Six Lizardman tribes have already pledged their allegiance, their numbers now exceeding seventy thousand. On top of that, a Minotaur Clan, lured by the promise of food, came forward to serve, and a Dark Dwarf tribe—having offended the Blood Elves—escaped here as well. In total, five underground races have joined, though only the Cave Goblins and Red-Skin Mana Leeches enjoy the best treatment, having been taken into the natural demi-plane.
The Lizard Tribe, Minotaur Clan, and Dark Dwarves all remain in the Netherworld, tasked with exploring, investigating, and gathering resources. All such work relies on the native races of the underground.
The territory was established in the Tunguska Mountains, where the Cave Goblins were first discovered. No one claimed this land anyway—it’s a buffer zone between several major races, and its resources aren’t particularly abundant. At least to the underground dwellers, it’s considered barren…
News about the Seventy-Third Deity isn’t anything special, but the scale of resource extraction in the Netherworld has even left Lin Yun astonished…
Magic crystals are exchanged for grain—a single sack of Level 30 magic crystals trades for three times its weight in food. Even so, Darryl has grumbled countless times that it’s a bargain for those lucky fools…
Metal materials of equal weight can be traded for the same weight in food, but only if they’ve been refined to a preliminary degree. Unprocessed ore—one thousand pounds of it—can only be exchanged for fifty pounds of food, and even then, those traders are considered lucky.
It was always known that food was the most desperately needed resource in the Netherworld, but no one expected scarcity to reach such extremes.
The unique environment of the Netherworld makes plant growth incredibly difficult—especially edible crops. There’s no shortage of magical plants, and their numbers are vast, but most are laced with toxins. Plants that thrive in areas saturated with dark energy are only edible for pure dark creatures; anyone else who tries risks a creative death.
Even the notoriously foolish Minotaurs know better than to put plants infused with dark power in their mouths—unless they want to die in some imaginative way. Even among the dark races, only a handful of named dark plants are safe to eat; the rest are best left untouched, or you risk dropping dead from poison.
Here, the most ordinary grain—almost devoid of magic, the kind eaten by commoners in Northend—is seen as the purest, untainted food. Even in the Netherworld, such food is rare.
Then, the price difference made Leon Merlin feel a bit guilty—a fifty-pound refined block of Eternal Dark Gold could be traded for five hundred pounds of grain. Even so, the Minotaurs in charge of security were red-eyed, thinking the deal was far too generous to the other party.
Fifty pounds of preliminary refined Eternal Dark Gold, after careful refinement, would yield at least thirty pounds of pure Eternal Dark Gold. Thirty pounds of pure Eternal Dark Gold in Northend could easily commission a top-tier artifact from a master craftsman—materials included.
If sold for purple gold coins, it could fetch up to a billion; exchanged for grain, it’s an astronomical figure—enough to feed a tribe of ten thousand for a thousand years, especially for Minotaurs, who have four stomachs and insatiable appetites.
Now, they traded for just five hundred pounds of grain, and even his own people felt shortchanged. Leon Merlin was a bit ashamed and stopped meddling. Andefa, who always claimed “only fools miss out on a bargain,” lasted less than half an hour before he couldn’t bear to watch anymore—no matter how thick-skinned, this was outright daylight robbery.
On the edge of the Tunguska Mountains, a simple small city was built for grain exchanges. Its walls were only a dozen meters high, and the entire city was less than two kilometers in diameter—just a modest fortress.
Now, a steady stream of people from other races come and go. Armored Minotaurs, armed to the teeth, patrol the city’s perimeter with their huge ox eyes. This small city has three thousand armed Minotaurs on patrol—anyone with sense wouldn’t dare cause trouble here.
Beside the city lies a large Lizardman tribe—tens of thousands strong—a Dark Dwarf tribe of several thousand, and a Minotaur tribe nearing ten thousand. Everyone knows that stirring up trouble here means a miserable death.
In the bare woods outside the city, dozens of corpses hang—some troublemakers, some thieves, all dealt with and strung up. Among them, more than ten Blood Elf corpses are displayed in the most prominent spots.
Those were Blood Elves sent to hunt the Dark Dwarves—all dead now. Yet, days have passed without any Blood Elf retaliation. Everyone knows the city’s rulers are not to be trifled with—reportedly, three dragons, two of them purebloods, and the third, though a hybrid, is even more terrifying.