The Rise of the Black Plain

Abby's group learned that soldiers' payments were made in the first five days of each month. The payment was made for all ranks these days, but those with the highest position in the army had preference over the payment order.

But this was only a small benefit for the strongest cultivators in the army. No one felt bad about it, as it made some sense to them. After all, the higher the level of an individual, the longer it takes to train!

On the other hand, the number of soldiers in the 5th and 4th stages of cultivation was not significant, so these individuals didn't generate absurd waits for the other soldiers either.

And for now, given the absence of banks in the Dry City, there was still no virtual financial system, which would allow payments made through cards or civil identification. Because of this, these soldiers still needed to receive physical compensation for spiritual crystals.

The problem regarding this issue is the absence of an extensive system, which the city's entire population could use. After all, it wouldn't be interesting if this only worked with army soldiers, as it already did with merit points.

However, adopting the system as the citywide merit points system would be an uphill task and expensive, but very, very expensive indeed.

After all, for the system to work, a private establishment would have to have spiritual arrays of the same type and with the same programming as those of the bank.

But not only that, part of the functioning of virtual payment systems is the fact that banks give validity to these transactions. That is, while spiritual crystals truly have their real-world value, what can give credibility to a virtual number on any card?

Only institutions of great financial power and reliability could do this!

And to create something like that, the Black Plain would have to have millions of reserve spiritual crystals, to validate transactions. And allied with this, the system would have to work together so that it would be correctly credited to their bank account when a customer uses their crystals.

How bad would it be to find out that all your savings are gone because of an error?

On the other hand, the bank could not have losses. Imagine if a customer spent everything he had, but the information showed that his account was still untouched...

Finally, even with all these problems resolved, who would guarantee that the population would use such a system? Because, yes, it is indeed more convenient and safer not to have to use physical crystals, but a population already used to do this for so long...

Anyway, it might not be easy to convince them to create bank accounts and join such a system!

And because of circumstances like these, it wasn't easy to create a virtual financial system. This required time, investments, planning, materials, and competent people for such a thing to happen. Only then could a bank have a chance to receive public trust.

Finally, banks not only exchanged crystals of different qualities, but they could also regulate virtual financial activities. The exchange was undoubtedly the most profitable activity of these companies, but virtual transactions were also common in these organizations.

However, there were no high-end banks in the north of the Central Continent, meaning that they were widely used and trusted by the public and small businesses.

With this, it might even be possible to see some establishments in specific cities using the services of local banks. Still, it would be almost impossible to see this happening in places far from that bank. At least, ordinary people would not use such a service, which appeared to be somewhat unreliable...

After all, what guarantee would they have that their crystals wouldn't be stolen? Large families even had security about it because they had the power to make demands, but what about the standard population?

That was the problem...

As a result, aside from negotiations between noble families, which in many cases used these systems to facilitate agreements, the virtual financial system was not widely used in the Central Continent's north.

Large regional banks, such as those from the Kingdom of the End, were used to make big deals, facilitating payments.

There were branches of these banks in each of the states' capitals, where large families usually had their accounts and made their transactions.

With this, an agreement made between two noble families, one from the Kingdom of the End and the other from the Cromwell Kingdom, could be facilitated, streamlining the payment when using this system.

Just to give you an idea, while a trip between these two states could take more than seven months, the transaction could be confirmed in less than two weeks!

That was the advantage of this service, and many noble families used it.

However, apart from situations like these, this system had not become popular in the Minos' region.

And the fact that Minos and Elen did not use such a system to streamline payments was due to the region's lack of a large bank spread across several cities.

Minos would not rely on a system where he would have to fetch crystals from the capital of the Brown Kingdom. Not only that, but given the large transactions between him and Elen, even if he received the crystals in his account after a few days, the branch of the bank he used might not have all of the crystals available for withdrawal!

It was not beneficial for him or the Black Plain to use this system with Elen.

Anyway, Minos forces were not able to use such a system for the time being. Perhaps something like this would develop on the Black Plain in the future, but this was far from their reality.

...

Shortly after walking up to the second floor of that building, the five people finally arrived at the Rewards Hall.

This one lived up to its name, and it was, in fact, a large hall, which displayed several glass windows with assorted items.

There were very different weapons, armor, spatial rings, pills, spiritual arrays, paintings, etc. These were, in general, things 'recovered' by local army soldiers on missions carried out externally.

Like the Yellow City's missions, Peter's investigation, Peter's rescue, and other minor situations. Anyway, all that was here in this building were items left behind by people killed by Minos or his soldiers.

And the quantity was not small!

Recently, the young Stuart's last trip had spawned more than 150 dead enemies of the Spiritual General stage, who had various belongings...

As a result, the amount of grade 1 spiritual items in this Hall of Rewards had gone up exponentially and now numbered over 5,000 items!

Most were pills of all kinds, but there were also many spiritual artifacts made by blacksmiths here.

However, none of this could catch the attention of Abby, a young noble and wealthy, who also no longer needed items of this quality. The same was true for the others who were with her, especially Eda.

Abby's bodyguard was already very close to becoming a Spiritual King. Because of that, only medium-level grade-2 items could get her attention.

Of course, even if she didn't mind wielding lesser quality items, she still couldn't. Even low-level grade-2 items would already have a short shelf 'life' for her. After all, items at this level could at most support the energy of newly promoted Spiritual Kings.

No wonder Minos' sword didn't hold up long after he fought with everything he had against Jaime...

As for the other three, even if they weren't in similar situations as Eda and Abby, that is, being very strong or very rich, they were no longer interested in these grade-1 items either.

Even Joey, the weakest of the three and with the lowest expectations given his level, wouldn't take long, and even high-level grade-1 items would lose their usefulness in his hands.

Even if he wasn't interested in fighting, he still understood the importance of these artifacts for self-protection. Therefore, Joey also felt that these items were less than desirable for him as well.

And at this point, Barbara expressed her opinions about this place. "Although there is almost nothing useful for people in the 5th stage of cultivation, this is because the army soldiers are mainly at the beginning of this stage. Same thing with Mr. Minos."

"For now, they can't face large numbers of cultivators from the end of the 5th stage of cultivation and the beginning of the 6th. So, there aren't many grade-2 items around here. However, that should change in a short time."

"Hmm, this young lady is right," Eda said, nodding her head in agreement. "This is a perfect place for soldiers, and it will be more interesting for people like us in a short time. Given the speed of young Minos, I believe that in less than two years, this place may be full of grade-2 items."