After getting the sample, Wang Qi discussed the local ghost situation with the students and finally decided to give up recruiting ghost helpers.
The students come from the Fountain of Youth Academy and will inevitably be influenced by some of the concepts of the Church of Life. Seeing is believing. After entering the snowfield, you can see enough ghosts to form your own judgment - these ghosts are unlikely to be caused by human beings. The soul is transformed.
This conclusion is first supported by mathematics.
Based on the behavior of ghosts devouring each other, and calculating the average density inside and outside, the entire region consumes tens of thousands or even more ghosts every year.
Even if it is only 2000 years since the incident at the Magic Well, the total number of ghosts consumed is definitely not something that this radius of less than 400 kilometers can contain. If the adventurers' capture of ghosts is included, the number must be in the hundreds of millions.
Assuming that people in the Magic Well era could widely use magic, there is no possibility that such an area could accommodate hundreds of millions.
It is not enough to mention water, because there is no such detailed historical hydrological data.
Just looking at the size of the city with hundreds of millions of people within a radius of 400 kilometers, it doesn’t match what everyone has seen along the way.
For specific speculation, Wang Qi does not need to provide samples from his previous life. It is enough to directly refer to cities with a population of more than 500,000 such as Fountain of Youth and Huguang City. If the area is not enough, it will naturally only develop upward.
Over two thousand years, a new soil layer with a thickness of more than twenty meters can indeed be formed, but such a thickness cannot cover the highest point of a city of that size anyway, and it will definitely leave behind an extremely large group of ruins.
Even if there are such ruins of urban agglomerations, the snowfield area will not become as desolate as it is now, because even if such a city is shattered, the remaining relatively intact areas can form many areas that can accommodate hundreds of thousands of people. Areas where people live, these urban areas will not be buried underground by time if they are maintained.
Beyond mathematical conclusions lies the behavior of ghosts.
It is difficult to see these ghosts acting with purpose. Their mode of action and logic are not even comparable to those of rabbit-sized monsters. They basically rely on instinct for support.
The ghosts above the fourth ring may have a certain degree of intelligence, but it is most likely caused by some changes in the process of devouring each other, and it cannot be the awakening of human memory.
Mixing the memories of two different people together is enough to create a lot of cognitive dislocation and ideological contradictions, and a four-ringed ghost is definitely not just grown by swallowing up various psionic energies, so the degree of memory confusion is certain. Will cause ghost madness.
But what everyone can see is that ghosts are not crazy at all. Although they have the behavior of devouring each other, they can also be regarded as their own ecological circle. At least no more advanced ghosts have been found to engage in more frequent devouring activities, which is enough to prove that ghosts " emotionally stable".
After giving up recruiting ghost helpers, there was nothing else going on in the snowfield. After collecting the samples, I changed a route and headed back.
The main reason for changing the route is to see if there will be any unexpected gains. Even if there is not, you can still observe the snowfield from a different angle.
There are also some strange stones and plants on the new route, which are slightly different from the ones I have seen before. After a few days of delay, I returned to the haunted town and returned the locator given by the God Warrior to the supply station of the Church of Light.
After driving all the way back to Sour Lake to exchange for his horse, there were only eighty days left before the next world gate opened.
Time has a certain sense of urgency.
To ensure that he would be able to go back when the doors opened next round, Wang Qi placed his first order in Sour Lake.
It is a collective way of obtaining directional information.
The specific implementation method is to take Sour Lake as an example. For example, if there are several large local households that are very concerned about information about the occurrence of magical disasters, but do not want to spend too much money on "intelligence collection entrustment", then they can choose "joint information transmission entrustment". ".
In this mode, the chamber of commerce will not issue tasks to local adventurers, but will split accounts with other chambers of commerce based on the entrusted money.
The "other chambers of commerce" inside, in the case of Sour Lake, are mainly northbound and eastbound trade routes. The north direction is not towards the haunted town, but before that the east and west roads are divided into other directions.
Each chamber of commerce that receives the money does not need to do anything extra. When it is confirmed that there is a magic disaster in its surroundings, the nearest chamber of commerce will initiate the "information transmission". During the process, other chambers of commerce will provide conveniences such as changing horses or even people, until the information is transmitted to the "commissioned initiation" point".
The local Sour Lake Chamber of Commerce, which received the largest proportion of the money, was responsible for the final information distribution.
This business model did not just appear after the magic disaster. It existed very early. It is the main channel used by the big players to keep an eye on the dynamics of the royal city and the capital. Of course, it can only obtain information that can be publicly accessed at the chamber of commerce level. If some confidentiality is involved , it does not belong to the scope of commission by the gangsters, and there is another way to play.
Now the demonic disaster is a very real threat. A country has been wiped out in the west, and Lei Ming in the south has been partially disabled. Wang Qi and others walked around outside, and the belated big households and businessmen finally realized this. Things are closely related to his head and pocket, and he initiated a joint commission against the demonic disaster.
There are also some problems with this kind of entrustment. For example, cities A, B, and C all have similar entrustments, but it is difficult for the chambers of commerce in different cities to receive the same entrustment. However, the three chambers of commerce do not get the same commission just because they all received the same entrustment. Give me a price concession.
Back at Sour Lake, Wang Qi was not the first initiator here, but just a member of the group, requesting that a copy of the information be delivered to a designated location.
There is no requirement to designate additional intelligence lines. The Sour Lake Chamber of Commerce will expand the existing lines. Each new entrusted chamber of commerce will be priced at 3 gold crowns of Saint Anthony, and the intelligence will be delivered to the designated location for 5 gold crowns, as well as the local area of the Sour Lake Chamber of Commerce. The commission fee is 3 gold, and the minimum is 11 gold, totaling about 46 grams of gold, to participate.
But in fact, the number of customers who actually join the joint commission is not very large.
On the one hand, many large investors who are aware of the risks will also keep a sense of luck. On the other hand, those who have contributed money will also think that others will contribute money and are unwilling to give too much.
In short, after Wang Qi joined the commission with the lowest threshold fee, the total commission amount he saw was only 102 gold. This amount had already deducted Sour Lake's own profits and information distribution fees, which meant that the commission would spread to 34 chambers of commerce.
34 chambers of commerce sounds like a lot, but actually it only covers a very small area.
Even if Suanhu strictly follows long-distance trade routes and tries to be as straight as possible, the average distance between two local chambers of commerce is less than 40 kilometers. With two trade routes running concurrently, the furthest intelligence coverage distance is less than 700 kilometers, and the straight-line distance may be only About four hundred kilometers.
This distance is enough for local large households and businessmen to give early warning and run away, but it is far from enough for Wang Qi.
Of course, the chambers of commerce at the farthest points on each line will definitely have similar joint commissions. Once they confirm the source of the information, they will also activate this commission. When this chain is long enough, it will always reach all areas that merchants can reach.
However, according to the guarantor's explanation, there will be a certain time difference between the linkage between the two different commissions. This is mainly to prevent problems with one of the chambers of commerce or intelligence sources, resulting in a large amount of false intelligence being sent out from various places at the same time.
From the perspective of the chamber of commerce, they mainly rely on serving local businessmen and value their own credibility, so it makes sense to be cautious no matter what.
Just standing on the side of the principal, there will be a situation where the more different delegations involved in information transmission, the lower the overall efficiency will be.
Wang Qi didn't feel too entangled. The plan had already been decided in the ice field, and he could just implement it step by step.
The price of the joint commission was not expensive. Wang Qi directly took out three additional small gold bars to expand the 34-node commission to 57.
If some customers can join in the future, even if they are all stingy, we can at least ensure the rapid flow of information for about a thousand kilometers in the east and north directions.
He did not choose to continue to add money because he did not want to be taken advantage of. After all, he was not a local. Even if there was a guarantor in the team, he had to add a "front" person. The chamber of commerce may not fully follow the rules. The more money he paid, the greater the risk.
His approach was to cast a wide net.
Next, during the process of moving along the coast of the Goddess Sea, you will participate in similar joint commissions at certain distances. In some special nodes and big cities where trade routes intersect, you will pay attention to the total commission amount.
It is not always necessary to pay extra. For example, there is a city on the west coast of the Goddess Sea that has a four-way intersection of trade routes. I don’t know whether it is because it is close to the Holy City of the Church of Nature or because the merchants are more famous. Wang Qi joined the alliance. At the time of delegation, the number of nodes involved in the delegation had reached 227!
When Wang Qi and his group returned to the area where the refugee bandits were infested and completed the last two registrations at the previously entrusted designated reception area to the west of the mountain range, a total of 11 gold bars were spent.
Much better than the worst-case scenario expected.
The next step is to unify consensus, integrate forces, and be ready to rush to the door when the news comes.
