Chapter 54. The Power of Money (2)

Title – ‘Shadow Duke of the Desert’

Grade – Special

Description – A special title only possessed by the master of the Hiddenline in the desert. This title belongs to the master of the Hiddenline, and will naturally disappear once qualifications are lost.

Effects – [Prefix : Allows the user to create a doll out of sand in the same appearance. However, it does not work against beings with special detection skills, and beings of a higher level. Also, it disappears after receiving a certain amount of damage. The sand puppet acts as a clone, and it can move as the user wishes, and can even see, speak, and hear through the puppet. The duration is 2 hours, and the cooldown is 16 hours.] [Suffix : Allows the user to generate a sand armor to protect the body. The sand armor can be used in many ways. The duration is 5 minutes, and the cooldown is 10 minutes.] [Constant effect : Desert Mirage – dodge rate increases by 20%.]

The Shadow Duke title was very good like the other one.

This was even better than the previous one in regards to battle. Of course, the two simply couldn’t be compared just like that. In the end, both of them were very good.

‘If I get the items right, I might get a ridiculous dodge rate setting.’

Even though Sanghyuk had come back to the past, he did not imagine that he would be able to acquire all these things. But somehow, his dodge rate kept increasing.

Currently, Sanghyuk’s dodge rate was even higher than the so-called ‘professional’ dodge-tankers. On top of that, he had great battle senses and had the confidence to dodge better than anyone.

‘Even the heavens are helping me. Let’s reach the peak of dodge rates since I’m here!’

Sanghyuk decided that he would focus on dodge-related items or skills in the future.

After checking everything, Sanghyuk started using the money.

First, he hired ten more merchant NPCs, and 7 of them were C-rank, 2 B-rank, and 1 A-rank.

The C-rank merchant NPCs were to reside near the auction or the commissioned sales store like the original 6 C-rank merchants and buy the items that Sanghyuk had set.

Sanghyuk was planning to hoard all the items even from small villages as well.

And to the 2 B-rank merchants, he made them open a store in Falcon City and Tune respectively and manage them.

These two stores weren’t stores that sold items.

These stores…… specialized in loaning money with item collaterals.

The minor things under 100 thousand gold would be taken care by the B-rank merchants and the items over that price point would be handled by Sanghyuk himself.

There was naturally an interest, and the possession of the item would be transferred away from the borrower if he/she could not repay the original sum + interest within a set time.

Since every contract was done through a scroll of oath, there was no possibility of a scam. Since the scroll of oath was only 1 gold each, they could be bought in bulk without any issues.

Actually, Sanghyuk wanted to operate something like a gambling store rather than a loan business. However, after consulting with the merchants association, he found out that Dimensional Travelers could not operate adult facilities such as a gambling store.

In other words, the cream of the crop was monopolized by the developers.

That was why he went with the loan business instead.

Like that, two stores named ‘Gold Mountain’ simultaneously appeared in Falcon and Tune respectively.

Sanghyuk was aiming for two things with these two stores. One was to earn gold by receiving interest, and the second was to ‘legally’ swallow jackpot items buried under the sand.

It was actually quite easy to swallow these buried treasures. He just had to lend more money than what the people wanted.

Normally, the user then would not be able to pay back in full. If they did, then he would just induce the user to trade in some other way.

The two B-rank users possessed a passive skill called ‘merchant’s eye’, and could judge the real value of items much more correctly than most users, albeit not as correctly as Sanghyuk. That was why Sanghyuk would have almost nothing to do in the store if items below 100 thousand gold in value were handled by them.

As for funds, he had more than 100 million, so he didn’t need to be worried about that.

As for the A-rank merchant, Sanghyuk left him the overall management of the Golden Mountain merchant guild. Taking items bought by C-rank merchants and resupplying them with gold was done by Sanghyuk until now, but that changed this time.

The name of this A-rank NPC was ‘Maori’, and he did what he was worth.

If his business became bigger, then he may have to leave more things for Maori to take care of, but right now, there weren’t that many things to do.

Perhaps due to that, Maori cleaned the warehouse or helped with B-rank NPCs in his spare time.

An A-rank NPC’s AI was definitely different than the rest.

“Do that as I ordered you…… Oh! You need to extend the contract period for the vendor NPC in Genesis Lake. Please take care of that.”

“Understood.”

Maori nodded his head as he replied to Sanghyuk.

If work regarding the Hiddenline was taken care of by Ilya, work regarding Golden Mountain merchant guild was taken care of by Maori.

Right now, the other users didn’t even know that NPCs could be used this way. In Sanghyuk’s previous life as well, it was only 4~5 years into the game that users started utilizing NPCs properly.

Sanghyuk was ahead of the era. This was one natural ability that he gained after returning in time.

Having left most of the stuff to Maori, Sanghyuk felt that it was about time he focused on his own growth.

Of course, he didn’t slack out on his leveling during this time either. However, leveling up wasn’t everything in growth, and that leveling up was starting to get difficult as well.

A quadra-soul……. No matter how much of the penalty he negated using numerous bonus effects, the amount of karma required to level up was increasingly higher the more he leveled up.

Although the one-soul users were feeling the limits of one Ancient Knowledge and were being left behind, the gap left behind by them was mostly being filled by double-soul users.

Double-souls were relatively good in terms of balance, and most new users were choosing Double souls right now.

They split the two Ancient Knowledge into something like one main job and one sub job.

Due to that, most of the megaphone users looked for ‘Main(XXXX), Sub(XXXX)’ nowadays.

However, once time passed, this would change again into something like a combination rather than two separate concepts. The time users started looking for the best combination of Ancient Knowledge would also be around here.

It was definitely not easy to activate a positive synergy with four Ancient Knowledge like what Sanghyuk did.

Of course, Sanghyuk wasn’t ‘complete’ either. He still had to raise ‘Bladeknight’ into ‘Shadow Knight’, and he still had to raise the proficiency in elementalism and cards.

Only Giant’s Blood, which was complete from the get-go, he didn’t have much to do with.

Then was leveling and Ancient Knowledge all he had to care about? Of course not. True growth combined leveling, Ancient Knowledge, items and titles.

Currently, Sanghyuk had a lot of good titles. However, he didn’t have a lot that he could use in battle. Once some time passed, competition would start rising for good, and it would be better for him to fill in the gaps while he still could.

‘Inferno Pyramid. Let’s conquer that place!’

Inferno Pyramid was the smallest dungeon in scale in Hellfire Desert but was the highest in difficulty.

Naturally, there were no users, parties, or even guilds that cleared this dungeon.

From what Sanghyuk gathered through the Hiddenline. Only the first named monster, ‘Black Mummy’ was barely conquered among the 7 named monsters.

The guild that conquered the Black Mummy was the guild Terrícŭlum led by Kun.

Kun was Finnish, and Terrícŭlum was strangely comprised only of Finnish people.

They had considerable achievements in regards to large-scale raids, albeit not as much in other fields.

Sanghyuk also knew of Terrícŭlum very well. Terrícŭlum was probably going to keep being reputed as the top in raid contents for quite a while.

‘Giant’s Cave marking bus business is almost finished now, so I think it’s about time I give up on that…… the problem is the contents that will replace that, right?’

He did not plan to end BJ Gale’s streams just yet. In fact, he was planning to make it even bigger. He was planning to stop streaming the Giant’s Cave marking bus, which users got bored of by now, and gather viewers with new contents.

‘Let’s go with raid contents just like I planned.’

Once he declared that he would conquer the Inferno Pyramid solo, then the number of users would only gather.

Of course, it would be impossible for even Sanghyuk to clear the Inferno Pyramid by himself with all of his stats shaved down by 30%.

At best, he would be able to kill the first and second bosses. However, these two bosses would give him plenty of stream material.

‘Black Mummy…… and the giant fire scorpion. I can procure enough contents for streaming with these two.’

He was planning for new contents for his streams.

He did not forget to leave out anything in his plan.

***

Inferno Pyramid.

This was a stereotypical 7-man raid dungeon with maximum of 7 members in a party.

Raid dungeons were separated into 7-man, 14-man, 21-man, and 28-man, and the most common were 7-man and 14-man. 21 and 28 were quite rare.

Of course, the difficulty of the dungeon didn’t have much to do with the maximum number of party members. It was just that as the number increased, it was more likely for a user to make a mistake. The difficulty of the dungeon, though, didn’t correspond to the number of entrants.

Inferno Pyramid was only a 7-man dungeon, but its difficulty was the highest in Hellfire Desert.

Kun and Terrícŭlum weren’t headbutting against that dungeon for nothing. Befitting of guys crazy for raids, they wanted to clear the Inferno Pyramid faster than anyone.

By now, the first kill bonus was no secret among the high-ranking users. In fact, there was even a rumor among the low-ranking users as well.

Once the first kill bonus was known, everyone started to go mad in hunting for named monsters. However, the good ones were already taken.

Inferno Pyramid was one of the few places that were left unconquered.

Sanghyuk had experience with the Inferno Pyramid in his previous life. Although not as much as the Giant’s Cave, he experienced enough to be proficient in its mechanics.

So, he knew very well about what skills the 7 named monsters used, and what to do in order to conquer them.

He combined new fusion cards as well and set himself up for conquering the Inferno Pyramid.

Others would take a long time just to get prepared, but Sanghyuk would just buy anything he lacked with gold and could prepare within a few hours.

After finishing his preparations in the game, he logged out and started getting ready for streaming.

[BJ Gale’s Inferno Pyramid walkthrough. Starts 7p.m. today.]

He put up a notice in his own channel in Pu TV, and put up a video footage from Blake’s battles.

The current time was 4 p.m.

After sleeping for two hours, he planned to have fun in this raid he hadn’t done for a long time.