With his decision made, he left the Merit Missions tab and hopped into the Public Trading Platform. As he did this, his mind was hit with a deluge of information. The information was so much that he became dizzy and his vision swam.
The trading platform was like an ocean of information. The information that he could was constantly changing and shifting like the real tides of an ocean. It was all too much for him.
Eventually, he couldn’t handle it anymore. He had to heave and vomit everything that he had within his stomach. Since he had stopped eating because of his abundant internal energy, he had nothing in his stomach to vomit, so his stomach could only roll painfully within his body.
On the good side, his mind slowly got through the barrage of information. He still couldn’t handle all the information that he was receiving, but his mind quickly learned to avoid most of it for the sake of his sanity.
He started looking at the trading platform like a large newspaper with content that was constantly updating. As long as he didn’t focus on the contents of the newspaper but only looked at the whole, he would be fine.
This tactic helped his mind relax, so he stopped being queasy and dizzy. When he stopped trying to vomit his entire empty stomach, he sat on the ground breathing heavily as if he had almost drowned.
"That was not what I expected. It was not what I expected at all."
He stopped to breathe for a while. He was breathing so hard that his chest rose and fell like the bellows of a furnace.
After calming down some more, he said, "On the good side, with this many transactions going on every moment, odds are on my side that I will find the Living Metal."
"But on the bad side, with the listings constantly moving around and changing like this, it might be difficult to find the Living Metal."
Then he began to grumble, "This is just bad design. How does anyone find anything in here?"
"This isn’t a trading platform at all. It is more like a mental attack disguised as a trading platform to lure unsuspecting fools like me into it."
"They got me, though. I’ll give them that. But this isn’t over."
He is determined to get the Living Metal. But even though he wanted to get it as soon as possible, he didn’t rush to do it at all.
The first thing he did was to let his stomach settle completely and wait for his vision to become completely still. All the grumbling and complaining helped to achieve this.
Then he tentatively extended his mind into the ocean of information. This process was so slow that it looked like he was putting his hands back into a flame that burned him recently.
When his mind finally entered the ocean of information again, he didn’t search with his eyes. He just tossed the name of what he was looking for into the ocean of information while he used his mind like hands to grope around, feeling things to see if they matched what he had in mind.
He was behaving like a blind man in a room of stuff, searching for only one thing. But this worked in a way that surprised him.
He shouldn’t have been able to find what he wanted this way, but the Public Trading Platform reacted to the information that he tossed into it as if it were an inquiry and then returned all of the items that matched what he wanted.
So thanks to the Public Trading Platform, he didn’t need to blindly search an entire room full of different things. Everything in the room had become what he wanted or extremely identical to what he wanted. This way, it became very easy to find what he wanted.
When he realized what was going on, he opened his eyes a little bit to see the full picture. His mind decided to focus on the content of the newspaper again, so he saw that the newspaper now contained the information he had come to read, and the contents were no longer changing as much.
This sight made him say, "Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the design of this trading platform isn’t so bad."
He had gotten the hang of the trading platform on his second try, so either he was a genius or the design of the trading platform wasn’t so bad.
Since he wasn’t going to give the creators of the trading platform the benefit of saying that they did a good job, he had to settle for the option that states that he is a genius.
This second option is one that bears a lot of responsibility and isn’t easy to handle at all. But he is willing to pay the necessary sacrifice in order to bear the great responsibility of the title of genius.
As this mantle settled on him, he sighed and said, "I guess I am a genius now. To be honest, I’ve always suspected it."
He is clearly in a good mood for him to make jokes like this. And it is for a good reason.
The trading platform has finally given him what he came looking for. Now, all that is left for him to do is pick one of the listings.
But before he could do that, he was briefly distracted by the large flashing warning at the top of the page that says that the sect will ensure that people get what they paid for, but buyers should make sure that what they are paying for is what they want, not something that looks like what they want.
This warning reminded him of the time that Tommy had fleeced him. So he knew how words could betray one’s intentions. This made him take the warning seriously.
At least, in the real world with a transaction done face to face, he can fight the seller if he is cheated. But he won’t be able to do something like that on the trading platform.