The city began to change.
A couple of days after the public hearing, Happiness Through Taste ;) was dissolved.
All the Extractors who were not involved in illegal activities were integrated into the city's forces.
As for the Specters, they were also all confiscated by the city.
When the Manufacturers heard that, they became shocked and outraged.
They were the ones that took care of the Specters!
As it stood, the city barely owned any Specters.
Over 90% of the Specters were in the hands of private Manufacturers.
This was even worse than Crimson City had been before Nick took over.
Even more, the city only had one Hero, the Governor, and two Specialists.
The central power of the city was extremely weak.
But with the addition of the new Specters and Extractors, the city had enough power to rival the third strongest Manufacturer.
The third strongest Manufacturer had around three Specialists and around 15 Experts.
The city now had two Specialists, one Hero, and about ten Experts.
Sadly, this still couldn't compare to Vertigo Box or Swirling Abyss, both of which had over ten Specialists.
As soon as the city proclaimed that it would confiscate all the Specters, the Manufacturers grew angry and protested.
However, the most important Manufacturers were missing from this protest.
Vertigo Box and Swirling Abyss.
The two of them were not interested in fighting for these couple of Specters.
No, they had much bigger targets.
Each other.
As long as they could absorb each other, they would become the rulers and anything within the city would belong to them anyway.
Sadly, without these two Manufacturers, the other Manufacturers essentially hit a wall while negotiating with the Governor.
Some heated exchanges happened, but nothing came of them.
Nick had gone through exchanges like this plenty enough in Crimson City, and he could easily navigate through them.
In the end, the Manufacturers gave up.
They complained, cried, and resisted, but eventually, they gave up and accepted their new reality.
Within a month, the entire situation with the chocolate had been dealt with.
The people who had eaten the chocolate either died or managed to recover from the addicting effects.
The city kept buying food from the caravans, but since nothing of it was used to create chocolate anymore, the city now had a surplus of food to sell.
Yet, the prices of food didn't drop.
People still starved.
But how?
Where was all the surplus food?
It was decomposing.
The food companies found out that they would earn more money via artificial scarcity.
For every piece of food they sold, they left five other pieces to rot.
But Nick noticed that very quickly and told the Governor what to do.
Within a week, a new law was passed.
"Due to a lack of strong and healthy people, production in the city has been crippled. In order to stimulate the economy, a maximum price on food is put in place. This will increase the overall health of the city, create more able-bodied people, and will increase production while lowering labor costs."
The rich people saw that and found that to be a good change.
They had to employ three starving people to do the work of one able-bodied person right now.
If they increased the wage of an able-bodied person by 50%, they would have a happy worker while having half of the costs.
Of course, the owners of the food companies were enraged beyond belief, but they couldn't do anything.
This time, the powerful people were not united.
The food companies were on their own.
They couldn't get the Governor to change the law.
However, this didn't mean that they were powerless.
So, they did the very thing that the Governor had been so afraid of during the last riots.
They protested.
The food companies refused to buy food from the caravans and refused to do business.
They closed their doors.
The citizens became terrified.
They were losing the little bit of food they had access to!
Starvation became even more of an issue.
However, the city didn't seem to do anything for the first couple of days.
After five days, the city opened its storages of emergency food and handed food to the people closest to starvation, but these storages weren't bottomless.
An entire month passed.
Caravans arrived every couple of days but left without selling any of their food.
The storages were running low.
The food companies felt victorious.
And then, after one month, something changed.
A caravan arrived, and all of its food was purchased.
By the city!
The food companies weren't surprised.
They had expected something like this to happen.
It was more surprising that it had taken the city so long to do that.
The food companies had no problem with that since this only made the city's issue worse.
The only thing the city had bought in the past decades was Zephyx for Aegis.
They had never sold anything before.
The people working for the city were Extractors and administrators.
None of these were businessmen.
By trying to take care of an entire sector of business, they would be losing money instead of making it.
It wasn't easy to lead a big company.
Now, the true terror of the city awaited the government.
The free market.
The food companies laughed when the city started to sell food for a tenth of the price.
According to their calculations, the city was losing money.
They were spending 20% more on buying the food than they were making.
This was unsustainable.
The food companies kept watching as the city kept ruining itself financially.
For an additional month, they just kept watching the city spending money wantonly.
Then, they decided to ramp up the pressure.
The food companies would buy a big chunk of the food from the next caravan.
They were going to show the government what it meant to mess with the leaders of an entire sector of business!
The next caravan arrived, and the food companies said that they wanted 70% of the food.
And were promptly shut down.
"Sorry, but we made an exclusive contract with the city. When we wanted to sell to you the last time, you left us hanging, and we lost three million credits since the food we bought decomposed and became unusable. The city has guaranteed a minimum number of bought goods for the next five years."
This was the answer of the caravan.
The food companies were shocked and tried to change the agreement.
They were even willing to buy the goods for 20% more than before.
"Apologies, but the security of the contract is more valuable in the long term."
They failed.
The food companies failed to procure any food.
Well, they might have failed this time, but they wouldn't fail the next time.
Except, they did.
And the next time.
Every caravan visited at least once a month, which meant that the caravans were arriving for the third time since the war started.
Nick had deliberately not bought from the caravans the first time. Like this, the caravans would lose a couple million credits.
Then, during the second month, while the caravans still had the painful loss of revenues in mind, Nick was willing to buy from them.
Of course, at the same time, he also changed the deal a bit.
The city would pay a slight bit less but guaranteed that the caravan would always earn at least a couple million credits every time they came.
The city would buy the food, even if they didn't need it.
Within a week, the food companies realized that there was no way to procure food anymore.
But before they could come up with an idea to deal with that, the next tragedy struck them.
Their bat caves were dying!
The bats in the bat caves ate from the insects inside the human corpses.
However, the number of deaths reduced drastically, and about half of the bats were starving due to a lack of insects!
Then, they realized something even worse.
The city was actually making money by selling food!
They were not running at a deficit!
But how?!
Even they would be running at a deficit like this!
Well, the reason was actually quite simple.
There were no dividends being paid out.
There were no executives that ate a huge chunk of the profit.
Without dividends, the food business's revenue was a bit higher than its cost, and the little profit it made was stored for bad times.
This business had not been built to make money and expand.
No, it was built to keep running indefinitely.
However, that didn't mean that nobody made any profit here.
Nick knew a lot about economics, and he knew that he had to make money move hands quicker.
The food prices were very low, and everyone could afford the food.
Yet, there was one thing the city didn't do.
Prepare the food.
Everything they gave out was raw and unprepared.
However, the city gave out some basic cookbooks free of charge.
This was Nick's idea.
And sure enough, it didn't take long for Nick to see results.
Privatized food distributors.
Food halls.
Restaurants.
Chefs.
Cooks.
By elevating the food, people could sell cheap and unprofitable food for insane prices!
For the first time in their lives, the city's people came into contact with true flavor.
And they became hooked!