I Only Wanted A Class In The Apocalypse

Chapter 1857: The Planet Paradox and the Crystal Shortage

As the initial shock of the racial tokens subsided, Hye began to analyse the hierarchy of the grading system with a cold, administrative eye.

The colours werenʼt just for aesthetic rarity; they were a precise scale of mass-population displacement. By cross-referencing the data from several dozen tokens across all tiers, he finally cracked the code of the Hescosʼ categorisation.

The scale was staggering. A single White Token yielded one billion individuals—already an entire planetʼs worth of population by pre-apocalyptic standards.

The Green Tokens jumped to ten billion, while the Blue offered fifty billion. But it was the upper echelons that truly defied reason: Gold provided a hundred billion, Black held five hundred billion, and the Red Tokens, the most vibrant and heavy of the lot, contained a staggering one trillion souls trapped in stasis.

Hye looked at the thousands of tokens shimmering in his inventory. By his rough estimate, he was now the custodian of several hundred trillion lives.

”I wonʼt be complaining about a labour shortage or a lack of taxpayers for a very, very long time,” he muttered with a dark chuckle. The dream of a kingdom was no longer just a vision; he had the literal seeds of a galaxy in his pocket.

However, as he delved deeper into the activation protocols, the ”best news ever” began to reveal its jagged edges. Every great power came with an equally great price, and the catches in this deal were formidable.

The first obstacle was the universal requirement of U.stat crystals. These races hadnʼt sealed themselves away for free; they were looking for a Lord who could jumpstart their evolution.

While the specific level requirements varied by race, the baseline was consistent: they needed a massive influx of energy to unlock their levels and regain their physical forms.

Hye ran the numbers and felt a cold pit form in his stomach. Even with the mountain of crystals he had just extracted from Moth, he wouldnʼt be able to satisfy the conditions for even ten percent of these tokens.

He was a billionaire who had just inherited a quadrillion-dollar debt. To unseal these legions, he needed a supply of crystals that surpassed the current production of his heart crystal by several orders of magnitude.

He could burn more bones to accelerate the growth of the crystal trees within his soul, but he had just paid a kingʼs ransom in bones to the Hescos. His reserves were at their lowest point in years.

”I need to improvise,” he whispered, his eyes darting across the projected data. ”I have one month to bridge this energy gap.”

He refused to leave for the Outer Battlefield with these tokens sitting idle in a warehouse. He remembered the stories from Major—about expeditions that stretched into a decade of constant warfare.

If he left now and didnʼt return for ten years, he would lose a decade of potential growth. A hundred billion mages trained for ten years would be gods; a hundred billion mages sitting in a token were just dust.

This month wasnʼt for rest; it was for a desperate, final harvest of bones. He needed to return to the fray and accumulate enough raw material to fuel the awakening of his new subjects.

But as he pondered the crystal shortage, a second, more physical problem emerged: The Planet Paradox.

The systemʼs advice for the Roranto—ten large planets—was just the beginning. As he checked the Black and Red tokens, the requirements scaled vertically.

For a Red Token of a trillion beings, he would need hundreds of habitable worlds just to avoid a planetary-scale famine and riot on day one.

His tens of thousands of artificial planets, which had seemed like an infinite expanse just an hour ago, were suddenly looking like a cramped studio apartment.

He had the people, but he didnʼt have the land. And unlike crystals, which he could harvest, planets couldnʼt be conjured out of thin air.

”You know, I can help you with the artificial planets problem.”

The voice sliced through his concentration like a razor. Hye snapped his head up, his eyes flashing with a mix of irritation and surprise. He had been so lost in his mental ledger that he hadnʼt realised heʼd been thinking out loud, pacing the throne room and muttering statistics like a madman.

Standing by the pillar, her arms crossed and a calculated glint in her eyes, was Olana. She had been listening to every word, mapping out the cracks in his armour.

”What?!” Hye gave her a long, searching look. He had treated her as a prisoner, a nuisance, and a data-entry clerk, but he had forgotten one crucial fact: she was a princess of a family owning a renowned resort. If anyone knew where the universe hid its spare worlds, it was her.

Hye hadnʼt spared Olana a single thought since assigning her the task of monitoring the warrior camps.

He had been adrift in a sea of logistical nightmares, navigating the impossible math of quadrillions of subjects and the planetary surface area required to house them. In his mind, she had become background noise—a captured asset of secondary importance.

”I said I can help you with the artificial planets,” she repeated, her voice cutting through his mental fog like a siren.

She shifted her posture, slowly crossing one leg over the other with a practised, predatory grace. She was a hunter who had finally spotted a crack in her preyʼs armour. ”I can even help you bridge the U.stat crystal deficit.”

”Interesting,” Hye said, his eyes flashing with a sharp, cold light. He leaned back on his throne, his gaze weighing her like a piece of questionable cargo.

”And what makes you think a prisoner like you has access to the kind of volume Iʼm looking for? We arenʼt talking about a few dozen crates, Olana. We are talking about the foundation of a sector.”

”My family has operated that resort for tens of thousands of years,” she replied, her voice steady as she began to lay her cards on the table. She knew this was her only bridge back to civilisation.