According to Li Yao and Li Jialing, the legal currency of the Imperium of True Human Beings, which had been established at the center of the cosmos for a thousand years, was named "crystal coin of the Imperium" because the currency system was linked to high-purity crystals at the beginning.
At the very beginning, there were five hundred million tons of ultimate crystals as the backstop of the crystal coin of the Imperium. Every crystal coin of the Imperium could be exchanged for 0.1 grams of ultimate crystals unconditionally.
"Ultimate" crystals were not an exaggeration but had strict standards. Only the crystals whose purity was above 95% could be marked as "ultimate". The only things purer than ultimate crystals were the rarely-seen marrow crystals.
Such a guarantee endowed the crystal coin of the Imperium with high credibility and vitality, helping Blackstar the Great to crush the weak economy and financial system of the old Star Ocean Republic.
Crystals were the crystallization of high-purity energy. They were indispensable for the daily training and battles of the trainers, the daily necessities of the people, and the colonization of the alien planets. Therefore, they were a super hard currency that was a hundred times harder than gold and silver.
Since the crystal coin of the Imperium could be directly exchanged for ultimate crystals, the people were naturally more than happy to choose such a currency. Choosing the crystal coin of the Imperium meant choosing the Imperium, which would kick the old Star Ocean Republic, whose prices were soaring, inflated, and decayed, into the gutter. Well, not the gutter, but the Xing Yao Federation at the edge of the cosmos.
To be honest, leaving aside how evil the high and mighty Immortal Cultivators such as Wuying Qi and his descendants were, the purchasing power of the crystal coin of the Imperium was quite solid at least in the first five hundred years of the rise of the Imperium.
On one hand, the ultimate crystals looted from everywhere in the universe had been increased from five hundred million tons to five billion tons, which guaranteed the solemn promise that the crystal coin of the Imperium could be exchanged for ultimate crystals anytime and anywhere.
There was interest when the money was kept in the bank, but it would not increase in value when it was exchanged for crystals. In the early years of the Imperium, the price of crystals was strictly controlled. Whoever dared to cause trouble in the market of crystals would be shot. Also, it was inconvenient to trade with crystals directly. Naturally, not many people would store too many crystals. The risk of a bank run was not high.
On the other hand, the newly-conquered worlds brought incessant war dividends and an expanding market. During the five hundred years, the sects and families of the Imperium were in the golden years of rapid expansion. The whole society was prosperous, and the colorful bubbles grew bigger and bigger. Even though the value of the currency was somewhat diluted, people's income significantly increased, too. Even the ordinary people in the central area could share the war dividends. Their lives were not bad. of course, they had great faith in the Imperium, His Majesty, and the crystal coin of the Imperium.
However, the Imperium of True Human Beings had just celebrated its five-hundredth birthday when both the internal and external threats, the Imperium.
Internally, the royal family was greatly weakened by the consecutive internal conflicts in the court. The four Kurfürst families took the opportunity to rise and usurp the power of the court under the name of 'the four elders who made great contributions elected His Majesty together to maintain the stability of the royal family'.
Externally, all the prosperous Sectors had been incorporated into the territory of the Imperium. The war cost and the management difficulty to continue the conquest had significantly increased. Also, the war of attrition against the Holy League had caused the Imperium to lose a lot of blood and reach the limits of expansion.
For a country of Immortal Cultivators such as the Imperium of True Human Beings, its vitality lay in constant invasion and conquest, building the prosperity of the conquerors with the blood and bones of the conquered.
Once the march of conquest stopped, the bubbles would immediately burst.
The first economic crisis that swept across the entire Imperium broke out. Many people went bankrupt overnight, and the bonds, stocks, and interests that they had purchased were all wasted paper. Even more people owed debts that they could never repay in their entire life and were reduced from free people to slaves.
In one of the most famous cases at that time, a powerful Immortal Cultivator with the surname of Pang, whose name was Pang Qingyun, claimed that he had connections in the court and knew that the court was about to launch an expedition of five million lightyears to conquer almost twenty Sectors that were marked on the ancient star map. He, Pang Qingyun, had received the subsequent colonization and management rights of three of the Sectors. His story was quite convincing.
In order to raise a large sum of funds for development, he sold the colonization and management rights separately, promising a very high rate of return, such as' ten times in three years', in order to tempt a lot of greedy people to invest with their lives.
In the beginning, Pang Qingyun did live up to his promise. Not only did he return the high interest on time, he also invited the investors to visit the various spaceports, saying that they were the expedition army of the Imperium and that they were his colonization fleet. Not only did he entertain them with delicious food and drinks, he also made all kinds of glamorous renderings and even the immersive Grand Illusionary Land, describing the beautiful future of the new colonies. All the investors were overjoyed.
In the end, not only did a lot of people invest a lot of money, even many Immortal Cultivators and sects were convinced by him and threw their coffins into the groundless colonization plan.
As it turned out, the Imperium, due to the economic crisis and the lack of funds, changed its policy of colonization. In principle, it would no longer send out a large-scale expedition army to explore the extraterrestrial lands like in the past. Instead, it developed a technology named 'star child', which would be used for small-scale, more precise explorations.
It also meant that the age of great development in the Imperium was over, perhaps forever!
Pang Qingyun's lies were exposed. Angry people surrounded his "development group". Only then did they know that he was just tearing down Peter to pay Paul, borrowing new money to pay off old debts. Countless people had jumped off buildings because of him. His tricks were also known as the "Ponzi scheme" and passed down to the world.
Pang Qingyun's scam was just one of the thousands of soap bubbles that were broken in the age of economic crisis. There were even greater Ponzi schemes that swallowed the wealth and even the lives of countless people.
The four Kurfürst families, on the other hand, did not help the court to resist the economic crisis at all. Instead, they added fuel to the fire and allowed the economic crisis to grow more and more intense, significantly weakening the last authority and vitality of the court. They also made a fortune from the crisis and expanded into behemoths that could not be removed.
As a result of the economic crisis, the crystal coins of the Imperium were announced to be unlinked from the ultimate crystals. Neither the ordinary people nor the low-level Immortal Cultivators could exchange for the ultimate crystals at a stable price in the banks and could only buy them at the market price.
The average price of the crystals on the market, on the other hand, increased by thirty times within a year. Crystals were also the source of production. As the crystals soared, so did the prices. Everything rose except for wages and the value of the currency. In other words, the crystal coins of the Imperium were devalued by thirty times within a year after the unlinking was announced.
The wealth of all the citizens of the Imperium was looted by the four Kurfürst families.
The four families, who had seized tremendous wealth by force, took the opportunity to control the politics of the court and gained the right to mint their own coins.
Although they were still called 'crystal coins of the Imperium' nominally, the four banks under the four families' names all had the right to issue them. A 'Joint Meeting of Banks' replaced the previous functions of the central bank of the Imperium, which equaled to robbing the emperor of his money.
The four families colluded with each other for interests, and the competition among them was quite intense. It was not hard to imagine that they did not care about the stability of the currency of the Imperium at all. After all, as long as the economy of their territory could be maintained, they did not care about the flood outside at all!
Starting from that year, the crystal coins of the Imperium had been running on the path of devaluation crazily, and their value had been more diluted than ever.
Another piece of terrible news was a fatal blow to the shaky economic and monetary system of the Imperium that was barely surviving. At first, didn't the central bank of the Imperium and the central bank of the Crystal Reserve Bureau have five billion tons of ultimate crystals as backup? Those ultimate crystals had always been the reassurance and ballast for the Imperium. But at some point, rumors spread among the people that the five billion tons of ultimate crystals had been divided up by the four families and consumed by the high-level Cultivators of the four families in their training!
"It was exactly because the four families divided the five billion tons of ultimate crystals and consumed them that they were able to raise so many Jin Dan, Yuanying, and Divinity Transformation Stage Cultivators all of a sudden. Their capability soared abruptly!"
Although the crystal coins of the Imperium had been separated from the ultimate crystals, such appalling rumors still shattered the last confidence that the ambitious people had in the Imperium brutally. Instead of rumors, they were more like plagues and curses that completely collapsed the financial market, the economy, and the monetary system of the Imperium. The people who truly believed in the true path of immortality were all disillusioned.
In the hundreds of years that followed, a few more economic crises broke out in the Imperium, and it gradually became what it was today, where the warlords ruled the country, the economy was in a mess, and the local governments were doing their own things. The root of the problem was that the people, from the ordinary people to the Immortal Cultivators, from the low-level Immortal Cultivators to the Yuanying and the Divinity Transformation Stage Cultivators, did not believe in the crystal coins of the Imperium at all. They did not even believe in a single coin!
Otherwise, such an enormous Imperium wouldn't have been mired in the swamp of total collapse again after more than ten years of expedition, which had been triumphant and triumphant all the way!
What was more critical was that not only was the value of the crystal coins of the Imperium unstable and maliciously depreciating, all the currencies had been virtualized and paperless recently. The concept of paper money ten thousand years ago was no longer there. All the transactions were done through the Spiritual Nexus. However much wealth one had, it was nothing more than a series of zeros in one's account.
The authorities of the Imperium were not shameless enough to directly tamper with the numbers in the citizens' accounts. The problem was that all the transactions on the Spiritual Nexus would leave traces. Everybody's production and consumption information would be grasped by the authorities. The authorities were sometimes the local warlords, sometimes the four Kurfürst families, and sometimes the so-called emperor.
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