Chapter 729: Sympathy Votes

On the large screen, the five offender players finished their first round of production and each returned to their waiting rooms.

After the three-minute rest period ended, they returned to the floor and began producing the second batch.

The whole process unfolded exactly as before, with no significant changes.

On the audience side, purchasing of the medication was proceeding in parallel.

[This batch has a total of 352 bottles available for purchase (5 tablets each), priced at 600 minutes of visa time per bottle.]

[All audience members, please use the vending machine in your waiting room to bid and purchase.]

[Bidding will remain open until the next batch of medication has finished production.]

[If demand exceeds supply during the bidding period, audience members may choose to Bid Up and Buy, with each increment costing an additional 100 minutes of visa time.]

[Once this batch has been fully sold, audience members may begin casting Sympathy Votes for the offender players.]

Ye Lin and Huang Shengjie went to the vending machine, where a new list of medication had indeed appeared.

Every bottle started at 600 minutes of visa time, with the current remaining count displayed alongside it.

The remaining count began shifting almost immediately.

The batch should have contained 352 bottles, but by the time Huang Shengjie first looked, the number had already dropped to 331. It fell to 292 shortly after, and the pace only picked up from there.

Eventually the remaining count reached zero.

Even so, the vending machine still allowed further action: Bid Up and Buy.

That meant paying 700 minutes of visa time to take a bottle directly away from another audience member who had already purchased one.

The rules didn't specify exactly whose bottle got taken, whether it was random or based on purchase order.

Either way, if a given audience member's bottle got taken from them, the visa time they'd originally spent would be refunded, and they could either give up on buying entirely or bid higher to take someone else's in turn.

The bidding on this batch would only close once the current round of the game ended, at which point it would settle according to the final bid prices.

Huang Shengjie looked genuinely surprised, "It's already sold out?

"That's remarkable.

"If you don't buy, you still get a share of the profits at the end. And people are still passing that up entirely?"

Ye Lin looked thoughtful, "It actually makes sense when you think it through.

"By our estimate, if all of this medication sells, the total visa time involved could reach as high as 2 million, and half of that would be split among audience members who didn't buy anything.

"There are 27 audience members in total.

"If roughly 10 of them end up not buying, each would receive around 100,000 minutes of visa time. That's a genuinely enormous sum.

"But there's another factor to consider. The more audience members who choose not to buy, the smaller each individual's share becomes. If 20 people abstain, each would only receive around 50,000.

"And this is the first batch, when audience demand is at its absolute peak.

"The later batches almost certainly won't sustain this level of demand, meaning less visa time changing hands overall, so each audience member's eventual payout would shrink considerably, possibly down to only 20,000 or 30,000, which wouldn't be nearly as favourable a deal.

"And from another angle, buying the medication isn't a pure loss either. There are ways to convert it into value, and it could potentially be even more profitable than taking the straight payout.

"An audience member could bring the medication back to their community, or sell it to another community entirely.

"Which raises the question: how much visa time would players in other communities be willing to spend to get their hands on Type M?

"Probably far more than we'd expect, and the demand for it is likely much higher too.

"Top-tier players, medication-dependent players in other communities, and even extreme community leaders who use medication to control their ordinary members, all of them could be potential buyers for something like this."

Huang Shengjie nodded in agreement, "That's true."

Type M medication was valuable precisely because of how minimal its side effects were.

The strongest players in any community would naturally prefer not to become dependent on medication themselves. Until now, they'd simply had to endure the pain outright. But with Type M available, they'd almost certainly be willing to pay a substantial premium for it, since strong players tend not to be short on visa time to begin with.

Players already struggling with medication dependency, meanwhile, would likely welcome a way out of it. Previously that hadn't been possible, since communities only had access to Type O and Type F. But with Type M now available, they might redirect the funds they would have spent on Type O or F toward this instead.

And then there were community leaders like Zhao Heng from Community 23, who used medication dependency as a means of control. The appearance of Type M could seriously threaten their grip on power, which meant they had strong incentive to buy it up themselves and corner the supply, keeping the rest of their community locked into Type O and F, and therefore under their control.

In short, because of its low harm and low addictiveness, Type M medication had effectively become an extremely scarce and precious luxury good, one whose value couldn't reasonably be anchored to the price of Type O or Type F.

Huang Shengjie kept watching the vending machine display. There had been no bidding wars yet.

This was, after all, only the first batch, with nine more still to come, so overall supply remained plentiful, and audience members had no real need to bid up prices for now.

Even so, Huang Shengjie already sensed that the audience's appetite to buy was genuinely stronger than he'd expected.

"Sister Ye Lin, if this Type M medication really does end up being bid up by others down the line, maybe we should pick a good moment and make a token purchase ourselves?

"We are two people, after all.

"I buy the medication, you take the profit share. Might not be a bad approach."

Ye Lin shook her head, "I don't think there's any need for that right now. Let's keep watching for a while longer.

"By the way, let's take a look at how the Sympathy Votes actually work."

The two of them went to the console to check, and found the Sympathy Vote function hadn't unlocked yet, though it looked close.

According to the rules, each of them had 15 Sympathy Votes, and they had to be cast personally. But Sympathy Votes couldn't be cast for Wen Wan, since she was from their own community.

Beyond that, the interface also included a Withdraw Sympathy Vote button.

The earlier rules had been vague on this point, stating only that votes could be withdrawn and recast at significant cost, without specifying what that cost actually was or how the recasting worked.

Huang Shengjie tried tapping the Withdraw button.

There was a click, and a small panel beside the console opened, revealing nothing but empty space inside.

"Do you need to have already cast a vote first, or activate some other special mechanism?"

Huang Shengjie couldn't quite work it out for now, but there was still plenty of time left in the game. There was no need to commit all the Sympathy Votes right away. It could wait.