It meant Sheffield needed to invest more money to buy the materials.

And he had to do it soon. After a short pause, he said, "I see."

He thought for a while in the car, and finally drove back to his apartment.

As soon as he entered his domicile, he went straight to the study. He booted up his computer, and began to make money.

Three days Later

Hilton Group's latest open world MMO was a huge hit. In any given

Internet cafe, the place was illuminated by glowing screens. A chaotic, caffeine-fueled corner, where two thirds of the patrons were logged into the game.

As the game was popular among the young, so were the cheating programs.

ALL kinds of cheating programs were being sold online.

One day, a special one showed up on the market. Players using it would be able to get massive amounts of gold, as well as level up quickly.

Everyone liked it. It was difficult, if not impossible to detect, so server-side anti-cheating protections were no help. The sales reached a fever pitch. The designer made hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.

Within days, he was a millionaire.

The MMO department head soon heard about the cheating program. He asked the developers to step up their anti-cheating methods.

But despite their best efforts, they failed. It was like trying to herd cats.

Helpless, the manager in charge had to report it to his superior. One thing led to another, and eventually Carlos got wind of it.

Without a second thought, Carlos contacted Star Anise and asked him to figure out a way to disable or even destroy the cheating program.

“Okay. Three hundred million," replied Star Anise.

“One hundred million," Carlos haggled.

“As far as I know, the designer earns more than 100 grand a day. On a good day, it's more than that. He's a millionaire already, and might eventually become one of the richest men in the world. Of course, that's not the point. You know as well as I do how much money Hilton Group invested in this game."

Carlos fixed his eyes on the computer screen. The subsidiary of Hilton Group had gone all out on this online game.

In addition to the Project Leader, Lead Designer, and Lead Programmer, the leads had their own teams consisting of character artists, world artists, creature artists, writers and quest designers, and 3-D modelers.

A composer had to be brought in for the music, and they needed video game sound designers to create entire libraries of custom sound effects.

And 5.5 million lines of code Later, they had a game. Most importantly, the commercial fees were bottomless. So far, they had spent over a half-billion dollars on this game.

If it was destroyed by this cheating program, everything they did was for nothing. Carlos’ reply was to the point.

"Deal," he said