Chapter 159: Niche Market
Breaking the monotony of only talking on a compressed dirt path, the tree canopy opened to a place bustling with activity.
"There's nothing in a radius of hundreds of kilometers apart from the training park! So everyone you see is someone having an interest in the park, be it as a tourist, an observer, a guide, a member, or an employee!" Utopia was shamelessly advertising the park with great enthusiasm.
Striding forward a bit faster, the 3 soon arrived at a cleared area where there was a fork in the path. Forward leads to the forest again, and to the capital eventually, while turning leads to a huge wooden gate.
It was so painfully obvious that the path forward was taken by nearly no one and that in fact, all the people they had been walking alongside, all the people they had seen at the Undecided node, or that they had seen passing them by, had all come here for one objective: Entering the training park, or leaving it.
Looking behind him, Miro was still able to see the node tower, showing at what point they were near to each other and how if they had rushed, not even 5 minutes would have been needed to arrive at the gate.
And that was 5 minutes of rushing with tier 1 stats and masteries.
'Anyone coming here through the teleportation network…'
He didn't even try finishing this line of thought. It was too obvious.
"Let's go to the counter, they have loads of connected lenses there."
Barely had he finished talking that he "teleported" to the counter and started speaking with a woman in casual wear that seemed to be in charge of the reception work with a few others.
Miro looked at Miri, and after exchanging looks for a few seconds, they started running, trying to outdo the other.
However, as they had the same strength stat and neither had a specialty that allowed them to go faster, they used the more efficient and optimized method of tripping the other in a gentle kick-to-the-face way.
Their childish behavior didn't attract that much attention as they were not only slow but also because everyone here was someone who knew or heard about what this training park was really like inside.
Innocent, competitive-minded, and training-minded agreed upon violence was not frowned upon, it was even a point very much stressed by all the other nascent training parks and training centers in addition to the general atmosphere.
And from there, everything happened fast.
Utopia gave them each a pair of connected lenses while stating that unfortunately, they didn't have a permanent supply of permanent ether pocket dimension so they would have to buy it themselves later.
He taught them the basics of how to use them, gave them a permanent membership to the park and a quick tutorial on how to access the network and how to use the map to find whatever they wanted, then they left for the center.
There, he confirmed they had enough EP to buy things and a trip to the capital through the network until they made the trip and opened their own bank account, sent a few websites perfect for people in their state, then advised them to a few places perfect for the quiet training they needed to advance to tier 2.
He made sure they sent a contact invitation to Rune and that they knew how to contact him, then promptly left without dilly-dallying.
His job was done.
They had money, unlimited access to information, a safe environment, a way to ask for help if needed, what more could they ask for?
So they started getting familiar with their new environment, walking through the central social area, visiting the quiet field, entering domes that didn't put them in danger.
They saw and experienced the cosmic mist domes filled with Rune's element, observed how others seriously challenged themselves through some domes and came out blooded all over from fighting with another, visited the tens of associations that entered into a partnership with the park…
And once they felt in control, started using all the services that weren't available for them back at their native dimension.
Some specialized cooks and bar chiefs of course came back after getting a specialization at tier 2 or 3, but their services weren't cheap due to their abysmal number.
A few days had allowed the two to settle down without asking for help, but they still didn't attack the tier 2 barrier, not due to not being able to, but because there were just too many new things to discover.
Curiosity was inscribed in their genes, and be it in reality or online, there were years of content for them to discover. So focusing on something was close to impossible, not even talking about days of dedicated training.
Eventually, Miri had enough to fill his mind and separated from his brother's side to go do his own things.
As for Miro, he decided to dedicate a whole day to learning more, or trying to, about the Undecided company that their big brother was a founding member of.
And what he learned wasn't just the story of a successful pioneer company that made loads of money, but the story of a pioneer company that created a new market for their own product and had created their own little haven.
When Utopia had emphasized that the company wasn't about growth but about stability, Miro finally understood that he was in fact diminishing what "his" company had accomplished.
The training park market wasn't a gigantic competitive market, it was a market that very few new and ancient companies ventured into. Why? Due to the fact that the rules surrounding it had been created, shaped, and adjusted by "amateur capitalists".
Summarized: The profit margin compared to the invested efforts and capital was too low.
From what he read online, the Undecided Training Park was close to a non-profit volunteer project by the Undecided company with a quality that kept going higher and higher, barring competition from taking even a speck of the small market.
A line particularly struck Miro when he read about the history of the training park market in general.
[The training park concept and structure was shaped to be dependent on others to thrive from its inception by the Undecided adventurer's group, and the first to have realized and put that to practice had been exactly the subsequently created Undecided pioneer company.]
This precise sentence was the introduction to the "Partnerships" section of the page on which the Undecided training park's hundreds of partnerships from all horizons were listed.
'So, summarized, the training park market is fully crushed and owned by a single giant that stubbornly keeps increasing the quality for price ratio and creating quality of life innovations as if the price had never been in consideration…'
But Miro wasn't even finished reading and another half an hour later, he revised his judgment after learning of a few of the core keys to the Undecided keeping nearly the whole small market to themselves.
'Everything is made public, from the daily profit to the monthly upkeeps. And as long as an innovative idea is proposed and accepted through the central reality-augmented board at the center, the creator will gain enough money to max even a tier 5 entity stats and connections to open his own minor company comfortably.'
The more he learned, the more it seemed strange for there not to be billions of adherents already for something that was supposed to be "owning the whole market" and that could help train all the fundamentals a bit more efficiently, as well as offer an extremely good environment for developing adventuring connections.
'Is the training park market perhaps… A very niche market?'
With his non-existent base of knowledge about all the economic talks, he tried to find something like a population reach or the profit generated by the training park field in general, and finally succeeded for the former after 10 minutes of arduous search.
The website was advised by lots of reviews and, as shady as it seemed, it contained a massive amount of data and traffic, so the chances of it being fake were low.
[Training Park Market:
Category: Pioneer - Exclusive - Nascent
Reach: Niche - Low
Influence: Pioneer - Low
Target: Specialized - Universal
Interest: Niche - Low - Specialized
Profit: N/A - Low - Medium
Maturity: Low - Medium
Political Implications: No
Projection: Fully Stabilized (99%+) - Extreme Growth (N/A%)
Description: The IGS isn't yet in a stable development phase, so the mass market isn't ready for this type of concept yet. All the target audience is either out on expeditions, educated at prospect schools, or don't think it's worth their while to go somewhere like this.
However, the fact that the main actor of this market is at the same time its creator owning the pioneer advantage, and is also extremely willing to cooperate and open its secrets for the competition is a fact that cannot be undermined.
It means a lot of trusts will be created from nothing the moment the name of the main actor company is heard as long as the partnerships are fruitful, which they should be.
Give it a few more years or decades, and if the main actor company is still as active and devoted as it is now, then I wouldn't dare estimate the reach and influence anymore.]
'So it's really a pretty niche market. But whether the guy took into account all the details remains unknown… Well, at least now I got an idea, can't complain.'
Wrapping up his day dedicated to understanding the Undecided company, Miro checked his messages, hoping for his big brother to send a message back, only to end up disappointed after not seeing anything.
However, after checking, he felt that he had nothing else to do.
He had ideas, he had thoughts, but now that he learned more about not only his environment but also the overall situation of the IGS in the Endless…
'Well, let's go find a quiet training ground. Reaching tier 2 will at least give me more things to do.'
Standing up, he opened the map of the training park and used the network to check the occupancy of the different single training grounds.
Finding one that wasn't too far and had ample capacity, Miro sent a message to Miri that he was going to use a few days to make all his lacking fundamentals reach tier 2.
…
Suspended in the air through two simple locked energy platforms under his feet, Rune was observing the ruins of the greatest city he had ever seen in the bone region.
After only 1 month of travel, the topography had greatly changed. Steep terrain had left the place to flat rocky plains that had only sporadically changed over the following 2 months they spent traveling to this location.
'Isn't it a bit too… Big?'
As the only judge of what he was seeing, Rune was having an internal dilemma concerning the size of what he was seeing.
And unfortunately, what was too big wasn't only the city.
Without turning his head or eyes, he started to describe what he was seeing, "Tolevia is much bigger than we expected if it's really the same city of Tolevia you talked about Astryde. I see the first obvious ruins much closer than the ones behind, a few hundred kilometers between the two would be a conservative estimation."
"It's just a bit bigger then," Astryde wasn't bothered by this observation, "The perfect time segment dates from 1500 years, so for things to have changed… It's really completely normal don't you think?"
Nodding to that, he continued to report, "There's also an extremely massive ether signature inside the city ruins. I can already pretty much say the origin is a super big bad boy, or maybe it's multiple big bad boys? I don't think so but who knows? Hehehe."
Rune wasn't over as he continued reporting the most worrisome intel to Arik and Astryde, "It seems there's a lot of underlings too, I see a lot of life and movement in there. If the ether wasn't stable and natural everywhere, I would think it was a nest, but it doesn't have any of the characteristics. Or maybe it's hidden from where I stand? Underground?"
He didn't even raise the possibility of having found ancient civilization's natives, it was that unlikely for the teeming life to be them.
"What are the chances the biggest one has a natural beyond health?" Despite not being able to see, Arik looked valiantly towards the big city as he asked a very important question that was yet unasked and unanswered.
"I would need to check its appearance from closer, see if there's a tie with smaller counterparts, it would mean it's not born at this size but has grown into it. Though it could still have developed it naturally…" He neither confirmed nor shut down the possibility.
"Then…" Astryde began, "Should we call for support? Maybe there are prospects relatively near that could help us."
Hearing the proposition, Arik started to scratch his bony chin, "We need a tower scan to prove our point if we do that. Is there something like monsters patrolling around the city perimeters that could hint at some sort of a hierarchy?"
Focusing on the unobstructed part of the ruins, Rune waited to see specks of ether moving too fast or too randomly to be ambient ether.
And he found a lot once he looked for them.
"I withdraw what I said before, it's most probably a nest and it most probably is hidden somewhere I can't see. So the big one is probably a lot more intelligent too, though I doubt it became altruistic after being born in the bone region," he voluntarily let escape his instinctual conclusion.
With this new piece of information unveiled, it was Astryde who realized its importance and put it into words first, "Monsters that can be tamed are the first step to advanced studies and foundational long-term colonization, if we prove there's a nest here it'll be nearly guaranteed that all the support we need will come."
Looking above, Rune felt that something else was amiss as he focused on trying to see monsters.
To confirm his hunch, he looked at the "sky" behind him.
"There are a lot fewer monsters above the ruins than there should be," he concluded aloud.
"So it's even been considered a danger zone by the aggressive monsters of the bone region? Is the big one possibly a tier 5 monster? Or is the nest much more organized and structured than normal? Those are scary possibilities I didn't even think of," Arik continued the logical line of thought.
"Should we ignore it then? Make a scan, record a bit, and go to another city's ruins?" A totally relevant and proper course of action for the Undecided was brought up by Astryde, who didn't hesitate a single second to possibly delete their last 3-month travel effort.
"If you give me a few days I'll actualize my cosmic mist intent and go in without much risk. So let me first see what it's really like, and then we'll decide whether to settle here or move again. Though, once you see the monster I see…" A bit of excitement colored Rune's voice.
"I think we'll skip months of training if we decide to focus on clearing Tolevia, it's really that big and that teeming with life and challenge from what I see. Oh, is the thrill taking over me? I need to start working on my cosmic mist then!"
The more he thought about it and tried to explain, the more he seemed to find the idea of clearing the whole city including the big monster to be a marvelous idea.
Eventually, having no plan of completely ignoring the ruins of Tolevia before their eyes, the group of 3 decided to create a safe camp where Rune was able to see the city but where they would still need at least 15 minutes at 1 kilometer per second to reach it.
There, while Rune was pushing his intent to its best in isolation, Astryde and Arik started to engineer a plan. A plan for making sure the IGS wouldn't be able to ignore their request for support while making sure they would still get all the contribution from it.
Min-maxing the different time-watching reports Astryde had prepared and their links to the situation and the city wasn't easy. Creating a proper timeline would also be a bit hard. As would be including all the observations files and intel Rune would bring back from his deep scouting trip.
But as long as they did it perfectly, the rewards would be exceptional even if there was no AI core to oversee the assessment to make sure it was impartial.
On Rune's side, with a short-term goal he created himself pushing him from behind, he didn't consider the next 2 days of not fighting as a break at all. He single-mindedly did his intent actualization for 5 hours straight, then proceeded to tinker with the bits he knew could be made purer or more smooth.
'Well, I think if I continue I'll just be doing pure slow tinkering.'
Feeling a 10-centimeter wide sphere of cosmic mist infused with his most powerful intent floating before him via his mind, he was reminded that the state where he quickly improved wasn't a normal state.
Months of accumulated fighting mutations, occasional tinkering, and providential insights had given him an intent that was coming extremely, even dangerously close to what he had named "complete 1st stage".
'I can feel it, it's so near, but at the same time… It's just so complex to push it further.'
The background motivation that made him persevere in this direction of first completing his 1st stage "spiritual perception extinction" was the fact that once it was done, he would finally be coming back to working with the other concepts he hadn't touched for more than a year.
'Though, is reaching the complete 1st stage now fast or slow? Do I even want an answer? Maybe I should erase the crafting whatever from my to-do list? No. I at least need to check it out, if only to boost my non-existent ego. I'm a bit too unfocused too, aren't I?'
Realizing he couldn't continue tinkering with his intent for eternity here, he dismissed his experimental spheres and stood up.
He needed to borrow Arik's stuff before departing.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone