Ruru Has a Lot of Money
Exactly one day after Ruru had started showing the true power of a farmer, Day Three arrived.
The server itself stayed open for every hour of the day except a six-hour window from two in the morning to eight—which, for someone like Lua who still had to go to school, could easily have meant falling behind. That was the ordinary way of looking at it.
But today was the weekend, and the weekend meant Lua didn’t have to set foot in school at all.
“Ruru is! Thump! Thump! Working!! Thump! Thump!! So hard again today~! Thump! Thump!!”
Ruru had even fired up a morning stream she would never normally have turned on, cheerfully singing while she farmed.
The loop itself never changed. Farm the crops, sell them, use the profits to finish enhancements while buying more seeds, then harvest even higher-grade produce and sell it for even more.
Repeating that cycle, her fortune began to balloon beyond all control.
Even the lower-grade crops that slipped through when the RNG failed her still sold for a surprisingly high price at the server shop, so the wealth kept piling up without pause.
And that wasn’t the end of it.
The two chefs had escalated their chicken game until they’d finally locked in a deal.
“We’ve agreed to buy at forty-five hundred.”
“You’ll sell to us, right?”
“Of course~”
Both of them had settled on buying everything from Ruru at four thousand five hundred each.
The reason it hadn’t dropped to four thousand was simple: if one of them undercut that far, the other would just snap everything up at forty-five hundred and monopolize Ruru’s entire harvest. Going any higher would have put the price too close to what the server shop already charged, so forty-five hundred was the natural compromise.
And Ruru—who had opened at a mere three thousand—had casually pitted the chefs against each other and steered the whole situation toward maximum profit for herself.
“Thank you~ Thank you so much~ Come again~!”
Ruru chirped a bright “Come again~!” and successfully offloaded every last crop she was holding.
Once the payment hit her account, she took a good long look at her funds…
“Mm! I think we’re about ready!”
…and suddenly declared that it was “about ready.”
The Ruru Corps felt a distinctly ominous chill at those words, but by then it was already too late.
“Casty-nim~ Castyyyy~”
Ruru called for the server admin, Casty, who came running at once.
“Yes, Ruru-nim.”
“Casty-nim, would it be possible to buy more land?”
“You can’t expand the plot you already have any further, so… you want to just buy more?”
“Yes!”
Casty began to look distinctly uncomfortable.
The truth was, Ruru’s wealth was already in a completely different league from everyone else’s.
Because of how RPG servers worked, dungeon raiders needed the buffs from food, which meant they had to rely on the chefs. The chefs, in turn, earned money selling their cooking and used that money to buy ingredients—a neat little circular economy they’d all been counting on.
Except the only person farming was Ruru, and she had been smarter than expected about pitting the chefs against each other and vacuuming up every coin in sight.
Other ingredient producers had competitors, so the pressure never quite got this extreme. Ruru, on the other hand, had locked down a monopoly almost overnight.
At this point she already had the foundation to seize the entire server economy and squeeze it however she liked the moment she decided to get serious.
Which was why Casty spoke to her with something uncomfortably close to a plea.
“Um… Ruru-nim.”
“Yes!”
“So… uh… well… right now, you have a lot of money.”
“I do, don’t I?”
“So… about that… um… you wouldn’t, you know, use that money to crash the economy or anything…”
“Aww~ Of course not~ I would never deliberately break it!”
“Ah. That’s a relief.”
“But~ oh, mind checking Concord for a second?”
Ruru suddenly said something to Casty through Concord that the viewers never heard, and Casty started laughing in disbelief.
“Ha… Ruru-nim, you’re scarier than I thought.”
“Come on, where else are you going to find a broadcaster this cute and adorable and pretty~?”
Casty was left with no good answer, while the chat flooded with nothing but question marks.
In the end, Casty had no choice but to accept Ruru’s not-quite-a-proposal.
“Alright. I’ll allow that much.”
“Thank you~ In that case! I’m buying a whooole lot of land right now!”
“Yes, Ruru-nim.”
Ruru poured a huge chunk of her fortune into real estate.
Not city plots—several massive empty lots out in the open.
Naturally, she dug into those lots and started turning them into fields with shovel and sickle.
By the time she came back to herself, she had successfully converted both lots into farmland.
“Alright then… shall we start up some tenant farming, everyone?”
From that single line, the viewers could roughly guess what Casty had just approved.
Permission to run tenant farmers. That was what Ruru had extracted from Casty.
Even then, though, our viewers still had no idea how far Ruru was actually looking.
She had zero intention of stopping at mere landlord. Ruru’s dream sat somewhere much higher—somewhere vast.
The newer streamers were doing everything they could to survive as latecomers.
On a server this big, you needed to stand out somehow—or at least show good chemistry—to leave a good impression on viewers.
So the newcomers tried to attach themselves to the current big names as much as possible: run raids together, trade favors, show off that precious chemistry with a famous streamer.
And to people like that…
“Recruiting members for the Farmers’ Union~!”
…Ruru’s Farmers’ Union looked like an awfully good offer.
Before Ruru started, there hadn’t been a single farmer on the server. Once she took the job, she locked down near-monopoly control over crops.
Leveraging that monopoly, she was already recognized as the single richest streamer on the server.
Ruru—already a top-tier name among Korean VTubers—was also storming ahead inside the server itself. Under those conditions, joining the Farmers’ Union she was recruiting for was an extremely attractive option.
“I’ll do it!”
“Me too!”
“Is it okay if I join as well?”
“Yes, yes~ Come on in, everyone~”
Ruru handed the new members of her Farmers’ Union high-grade seeds only her rank could obtain, and even lent them land on top of that.
They would keep fifty percent of the sales revenue; Ruru would take the other half.
At a glance, it didn’t look like a great deal for the streamers becoming tenant farmers. You could fairly call her a predatory boss for skimming a full fifty percent fee.
Looked at another way, though, it was an enormous win for those same streamers. Why?
Because the absolute size of the money they could earn was staggering for people who had only just joined the server.
Frankly, even streamers who had planned to pick a completely different job were saying things like…
“Um, Ruru-nim, I’m not actually a farmer, but could I still do tenant farming like a part-time gig?”
…and asking to become tenants themselves.
From Ruru’s perspective, it was perfect. The more tenant farmers she had, the higher the output and the faster the money came in—and because those tenants were all splitting a limited pool of goods, she could kick the ladder out from under the latecomers at the same time.
It looked like a win-win, but the one who kept climbing was always Ruru.
Having calculated that far in advance, she began running the Farmers’ Union in earnest…
…and by the end of Day Three, she had almost fully recovered the fortune she’d spent buying all that land.
There was one minor snag along the way, though…
“Ah, the seed grade dropped again.”
“Yeah, when we harvested it went down.”
“Hmm~ Then we’ll have to put a daily limit on it. I’ll need to harvest myself if we want high-grade seeds to keep coming out.”
The seed-grade problem. When Ruru harvested, the system correction produced high-grade crops and high-grade seeds together. Her tenant farmers didn’t have farmer ranks high enough to match her, so even when the crops themselves came out high-grade, the seeds did not.
In the end, Ruru’s tenant-farming project became limited to a fixed number of people per day—and even picked up a reputation as premium part-time work…
By the start of Day Four, Ruru had truly become the master of wealth on this server.
“Alright~ Then~ shall we move on to the next thing?”
And from there, Ruru’s dream was only just beginning.
The dream of Golden King Ruru, who meant to conquer this server in a whole new way.