The ecosystem consulting business. In other words, a business where I advised other players the way I had Sesaisa and collected Points in return.
At 4 Points per 1 point of contribution, I just had to raise someone else’s ecosystem score by 22,437 points.
Sure, Sesaisa had been easy to raise because the baseline had been so catastrophic, but think about it. I’d raised Sesaisa’s score by a full ten thousand points. Taking into account that my world had now doubled in size, that meant I could either rip 20,000 score points—80,000 Points total—out of one person, or pull 40,000 Points from two people, or 20,000 Points from four. Or skim about 10,000 Points each from eight.
“At 4 Points per contribution point, that’s just the current fixed market rate anyway, so it’s not even unfair. And if the buyers can reliably raise their scores, it doesn’t sound like that big a problem either.”
Right. The real question was whether I could actually raise them that much. Second, whether I could build trust. Third, whether other people would be willing to hand me the job in the first place.
I was confident about the first. The second didn’t matter either, since contracts mediated through the organizers seemed absolute. The third was the problem.
I opened the Community and looked around for a while.
With the Trait shop event, the situation had split broadly into two groups.
First, people trying to earn score somehow.
「Title: Selling slave species.
Content: Selling all 2,500 slave-species individuals acquired in the last war. Roughly 700 Life Score. Bulk up your population for 2,000 Points.」
「Player: Dan Woojung
Item Name: Law Book
Price: 5,000 Points (negotiable)
Description: A law book personally written by Dan Woojung. Since it was written by the highest-level legal expert in his world, it provides foundational understanding of law and practical methods of application. If player Nonhuman reads it, their understanding of <Politics> appears likely to rise significantly.」
And conversely, people trying to sell score.
「Title: I’m trying to sell 3,000 score points. Anyone interested in a knowledge exchange?
Content: Is there a <Culture> specialist around? I know nothing about <Culture>, so it just won’t go up. Please make an offer.」
「Title: Selling Points.
Content: 4 Points per 1 contribution point. Please save my world, it’s been devastated by war.」
And that was only because my war had ended relatively early, so there weren’t many posts yet. Give it a little time and there’d probably be millions.
A common-grade Trait currently cost 1,680 Points. Hardly anyone would be unable to afford that, but if you wanted to function like an actual person, you needed either the extraordinary-grade Trait at 7,409 Points or the heroic-grade Trait at 15,559.
Which meant that a player sitting around the midpoint, say ten thousand Points, could hand three thousand to someone else and still get an extraordinary-grade Trait anyway. Or if they somehow scraped together another five thousand, they could get a heroic-grade one.
Now factor in that Points only came in at the end of a collision and didn’t increase after that. And that among the players still alive, there were some cooperation-focused types with absurdly high Point reserves. And that Sesaisa and I were both top-tier players even though we’d barely interacted with anyone...
So roughly speaking, people had probably earned fifteen to twenty thousand score this collision, and maybe their total accumulated Points from before amounted to about that much too?
That was awkward. Extracting twenty thousand Points from a single person was almost impossible... they’d want to buy a thirty-thousand-Point Trait themselves.
But looked at the other way around, you could probably pull ten thousand or so from a player sitting on forty thousand Points. At the moment, after all, epic-grade Traits cost 32,000, legendary cost 68,000, and mythic cost 144,000.
Right. Then I should aim for players with forty to fifty thousand Points and try to strip ten or twenty thousand out of each.
There were currently sixty-seven million players left. Was I really not going to find ten who fit those conditions?
Thinking that, I decided the first thing I needed to do was raise my own credibility.
First, I should push my Life Score even higher.
“Why does credibility equal Life? You’re already far beyond the standard score of 926. You’re at 12,328 right now. Unquestionably first place out of sixty-seven million.”
If I raised it now, it wouldn’t mean anything anyway. I’d ended the collision too early. Better to wait until people had gathered in decent numbers, then reveal a maximized figure so it carried authority as proof of my ability.
Ah, but before that. I should answer first.
[Nonhuman: Sesaisaaa ;_; I need to earn some Points, so I probably won’t have time to look at your world (bows)]
[Sesaisa: I see. I’m in the same situation myself.]
[Nonhuman: Yup. I wanted to ask you for some advice too lol, but if we spend time looking at each other’s worlds, everyone else is gonna scoop up all the Points first haha. So how about this? For this phase, let’s both just focus on the Trait shop event.]
[Sesaisa: I lament this! But very well. The meat players here seem to understand Mysticism so poorly that perhaps I ought to sell my talents in that area as well. By the way, what grade are you aiming for?]
[Nonhuman: Mythic lol. Maybe I’m aiming too high lol]
[Sesaisa: Same here. I intend to win. Very well, then. Until later.]
End conversation.
I was going to need long-term exchanges with Sesaisa. Still, that lunatic probably wasn’t going to die in the next collision either.
For now, I needed to make myself marketable. Which meant large-scale tuning of my world and further development of the ecosystem.
Partly to fully assimilate the newly acquired land into the Dessert Legion, and beyond that, to carry out a sweeping edit of the existing terrain as well.
“That choice itself is rational. So what are you going to do?”
First, get rid of the aquifer oasis that had fused with the 《Nectar Spring》.
I’d meant to do it while I was helping with Sesaisa’s world, but the collision approached before I got around to it. If a fragment of a god kept producing freshwater, that was a bit of a problem.
That aquifer was sharing Mana with the spring and leveling up alongside it, and as it rose in level, it stored even more freshwater, which diluted the 《Nectar Spring》.
But maybe that was exactly why Sesaisa had already moved the aquifer. The increased concentration of the Nectar Spring was probably partly thanks to that.
It had been moved pretty far away, but if anything, that seemed to be having a positive effect on the world.
As expected, when it came to fragments of gods or magic, Sesaisa’s understanding wasn’t just higher than mine. “Far higher” didn’t even begin to cover it. It was beyond comparison.
From Sesaisa’s perspective, it was probably the ideal location for amplifying magic.
But I cared more about the ecosystem. Any geomantic magic based on terrain could go eat shit.
“Wow. That’s harsh...”
Anyway, the newly acquired world had an oasis too. A pretty big one. In other words, it had an aquifer, so I merged my original aquifer into that one.
「The level of 《Aquifer》 rises.」
Nice. Though maybe because the aquifer had grown so huge, about half of the newly acquired world had nearly been submerged. Or rather, the former civilization zone had been massively encroached on and collapsed in on itself.
The water had expanded to an absurd degree and overflowed everywhere. The other world had apparently been well developed, because its oases and rivers had been turned into extensive fields and rice paddies, and all of it was now underwater.
Good. Whether it was dry fields or rice paddies... agriculture only ever harmed ecosystems.
To put agriculture in simple terms, it meant eliminating every species in an ecosystem except one, then unnaturally modifying that species until it would die outright without human intervention.
How could that possibly be healthy? The enormous plains and rich forests that had once existed in Mesopotamia, along with its wetlands, were utterly ruined after thousands of years of human agriculture and ended up as desert regions.
You could make excuses about the limits of agricultural technology back then, or unavoidable environmental conditions, but fundamentally, if humans hadn’t touched it, it would have been fine.
And at a deeper level, humans never needed to multiply their population that much in the first place, not to the point of farming for it.
Obsessed with reproduction and population growth, they wrecked the natural environment with farming and hunting, then after building civilization, suddenly decided they didn’t want to have children because of low birth rates and started wrecking even civilization itself—
“Hey. How far are you going to take this? Stop.”
Anyway, if we were being honest, the thing that had damaged Soon’s world the most was my people-killing Candies.
“Then why were you attacking civilization?”
That’s what happens when an invasive species gets in. But now that it was my land, I needed to adjust things a little.
For one thing, the enemy’s Life Score hadn’t actually been that low. Most of it had come from agriculture and population, but there had also been a fair number of wild animals and livestock.
More importantly, the enemy land came with mountain and hill terrain, and although it was a desert, it also had plain terrain where grasses grew reasonably well instead of just bare sand and bare gravel. There was even one terrain zone specialized purely for magic.
At this rate, maybe my next opponent wouldn’t be a desert dweller at all, but something like nomads from grassland country.
And there were an incredible number of birds. Were those even birds? They had membranes rather than feathers, so they looked more like bats or pterosaurs. Were they creatures from another world? Whatever. They had independent flight and occupied the avian niche, so I’d just call them bat-birds.
“The players of that game gave them a different name. They were a pretty flourishing species in that world’s ecosystem...”
Bat. Birds.
Do I need to care what the things I exterminated used to call them? In scholarship, the official name is the one assigned by the bastard who coined the scientific name, not whatever the natives called it.
“Ah. Right.”
Ecological niches were incredibly important in an ecosystem.
Those bat-birds had flourished in the abundant environment by feeding on overflowing grain and insects; some served as livestock, while others filled a role like hunting falcons.
And I’m explaining them in such detail because they were the only animal from that world that had survived the great offensive of my people-killing Candies.
Well, they could fly...
The people-killing Candy’s ultimate move—and its method of hunting—was the final body-slam of its life, but those things were small and could just leap upward, so the less accurate people-killing Candies had failed to hunt them.
And as a sort of last resort of resistance, those things had evolved to be able to eat Candies.
Ah. Wait, no, that wasn’t it. Since the Candies had evolved to concentrate all their mineral content in their outer shells, it seemed the birds could digest the jelly-muscle flesh just fine.
So they were like storks prying the meat out of shellfish and leaving the shell behind. Some of the birds had even learned to attract the Candies’ attention, make them charge, and then peck apart the Candy after all its muscles had been torn. They even passed that hunting method on to other members of their kind, and the birds rapidly cut down the Candy population. Smaller Candies that hadn’t fully matured yet were eaten by the birds.
“Interesting. If the enemy had just held out a little longer, or intentionally used divine power to force their evolution, then maybe...”
“Yogur-tosoth might have had to step in.”
“Ah. Right. True enough. There was that.”
That told me two things.
First, the enemy world’s biodiversity had already started increasing, and it was beginning to discover countermeasures to my ecosystem on its own.
Second, at least those bat-birds had the potential to hunt the Dessert Legion with high intelligence while still falling short of civilization.
Could I turn the bat-birds into members of the Dessert Legion? If I could make active use of them, seize control of the skies, and build a flying legion to support Yogur-tosoth...
“Ah.”
“What is it?”
I’d just had a more interesting idea.
Let’s make those bastards the Dessert Legion’s natural enemy instead.
“Huh?”
They weren’t bat-birds. That was a pretty bad name for things that were neither bats nor birds.
“Shameless.”
From now on, you are Sweet Tooth. The devourers of dessert. The mortal enemy of the Dessert Legion.
And beyond that, you would become the strongest evolutionary pressure of this age.
Author’s Note
Thank you for the support, hbin1126 and Mangsinchang-i!