Chapter 70

In the time that followed, Ma Le arrived at the commercial street of Miracle City. The so-called commercial street was the gathering place of official stores in Miracle City, while Miracle Square was a spontaneous trading venue for adventurers, where both buyers and sellers were adventurers. However, the commercial street was different; the shops here were run by system characters, selling a wide range of items from weapons and equipment to tools and supplies, and even some enchantment cards with average attributes. However, most of the equipment and items sold here were standardized, mostly of blue and white quality, with occasional silver attributes that were also quite ordinary. Moreover, all the items were quite expensive, generally more than twice the price of items of the same quality in Miracle Square. Similarly, these stores would buy items that adventurers no longer needed in unlimited quantities, but the prices were extremely low, less than one-fifth of the selling price!

Therefore, adventurers generally referred to the commercial street as the "Black Market Street."

However, this "Black Market Street" was still frequented by countless adventurers. One reason was that many small items did not sell well, and it was more practical to sell them directly to the stores rather than waste time setting up stalls. Another reason was that all the entertainment venues in Miracle City were located on the commercial street!

Compared to the simple and ordinary facilities elsewhere, the entertainment venues on the commercial street were extremely luxurious and opulent, with casinos, taverns, brothels, and auction houses all available. Each place was sumptuously decorated, and the materials used for food and entertainment were all acquired from adventurers, sourced from various mission worlds.

Here, adventurers could experience extraordinary pleasures that were hard to come by in the real world. Imagine hugging a beautiful elf, drinking a thousand-year-old wine, tasting the meat of a legendary dragon, and watching gladiators fight to the death. How captivating would that be! More importantly, compared to the high prices of equipment and items, the entertainment industry's charges were relatively low. This allowed most adventurers to spend one-tenth to one-fifth of their income after completing life-and-death missions in the mission worlds, to come here and enjoy a thorough relaxation, experiencing the feeling of being an emperor!

However, Ma Le did not come here for relaxation or entertainment. Along the way, he resisted the temptation of exotic delicacies and the allure of fantastical beauties, and with a nosebleed and a mouth full of saliva, he finally reached his destination, the largest teahouse and information trading center in Miracle City—the Guangwen Building!

The Guangwen Building was a venue with restricted customer access; only those who had reached the citizen level could enter. Ma Le just made the grade, and after paying 30 credit points at the front desk, he was led to a private table by a waiter.

Like a self-service teahouse in the real world, after paying the credit points, Ma Le could freely enjoy the tea and snacks. The tables in the teahouse were small black squares, made of a material similar to marble, which served as a large tablet computer. When activated, it could be operated with fingers to place orders.

Of course, the adventurers who came here were not simply for the tea and snacks. After ordering a pot of green tea and a plate of broad beans, Ma Le operated the table to open the information interface.

The information system of the Guangwen Building was quite interesting. All the information was provided by adventurers. If an adventurer discovered some valuable information, they could come here, connect to the information system through the table, and upload their information. The system would automatically review the value of the information and check if similar information had already been uploaded. As long as the information was original and valuable, it could be priced and sold on the information system, visible to all visitors to the Guangwen Building.

When adventurers viewed the information, they could use a search engine to find the entries they needed. Once found, they would need to pay a fee to view the specific information. The cost of general information ranged from a few to several dozen credit points, while some higher-level, more secret information was more expensive, sometimes even reaching thousands of credit points. Correspondingly, these pieces of information often had level or rank restrictions, requiring adventurers to reach a certain level or rank to view them. According to legend, there was even information in the Guangwen Building about leaving Miracle City and the city battle system, the ultimate hidden mission!

When adventurers viewed the information, a portion of the fee paid would be given to the information provider, usually about half. Therefore, if valuable information was provided, one could earn a considerable number of credit points even without completing missions.

However, this benefit also led to a mix of good and bad information, making it difficult to distinguish between truth and falsehood. The system reviewed the value of the information but did not verify its authenticity. Therefore, many people, driven by speculation, deliberately fabricated sensational false information to gain clicks and credit points. To address this, the information system had an evaluation function, allowing all adventurers who had viewed the information to rate its authenticity. Before clicking on the information, adventurers could see the ratio of true to false evaluations, helping them decide whether to open it. If an information piece was marked as false by more than ten people, it would be deleted, and the information provider would be penalized with credit points. Of course, whether the penalty could match their earnings was unknown.

Before coming here, Ma Le had already decided on the information he needed. He had previously absorbed the adventurer Brad from Hurricane City and read part of his memory. However, for some reason, the memory he read was very fragmented and chaotic, making it difficult to piece together useful information. This situation did not occur when he absorbed Zhao Renfan, leading Ma Le to speculate that adventurers' memories were protected in the mission worlds. After all, the ability to read memories was not uncommon, and if an adventurer's memory was read, it could reveal the existence of Miracle City to the characters in the mission world, causing significant trouble. This suggests that the plan to sacrifice Ma Le to turn Alex in Hurricane City had a low success rate.

Although most of the memory Ma Le read was worthless and chaotic, he still managed to extract two useful pieces of information. The first was the fact that Brad had never seen the King's Uniform, which he had mentioned to Snowy Owl and Persian Cat. The second was about Hurricane City, which mentioned only the number of people. From this memory, Ma Le learned that although both Hurricane City and Miracle City were part of the city battle system, Hurricane City seemed much quieter, with fewer than 3,000 people! This made Ma Le curious, as Miracle City had over 8,000 people. Did this mean that the population of each city varied? If so, since all adventurer numbers were six digits, with the first two digits being the city number, did this imply that each city could accommodate up to 9,999 adventurers? If so, wouldn't an 8,000-person city like Miracle City be quite powerful?

With these questions in mind, Ma Le opened the search engine and searched for information related to the number and scale of cities.

There was a lot of information on this topic, and the prices were not high, as it was common knowledge for adventurers who had reached a certain level. However, as a newcomer, Ma Le found it mysterious. After browsing hundreds of titles, he finally chose a post titled "Comprehensive Overview of the City Battle System," which cost 60 credit points. It had 300 positive reviews and no false reports, with only two questioning records, indicating that some adventurers had doubts about certain parts of the information but generally acknowledged its authenticity.

Opening the post, it was a detailed piece of information spanning several thousand words, providing a broad overview of the city battle system, including its scale, population, activity patterns, and participating cities. From this post, Ma Le learned that the entire city battle system consisted of 60 cities, with adventurer numbers ranging from 00 to 59. The scale of these 60 cities varied greatly, from large cities like Miracle City with over 8,000 adventurers to small towns with just a few hundred. Most cities had populations of one to two thousand, and a city like Hurricane City with 3,000 people was considered relatively large.

All cities started with similar initial conditions and hardware facilities, and the key was the success of their development process. The current situation was the result of free development, with most development resources coming from mission worlds.

Larger cities, with more adventurers, had a wide range of information sources and a steady supply of equipment and items, leading to generally well-developed adventurers. Smaller cities, with fewer people, often had fewer resources from mission worlds, making life for adventurers more difficult. Therefore, the larger the city, the higher the general level of its adventurers. Of course, this was not absolute; for example, the Silver Snow trio from Miracle City was pursued by the Beastly Gentleman and his group from Hurricane City across three mission worlds, ultimately leading to their demise.

Among the 60 cities, there was a ranking based on population, but it was not related to the city numbers. Currently, there were seven super-large cities with over 5,000 people: Origin City (00), Sacred City (09), Miracle City (11), Imperial City (26), Agile City (31), Dark City (48), and Yellow Sand City (55). These seven cities were the largest and strongest, collectively known as the Seven Heroes of the City Battle System. Miracle City ranked third, with Origin City and Dark City, both with 9,000 people, ranking higher.

As for the others, there were about eight large cities with over 2,000 people, 32 medium-sized cities with 1,000 to 2,000 people, and the rest were small cities with fewer than 1,000 people. The entire city battle system currently had around 120,000 adventurers, with about 70,000 at the beginner level, 30,000 at the ordinary level, 10,000 at the veteran level, and fewer than 1,000 at the elite and champion levels.

In other words, in the real world with a population of over 7 billion, there was one adventurer for every 60,000 people. Shengzhou City, where Ma Le lived, had a population of 5.5 million, which meant there should be about 100 adventurers in the city!

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