The Farmers' Movement
The so-called "Ruru Fight," hosted by Ruru herself, continued to thrive in spectacular fashion.
Inside that arena, everyone from Dig Craft specialists who prided themselves on their mechanical skill, to variety streamers, to former pro gamers had shown up to compete.
As a result, Ruru's earnings climbed higher by the day, and she funneled every coin of it into aggressive expansion.
Barely a week after the server had opened, she had already reached a point where she could seize the game's entire economy by the throat.
"Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! This is me! This is Ruru!"
Her nose rose higher with every passing day, and her viewers could only watch in open-mouthed horror.
For the record, that "gambling den" was a feature of Ruru's arena system: spectators could put money on which of the two duelists would win. Ruru skimmed only a commission, then split the rest evenly among the winners — except that the pot had ballooned into a massive pool with the viewers themselves piling in, and the money involved had grown even larger as a result.
Later on, things escalated to the point where viewers were donating with messages like "Throw more money on it!" and actively puppeteering the streamers. That was the level we were at.
Ruru giggled as she looked over the next matchup.
"Ooooh, Fantasy Live fans are gonna love this next fight~"
Indeed. The next bout was a quarterfinal: base-item only.
The competitors? None other than Aris and Elia.
Fantasy Live's two strongest controllers, fighting with nothing but starter gear. It was a matchup worth looking forward to — and because both of them were quietly famous for their mechanics, a truly enormous amount of money had been staked nearly fifty-fifty.
"Look at all that money on the line! That's all my money! Mine!!"
Ruru cackled outright as she savored the moment, and her viewers began to tremble at the sheer mania of it.
I was one of them. I'd known Ruru had a streak of madness in her, but I hadn't realized it ran this deep.
I also hadn't realized her obsession with money — her sheer love of the stuff — went this far.
For the moment I still knew it was an act… but a little "what if?" had started to creep in at the edges.
That her performance was good enough to make me wonder "what if" at all. I wanted to leave it at that and move on.
Meanwhile, Elia and Aris's duel came to an end.
Just once, Elia slipped — and Aris drove into the opening. Aris took the win by a single hit; Elia lost by the narrowest of margins.
"Aaaaaah…! Aaaughhh…! Why did I have to lose that?! Why me?!"
"Good fight, Elia~"
"Tch… senpai, how are you even that good?"
"This is what this senpai can do."
"I won't lose next time!"
"Sure. Come at me again whenever."
The other streamers cheered for the two of them, between whom a fresh little friendship had already begun to bloom.
Up to that point, everything had gone perfectly smoothly. Smoothly for Ruru's economic plunder, too.
Even while the duels were in full swing, some streamers were still hard at work out in Ruru's fields; others were buying her crops and cooking up new dishes. Still others had already set out on adventures with food made from her produce, and yet more had applied for part-time work in hopes of becoming her next batch of tenant farmers.
Bit by bit, the game had reached a state where things ran a little awkwardly without Ruru in it — and she, for her part, was calmly leveling her farmer class and dumping points into every skill on the tree.
Looking at the absurd fortune piling up, she spoke with absolute conviction.
"As expected, whether it's real life or a game, money makes money."
By building a gambling den on top of everything else, Ruru had driven her own stock through the roof, and it looked as though no one would ever be able to stop her economic encroachment.
Right up until the day someone calculated exactly how much money she had, that is.
The next day, Ruru fired up her stream as usual — and was greeted by something that left her thoroughly bewildered.
Evil Landlord Ruru, Step Down!
A poster reading "Evil Landlord Ruru, Step Down!" had appeared before her eyes.
"Huh? Evil landlord…?!"
Flustered, Ruru took stock of the situation — and once she did, the picture came into focus all too clearly.
At this point, Ruru was essentially doing nothing but handing out seeds while her money kept multiplying. On top of that, ever since she'd opened the betting floor at the arena, she'd been vacuuming up cash at a staggering rate.
As a result, she was claiming an ever-larger share of the server's economy — and the argument was that a redistribution of wealth was in order.
"Do you know how hard I've worked for this…!"
Ruru shot back, but there was one point in their case she simply couldn't refute.
Namely, the carefully engineered profit structure she herself had built — one in which she could only ever come out ahead.
She had settled accounts with her tenant farmers at a proportional rate… but only at the very beginning. As crop grades climbed, Ruru's own revenue had soared, while the pay she handed her tenants wasn't scaled to a percentage at all. She simply nudged the original flat rate up by a little.
In other words: the amount Ruru earned kept growing steadily, while her tenant farmers' pay barely budged.
Until now, the money had still been good enough for both new players and early-server veterans that no one had made a fuss. But inflation had finally reached the point where you could make more doing something other than tenant farming — and that was when the problem erupted.
"Uuuugh…! After everything I've done for them…!"
She said she'd treated them well, but if you really broke it down, she'd been generous in the sense of "giving the audience a good show." She hadn't exactly been showering the participating streamers in sweetheart deals.
In the end, the farmer-class players who'd been working as her tenants declared a strike — and the non-farmer streamers who'd been drawing day wages as hired hands announced they were walking out with them.
"Uh… uh-oh…?"
"We want fair wages!"
"Fair wages!!"
"Raise our pay alreadyyyyy!"
"Give us the moneyyyyy!"
"Everyone, please, calm do—"
"We said give us the money! The money!!"
"At this rate we'd rather go do something else!"
Faced with the furious pushback, Ruru trembled and shrieked at the top of her lungs.
"Ruru already gave them plenty! Plenty!! She raised it by a whole twenty percent!!!"
For the record, the viewers all knew the truth: yes, Ruru had paid out more money — but the person who'd profited the most from that arrangement was still Ruru herself.
Things escalated all the way into a full-blown fight over whether or not to strike, and word of it eventually reached the ears of the server admins.
"Hmm, hmm… I see…"
"Never thought I'd live to see a labor dispute inside a game."
"A labor dispute… this is basically the Donghak Peasant Revolution."
"I wouldn't go so far as to call it the Donghak Peasant Revolution. Ruru hasn't been that exploitative."
"Factor in the inflation and yeah, this is exploitation."
Debate flew back and forth among the admins, and no easy decision presented itself.
Honestly, none of them had seen this coming.
A combination of a minor design misstep on their part and a misread of the players' class preferences had let Ruru construct a complete crop monopoly — and within that monopoly, she had demonstrated an overwhelming ability to print money.
At the same time, it was hard to say either side was clearly in the wrong.
From Ruru's perspective, she had at least raised the pay from what she'd been offering before. From the workers' side, early- and mid-server players had been able to put in a day or two of work and walk away with enough starting capital to grow very quickly.
A week in, there were even strategy guides telling every new streamer to start by working as one of Ruru's tenants. That was how good it had been.
Conversely, from the tenants' point of view, rising inflation meant the subjective value of Ruru's farm work no longer looked so great — so the fact that Ruru herself had been raking in ever more money within that same inflationary spiral made her feel like the villain of the piece.
Neither side was truly guilty of any great crime. In that situation, the only option was to make the wisest call possible.
"We'll set a rate adjusted for inflation and compensate the difference. This is mostly on us for the design mistake."
Admin compensation. That was the best move available to them.
On top of that, Ruru would have to start settling with future tenants on a proportional basis again, the way she had at the start, if she wanted to stay competitive.
It was the only solution that minimized Ruru's losses while also quieting the discontented streamers to a manageable degree.
And as I found out later…
…All of it had been Lua's design.
Even if the whole thing had played out in a fun atmosphere, I'd messaged her because I thought Ruru — Lua — might still feel a little wronged. Instead she was laughing.
On top of that, public opinion seemed to have rolled with it as nothing more than a cheerful, entertaining bit of drama.
…This girl was genuinely unhinged. In more ways than one.