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"How did it go? Any problems?" Nadia asked, still in the same spot and position she was in when Mathew reached out to enter the merchant\'s subspace in the first place.

"I think I have all I need," Mathew replied, stepping away from the headless merchant and stretching his back as he walked.

Even though for everyone else the time was either completely stopped or extremely slowed down, he still spent quite some time sitting in a cheap, uncomfortable chair while staring at the old-type CRT monitor.

"And?" Nadia asked, slightly raising her eyebrows as she saw her man put all of himself into his stretches.

"Well, it\'s both simple and complicated at the same time." Mathew released a short sigh.

"Can you move on to the details already?" Beatrice asked from the side. "I understand that this back and forth is normal for you but it does not contribute to our development at all. And don\'t forget, it\'s you who claimed we are pretty much in a damn hurry."

Beatrice didn\'t appear to be angry. At most, she was slightly annoyed.

Just like with Nadia\'s position, her reaction to Mathew\'s unwillingness to enter the subspace didn\'t disappear as no real-time has passed for her.

\'It\'s a pretty weird feeling,\' Mathew thought, \'to be the only one who has long since moved on.\'

"Whether we are in a hurry or not doesn\'t matter, as we don\'t have the cores for even a single upgrade,\' he pointed out. Mathew then squinted his eyes and looked up, recalling the details of the message he got from his other, past or future, self. "And we need seven more upgrades to get the bonus I talked about," he then added.

Recalling the content of what he heard from his other self took Mathew only a second. Every word of the message was deeply imprinted upon his mind due to how important it was to him.

No, the reason for his hesitation was Mathew\'s need to recall what he was talking about with the girls before stepping into the merchant.

Once again, a problem created by the two different time-flows that they experienced.

"Anyway, let\'s talk about the details you want," Mathew said, picking a clean spot on the floor to sit down and cross his legs while slightly pushing his chest forward to put his back in a position that allowed him to relax his tired muscles. "There are four types of upgrades. The utility area upgrade that we have on the third level already. It refers to all the… well," Mathew smiled, "utilities that we are using even though they shouldn\'t be working at all."

"So the total number of upgrades we need is ten," Daria joined in, pointing out the connection between Mathew\'s earlier statement to what he said right now.

"That\'s right," Mathew nodded his head. "We need seven more upgrades between utilities, production, manufacturing, and trade," he explained. "Production is about growing, mining…" the young man hesitated for a second, "extracting stuff?" he said in an uncertain voice, unsure what words would best describe what he saw back in the system.

"Wait, trade?" Nadia butted in before Mathew could properly ramp up his explanation. "Manufacturing I can understand as the second step, as transforming the basic products from the production upgrades into something more complex. But trade?" she then asked again. "Isn\'t that just a copy of what the merchant does already?"

Mathew turned his eyes to the girl before nodding his head.

"As usual, yes and no," he gave the short answer. "You are right about the manufacturing stuff, but trade…" Mathew pursed his lips, failing to stop his face from putting on a displeased grimace. "I can\'t say for sure and I think we should test it more extensively… But I don\'t think we can buy the stuff that we will need from the merchant without upgrading the trade."

"So we will need to pay for a trade upgrade, right?" Beatrice chimed in, her annoyance washed away by her curiosity about the topic.

Being the former leader of a police unit, she could easily switch her entire mindset to fully focus on the important topic at hand, leaving all the useless emotions and thoughts for the future.

"Most likely, yeah," Mathew nodded his head. "But once again, I can\'t say for sure. I only saw the general descriptions of each of the upgrades and a few recipes. And the recipes that I saw all required stuff that would be too much of a drag for us to produce. To top it all off," Mathew twisted his lips, showcasing how annoyed he himself was with the notion, "the items that we will likely need… I couldn\'t find them in the merchant\'s store."

Nadia released a short sigh.

"They wouldn\'t put in something important for us to pay with cores for if we could circumvent its use, would they?" she muttered.

Before Mathew received the message, everyone in his group did their absolute best not to mention or even reference the beings that were responsible for the ongoing apocalypse. Ever since their influence started to show in more direct ways, though, they gave up on all their attempts at keeping shut about it.

"Anyway, there is still the topic of pricing," Mathew pointed out, quickly moving away from the topic of recipes and what products they could get from them.

Given how he couldn\'t pick the location of the production upgrades, he had no idea what sort of items they would be able to produce. That, in turn, would determine what sort of items they would be able to manufacture while deciding what other items they would need to buy. As such, discussing the topic of what items they could potentially produce would be nothing more than a waste of time.

"All three of the upgrades that we have yet to get cost five hundred cores to get," Mathew finally revealed the price of the upgrades. "But bringing the utilities to a fourth level would cost four thousand cores. Meaning…"

"For every level of the upgrade, its cost doubles," Leila joined in.

It was only a guess… but a guess of which the math checked out.

"And that means, if we go with the cheapest path to reach a total of ten upgrades for the settlements, we need to gather four thousand cores," Beatrice did the math and summed up out loud.

Mathew then spread his arms open.

"It\'s not a small amount, but it\'s nothing that we would struggle with!"