The enthusiasm for bidding was like a prairie fire, erupting completely in the final monts of the countdown.
The numbers on the Evolution Store auction interface started jumping like crazy, every refresh accompanied by a huge leap.
All the racial representatives stared dead at the screen, exclamations rising one after another.
"Fuck, it went up again. Where the hell did this guy get so much sacrificial power?"
"The Tianyu Clan just raised the bid by 30%. That's brutal."
"The Great Barbarian Tribe directly doubled the price."
The climb of the numbers went completely out of control.
In the anti, so people had cold sweat seeping from their foreheads, so unconsciously clenched their jaws, and so others, eyes red, pushed all of their Sacrificial Power Reserve in at once.
Every tick of the countdown felt like a Heavy Hamr pounding on their hearts.
When the last second returned to zero, all bidding data suddenly froze.
The four big words "Auction Ended" appeared on the auction page, like a bucket of ice water dousing the frenzy from monts before.
This war without gunpowder ca to an end at this mont.
So races were vexed, feeling the auction ti was too short and they hadn't had ti to prepare sacrificial power.
Others were delighted that they had managed to secure their auction item.
In the end, a line of text popped up on the Evolution Mall interface:
[This auction has ended. The next auction will occur at a random ti, with a random quantity of random types of goods on the shelf.]
At the sa ti, crimson light converged on the altar at Eclipse City's transportation center, and the goods listed in this auction were rapidly generated…
...
Primordial Altar.
Qi Sheng had been watching the Evolution Store's first test run from start to finish.
The outco matched his expectations completely.
The Lifespan Extension Pill's effect was to increase lifespan, and after consumption it could also feed back 1329 points of Body Refining Level to the player's body in Monster World.
And in this auction, the lowest winning bid among the top hundred Lifespan Extension Pills reached 780,000 sacrificial power.
According to Monster World's settings, there were many ways to obtain Body Refining Experience, but the direct exchange ratio with sacrificial power was 1:1.
In other words, an item that a player could buy in Monster World for 1329 sacrificial power had, in the real world, gone up in price by a factor of 586.
Yet neither tourists nor players felt there was any problem with that.
In the eyes of players, no matter how fun Monster World was, it was still just a virtual ga.
No matter how high in-ga prices went, they were just numbers.
At worst you just spend more ti Hunting, farming dungeons, exploring opportunities… you'd eventually accumulate enough sacrificial power to climb toward your goal.
But the real world is different. Lifespan, health, Transcendent Constitution—before the Evolution Store went online, these things only existed in myths and history books.
If the Lifespan Extension Pill was priced at 1329 sacrificial power in Monster World, a player's reaction would be:
"Who the hell is dumb enough to spend 1329 sacrificial power to buy 1329 points of Body Refining Level? Just turn on the auto-Cultivation mode and it'll grow slowly on its own. The cost is way lower than direct sacrificial power exchange. In the early stage, just grind a bit, save a bit, and buying a Combat Skill Body Refining Technique is the smart move."
But the sa item placed in the real world, its value turns into:
"Holy shit, this is a divine pill that can truly extend lifespan, and it's limited edition. If you miss it, you'll lose big."
This gap in perception made the real-world markup feel perfectly natural.
In the ga, sacrificial power could be obtained Infinite-ly, but in reality, Life was a little less with every bit spent.
Players were more than willing to pay for this real feedback, even feeling that a 135-fold price difference was cheap—another hundred tis more would still be reasonable.
Using virtual data to buy real resources, no amount of markup was too much.
And this was precisely one of the core reasons Qi Sheng launched the Real Mall.
There would be many more channels that consud sacrificial power in the future.
Player recruitnt, improving the Battle Array System, adding growth pets, building the "Montum" system… everywhere you looked required Flower Sacrificial Power.
His tax rate on players wasn't high, mainly to help them grow better.
Only when players' strength improved would the sacrificial power they generated increase.
But he would still occasionally run into situations where sacrificial power was not enough.
At such tis, taking sacrificial power directly from players was the dumbest move.
In the early days, he had tried a lottery model, using behind-the-scenes manipulation to urgently scoop sacrificial power from players.
But nothing from those early attempts could compare to the Real Mall model.
This was the true way to turn one into ten thousand, making players willingly fork over sacrificial power at hundreds of tis markup or more.
Going forward, the real-world store would be his regulatory channel whenever he was short on sacrificial power.
If he was short, he'd just put out a new batch of cheap goods produced with sacrificial power, and the players would push those goods' prices up to exactly the level he wanted.
The test release had relatively few items; later he would increase the supply of goods in the Evolution Mall.
He would let more players take part in the Evolution wave on the real-world side.
Thus achieving a three-way win.
First win: players gain real-world enhancent, with their lifespan and safety secured.
Second win: he opens up a controllable sacrificial power tax (super-tax) channel.
Third win: players use Evolution Mall Items, and the attribute feedback goes to the players' bodies in Monster World, preventing resources from being wasted or flowing outward.
As for resources possibly ending up in the hands of non-qualified players, that wasn't sothing he needed to worry about.
All beings of the Earth Alliance would beco players in the future, and the speed of player recruitnt would only get faster and faster.
This didn't count as outflow; it was just a temporary deposit.
From the perspective of an individual Life, waiting for qualification might take months or even years—indeed a long ti.
But on the scale of civilizational evolution, that ti was just the blink of an eye.
To Monster World, which operated on the Eternal scale, it was nothing more than a tiny tistamp in its Eternal log.
Just like a farr sowing in spring doesn't fuss over which seed sprouts first.
Before the arrival of nationwide ascension, no matter whose hands these resources rested in, they would ultimately return into the circulation of the Player System.
Their temporary flow could allow more tourists to experience the dawn brought by Monster World ahead of ti.
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