The Golden Experience Point [Part 1]

Chapter 23: "The Future Direction of the In-Game Economy (Maybe)"

Hakuma was left in charge of the tanuki's meat; Rare told him the wolves could just use whatever they needed for food, then she and the catkin girls crawled back into the ant nest.

They returned to the (provisional) queen's room, where Sugaru, who was completely thawed, and Remy were waiting together. Marion immediately went to brag to Remy about being able to use inventory. While watching them out of the corner of her eye, Rare dumped a bunch of XP into Remy's and Sugaru's INT stats.

"How about you try it too, Remy? Marion, why don't you teach her how."

It was a good opportunity to see if Remy could successfully access her inventory with Marion's instructions. At first, the expression she made screamed "what the hell is this girl talking about?", but after seeing Marion manipulate her inventory a number of times, it immediately clicked for her. The hypothesis that "anyone could explain how to use the inventory" seemed increasingly likely. Furthermore, seeing someone use it before their very eyes was probably also necessary for learning how to use it. If those were the only conditions, then it would be possible to learn just from watching an explanation from afar. If that were the case, then pretty soon, as more players interacted with more NPCs, there was a chance that the number of NPCs who could use the inventory would increase.

If that came to pass, what kind of effect would that have?

First, the logistics industry would collapse. Just talking about luggage, having even a single capable person would be more than sufficient, so horse carriage demand would probably drop like a rock. After carriages, anything related to logistics would suffer irreparable damage, transportation costs would fall dramatically, and even costs of living would decrease. It would probably cause historic deflation.

Fresh ingredients could be transported to any location regardless of the distance. Any related services that were valued due to their speed would lose that value. Foodstuffs as a whole would drop in price as a result, aside from any that were naturally limited in availability.

Next, the efficiency of mercenaries hunting monsters would skyrocket. Currently, they had to butcher their prey on the spot and only carry what little they could back to town to sell. But now, they could bring the entire corpse back with them. Because there was no cost to transporting food and water, there would be no need to pace military campaigns, so no matter how long the journey, no matter how much they hunted, logistics would never be the cause of failure. Supply trains would cease to exist as a concept altogether.

And that moved the theorizing to military matters. Whichever country implemented inventories into their armies first would gain the initiative in controlling the continent, and the entire continent would become engulfed in war.

With regards to the construction industry, only a single person would be needed to move around any amount of stone and lumber. Expensive furniture would never get damaged in transit either. It would benefit the fishing industry, too; the amount of fish that could be caught at once no longer relied on the size of the boat. Even the farming industry would be affected—whenever there was a bumper crop, freshly harvested produce could be shipped out at a moment's notice.

Taken to its extreme, it would be beyond simple to commit tax fraud; it was impossible to interact with anything that was stored in someone else's inventory.

And what Rare suddenly realized was along the same lines, but on a completely different scale. After all, with an inventory, one could even argue that a person technically wouldn't even need a home, meaning they wouldn't need land at all anymore.

Without being bound by the shackles of land ownership, people wouldn't need to be bound to countries either, and that would cause the economy to collapse. Gold would lose its value, and trading would have to be done via jewels and precious metals.