Sasha was readily taken hostage. In fact, there was no way for her to resist. Not with five max-level players present.

On one side, she was treated better than expected. On the other hand, she was still gagged, blinded and tied up.

The worst part, however, came once they took the blindfold out. War and flames. Blood and gore. The Goblin Empire could be summed up with those four words.

From the air, Sasha could see the multiple fighting arenas and shady, green-and-maroon slums.

Fires burned openly in the streets, and orc people could be seen walking hurriedly from one side to the other.

Further ahead, made of casted iron, a big wall separated the common folk from the upper echelons of power. There, imposing houses with pointy and aggressive architecture housed private fighting arenas and open-air punishment poles.

Further ahead still, a great mountain seemingly touched the skies. It’s massive doors, over a kilometer in height, were made of unknown metal with intricate and beautiful carvings - completely dissonant with the rest of the city, except for the fact that, once one entered them, palaces and skyscrapers had been erected on a disorderly and seemingly chaotic manner.

Some hanged from the walls, other elevated from the ground until reaching the ceiling, while some were a mix of both - started from the ground, leaned on the walls, and then rose.

Between the buildings, a number of bridges and roads could be seen, and people walked in then. There were no clear signs of degradation, violence and blood, but everyone in the place walked while protecting their own backs.

“Have so many people come to Another World?!” - Sasha thought, her mind in disarray. From what she knew, the number of people who committed suicide in order to ditch reality and come to live in Another World permanently shouldn’t be above fifteen million, even in the worst-case scenario.

Had every single one of them come to live in the Goblin Empire?

The truth is that many of those people, indeed, had ended up living in the Goblin Empire - be because they liked the trill or, most likely, by having their minds stolen in wars and raids.

In fact, every since they discovered how neuromancy worked, the people from the Goblin Empire had been taking every single soul they could and forcefully inserting it on their Empire, as “citizens”.

Over the course of three decades and through countless skirmishes and small wars, almost eight million souls ended going through this small island - while the remaining three or four million remained scattered through the continent.

Of course, those wars didn’t happen against other player-controlled kingdoms. Had this happened, and Carlos would have surely intervened.

Rather, they happened through constant and unending NPC massacre through Another World. For every thousand NPCs killed, be it beasts, demons, humanoids or whatever, maybe one or two player souls would then be found amongst them.

Just like happened with Yrwin, Raphael, Max and Lillian when they first arrived into Another World, most of the players went through bad times while trying to reach somewhere safe - and almost all of them died in the process, being reborn as memory-deprived NPCs.

It was only through constant war, bloodshed and massacre that those people’s souls could be harvested.

Carlos, by his time, would trade with Marcus using these souls as currency. In fact, most neuromancers from the Demon Kingdom wouldn’t use mana as their currency, but souls!

As the Orcs and Half-Orcs of the Goblin Empire desperately needed expert neuromancers in order to change their bodies from time to time, and the Empire’s own neuromancers were forbidden to do so - in order not to become targets of banishment in case of war -, the only option was to pay the Demon Kingdom for the service.

This way, the Kingdom managed to take around two thirds of all souls that the Goblin Kingdom managed to gather, meaning that, from the eight million souls they gathered, only around three million remained in the Empire.

The rest had become property of the Demon Kingdom.

Still, three million people, plus the NPCs they had as slaves - all living in a small island, no more than a couple hundred square kilometers wide.

Had it not been for the fact that Jack had hollowed the entire Dragon King’s Island mountain while lazily looking for gold and gems, and there wouldn’t be enough space for even the players to live on, what to say about their NPCs.

In fact, even on the Mountain, the populational density was above twice the one of Beijing, while on slums outside it peaked at thirty times as much.

As Sasha’s transportation - a mid-sized green dragon - went deeper and higher inside the mountain, all she could think was that she definitely didn’t want to live in that kind of place. Ever.