The World Online
Page 783Chapter 783 – Problems of the Voyage Route
Every single item in Gaia's auction was a masterpiece, and this was no exception. The final item was finally revealed, and it was a token.
At first glance, it looked similar to the village creation token.
The auctioneer smiled and introduced the item, "This item is the Satellite City token. After it is used, the player immediately obtains the rights to the Satellite City. Starting bid 800 thousand gold, no buyout, please make your bids."
"Woah!"
The moment his words finished, everyone sucked in a deep and cold breath.
Gaia's magnanimity knew no bounds.
This time, all the guild leaders in the world could not hide their greed toward this token, and their eyes turned red. The bidding price soared and reached 1.5 million in just 10 minutes.
The various guild leaders now became extremely careful.
When the price rose to 1.8 million, Blood Romance dropped out. Although he the ability to potentially obtain this token, he still had to decide whether this item was worth it or not.
Blood Evil Mercenary Guild was the best guild in China and had an absolute rule over Xianyang. Even if they fought for the Satellite City using normal means, there was still a high chance they could take down the Satellite City.
Hence, Blood Romance chose to back out.
When the price rose to two million gold, guilds like them who had enough power to fight for the city would all choose to drop out. Those who still bid were those guilds that were not confident about obtaining victory.
Naturally, it was not difficult to understand their mentality.
If it were not for Ouyang Shuo reminding Lin Jing to make the War-Snow Rose Mercenary Guild sign alliance contracts before the system update came out, Xie Siyun would probably fight for this item.
After an intense chase, the token was finally taken by an American guild leader for two million gold.
During this auction, the China and America regions had done exceptionally well.
As everything came to an end, Gaia really did not care and just kicked everyone out of the place. When Ouyang Shuo returned to Shanhai City, it was already 3 PM.
He had only spent around three million gold during this auction, which was much lower than what he had expected. He spent less than he expected because most of the items were targeted at adventure gamemode players.
Out of the ten items, six of the items were prepared for adventure gamemode players. Out of the remaining four, Ouyang Shuo managed to obtain two of them, which was truly a remarkable achievement.
In the 4th year of Gaia, Gaia had started to pay attention to the adventure gamemode players who accounted for 99% of the player base. Gaia had injected some new blood into the adventure gamemode.
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After returning to the Governor-General Manor, Ouyang Shuo took out the Teleportation Token.
"System Notification: Found that player Qiyue Wuyi has special item, Teleportation Token. Will you use this item?"
"Yes!"
"System Notification: Please choose the city to build the teleportation formation in!"
"Friendship City."
"System Notification: City choice completed; the teleportation formation is being created."
"System Notification: Discovered that Friendship City is located overseas. Hence, this teleportation formation will be listed as a cross country formation."
At this point, the territory had one more city with a teleportation formation.
Friendship City, which was built in Somalia, was located between Jidian City and Lion City, so it was at a crucial point on the voyage route.
However, Friendship City was recently facing some problems.
A day ago in a memorial sent by City Magistrate Gu Xiuwen, it was mentioned that the friendly attitude of the Somali people were changing for the worse.
The entire situation was changing.
Due to the passage of time, the contributions of the voyage squadron to Somalia were gradually being forgotten. Both sides had conflicts of interest due to voyage trading.
This was especially the case between Friendship City's Courage Port and Somalia's Berbera Port. In terms of fighting for ships to come and gain resources, there was a direct conflict of interest.
As most of the merchant ships on the voyage trading route came from China, they were mostly willing to stop at Courage Port. Even western merchant ships chose to stop at Courage Port due to the presence of the Mediterranean Squadron.
Over 500 ships would stop there every day, and they were working toward a thousand. With Gu Xiuwen taking charge, the second round of construction works on the port was coming to an end.
After the construction was finished, the port could have three thousand odd ships docking at once.
In comparison, Berbera Port was left in the cold.
Merchant ships stopping by the port brought with them huge profits. Apart from border taxes, the spending of tens of thousands of merchants could totally sustain the economy of an entire city.
Who knew that Ouyang Shuo would actually build a mega city on the land that they gave him? Currently, the construction of Friendship City had already reached its end.
Thanks to the massive financial support of Shanhai City, the construction of Friendship City was much bigger than any other city in Somalia. Hence, it made the nearby Berbera Port seem out of sorts.
Gu Xiuwen mentioned in the memorial that Somalia was reducing the resource provisions to Friendship City. The prices of grain and vegetable were continuously being raised.
Friendship City itself did not produce such resources as the city was mainly service based. If Somalia removed these provisions, the people in Friendship City would have to starve.
When Ouyang Shuo received the news, he had already instructed the Honglu Temple and the Industry Division to send out envoys to Somalia to engage in diplomacy and try to calm down the situation.
At the same time, he also told the intel office of the Black Snake Guards to try to break the unity of the Somalia players to gain some allies for Friendship City.
To provide agricultural products for Friendship City was a great deal for the Somalia Lords.
There must be someone behind the combined acts of the Somali Lords. The mission of the Black Snake Guards was to find out the identity of this person and strike them down if possible.
Du Ruhui had raised the idea of attacking Somalia to Ouyang Shuo.
Ouyang Shuo thought about the matter but rejected the suggestion in the end. Although he was not soft hearted, he knew that the time was not right. The voyage route had been opened for a few months, so Ouyang Shuo did not wish to start the flames of war during this period and affect trade.
Shanhai City also could not let other countries think that they were warmongers, at least not now. If they truly wanted to take down Somalia, they would need to wait for the right time.
Under such circumstances, opening the teleportation formation there became an effective method, giving the port support from Shanhai City.
There was also another reason why Ouyang Shuo had hurried to open the teleportation formation.
That was because the navy unit housed in the city had reported that the Somali pirates had shown signs of revival.
Farrah, now the head of the pirates, had slowly entered the field of sight of the navy unit.
Farrah hated Ouyang Shuo to the bone.
When Ouyang Shuo received the report, he was extremely wary and immediately ordered Fleet Admiral of the Mediterranean Squadron Alvaro to send a division over to patrol the Gulf of Aden.
Protecting the safety of the Gulf of Aden was in Shanhai City's best interests.
...
On the topic of the Mediterranean Squadron, their base in Jidian City was also worrying.
All the resources in Friendship City relied on the French.
Based on the reports from Alvaro, the Spanish had walked away from the crisis, and a new Spanish Invincible Squadron had been built, and they were ready to enter the Mediterranean once more.
The entire route from Jidian City to France was by the shoreline of the Spain.
If they had ill intentions, they could totally cut off all the resources of Jidian City and make the Mediterranean Squadron hungry.
Luckily, when Shanhai City had upgraded to Grade 3 Prefecture a while ago, he had opened up a teleportation formation there. Furthermore, since the city had the help of Atlantis, the Spanish would not dare to try anything.
As for the future, it was an unknown.
How would it be easy to protect a trade route? In history, which country that protected such a voyage trade route was not an overlord in the world?
And Shanhai City was still a distance away from reaching such a position. Since they had opened up the trade route so easily, they naturally needed to pay a heavier price and take unorthodox precautions.
Luckily, this was the game and anything was possible.
Alvaro suggested that they find a more stable supply base before the Spanish grew strong enough.
Alvaro did not consider the territories north of the Mediterranean; his suggestion was to attack one of the African states.
His suggested target was Morocco, which was currently facing Spain.
Morocco was located to the northwest of Africa, connected to Algeria in the east and the Sahara Desert was to the south. West of it was the Atlantic and north of it was the Gibraltar Straits.
The mid and north portions of the country consisted of the Atlas Mountains, east and south was high plains and the ex-Saharan plains. Only the northwest region was relatively narrow and low plains.
In history, Morocco was occupied by France, Spain, and other countries.
Ouyang Shuo supported Alvaro's suggestion. Gibraltar Straits was like the lifeline of Shanhai City's ocean life and it being broken would be catastrophic.
A day ago, Ouyang Shuo had instructed the Military Affairs Bureau to meet up with the Nanyang Navy Headquarters to discuss this problem.