As the range of his purchasing expanded—accepting almost everything, offering generous prices, buying up even the most common trash-tier items flooding the market that had long since lost any in-game value—word continued to spread.
More and more players who had already quit the game came back online just to sell him their items.
For a time, Yggdrasil showed unmistakable signs of coming back to life. The game was hot again in the real world.
He'd half-expected his identity to be exposed.
If that happened, it would certainly draw a lot of attention. Someone of his standing had absolutely no business having that kind of money.
But it didn't happen.
There was plenty of discussion online—but it seemed to stay confined to discussion.
He suspected he'd probably already been flagged by someone higher up, held under quiet surveillance while they guessed at which faction had put him forward.
Or maybe he was just overthinking it. But he still felt like he was being watched.
Because what he'd displayed was completely inconsistent with who he was supposed to be.
He'd tried with his friends. Most of them didn't believe him—a few even wondered if he'd fallen ill.
He'd wanted to prove it. Videos, photos—they didn't give him the chance.
Even hearing that someone was scooping up game items on a massive scale wasn't enough to make them log back in.
Some had believed him, but even they had no intention of abandoning their real lives to follow him to another world. He could only respect that.
They weren't high schoolers or college students anymore. Another world meant danger and instability. They had no desire to throw away the stable lives and families they'd built to go exploring somewhere unknown.
Honestly, if he himself hadn't been a person without any ties to hold him in the real world—if he hadn't poured himself into the game as his only anchor—he wasn't sure he would have chosen to leave either.
---
**Ordinary Group Leader:** Honestly, I keep getting the feeling that Flying Squirrel's transmigration wasn't an accident. That someone engineered it.
**Ordinary Group Leader:** Maybe at the end of this story there'll be a mastermind pulling the strings behind the scenes.
**Ordinary Group Leader:** The things Flying Squirrel's been doing—in the real world, you'd have been flagged a dozen times over by now.
**Ordinary Group Leader:** Especially since he even let slip the information about going to another world. Even if they were skeptical, they wouldn't just sit on it until it happened. They'd pull him in for questioning immediately.
**Ordinary Group Leader:** So maybe there's a hidden hand keeping everything stable. Waiting for his transmigration to happen.
**Richest Man:** . . .
**Uchiha Dance King:** . . .
**Cook Daigu Into Soup:** Is that really how it is?
**Size-Shift Anywhere:** That actually seems plausible! Terrifying.jpg
**Utaha:** Like Aizen?
**Ordinary Group Leader:** Hmm, possibly?!
**Fifth Division Captain:** . . .
**Richest Man:** Oh, come on.
**Richest Man:** You're not actually buying this, are you?
**Richest Man:** Aizen took interest in Ichigo Kurosaki because Ichigo had the potential. That was the whole point.
**Richest Man:** Flying Squirrel doesn't have anything that would set him apart from an ordinary person.
**Richest Man:** And if there really were a mastermind, Flying Squirrel's recent moves should be completely outside of his control by now.
**Richest Man:** The sudden windfall, the deliberate item collecting with foreknowledge of the future, even trying to bring his friends along.
**Richest Man:** All of that should be very easy to notice.
**Richest Man:** Besides, Flying Squirrel isn't the only player who transmigrated. Aren't the Six Great Gods and the Eight Greed Kings all players too?
**Richest Man:** I'm more inclined to call it coincidence than credit a mysterious puppeteer.
**Richest Man:** And if someone IS pulling the strings—that someone is just the author of the work.
**Ordinary Group Leader:** But then those glaring inconsistencies that should obviously have been noticed—
**Richest Man:** Protagonist's luck.
**Richest Man:** Isn't Flying Squirrel the main character of that world? The child of fate? If you're the protagonist, "reasonable" stops applying.
**Ordinary Group Leader:** Hsssss~~~, okay, that actually tracks!
Su Yunqing was immediately convinced by Tony Stark.
The protagonist really was the child of the world. How could anything unfavorable to the world's child actually happen to him?
Of course, it depended on the world.
Flying Squirrel's world was obviously not one of those stories that existed to torture its main character.
**Flying Squirrel:** Please stop scaring me.
He didn't have nerves like that.
A mastermind behind the scenes—if such a thing existed, he sincerely hoped it would stay behind the scenes forever. Please, under no circumstances, appear before him.
**Ordinary Group Leader:** Shiba Inu scratching head.jpg
**Richest Man:** @Flying Squirrel Any leads on the dual-class item yet?
**Flying Squirrel:** Nothing on the market so far.
**Flying Squirrel:** However, Aizen lent me a million points to buy one through the chat group.
**Flying Squirrel:** It's a fairly rare item, but a million points is even more expensive than I expected.
**Flying Squirrel:** @Fifth Division Captain — thank you, genuinely.
**Richest Man:** Bought through the chat group?
**Richest Man:** I actually forgot that was an option.
**Richest Man:** But a million points—that really is absurdly expensive.
It was worth noting that even the Dog Talisman had only cost a million points.
A dual-class item—outside of someone like Flying Squirrel, who would even buy that?
In the real world, there was no such thing as dual-class restrictions. You could study whatever you wanted.
**Richest Man:** @Fifth Division Captain — was that an investment or a trade? Can you say?
Tony didn't doubt Aizen's motives. There was nothing to doubt—it obviously wasn't charity.
He was simply curious about what arrangement the two of them had reached that made Aizen voluntarily hand over a million points.
As for why the initiative hadn't come from Flying Squirrel—
Of all people to approach, it shouldn't have been Aizen.
**Fifth Division Captain:** It's merely a common item.
**Fifth Division Captain:** Image.jpg
---
[Item: Life and Death]
[Ability: The user may freely toggle between the states of life and death]
[Property: No level restriction]
---
**Ordinary Group Leader:** Life and Death? What kind of item is this?
**Ordinary Group Leader:** Does this even exist in any anime?
**Ordinary Group Leader:** And this ability—freely toggling between life and death?
**Ordinary Group Leader:** What a useless ability.
**Ordinary Group Leader:** Even for an in-game character, switching yourself from life to death should just make you disappear, right? What, does using this let you persist as a spirit?
The ability description was brutally sparse. With only that much information, no matter how you thought about it, the practical application was impossible to imagine.
In the real world, a living person who used this item would just die, wouldn't they?
And death means gone.
A dead person using it could theoretically come back to life—but the dead can't use items.
The former Madara Uchiha could have, perhaps. But he was already alive again now.
This thing was useless to him too.
*(End of Chapter)*