Chapter 091: Buying Top-Grade Goods in the Shop

The transfer window lasted four days in total, and once that time passed, no further transfers would be possible. Anyone who had already moved would not be able to return. But within those four days, players who transferred from Thunder to Radiance or Flame and found those servers unsatisfactory could still choose to move back. A transfer request had to be submitted two days before the migration, and a request to return to the original server had to be submitted within two days after the transfer.

Once a transfer request was submitted, the official Legend staff would move the player’s data from the Thunder server in its entirety to the new server, while the character on the original server would vanish. In this way, the player would be successfully transferred from Thunder to either Radiance or Flame, completing the transfer process.

Likewise, if a player who had already transferred found the new server unsatisfactory during the transfer period, they could submit a transfer request, and the official staff would gather those players’ records and move them back to Thunder, restoring everything to its original state.

The loophole in the system rules that Lin Jia spotted was the imbalance in item ownership between the old and new servers. Since Thunder had opened earlier than the other two servers, there were more players who had leveled up in advance, and many discarded pieces of equipment had been sold to the system shops. Among those items were quite a few non-restocking goods that the system would never refresh. Lin Jia and the others planned to buy up those non-restocking items from the shops, then create a large number of alternate accounts and transfer them all together. By then, the flood of new players pouring into the new servers would become ravenous customers for the gear that could no longer be found in the shops.

Before the servers shut down in the morning for the transfer, Lin Jia had already bought the last batch of weapons from the blacksmith’s shop beside the safe zone in Desert City: a little over twenty Crescent Moons, Sea Souls, Eight Wastes, and the like. He even unexpectedly bought a Swiftwind Blade. Even among high-level players, a Swiftwind Blade was worth around one hundred thousand gold coins, yet someone had actually sold one to the shop. He could not tell whether it had come from a wealthy fool or from someone who had simply made a mistake.

After buying up the weapons, Lin Jia found little to nothing in the clothing shop next door. Perhaps clothes and hats were in greater demand, leaving little surplus to be sold to the shops. In a shop that already sold Bronze Helmets and Magic Helmets, hats had little value. Among the garments, Light Armor had already been added in a small update before the transfer, while Medium Armor was in short supply. Basically, anyone at level twenty-two who had enough carrying capacity wore medium armor, so almost nobody sold it to the shops. As for the level-twenty-two class outfits, only a tiny handful of players could wear them yet. If someone sold those to the shop, that would mean their brain had been smashed in a door.

But in the accessories shop, the three brothers struck gold. Their packs were stuffed with large quantities of level-fifteen to level-twenty jewelry. After sweeping through every system shop in Desert City, Shabak City, Bichi City, and Snake Mountain Village, Lin Jia and the others filled the storage of their three main accounts as well as three alternate accounts. In addition, they applied for several level-one alternates to serve as storage mules in the beginner village.

Now the transfer had been completed. Lin Jia had moved an account on the new server to Bichi Beginner Village for one purpose: to transfer those items out of the mules, haul them to the great city of Bichi, and hand them over together with the items from the main accounts to that fellow, Lonely Windburst, in Desert City for sale. Why not run the mules to Alliance Lands instead? A level-one mule with a pack full of gear, burdened beyond belief, crawling along as if doing a moonwalk—go on, show me how you would run a level-one mule all the way from Bichi to Alliance Lands.

After the Radiance server opened, there was almost nothing in the system shops that players had sold in themselves. During this period of cooperation with Lonely Windburst, Lin Jia and the others had accumulated more than fifteen million gold coins. Every piece of gear they had obtained while leveling each day had been exchanged for gold and stored separately across the six accounts, large and small, in the three brothers’ hands. As for Lonely Windburst, who made his living as a professional trader, he had also accumulated nearly ten million gold coins by buying low and selling high, flipping all kinds of gear for profit. For a group of only four people, that was already an immense fortune beyond measure.

While many players had not yet realized that the shops still contained a great deal of low-level non-restocking gear, Lin Jia and the others had already made ample preparations, waiting only for the servers to reopen so they could make a killing.

The three brothers moved part of the low-level gear from their mules to Bichi City and handed it to Lonely Windburst’s alternate account, while the rest was hauled to Desert City and given to his main account. According to the man himself, he had already booked a large private room at the internet cafe for tonight’s operation, set up multiple computers for simultaneous control, and even roped in several of his dorm mates to help.

Tonight their task was to take the low-level non-restocking gear Lin Jia and the others had hauled in, dump it into the beginner villages, and work hard to sell every piece for gold.

The influx of massive numbers of new players meant that the large quantities of low-level equipment in Lin Jia’s hands would surely become hot commodities. Some newcomers would earn the money themselves by diligently hunting deer, cutting meat, and saving up; others would borrow from friends who had started earlier; and some wealthier newcomers might even buy equipment in advance for levels they had not yet reached, so that the moment they leveled up they could equip it immediately, saving the time otherwise spent shopping and using it instead to grind experience and narrow the level gap between themselves and veteran players.

During this mass exchange of low-tier gear in the shops, Lin Jia and the others discovered an interesting secret: even among the low-level items in the shops, and even among equipment sold by the system, there were hidden treasures of extraordinary quality, or outright abnormal pieces. This time, Lin Jia had accidentally bought a freakish Iron Bracelet with Accuracy plus two and Magic plus zero to two, as well as a Silver Bracelet with Agility plus three and Magic plus zero to three. He was so overjoyed that he nearly fainted on the spot.

Before purchase, items sold by the system could not reveal their mutated attributes in the shop. They displayed only the normal attributes assigned by the system, and those attributes, along with durability, were usually at full value. For example, the normal properties of an Iron Bracelet were weight one, durability four, level three to wear, with Accuracy plus one. The system shop sold it at a clearly marked price of 880 gold coins. By contrast, equipment obtained by players during leveling often had incomplete durability, so when such items were sold into the shop, the listed price might be something like 678 gold coins, reflecting the missing durability. After buying it, the player would still have to repair it themselves.