Chapter 131: Special Business
Chapter 131: Special Business
It had been a little over a month since TLF Online officially launched. Jamie, one of the open beta players, had become a merchant.
Among the open beta players, those who played diligently had all settled into their own positions to some extent. After passing through four generations, their character levels had risen beyond the beginner stage, they had accumulated experience and knowledge about the game, and above all, they had gathered a decent amount of capital.
Normally, players used that money to buy expensive companions, expensive equipment, and expensive magic in order to tackle higher-level hunting grounds. But thanks to this game’s high degree of freedom and intricate systems, there were many viable playstyles besides hunting, and Jamie chose trade, which had interested him from the beginning.
At first, he conducted business in the standard way.
He searched through information he discovered personally while traveling and through communities to find routes with worthwhile price differences and moved back and forth along them.
In the beginning, since he did not have much capital, he did not buy his own wagon or hire escorts. Instead, he simply bought as much cargo as he could carry and rode on the wagons of transport operators.
[Heading to Cabellyn!]
[Safe transport!]
[Calpo Shoulder Guild escorts available!]
Riding other people’s wagons was surprisingly fun. In the earliest days, the field had been full of sloppy operators and scammers, but as everyone gained experience and learned, and as smarter people built systems, it gradually became fairly convincing.
First of all, fares gradually became standardized by calculating costs according to weight. Reliable guild marks became common, and even the escorts working alongside transport operators were generally trustworthy hires.
Of course, scammers still existed. There were also new operators and small-scale businesses entering the market with lower prices, along with people who accepted extra risk by removing escort options altogether, so the industry remained noisy instead of becoming completely fixed.
At first Jamie also used cheap operators, but after being scammed and going through several close calls, he started using only highly reliable transporters.
[Ah! You came again?]
[Yeah. Twelve hundred pounds to Uzen.]
If you used them frequently, you naturally became acquainted and turned into a regular customer, making things even safer while also earning slight discounts on fares. The transporters quickly realized that even if they charged a bit less, it was more profitable to keep customers who used their services often and paid high fees.
Of course, the people who stubbornly refused to lower prices even slightly were quickly weeded out, so rather than everyone realizing it, it was more accurate to say that only the ones who realized it survived.
The normal route for merchants was to continue trading like this, accumulate money, expand their scale, or buy their own wagons and directly hire escorts.
But Jamie felt frustrated.
He thought the transport operators were taking too much of his money. So he started searching for another method.
‘Not that I’m going to become a peddler.’
Some people hated paying transport fees so much that they carried only what they could personally hold and traveled on foot. But doing that reduced the amount of goods they could distribute and greatly increased travel time, which actually lowered profits.
It was only worthwhile for people trading for fun or those with extremely small starting capital.
‘Is there really no other way?’
Just as he was becoming disappointed from failing to find the answer he wanted, he happened to discover a post on WET’s TLF merchant community.
<Shit. Almost got killed by monsters while crossing the mountain.>
At first glance, it just looked like a story about getting caught by aggressive monsters in mountainous terrain. But this post was in the merchant community, and the following discussion used suspiciously meaningful words like “cargo,” “enemy nation,” and “trading partner.”
It felt like there was something there, so he searched through the poster’s other posts and looked up those keywords. As a result, he uncovered another kind of business merchants had recently started attempting.
Smuggling.
As expected of a game from the mid-1990s, this game looked unimpressive at first glance with its 2D graphics and relatively low resolution.
But instead, it possessed intricate systems and a high degree of freedom.
Because of that, countless situations emerged, and the results varied wildly depending on how players responded to them.
This game had a system called World Events. It generated disasters or incidents occurring in the fantasy world according to conditions and probabilities, naturally introducing variables into the world even without constant manual updates from the operators.
It was a system previously applied in MFN and TLF2, featuring events such as “Demon King Descends,” “Hero Appears,” “Divine Revelation,” and “Mad Dragon Emerges.”
But even outside those World Events, the results generated by the constantly running simulation greatly influenced players.
Among those, the biggest was naturally war.
Borders changed because of it, and since characters possessed nationalities, players could suddenly find themselves driven out of cities and regions where they had previously operated.
And this had an even greater effect on players engaged in commerce than on ordinary users.
Once a region became an enemy nation, the probability of being attacked by NPCs there increased significantly. Military NPCs almost always attacked first. Moreover, killing enemy nationals carried no penalty and instead raised honor, meaning other players could attack them as well.
On top of that, nobles from the border regions established checkpoints and barricades while stationing soldiers there, making passage extremely difficult.
Under such circumstances, ordinary merchants would usually give up trading with cities that had become enemy territory.
But people all thought differently.
Some likely hated being blocked and tried forcing their way through out of stubbornness, while others calculated that although exchanges were nearly cut off, the actual physical distance remained short and there were very few competitors, making it a major advantage.
‘But if the roads are blocked, how are they getting through?’
Jamie investigated how these smugglers crossed borders. It would have been best to directly meet smugglers and ask, but smugglers obviously did not walk around with signs on their foreheads, nor would they welcome more competitors.
And after reading around a bit, he realized these smugglers were extremely cautious.
Which made sense. Since they traded with enemy nations, they were basically treasure goblins without penalty protections to the opposing side. If they got caught, they would immediately be killed and have all their cargo stolen, so caution was unavoidable.
Apparently, there were already many such cases.
But in the end, this was still a game, not real life-or-death danger. Besides, unless they revealed specific information like character names or trading regions, casually sharing stories online did not realistically endanger them.
Thanks to that, after digging around for a while, Jamie learned the method.
‘What? That’s it?’
It was simpler than expected. They simply traveled through rough terrain without checkpoints. After all, checkpoints were mostly built along roads.
Naturally so. Checkpoints consumed resources, and the number of soldiers was limited, so they had no choice but to focus on high-traffic areas.
Naturally, wagons could not be used off-road, so they used horses or donkeys instead.
‘But doesn’t this reduce cargo volume too much?’
Horses and donkeys could carry more than people, but compared to wagons, the difference was huge.
At most, nearly ten times less.
The answer to that problem was also simpler than expected. They simply carried products with very high profit margins and repeatedly traveled short distances.
In truth, this was like saying that studying hard was the way to get good exam scores. The basic principle was easy, but actually putting it into practice was difficult.
‘Oh! Come to think of it, this place is inland, isn’t it?’
Fortunately, Jamie found a decent target without much difficulty.
It was a city called Tayron, and Jamie judged that salt would sell well there. It was inland, and there were no nearby salt mines, meaning it relied on outside supply. Meanwhile, the Alsran Kingdom, which had recently absorbed Tayron, was not particularly good at salt production, and the land route connecting to Tayron was long and narrow, making distribution conditions poor.
He also checked internet and in-game communities, and things aligned closely with his expectations.
[Salt prices are skyrocketing.]
[But the route is absolutely awful.]
[Feels like labor costs alone would wipe out profits.]
[Doesn’t that place have any local specialties?]
Of course, this situation would not last forever. But it was enough if he made profits while it lasted.
Incidentally, this game had required resources for villages and cities. If those requirements were not met, prices naturally increased, encouraging player trade caravans. Naturally, each region also produced its own resources.
For now, production amounts were simply fixed values assigned to regions, but future updates planned to add systems for developing them.
In any case, after finding a source of income, Jamie loaded up on salt and headed for Tayron.
Traveling through rough, sparsely populated terrain while remaining alert for soldiers, bandits, and monsters was fairly nerve-racking.
But it was not as difficult or dangerous as he had imagined. Without incident, he passed beyond the checkpoint regions and reached the vicinity of Tayron.
After learning about smuggling, Jamie had several questions. One of them was how they sold their cargo even after risking their lives to reach enemy cities.
After all, when factions became hostile in this game, players could no longer trade at shops in those cities or villages.
But even that was not a particularly difficult problem.
[Goldblood, I’m here.]
[Ah! You came? Just a moment.]
After sending a whisper, a player soon appeared from the Tayron side.
He was a local merchant.
In other words, a broker.
Inside the game there were enemy nations and allies, but at the end of the day, it was still just a game. To players, profit mattered more than fictional nationalities.
Of course, some profits had to be shared. But this broker named Goldblood did not take an especially large cut.
Roughly ten percent of the profits.
Broker work involved some risk, but it was so simple that there was no shortage of competitors, meaning they were not in a position to act arrogantly.
Jamie focused less on the commission and more on staying wary of the other party. Since they belonged to enemy nations, if the broker deceived him and brought allies, Jamie would be robbed without being able to resist.
[It was a good trade.]
[Yes. Thank you.]
Fortunately, it seemed Goldblood had no intention of collecting his retirement payout today. Jamie quietly sighed in relief.
Because this was a game, no matter how secretly people operated, things could not remain hidden forever. Betrayal was something you could only do once.
And to even work as a broker, you needed at minimum the ability to leave the city and handle another player’s cargo. That meant, like Jamie, you needed at least a fourth-playthrough max-level character along with horses or donkeys. Freshly made characters could not do this.
The cost of scamming was too high.
So it was not about trusting people. It was about trusting the situation.
Afterward, Jamie purchased iron ore through Goldblood.
Tayron was rich in iron mines. That was probably the reason the Alsran Kingdom had conquered Tayron in the first place.
He brought the iron ore back, sold it, and earned profits again.
Honestly, for something grandly called smuggling, the profits were not actually that large compared to major merchants openly trading along the highways.
But relative to the scale of capital Jamie employed, the profits were substantial.
Still, even if Jamie earned more money, he had no intention of expanding the business.
At first, he had intended to keep being a merchant, but after seeing other gamers on the community boards improving their specs, conquering difficult hunting grounds, and actively playing the game, he found himself wanting to do those things too.