Since Elon hadn't publicly listed the required materials, no one was competing with him for Darksteel yet.

  The problem was time. He couldn't possibly buy up the entire market supply on such short notice. And launching a massive buyout campaign now would definitely raise red flags. Any smart player would connect it to his announcement and figure out his plan.

  Still, he had no choice. He had to do it.

  Elon tasked the managers of his ten shops across the main cities with buying up all the Darksteel they could find. The price, which started at 20 silver per unit, began to skyrocket as his buyers swept the market. By midnight, Darksteel was nearly 1 gold piece per unit. Clearly, others had caught on.

  In total, Elon spent 1 million gold coins to acquire just over 3 million units of Darksteel.

  As the clock struck midnight, he ordered his staff to list the Darksteel on their shelves for 5 gold a piece.

  Then, he revealed the full crafting requirements:

  [Vowforged Plate (Legendary)] - Lvl 25

  - Fee: $5,000 USD

  - Materials: 20 Darksteel, 30 Iron, 40 Linen Cloth

  .....

  [Vowforged Plate (Legendary)] - Lvl 30

  - Fee: $10,000 USD

  - Materials: 30 Darksteel, 50 Iron, 80 Linen Cloth

  Kael’s jaw hit the floor when he saw the prices. Had Elon lost his mind? He had marked up the materials several times over and was demanding a real-money fee on top of it. This wasn't just profitable; it was a license to print money.

  But after a moment, Kael realized Elon’s pricing was actually brilliant. You couldn’t buy a level 25 legendary item on the open market for $5,000. You’d be lucky to get one for $50,000. Elon could have easily set the price at $50k and people would still have been lining up around the block. But he was playing a different game.

  Later, when Kael asked him about it, Elon explained his philosophy.

  "The number of players willing to drop fifty grand on a game is maybe five in ten thousand. But the number of players willing to spend five thousand? That’s closer to five in a thousand."

  "But the total money from the five-in-ten-thousand group is just as much as the five-in-a-thousand group, isn't it?" Kael had argued.

  Elon shook his head. "You can't just milk the whales. The small fry gotta throw a few coins around too, or they'll feel left out."

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  As it turned out, Elon was a business prodigy.

  Three months later, when the accountants ran the numbers, Kael was absolutely floored.

  On the Earth Server alone, each main city region had a population of thirty to forty million people. Post-event analysis showed that in every city, over 200,000 players had commissioned Elon’s services—roughly five out of every thousand, just as he’d predicted.

  At $5,000 per person, 200,000 people translated to a billion dollars in revenue. Per city. Including the auction fees from the guild leaders and the revenue from all twenty-plus main cities, the total income was nearly $40 billion. After the system's 10% transaction fee and a 20% operational cost, the net profit was $28 billion.

  Since Kael provided the core Recipe, he and Arbazon had agreed to a 50/50 split. From that one deal, Kael personally earned $14 billion. On top of that, as a 40% shareholder in Arbazon, he was entitled to another $5.6 billion from their half. His total take was close to $20 billion. He was so ecstatic that he sent Elon a personal bonus of a billion dollars.

  And that was just the cash.

  In terms of materials, they netted 10-20 units of profit per item crafted. With over three million items sold, that amounted to a surplus of over 50 million units of Darksteel, Iron, and Linen Cloth. For Elon, this was a lifesaver.

  Until now, Arbazon's business model had been dangerously simple: buy items from the system’s wholesale market and resell them. With his merchant privileges, Elon could buy goods at a 15% discount. After the mandatory 10% sales tax, his profit was razor-thin.

  For an item that cost 100 gold, he'd pay 85, sell it for 100, pay 10 in tax, and make 5 gold. But to attract customers, he had to undercut the system, pricing items at 99 or even 98 gold. This meant his actual profit margin was a meager 3-4%.

  In the real world, a business with margins like that would go bankrupt from rent and payroll alone.

  Thankfully, this was a game, and you could hire NPCs. Elon, a shrewd businessman, knew how to exploit the rules.

  In his eyes, NPCs were the perfect employees: they worked 24/7, never asked for holidays, and never got sick. He was very satisfied with his tireless virtual workforce.

  The sudden influx of tens of millions of raw materials gave Arbazon a solid foundation. Now, all he needed were more recipes, and he could start listing his own exclusive, high-profit crafted goods.

  .....

  Back in the present, Kael couldn’t have imagined that a single recipe from the blacksmith would turn Elon into a legend and bring him billions in wealth. His mind wasn’t on Elon’s grand financial schemes, but on the unresolved business in the Land of the Behemoth.

  For Lila, Orion, and the others, that chapter was closed. But for Kael, one crucial task remained: retrieving the Behemoth’s corpse from Mount Celestara.

  In his mind, it should be easy.

  He equipped a high-quality shovel and took the portal from Crescent straight to the Ironclad Citadel, the main city closest to his destination.

  Ironclad Citadel was built at the foot of Mount Celestara.

  Strictly speaking, Mount Celestara wasn’t a single peak, but an enormous mountain range. It stretched over three thousand miles from east to west and spanned eight hundred miles from north to south—far too vast for any single main city to claim. Thus, the Mount Celestara range formed its own independent territory.

  It contained hundreds of named peaks, and even more that remained unexplored and unnamed.

  Those uncharted mountains were terrifying places, home to unknown and horrifying monsters.

  The reason Kael felt so confident was that Apollo had told him the Behemoth's corpse was buried on a mountain called "Dozing," a peak located relatively close to civilized territory. The monster levels there weren't high.

  Dozing's most notable feature was its proximity to Bloodthorn Vale, the region where the Behemoth had lived. After Apollo killed it, he had simply buried the body in the nearest convenient mountain.

  After arriving at the Ironclad Citadel, Kael followed his memory and headed straight for Dozing. But when he reached the coordinates Apollo had imprinted on his mind, he stopped dead in his tracks.

  Hundreds of players were gathered in a circle, locked in a massive, chaotic battle.