Chapter 460: Entertainment District

After a nice breakfast and short banter with his parents Joshua decided to get on the move for the day and check out the hub city. He planned to spend the entire day away from training so he didn't even bother to check his stats from all of the level ups during the expedition. He knew that if he did he'd likely get the urge to go train again, but he had plenty of time before the tournament to do just that so he'd wait till later before he'd go off and start grinding.

Amy planned to relax for the day too as she found something on the TV that she was actually interested in watching. It was a mixed martial arts match that was being broadcast from one of the dojos in the hub city. It was entertaining to see different styles of combat and for a muscle head like Amy it was something she could spend the whole day watching if she wanted to. It didn't take very long for their father to join her on the couch and watch the fights alongside her. Joshua reminded her to get registered for the tournament before he left and she gave him a brief wave to let him know she heard him.

Joshua took a portal to the main district of the hub city just to see how busy the place was. The entertainment district was near the battle arena so it wasn't too far of a walk for Joshua and it gave him a chance to see all of the changes around the place. The main district was about as busy as usual since there were a lot of explorers going between the guilds and even more heading to the markets to sell materials or find supplies. Joshua was glad this time around he wasn't in any rush to sell off any materials and he didn't need to stop by the blue print shop either since they hadn't found any during their prairie expedition.

Even so Joshua walked through the market area so that he could head for the battle arena. He was thinking of checking out the auction house to see if there were any new skills that he was going to want to learn before the tournament, but from the smaller amount of people there at the moment he doubted there was anything decent up for auction. So Joshua just finished moving through the market area until it got to the point where he could see the large battle arena in the distance. The place towered over everything around it, but there was something that caused Joshua to raise an eyebrow at the site before him.

The battle arena had so many people outside of it at the moment that there was no way that Joshua was going to be able to get in the place without having to wait for hours. It was likely that most of the people there at the moment were going there to sign up for the tournament which meant it was going to be an incredibly large one from what Joshua could see. The crowd looked like what you would see at a presidential inauguration speech or something along those lines.

With a sigh Joshua decided to put looking into signing up for the tournament off until later on in the day and headed over to the entertainment district for the time being. He had to make his way around the large crowds, but it didn't take him very long to see the new entertainment district and it was full of all sorts of people running from place to place. It was even more busy then the main guild area of the hub city showing just how much people were looking for a new avenue for not only entertainment but work as well.

On the outskirts of the entertainment district there were some smaller buildings that looked like art studios of some sort just based off of how they were designed. Joshua wasn't surprised that art studios were having a big boom in the new entertainment district since they didn't really have anywhere else to go and show their skills. Now that there were actual means to use art projects outside of constructing new towns in dangerous areas there were a lot of people rushing back to the field. Joshua knew it wasn't going to take long before he started seeing some actual paintings around the house that matched his mother's taste since she was the only one in the family that really cared about that sort of thing.

The next type of buildings that Joshua noticed standing out from all of the smaller little buildings around them were the broadcasting buildings. It didn't matter if they were broadcasting through television, or broadcasting through the system itself. These buildings were fairly eye catching in comparison to a lot of the other places in the entertainment district. They weren't as big as the two behemoth broadcasting buildings in the main part of the hub city where the two competing news station set up shop, but they were going to be the back bone for television entertainment going forward. News was important, but if there was nothing else on the TV then everyone might as well read any news that the system puts out.

Joshua didn't know much about how the broadcasting business works, but he knew it was going to open a lot of opportunities for a lot of people that didn't involve fighting wild beast and risking their lives. Not everyone was built for the explorer life style and having other options would allow humanity to feel more civilized in the long run. Joshua spent a little time looking around at all the smaller businesses that were being put up in the entertainment district and they ranged from little studios that did acting lessons so people could learn the trade, to clubs filled with entertainment for people to enjoy. The area was going to be busy for a long time to come.

Eventually Joshua did come to the core part of the entertainment district and that was where the large stadium like buildings were located. They were all set up in the center of the entertainment district and they all stood out since they were so much larger than any of the other buildings around. None of them were quite as big as the battle arena, but they were big enough for city size entertainment venues. From the way some of them were designed they were clearly put together for plays and musicals. They were auditorium like structures that kept the audience in front of the play instead of all around it.

The stadiums that stood out the most to Joshua however were the larger ones that were clearly for multiple purposes, but with sports kept in mind primarily. There were the indoor stadiums that were more made for sports like basketball or hockey, then there were the outdoor stadiums for just about every other sport you could think of. It was clear that people were already getting to work on setting up the stadiums so that they could start actual events here soon enough. The crowds around this area seemed far busier than anywhere else. There were people moving different equipment around at the instructions of architects that actually knew what they were doing. There were also robots from the system that were helping people set everything up.

Joshua didn't know who exactly was in charge of all of this madness, but it seemed to be a truce of sorts between the World Government Guild and several of the other major guilds. Joshua was sure the Alliance would probably have to get involved as well now that they had gotten back from their expedition, but he didn't plan on personally getting involved at all. Sometimes it was nice to just sit back and watch how things turned out, besides he had a lot of other things on his plate. For now Joshua wanted to focus on the upcoming tournament more than anything else. It could have a huge effect on his overall power ranking in this particular phase. The rewards for being first during the first rankings were great, so Joshua didn't want to pass up on them again.

When Joshua finished looking at all of the different stadiums and auditoriums he decided to turn his attention to how exactly signing up to work in the entertainment industry even worked. Joshua found a system terminal near one of the stadiums that would allow him to check out all of the information he would need on the entertainment district and after a while of reading through updates and guide lines he finally had a fairly good idea of how things worked.

First off you didn't have to have a support job that was connected to any entertainment profession to work in the district. Unlike with restaurants where the system made sure the cooks had to be at a certain level before they could own their own places, the entertainment industry was a much more free space. That didn't mean that having a support job that connected to the entertainment industry was useless. For example anybody could be an actor. Someone that was an actor before the world changed could still perform like they did in the past, but getting a support job of an actor gives benefits to that role specifically. Joshua imagined they were probably charisma related if anything, but since it wasn't a stat he saw in his combat job he didn't know much about it.

The only jobs in the entertainment industry that didn't technically have a support job correlating to them were anything sports related. Instead there was another particular requirement for that field. If you wanted to be involved in any type of sport you couldn't be a full time explorer. At first Joshua was confused by this requirement. He had seen how the system was able to restrict people's capabilities to a certain level while sparring in dojos so he didn't know why that would matter at first. Then he found out that having a combat job as your primary job gave you a boost that the system couldn't entirely mitigate to make everything fair, but if you had a combat job as your secondary role then it was possible for the system to regulate it.

This meant that his father could participate in sports if he wanted to while explorers like himself and Amy wouldn't be allowed in due to the unfair advantage. Joshua spent a while going over all of the new guide lines, but eventually he figured he had spent enough time fooling around and that he should get back to what he had come to the area for in the first place to do. He just hoped that all of the lines around the battle arena had shrunk down after all the time he spent exploring the entertainment district.