The Visible Big Hand
Haven's community was packed with users who all but lived there. Plenty of them had turned the game into a trade and made their living inside it, and what marked them was simple: they bragged about every coin they'd earned and drank deep on the superiority that came with it. Just as many clung to those earners, flattering and fawning, desperate to squeeze out whatever scrap of information they could.
Supply and demand. Where the two overlapped, the Trading Board was born.
Anything worth making money on these days?
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Naturally, the place had been frantic from the instant Kim Siwoo appeared. Nowhere was that truer than during the exchange-rate panic.
Tens of millions of dollars had slammed in at a single stroke, and over a few days the flood climbed as high as a hundred million. With that much real cash pouring into the market all at once, the rate between Haven currency and real-world money sank as low as 2.5 to 1. A few weeks on it had clawed its way back to 2.8, but it refused to climb any farther without a fight. Expectation has a gravity of its own. So long as Kim Siwoo kept playing Haven, he would keep cashing out—and because of that, the exchange rate would rise.
In truth, actually pocketing a spread off that gap was close to impossible. At best you moved pocket change through back channels and skimmed a profit equal to the difference in fees, and even that only held up to a point. Past a certain sum, a large transfer with no explanation brought the tax office knocking. Push it any further and you needed accounts under other people's names, and the users professional enough to make money even going that far could be counted on one hand.
Even so, the exchange rate mattered to anyone trying to do business in here.
Stockpile Haven money while it was cheap, multiply it in-game, and sell once the exchange rate climbed—the profit that came back was obscene. And for the users who haunted the auction house every single day, Kim Siwoo's stream was no different from an open-book exam.
Lowest-Grade Essence was the most heavily listed item among all the essences. The price wasn't bad, but that was exactly why plenty of people never bothered putting it up—too much of a hassle for what it paid. For that price to actually move, the listings really did have to get ripped out all at once. Kim Siwoo was live right now, and even after he bought a hundred thousand of them the price had climbed only a few dollars. Considering the stock had vanished in a single stroke, it barely counted as a rise at all.
Even so, the user who had announced his call while playing at foresight shoved ahead with pure stubbornness. Trading was faith. The belief that you would win was what led you down the road to a jackpot, and the less anyone else was willing to do it, the bigger that jackpot grew.
A little later, his foresight paid out enormous.
By the time Kim Siwoo's stream was winding down, a huge share of the listings had already vanished and the price sat at one hundred and thirty dollars. Plenty of users were late climbing aboard, but by then the Trading Board had turned skeptical.
It would rise. Just not yet. The price in front of them was nothing but foam. Right around the time they settled on that, something happened.
Somewhere around six hundred thousand listings had been left, slowly filling back in—and then, before anyone noticed, they were gone.
About six hundred thousand had evaporated in a single stroke. With the listings wiped out, the price broke past two hundred dollars. It wasn't a bug, obviously. Everything listed up through the two-hundred-dollar mark had simply sold.
An average of one-fifty was only a rough guess, but six hundred thousand at that price was ninety million dollars. Listings poured back in afterward, yet the price never dipped under one-eighty, and they sold nearly as fast as they appeared. Nothing was moving in a single bulk buy, so the big hand—presumed to be Kim Siwoo—didn't seem to be purchasing anymore. Even so, the Trading Board understood.
The Trading Board sucked their thumbs in bitter regret.
There was nothing left on the auction house, and as the rumor began to creep out, even the fresh listings got swept away. People said this kind of trading was no different from the stock market. The ants—right down to the users who jumped aboard the moment they smelled money. Buying now was an extremely stupid thing to do.
The Trading Board could be careless, and they failed often, but these were people who ate their meals and then did nothing but stare at the auction house. When it came to a long view and reading the flow, nobody could touch them. Sure enough, from the next day the incoming volume started to thicken, and about twenty-four hours after the incident another three or four hundred thousand listings had piled up. The price settled in the one-fifties.
Tomorrow. I'll scoop them up tomorrow.
The moment the thought landed, it happened again.
Even the newly listed stock vanished to the last unit, and the price shot into the two-fifties. That wasn't all.
It happened in an instant. Every essence in the auction house—every last one—dried up to nothing.
Not only the Trading Board, but every user in every community who had been watching from the sidelines understood. This was not simply one user buying the materials he needed and making a mess along the way. And it was not something you could have sat back and enjoyed.
Of course they had assumed that Kim Siwoo, currently level 12, would only need Lowest-Grade Essence. Even at level 20 you still used the lowest grade; you didn't step up to Low-Grade Essence until level 30. No matter how fast the hunting went, getting there would take more than a month. Two, if it ran long. So they had gotten complacent. When the time came, they could just buy. They hadn't given the rankers a single thought either. Who would have imagined that someone, overnight, would buy out materials that might not even be needed a year from now, off in some distant future?
The listings would fill back in, of course. But the price had already risen, and the dead stock rotting in the auction house was gone. The very person who had caused it had even manufactured a trend—a sudden fashion for needing essence.
Most users, watching Kim Siwoo's stream, found themselves thinking the same thing. Maybe I should roll my skills too. See if I can pull even one S.
There was no need to force a reroll on the skills they already had. It would cost some money, but there was a sure way to unlock a skill slot, and once it was open you could roll a new skill into it. That cost, on essences alone, had climbed by an absurd amount.
A bigger problem was waiting apart from all of that.
A user who had been to the Magic Tower laid out just how serious it was.
Essence dropped constantly, hunted every day by countless users. Magic powder, though, was produced by the Magic Tower's mages, and there were only so many of them. It took materials. It took time.
No one had put a name to whoever bought it, but not a single person was in any doubt.
They knew whose visible big hand had reached across the auction house and the Magic Tower.