Cthulhu Gonfalon

[Due to the needs of government affairs, all registered citizens of the Republic of Northwest are required to register their surnames at the sub-district office of the Ministry of Civil Affairs from this day on. Citizens without surnames can proceed by designing their registration forms.

Note: To avoid repetition, for individuals who have designated surnames to their family, every surname should not be shared by more than 200 families. The surnames will be available for registration on a first-come, first-serve basis and will be accepted in the order of time of registration. After the first batch of surnames have been registered, the Ministry of Civil Affairs will release the number of family names that have been registered. Families who are unsuccessful in this round of registration may proceed with designing another registration. Even a second, or third design…

Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Republic of Northwest, effective as of today.]

This notice was plastered all over the streets of the various cities and towns in the Republic of Northwest. The Ministry of Civil Affairs had even employed temporary loudmouthed propagandists who had taken to the streets, yelling and publicizing this policy—this was a unique characteristic of the Republic of Northwest. Every time a new policy was issued, there would be a team of propagandists hired for publicity and explanatory purposes.

Hiring these propagandists would, of course, entail a small expenditure. But that would be nothing compared to the increase in efficiency of administering the policy. That small amount of money was really no big deal.

Moreover, the Republic of Northwest lacked resources and talent, but not money.

Had everyone not seen how the preparation work for the venue of the Fifth Fighter Championship was progressing? Just the amount spent on the renovations and refurbishments of the venue would be enough to hire propagandists for a few rounds of publicity.

For every Fighter Championship tournament, a large amount of prize money would be awarded. Even the top eight fighters from the youth category would receive an alarming amount of prize money, not to mention the final legitimate champion of the tournament.

On several occasions, higher-ups of the Republic of Northwest had attempted to persuade Sui Xiong not to organize such a Fighter Championship because it was simply a waste of manpower and money. Or if he wanted to do so, he should at least reduce the frequency of such an activity. They felt that once every decade was simply too frequent. At best, they could accept a frequency of once every 20 years.

To this, Sui Xiong merely smiled.

What was money? Money was not gold, silver or a precious stone. It was the currency in circulation.

He might not have fared well in politics, but the “essence of money” was the focus of his politics class in his freshman year that his teacher had reiterated more than once. It was a topic that was highly likely to appear in examinations most of the time. No matter how poorly he had fared in this subject, he would more or less still have some impression.

The essence of money was a commodity used to supplement circulation. There was another special name designated to it, which was called the “universal equivalent.” On Earth, this had developed to the point at which the nation’s credit guaranteed its accounting data. To put it bluntly, it simply meant that the nation’s credit was used as a commodity—this was why their politics teacher had been contemptuous of the people in the IT industry who had highly lauded the types of non-negotiable currencies like “Bitcoins.” Their teacher had even come up with mocking statements like, “If I were to take a gun and rob the trading platform of a certain Bitcoin, could they possibly transfer some electronic data to arrest me?”

In this world, the development of currency had not advanced to the stage of being creditworthy. It was still in the era of production with portable and expensive things like gold, silver and precious stones. Though the value of currency of every country was different, the users would still recognize the currency by itself, and not the country of origin of the currency.

As for credit money and such, even the Goddess of Wealth dared not dabble in it. Up till the present, her church only offered money transfer services based on the customer’s existing funds.

In other words, if a gold coin was stored in a warehouse, the market would literally be lacking this one gold coin. Regardless of which country, no one would be able to replace this gold coin via means like money printing.

If too much money was stored in the warehouse, the market would have too little money. This would definitely affect the circulation in the market. The most direct effect was that the prices of commodities would fall while the value of money would rise.

After all, things like gold, silver and precious stones, were commodities in their own right. Their prices would definitely rise if they were scarce. Also, unlike Earth, there were many places in this world where these things were consumed—for example, whenever magicians made statues or laid out magic arrays, they would usually consume kilograms of gold, several times or even ten times more of white silver and many rare precious stones as well.

This would cause money in the market to continue to decrease. This would certainly cause a major disaster!

Sui Xiong had always been a little worried about this matter. All these years, due to the development in the commercial and entertainment industries, the Republic of Northwest could be said to be earning buckets of gold every day. Although large quantities of materials for production were purchased at the same time, most of these materials for production were converted to food, beverages, weapons and armor, or even things like luxury products. Then again, these things would become money again.

So there were more and more gold coins in the vault. They no longer “piled up into a mountain,” but rather, they piled up into many small mountains. Watching the gold coins piling into a mountain would previously be a delightful sight to Frost and Graupel, but now, they were simply numbed into indifference.

These two were probably the happiest rock dragons, or perhaps even the happiest dragons in the world. The other dragons had to think of all ways possible and risk all sorts of dangers to earn enough wealth. These two dragons only had to guard the vault for Sui Xiong, and then they could enjoy a happy life of rolling about in gold coins and precious stones when they pleased. The other dragons’ nests only had one pile of gold coins, while the gold coins in their vault had piled into a… golden sea.

About two-thirds of these gold coins were Sui Xiong’s personal assets. They really were his personal assets because he had practically built the few most lucrative businesses in the Republic of Northwest through his personal investments. He had sole proprietorship over all of them. Even if he were to divest a portion of these shares, he would still remain the biggest shareholder.

More importantly, those who received a part of the shares—for instance, the higher-ups of the Republic—were all people who had to spend money, and they often spent a great amount of money. But Sui Xiong had practically spent next to nothing.

Basically, he had no expenses to speak of at all.

In the past, he would occasionally create a copy of himself, take the appearance of a mortal and wander around the mortal world. When in high spirits, he would often spend money extravagantly. In recent years, he had stopped doing such things. There was no longer any place for him to spend money.

As he watched the wealth in his vault grow with the passing of time, Sui Xiong felt that the financial order of this world was on the verge of collapse.

So he could hardly wait to spend his money.

The best way was to spend in places where the money would go into circulation very quickly, for instance, giving out money, distributing money and also, allocating money…

However, money should not be given out without any form of order. Sui Xiong had once proposed to give every adult citizen of the Republic of Northwest dozens of gold coins on an annual basis, but this was jointly rejected by the country’s higher-ups. Their reason was that giving out money so loosely would affect the normal production and life of the country.

Sui Xiong really did not know how giving out money could affect the normal production and life of the country, but since that was what everyone said, he surmised that perhaps the situation was really as such.

So he could only worry as he watched more and more money piling up.

The Fighter Championship was the best way he had ever thought of to spend money. The prizes were only second best. Every time this grand event was held, a large amount of money would be spent on purchasing materials and paying for labor costs. These were the areas where most of the money was spent on.

Unfortunately, this event was held on a once-a-decade basis. The amount of money spent was still too little…

As he squandered his money as he pleased, Sui Xiong was also secretly mumbling to himself, “None of you are in favor of me giving out money. If I still don’t think of some ways to put money back into the market, what will I do when the world’s financial order goes wrong in the future…”