Chapter 767.2: ()

Ample Time raised the coffee on the table and took a sip before speaking slowly. “Then what if I told you that the Bugra Free State’s currency was actually designed in imitation of CR?”

“Huh?!” Dori stared at him in shock, her small mouth unconsciously falling open. “Is that true?! But... Why has the Bugra Dollar depreciated so severely?”

She had heard that people there needed strings of zeroes merely to purchase ordinary goods, and that the smallest banknote denomination was one thousand.

Something like that had actually been modeled after CR?!

Enjoying the astonished expression on Dori’s face, Ample Time smiled faintly and continued to tease, “In fact, it isn’t only the Bugra Dollar... The S Coin that briefly appeared in Boulder Town’s history was also a crude imitation of CR. You wrote reports about that thing, so you should understand very well what it was.”

Dori nodded blankly, her thoughts still unable to recover from the shocking revelation. She still could not believe that the Bugra Dollar and CR were fundamentally the same thing.

Ample Time continued with confidence, “As I mentioned earlier, Cr is a decentralized currency issued with the total credit of society as its anchor. The Bugra Dollar is actually the same thing. However, there is one difference. In Bugra, the ‘quantitative standard for society’s total credit’ is not decentralized. It is controlled by a small group of people to an extent even more extreme than traditional currency, or even primitive precious-metal currency. If that concept is difficult to understand, you can think of it as the pen used to sign the bill when paying by card for food, drinks, and other consumption.”

“You mean they used it incorrectly?” Dori keenly discovered the problem and widened her eyes with delight.

Hearing her, Ample Time did not know whether to laugh or cry. “Look at you. I’ve said so much, and you’re still discussing right and wrong! ARGH! Don’t use your teeth!”

He had only spoken halfway when Dori, flushed with shame and anger, lunged toward him and bit down on his arm.

She had clearly been thinking earnestly about a problem she could not understand and sincerely asking him for guidance, yet this fellow constantly interrupted to flaunt his intellectual superiority.

Everything else about him was wonderful. She was just annoyed by that one trait!

Hmph, aren’t you just a little smarter than me? Wasn’t there still. Wasn’t there still... Arghhh weren't there times when I rode on your head and trampled you beneath my feet?!

However, when she saw him baring his teeth in apparent pain, she instinctively relaxed her bite. Blushing, she released the arm now covered in neat rows of tooth marks and mumbled, “Who told you to keep speaking in riddles... Can’t you answer my questions properly?”

Ample Time had not actually felt any pain. Players could not experience pain beyond a certain threshold, and it had even felt somewhat...

Well, saying that out loud would make him sound like a pervert.

Out of gentlemanly courtesy, he rubbed the bite marks on his arm and pretended to have been threatened. “Ahem, haven’t I been answering properly? You keep talking about right and wrong. I’m correcting that way of thinking. How do you know the Flintstone Group didn’t do this deliberately?”

Dori stared at him blankly before asking in confusion, “... Deliberately? What do you mean?”

“Has the Flintstone Group gone bankrupt? Are the people of the Free State unable to survive? Their economy is no worse than ours. They were already running while we were still learning to walk. We laugh at them because they have to watch a 30 second advertisement merely to open a refrigerator door, but they might be laughing at us because we don’t even own refrigerators.”

To be honest, if war truly broke out with the Bugra Free State, even if they did not bring the Great Rift Valley into it, the New Alliance would still need to expend considerable effort to defeat them through conventional warfare without using strategic weapons first.

At the very least, they would have to be prepared to sacrifice Daybreak City if they wanted to take the Free State down.

At least judging from its performance on the Northern Front, the Hound Special Forces were not much worse in combat than the 100th Mechanized Mountain Division. Their equipment might have been somewhat inferior, but the quality of their personnel was clearly superior.

The New Alliance and the Bugra Free State had previously experienced a few minor military clashes along their border, but neither side had ever deployed its main forces. Instead, they had cautiously tested each other.

In one incident Ample Time remembered, the New Alliance had deployed bionic soldiers from Camp 101, which had not yet joined the New Alliance at the time. The Free State, meanwhile, had sent an incompetent third-rate mercenary company that had actually been hired by Wislander officers.

Looking back, that clash had in fact been both a contest between the administrator and Sigma and a mutual probe of each side’s limits.

Sigma had accurately identified the New Alliance’s weakness as its limited control over the border and difficulty distinguishing paramilitary forces disguised as refugees.

Chu Guang had responded forcefully to the Free State’s vulnerability in turn which revealed that their powerful and unconstrained individuals posed an enormous hidden threat to the Free State’s false freedom.

A single bionic soldier could slaughter an entire 100-man unit. What if 100 bionic soldiers or 100 Awakeners, even more troublesome than bionic soldiers, managed to infiltrate the Free State?

For Sigma, that was far more intimidating than having a regular army openly and honorably annihilate a 100-man unit on the battlefield.

That was the true reason both sides had tacitly controlled the scale of their conflicts all that time.

The game’s NPCs were just like real people. The more deeply one thought about them, the more apparent that became.

This was not the first time Ample Time had thought so.

After a brief pause, he looked at Dori, who seemed to understand only vaguely, and continued, “So the moment you begin discussing whether what they did was right or wrong, good or bad, you’ve already entered a dead end. A gun is faster than a knife, and some guns are faster than other guns, but they aren’t necessarily more useful than a fruit knife when peeling an apple.”

“Returning to your original question, I can tell you that chips were neither good nor bad, nor right nor wrong. They were simply a tool. The people holding them used them according to their own understanding of that tool. That included the people who issued the chips and the people who used them. Nothing more.”

“As for why chips did not produce the same result as Silver, it was because the man who raised the chips up wanted precisely that outcome from the beginning. He accomplished what he intended. Whether he eventually lost control of the game or not is another matter entirely.”

Bugra Free State was the same.

A series of tools, including the Bugra Dollar and its board-of-directors structure, had been modeled after Ideal City. Like the overwhelming majority of wastelanders, they deeply envied Ideal City’s prosperity. They believed they understood everything else about Ideal City, but in reality, they knew absolutely nothing.

That was what had produced Bugra Free State’s cyberpunk society, a settlement where an extraordinarily high level of technology existed alongside an extraordinarily low standard of living, with everyone resembling a hamster running along a tightrope.

It shared certain similarities with the Scientific Committee, yet was fundamentally different.

Supposedly, the Social Science Department of the New Alliance’s Scientific Expedition Team had established projects to analyze the phenomena, including the New Alliance’s own current social conditions. However, it was a long-term undertaking that needed to be continued indefinitely. Expecting to reach conclusions about the present while still living within it was unrealistic.

At that point, Ample Time could not resist teasing the bewildered Dori again. Her face immediately flushed red as she bared her teeth and claws. “It’s just like the vendor who sold you those succulents. He wasn’t concerned about your health or whether radiation could be absorbed. He only wanted the Silver in your pocket. The difference was merely that some people understood that and some did not... OI! Stop trying to bite me!”

Seeing Dori leap onto the table like a cat, Ample Time hurriedly moved his unfinished coffee aside, afraid she might burn herself. However, because doing so deprived him of one hand, he quickly lost against Dori’s assault.

When the commotion in the room finally ended, Dori, red-faced and panting, at last noticed the crumpled newspaper on the table. “Is this the Survivor’s Daily?” Surprise appeared on her face, especially after she noticed that its layout differed from the Dawn City edition.

Ample Time flattened the newspaper and smiled faintly. “This is the Port Gallon edition. More and more survivors are standing on the same front as us. Every so often, some remarkably impressive articles appear in it.”

Since he spent long periods away from Port Gallon, he also needed the local newspaper to learn about the situation there. He had never imagined that in only a few months, that harbor once filled with slaves and utterly devoid of hope could produce such an earth-shaking roar.

The situation genuinely surprised him. Perhaps, given a little more time, they truly might catch the ship heading toward the new world.

In truth, besides providing money, he had also helped cultivate some local talent.

Yadoo, for example, who served as secretary in the Governor’s Office, was a capable and moderate reformist.

Then there was Laxi, director of the Civil Defense Office. He possessed courage and strong executive ability and could accept new ideas. His speech and behavior were somewhat crude, but that was hardly a major flaw. Objectively speaking, he had contributed to the successful transformation of Port Gallon.

After all, nothing intimidated the former nobles more than a Moonfolk holding a gun, especially one who was equally ruthless toward outsiders and his own people.

To survive, those former nobles worked even harder than the new social classes to ingratiate themselves with the New Alliance.

They were afraid that if they complained too much, the New Alliance might simply look the other way. The people of the New Alliance valued reason and discipline, but the dogs they kept clearly did not.

Laxi was a promising man. Leaving him in an office for a while to temper his disposition was probably for the best. Whatever strange position he hoped to attain, he should not display every thought in his heart openly upon his face. That was a fundamental skill in politics. If he could not master it, then he would be destined to remain no more than the commander of the militia for the rest of his life.

“Red Soil... This article is excellent. It doesn’t seem like something written by a person who only recently learned to write.” Dori read the newspaper article from beginning to end, becoming increasingly surprised and even delighted.

Perhaps Dawn City’s Survivor’s Daily could reprint the article!

No... That did not seem like a mere article. It was more like the preface to a long literary collection.

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