-shop design side.
I’ll take care of the rest.”
Once he said that, nobody at the company dared object.
Boss had the money, after all.
If he wanted to go this far, the company would happily go along with it.
Roy’s presence had made a small fortune for plenty of designers and ops staff along the way.
Even though the company was ultimately controlled by the mega-corporations, with military backing standing behind it.
The people actually running it could still profit personally from all this, which was exactly why they were so eager to help him.
They’d never actually expected any player to beat this new World City design anyway.
As long as the whale was happy.
After all, Roy had poured over 100 billion yen into World City alone.
100 billion yen in physical cash could bury the entire company’s staff under a mountain of bills.
So what was there left to argue? This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
As long as it stayed within the game’s underlying limits, they just kept stacking increasingly overpowered features on top.
Just like Roy’s own theory had always gone.
He only wanted mechanics.
He never needed inflated stats.
Take an example: even if a million max-level players threw themselves at it wave after wave and actually broke through all nine branch guilds, that still wouldn’t mean victory.
Because there was a time limit.
World City’s stealth effect only broke if all nine branch guilds fell within the same single day.
Otherwise, the guild’s artifact would activate.
All the damage, reset.
Every dead NPC, every trap, restored.
That was something not even a World-tier item could normally pull off.
It was purely exploiting the dungeon system’s own mechanics.
Each of the nine branch guilds got its own matching artifact, more than enough to make every player miserable.
Not that any player was ever going to actually clear this level anyway.
And that was just one mechanic among many.
What if he ran into a genuinely dangerous enemy?
Just teleport them away!
Yes, Roy had set up a special teleportation space just for that.
If One Punch Man’s Saitama ever showed up, he’d get teleported straight into the sun’s core, with no way back.
And if teleportation somehow failed, the entire room would transform into a rocket and launch itself straight into the sun.
There were countless dirty little tricks like that, and more.
The designer in charge of the guild’s layout couldn’t help but ask:
“Lead, are we actually designing this so players can clear it?”
The lead designer answered with a completely straight face:
“It’s fine if nobody clears it.
None of this is stat-gated anyway.”
That was somehow even worse than a raw-stat wall.
But Roy liked it, so everyone else just had to make it happen.
To test World City’s defenses, the company even brought in a dedicated simulation system.
They cloned the data of a million max-level players to form assault teams, had an AI command them, with human oversight fine-tuning the strategy, and ran them as coordinated raid squads.
Roy, playing the World King, took on the challenge.
The battle of AI against AI played out entirely on the test server.
Roy had never actually run dungeons or fought monsters in the live game.
But he knew most of the game’s dungeons and monsters inside and out.
Because he’d played them all on the test server.
The test server ran on the top-tier AI, Eve, to help calculate tactics.
Eve’s daily power draw matched that of ten giant eco-cities combined.
One day’s electricity bill alone ran to 700 million dollars, easily topping 250 billion dollars a year.
And that was just power.
Factor in replacement hardware, GPUs, drives, and Eve cost a full trillion dollars a year to run.
The entire Sigma family fortune could be burned through by Eve in just two years.
That was the kind of power the real mega-corporations actually wielded.
Word was the Eve conglomerate was already developing its next-generation AI, Adam.
According to the Sigma family’s intelligence, this new AI was pushing right up against the concept of Laplace’s Demon, functional omniscience.
The Sigma family controlled a share of the world’s food supply, keeping working drones like Suzuki Satoru fed on liquid meal packs and pills.
The Eve conglomerate, meanwhile, drained the planet’s energy dry just to keep its various AI running.
Who actually ran this world went without saying.
Roy couldn’t afford AI at that level unless he dipped into his actual principal.
Not for the long term.
Short bursts, though, he could manage.
He’d borrow Eve for short stretches, just a minute at a time, enough to catch weak points, rework tactics, and stress-test the defenses.
Residential, production, and combat: he split everything into these three modules for allocation and tuning.
Every branch guild had to be able to hold off tens of thousands of attacking players.
Roy had already spent five years building his NPCs.
By the time it was finally finished, even with Eve drawing up the strategy and a million of the server’s absolute strongest players sent in to storm it, the attackers could, at best, take the nine outer cities, while World City itself could just barely hold on through its own defenses alone.
But that still wasn’t enough.
Roy also used the test server to generate simulated players wielding every World-tier item at once for combat trials, and specifically spawned a simulated Saitama for destructive stress-testing.
In the end, he distilled all of that combat experience down and loaded it into his own NPCs.
Countless battles’ worth of experience honed and trained his NPCs, and once paired with top-tier AI, no player’s tactics could even keep up.
Over those five years, Roy kept refining things, endlessly improving World City’s setup and his NPCs’ gear.
Sure, World City could still fall to someone like Saitama, or any planet-tier powerhouse.
But that was pure brute force overwhelming everything in its path.
But Yggdrasil’s top players, unless they came together perfectly and already knew every dirty trick in advance, stood no chance of ever laying eyes on Roy.
Compared to all that, the game’s own official final boss, the Nine Radiant World Devourer, looked almost cute.
So was Roy finally ready to just wait for the crossing?
Not yet.
The guild’s defenses were only part of the picture.
What Roy actually cared about wasn’t defense.
He wasn’t the type to go looking for trouble anyway.
What he really needed was to squeeze as many possibilities as he could out of the instant he crossed over.
Take an example: golden rice yielding 3000 kilograms per acre, or super hens laying a thousand eggs a year.
That’s right, crops and livestock that could never exist in reality had a real shot at getting cashed in through the crossing.
They looked ordinary on the surface, but the tech packed into them was staggering.
And that was just a small taste of what he was exploring through the life-skill classes.
Roy’s imagination never ran short.
He wanted all kinds of wondrous structures built into World City.
Things like the legendary Paradise Lost, a Cloning Base, and more.
Inside Paradise Lost, that golden rice could yield 3000 kilograms per acre, harvested three times a year, 9000 kilograms per acre total, more than enough to feed everyone from both his old life and his new one.
Helping out the people of the New World would be that much easier because of it.
Beyond the super-crops, he could throw in all sorts of fantastical plants too.
Things like golden apples that restored youth, or life-extending fruit like Peaches of Eternal Life and the Root of Longevity.
Whatever he wanted, he could have.
In the instant of cashing out, even the most devastating artifacts were just a bonus on top.
As long as Roy tried enough things, he didn’t need every single one to succeed.
Even a fraction paying off would be more than enough to carry him through his future exploration of the world.
That was the real bottomless treasure.
He even had all sorts of little tricks in mind, like devices to speed up time in his farmland.
“Boss, you mean a device where you dump in gold and it speeds up farm production?”
“Right.”
“It’s like a farming mini-game.
You shouldn’t have to wait a full season just for something to bloom and bear fruit.”
“We need different price points for devices that speed up time itself.”
“One second out here, a full year inside the fields.”
Roy wasn’t asking for this little gadget just to farm, obviously.
It was for the Peaches of Eternal Life and the Root of Longevity.
He didn’t believe he’d get a fully grown peach the instant he crossed over, but he could grow his own.
He just needed something to speed up the clock a little.
The lead designer naturally didn’t refuse:
“That’s a perfectly reasonable request, Boss.”
“Our farming system already has an acceleration feature built in.
We just need to tune it up a bit.”
That was exactly how meticulous Roy was, determined to have every possibility covered.
And so, tens of thousands of crops ended up growing across Roy’s World City, an almost absurd wealth of daily necessities.
Fruit, staple grains, fantastical plants, the list went on.
Even with treasures like that piling up, Roy still wasn’t satisfied.
Was there anything else he hadn’t accounted for?
Of course there was.
Modern technology.
***
bro we get it, he’s going to be op, hurry tf up