Chapter 14 Birth of a Demon

At home, Vesta asked me how it went. I gave him a thumbs-up.

Tonight I registered for an online wallet.

Tomorrow morning, before school, I went to the terminal. I entered the online account recharge there and fed the bills to the machine. 10 minutes later I received a notification of the recharge.

I went to the online goods store and bought what I wanted.....

A day later, the school was visited by the police.

I was scared to death then and my face turned dead pale.

That's when my thoughts started to undermine my mind and I thought of all the possible missteps that could give me away.

Sneaker marks, for example.

I realized it wasn't much, but it was the first thing I remembered. It was possible... it was possible that someone had seen me and now they had come to publicize their suspicions.

Fortunately, I was lucky.

They didn't come for me.

These uniformed men went into each class, giving them a preventive talk about how it was better not to go anywhere with strangers, to always be on the lookout and, if anything, to go straight to the police.

As for the reason for this, it was because of the increasing number of missing children in the city.

There were already 3 children missing in two neighborhoods, and that was in the last 3 weeks.

The first one, as I knew best, was Akira last name I can't remember, or he didn't say. Well, either way, he's the first. And the other two... judging from the pictures shown, one was my age and the other was 2 years younger.

Both looked Japanese and quite cute.

'So child abductions are rampant in the city?'

It's disturbing.

Of course, I kind of care, but the others... the environment won't be the most fun.

Two days later I got my computer delivered, I brought it home and plugged it in.

The next thing I knew, I just fell out.

I plugged the cord from my phone into the computer, setting my phone to modem mode. That's how I got internet.

Next I downloaded books to the phone, studied in space, wrote code on a piece of paper or on the phone, and then went back to real space and rewrote it there.

That's how the long four months went.

I got the first money I earned.

Earlier I tried to get a job in all sorts of firms. Alas, I was rejected. There, though the projects were more important than anything else, you needed a crust and a voice connection. But, the communication had to be without changing the voice, they can sense it right away.

That's when I decided to try something else.

Creating software.

So everything came out very well, and even Vesta praised me when I explained him the principles of the application, but... when uploading to the paid platform, I did not get a single purchase. When uploaded to the forum where all self-respecting programmers posted, I was faced with an act of piggishness in human society. My code, beautiful, debugged, and my code in general, was simply taken and dragged away. They changed the name, ran advertising, and that's all.

Then it got four more owners.

I realized it was a thankless job.

The track changed again. I started downloading all sorts of files that people needed, such as a bank application, and embedded my little bug in them. To be honest, I was really disappointed in everything then and decided to make some money somehow. A small script that simply copies the memorized values of the name and password, if the user has so set, and then sent it all to me to a fake email. I did it all through code or, if the application was too serious, with some hex editor.

I did this with about a hundred applications of all sorts, most of them on the computer.

Soon, of course, I got "kicked in the teeth" for this. My main email was hacked and all my accounts were emptied.

How - I don't know, but it seems that one of the owners of the site where I was posting all this stuff disclosed my ip address to whoever did it, and there just got to the real me via proxy and punished me.

Then I started to improve myself further, got acquainted with the dark part of the internet. It was extremely unpleasant, but the information there, at times, was top-notch. At least some things you just can't find in ordinary books.

Created a program-miner, which was hidden and was called cacheback from purchases. The idea is that when someone work and pay through the service accumulates possible "bonuses", which can then be withdrawn to the card. 

I even described it as an innovative approach to shopping, where all human need to do to work and accumulate cashback is just not to close the application, and explained the need for an open state of the application by the fact that, say, to ensure the operation of services. He disguised his 40% profit, which, by the way, they have not seen, under the words "the creator of the application receives a small part of the commission from cooperation". 

My name, as an author, was "Oni". From mythology, it meant a big, fanged, scary and bloodthirsty demon.

Well, it all fit.

As a result, with each passing payment, a person could get a plus on the card from which the money was debited, and this plus was their interest.

The cryptocurrency itself was somehow not very familiar to people, so I mined quite a bit.

I put the app out for free.

And the idea... people loved it! I just ordered a small advertisement, as suddenly it became freakishly popular.

Of course, I thought everyone would love the idea of passive income, but to have it so much... soon it was flying around the country.

Scared of such an influx of users, I immediately started working on my security protocols and code encryption. Once I got to the "die but don't break" level, I calmed down. All this was downloaded by people in the new update, and I simply disabled support for the old version and set automatic uninstallation.

And that's when the money came in. A lot of money. I even created an automatic breakdown from receiving one account to 3 to withdraw without any tangible limits.

Now that I got an influx of money, I could afford to do a lot of things. For example, getting back into the bakugan game. The same Vesta was already frankly bored for days and even began to be interested in how exactly I create this or that program.

Of course, he realized that with little money strong cards do not see, and without cards can not win the strongest Bakugan, and no one wants to lose.

He also told me that it was possible that a Bakugan could evolve, but only after countless battles.

I was interested.

Of course, it was all in perspective, but wasn't the picture of me smashing enemies with powerful strategies and having a Bakugan with power that was as strong as that of the first ranked Bakugan just wonderful.

To be honest, in all this time of learning and schooling, I never found anything more interesting than the Bakugan. I understood the reason for the decline of online games, they faded too much against the backdrop of this game.

It turned out that in the first week I earned $800 from various users of my app. That's just amazing!

I went online and bought up all the available gate cards, abilities, and so on, which was Ventusa, and what my hands could reach.

There was one smartass who thought that an imitation ability card from Sabterra, touched by Jules herself, might be worth like 100 of these. Well, that's funny, let's flip through it.

The gate cards that were purchased included...

"Pyrus" - bakugans swap power levels;

"Sabterra Threat" - changes the element of all bakugans on the card to Sabterra (universal);

"Property Card" (Reinforcement) - doubles the power of a given bakugan type;

"Triple Battle" - allows to throw an ally bakugan into the battle;

"Peacemaker" - returns bakugans to the players;

"Ghost Mind" - all bakugans on the gate card lose (my fav);

"Reverse Shift" - reverses the opponent's last action.

"Second Breath" - adds 50g multiplied by the number of gate cards on the field.

"Level 1 Card" - lowers the opponent's power by 100g.

As for the ability cards, I took the following cards...

"Blow an enemy off the field" - moves any bakugan (except yourself)  to any gate card (Ventus universal ability).

I would like to stop on this card. Although it states here that own bakugan cannot be sent to another gate card, this is not the case. Either it was written that way in the rules, or something else, but I immediately noticed the effect earlier - the simple appearance of a tornado, moving away. Considering that this is a throwing card, and not the ability of a specific bakugan, the energy source is "independent", and therefore does not depend on the bakugan itself. And if so, then what prevents someone from changing the enemy target to an allied target?

"Reverse Traction" - returns one of the bakugan in the battle to the master.

"Battle in the Air" - allows a bakugan to move freely around the field, attack any bakugan, and blocks an opponent's gate card it lands on.

Of course, I scooped up all the Ventus cards at once. There was only one person selling them.

Next came the usual bakugan abilities, I only took on my own bakugans.

Raven: "Tornado of the Underworld" - takes 100g from the opponent, "Thunderstorm Scatterer" - cancels the gate card.

Bee: "Vertical Tornado" - lowers opponent's power by 50g, returns Bee from the field.

To be honest, Bee was very disappointing. I was hoping for more.

Mantris: "Cutter" - takes 50g away from the opponent, "Double Machete" - adds 100g to Mantris, "Puppet" - moves any bakugan (except yourself) to any card.

Because it's a common bakugan, I got almost everything from it, though... to be honest, I was a little bummed I didn't get the last "Glittering Slingshot", which had a similar effect to the puppet ability.

And Centipoid... well, it`s abilities... it`s flawed. There was one that was a great attraction, moving him to another gate card. If there's a battle on that one, his power is a tenth of the total. So, it's like a boost to... a difference of tens from 310g... 10g... well... except to use for escape, but that's not an option at all.

When I looked at Vesta with the appropriate look, he got angry.

I'd heard all sorts of things from him, but, swear words aside, I concluded that he was stronger than... than this.

Basically, yes. It's true. It's just that on the internet, Ventus was the smallest category of everything.

Like, really, the weakest cards and bakugans. Kind of like that.

Thinking that it might be a bit dangerous to play just like that, since I still remembered that incident with the flame, I decided to create an alias for myself. I decided to create a pseudonym for myself and, of course, a corresponding image.

I went online to look for beautiful images and found an Oni mask.

It's beautiful, I'll order it.