Golden Experience
Chapter 23: “The Future Direction of the In-Game Economy (Maybe)”

Hakuma was left in charge of the tanuki’s meat; Rare told him the wolves could just use whatever they needed for food, then she and the catkin girls crawled back into the ant nest.

They returned to the (provisional) queen’s room, where Sugaru, who was completely thawed, and Remy were waiting together. Marion immediately went to brag to Remy about being able to use inventory. While watching them out of the corner of her eye, Rare dumped a bunch of XP into Remy’s and Sugaru’s INT stats.

“How about you try it too, Remy? Marion, why don’t you teach her how.”

It was a good opportunity to see if Remy could successfully access her inventory with Marion’s instructions. At first, the expression she made screamed “what the hell is this girl talking about?”, but after seeing Marion manipulate her inventory a number of times, it immediately clicked for her. The hypothesis that “anyone could explain how to use the inventory” seemed increasingly likely. Furthermore, seeing someone use it before their very eyes was probably also necessary for learning how to use it. If those were the only conditions, then it would be possible to learn just from watching an explanation from afar. If that were the case, then pretty soon, as more players interacted with more NPCs, there was a chance that the number of NPCs who could use the inventory would increase.

If that came to pass, what kind of effect would that have?

First, the logistics industry would collapse. Just talking about luggage, having even a single capable person would be more than sufficient, so horse carriage demand would probably drop like a rock. After carriages, anything related to logistics would suffer irreparable damage, transportation costs would fall dramatically, and even costs of living would decrease. It would probably cause historic deflation.

Fresh ingredients could be transported to any location regardless of the distance. Any related services that were valued due to their speed would lose that value. Foodstuffs as a whole would drop in price as a result, aside from any that were naturally limited in availability.

Next, the efficiency of mercenaries hunting monsters would skyrocket. Currently, they had to butcher their prey on the spot and only carry what little they could back to town to sell. But now, they could bring the entire corpse back with them. Because there was no cost to transporting food and water, there would be no need to pace military campaigns, so no matter how long the journey, no matter how much they hunted, logistics would never be the cause of failure. Supply trains would cease to exist as a concept altogether.

And that moved the theorizing to military matters. Whichever country implemented inventories into their armies first would gain the initiative in controlling the continent, and the entire continent would become engulfed in war.

With regards to the construction industry, only a single person would be needed to move around any amount of stone and lumber. Expensive furniture would never get damaged in transit either. It would benefit the fishing industry, too; the amount of fish that could be caught at once no longer relied on the size of the boat. Even the farming industry would be affected—whenever there was a bumper crop, freshly harvested produce could be shipped out at a moment’s notice.

Taken to its extreme, it would be beyond simple to commit tax fraud; it was impossible to interact with anything that was stored in someone else’s inventory.

And what Rare suddenly realized was along the same lines, but on a completely different scale. After all, with an inventory, one could even argue that a person technically wouldn’t even need a home, meaning they wouldn’t need land at all anymore.

Without being bound by the shackles of land ownership, people wouldn’t need to be bound to countries either, and that would cause the economy to collapse. Gold would lose its value, and trading would have to be done via jewels and precious metals.

If things devolved that far, then no one would be comfortable with their personal information being available to the general public. Most people would still have some kind of profession, but it would be common sense to completely hide it from others. If your assets and home were both hidden, the only form of tax that could be collected was a poll tax. But without a permanent residence, the country couldn’t ascertain if someone was a citizen or a visitor from abroad, so even that would be hard to collect.

Anything that was out in the open could be flawlessly stolen by anyone, and there’d be no way to prove it one way or the other. And if no one ever took anything out of their inventories, then jewel trades would need to be conducted with trustworthy documents of guarantee. However, until such a system of documentation was developed and became reliable enough, the simple act of trading itself would probably transform into something unrecognizable.

If the use of the inventory were ever to spread, it would herald the birth of a completely new economic system.

Even after having those ominous thoughts, Rare figured it probably would never actually turn out that way. If this were actually an emulation of another world on hardware powerful enough for a full world simulator, and the entire economy were about to collapse, the system administrators were likely to step in to prevent that, not to mention how improbable it was that things would develop exactly as Rare predicted anyway. This was just like the time she had speculated about the game’s AI; Rare was not well-versed in economics, she was just influenced by someone close to her that did enjoy thinking about these things. As the proverb went, “it’s hard to tell a poor thinker from a sleeping one^[1];” in other words, since she didn’t know any better, she shouldn’t think too hard about it.

If no one wanted to spread the knowledge, then there was the possibility the technology wouldn’t be passed on. Or it was possible that people would just be unable to learn. Right now, Sugaru was also trying to do it, but it didn’t seem like she was having much luck.

“All right Remy, it looks like you’ve gotten the hang of it, so I’d like you to try teaching Sugaru. Make sure you’re showing her your own inventory as an example, too.”

Remy began to instruct Sugaru on how to use the inventory. Rare decided to check Sugaru’s skills, which she had put off before.

As she suspected, there were numerous skills she had never seen before. Skills that she couldn’t imagine players ever obtaining like [Haplodiploidy] and [Fecundity] piqued her interest somewhat, but what really caught her eye was [Enhance Follower: STR]. It was on the list of learnable skills right now, Sugaru didn’t have it yet, but Rare couldn’t help wondering—if there were a related [Enhance Follower: MND] skill, and Sugaru had it, would it have been quite as easy to conquer the ant nest?

And what intrigued her was that [Enhance Follower] skill was not off by itself, but it was under the [Discipline] skill tree. That meant it should follow how most skill trees worked—after learning [Discipline], anyone could learn the skill as long as they met the prerequisites. The question was how to clear those prerequisites. Now that she knew this skill existed, Rare definitely wanted to learn it. If she were to have access to this family of skills, the first thing she imagined was that she wouldn’t have to use so much XP on her followers, so it would be a long-term gain in XP spending efficiency.

Looking at Sugaru’s skills, the prereqs didn’t require anything special. Or they didn’t look like they should. Assuming at least that skills like [Haplodiploidy] and [Fecundity] were out.

Rare brought up her own learnable skills screen and tried to replace a connecting thread. First, since Sugaru didn’t have any magic skills, it was hard to believe that magic would be related.

That was when she realized. Sugari didn’t have [Mental Magic]. Despite that, she still had [Subordinate], which meant that her [Subordinate] was a race specialty. This also meant that her [Discipline] tree was special, implying that maybe Rare could get the skills she wanted without meeting any prerequisites.

In other words, there were no hints to be gained by looking through Sugaru’s skills.

If these skills were in fact related to magic, then the most likely candidate was [Enchantment Magic]. This skill’s tree contained spells that allowed enchanting people or objects, just as the name said.

The [Enchantment Magic] tree didn’t have any other skills aside from [Enchantment Magic]. But just like with [Alchemy], it was obvious that there were derivative skills, which were mostly all discovered back in the closed beta. These skills were:

[Enchantment Magic] + [Fire Magic] = [Enhancement Magic: STR]

[Enchantment Magic] + [Water Magic] = [Enhancement Magic: MND]

[Enchantment Magic] + [Wind Magic] = [Enhancement Magic: AGI]

[Enchantment Magic] + [Earth Magic] = [Enhancement Magic: VIT]

[Enchantment Magic] + [Lightning Magic] = [Enhancement Magic: DEX]

[Enchantment Magic] + [Ice Magic] = [Enhancement Magic: INT]

In all likelihood, once she learned a given [Enhancement Magic] spell, it should also unlock the corresponding [Enhance Follower] skill. If her conjectures turned out to be wrong, she wasn’t planning to participate directly in combat much herself, so she wasn’t opposed to learning a suitable element of magic. The bigger problem was whether this experiment would cost her a huge amount of XP or not.

Once Sugaru was completely melted, Rare would have to meet up with her and Remy to raise their INT and teach them how to use the inventory.

TL notes!

^[1]: 下手の考え休むに似たり, literally “(having) poor/uninformed thoughts is akin to sleeping”