[Bonus Chapter] 22 - You can Laugh for Now

Mana Stones was one of the means that Players used to profit even more while doing missions. The monsters that Players encountered during quests were classified as common monsters and Elite monsters.

While ordinary monsters were just a waste of effort and ammo, Elite monsters had a small Mana Stone in their heads which was responsible for making those monsters more powerful than ordinary monsters. When Players killed Elite monsters, these Players could take the Mana Stone that was in the head of the monster and sell it in the city to get more money.

Another use for the Mana Stone was that Players could absorb the extra Mana that was in these stones in order to spend more time training. While a Rank F Player had an average of 1 Mana Units, which could go up to 2 Mana Units in total, a Rank F Mana Stone had 10 Mana Units, which was equivalent to letting a Rank F Player train for 5 to 10x longer than he could with his body's Mana.

The Players' idea of ​​using a Mana Stone to get a Residual Devil weapon in real life was not unfounded. This was something that has come to be known to humanity in recent decades. As long as a Player intended to extract an item from the game into real life, they could do so as long as they provided enough Mana within 10 minutes.

But the price for that was simply far too high. A simple sword extracted from a Rank F game needed 50 Units of Mana. This was a high amount of Mana that probably at Rank F only Developers could do with their body's Mana, and among Players only Rank D Players could pull off something like that. And since for Rank D Players this type of Rank F weapon was completely useless, considering the amount of money they received per mission, it was just a waste of time and waste of Mana to extract most weapons from Rank F games.

Considering that a Rank F Mana Stone cost $2,000 and a Rank F mission yielded $200, for Rank F Players it was more profitable to sell these items than to use them to train more, since with a lot of training time the income from it would decrease, and considering that there weren't good enough weapons in Rank F games anyhow, it made the Rank F Mana Stone even more useless.

But seeing now that in Residual Devil they could extract weapons that would be stronger than ordinary weapons, maybe even weapons that could damage Rank E monsters, as long as the price they spent on Rank F Mana Stones was not higher than the price of a magic weapon they could pull from the game, they would be making a profit! Once this kind of news began to spread in Sandstone Bay, the price of Rank F Mana Stones, which were only $2,000 at that moment, would definitely rise past $3,000 in a short time, possibly even going higher in the near future!

Among the Players who thought about this possibility, Amoura was the one who felt the most urgency, as she was itching to try it out. So, without thinking twice, still live, she paused the game, took out her cell phone, and ordered 10 F Rank Mana Stones. She didn't have that money available in her account at that moment, but she had a credit card. As long as she continued to do Rank E quests, she would be able to pay off these stones quickly. But she knew that if she took a few days to do this, instead of spending $20,000 on these 10 F-Rank Mana Stones, it was very likely that she would spend more than $30,000 on them, greatly reducing how much she would save by not buying a Magic Weapon.

As someone who had been living on her own for over a year now, the previous Amoura would have been unlikely to do something as risky as taking on $20,000 in debt without a second thought, but seeing how much Residual Devil was changing her life, she understood that she needed to take advantage of this opportunity as soon as possible. While other players would still have a bit of doubt in the early days, she had more than a bit of confidence in EA, the genius Developer who was making this miracle game, and she felt that she would not regret this choice.

Not only was Amoura quick to do this, but some other Players and Streamers were quite decisive when they saw the weapons in Duke's shop and decided to do the same thing.

Residual Devil had greatly increased many Players' firearm shooting skill. It would be a shame to waste such a skill once they reached Rank E, so the safest choice would be to invest now and take advantage of the profit boost they would have with a better weapon.

Gabe, who was watching Amoura buy the Mana Stones so decisively, just smiled at her attitude. Honestly this was something he already expected to happen. Despite being a Developer, he understood the suffering of Players when it came to using firearms in Rank E, so much so that this was the biggest factor for Players to avoid using firearms to grow past Rank F, since in Rank F they could take very little advantage of this ability.

And as a Rank F Game Developer where the focus was firearms training, Gabe knew he had to do something to help these Players, since they were the audience that consumed his game. If these people got stronger, the better it would be for him, allowing these people to play his game even more.

So Gabe had hatched this idea.

Duke in the game he played in his previous life already had the ability to enhance the Players' weapons, but this ability was never exploited, as it would not be as interesting for the style of play that it had in his other life. But here it was different. Being able to have a more powerful weapon was very tempting, as it meant that your chance of dying in a real mission was much lower!

So Gabe spent around 400 Mana Units to develop Duke, which was much higher than the amount he spent to make a Lycan but still much cheaper than it cost him to make the strongest monsters in the game. And this was enough for Duke to have the ability to truly upgrade the player's weapon in a logical way. If he was going to do something like this normally, Gabe would first need to have the knowledge of how to do it, and then add that to the character he developed for the game, but Gabe didn't have to do things here normally. He had the System that allowed him to simulate a character the way he imagined it, that is, as long as he imagined a character with a skill, the system would do all the calculations for that character to be the way Gabe imagined. So he didn't need to discover this knowledge on his own, and he could still learn anything himself from the characters he made!

In Residual Devil, the player could watch Duke enhancing the weapon in front of them, and just like the training knowledge the Players absorbed with Mana, Duke's weapon enhancement knowledge could also be learned. But of course, this was not an easy thing to acquire for most anyone. By Gabe's calculations, an average Player with low talent would need dozens of hours of observation to learn how to do what Duke did. So seeing players like Amoura purchase Mana Stones so decisively made Gabe nod his head in agreement.

"It's easier to buy the finished product and make more money than trying to learn something you don't have the talent to waste time on," Gabe said with a smile as he looked at Amoura, who was very interested in the game.

Unfortunately, she didn't have enough money to pay Duke to upgrade one of her weapons for her yet, but she was determined to do her best to accumulate in-game money and try out his abilities. If she got a rifle in the game, she had no doubt that it would be this weapon that she would use to extract from the game with Mana Stones after the weapon was fully upgraded. This new possibility which Gabe had added to the game not only surprised the Residual Devil Players, but also Wilson, who was still watching Amoura's livestream while watching this game.

As a C Rank Developer, Wilson's thoughts ran even deeper than most of the Players' thoughts. He could see that with this Rank F game, Gabe Howard was capable of influencing not only the development of Sandstone Bay's Rank F Players, but also the development of Rank E Players in the city as well!

For a city like Sandstone Bay that had at least 8,000 Rank E Players, a single Developer being able to influence such a large amount of Players was almost unheard of! Even Wilson wasn't very confident of making an E Rank game that could influence Players so much in such a simple way, but a young F Rank Developer boy was managing to do just that!

"This is only his first game and he's already wreaking so much havoc… I'm scared to even imagine this kid's future," Wilson sighed with a smile as he watched Amoura's livestream.

Thinking of something, Wilson pressed a button to call Ashley.

When she arrived at the office, he spoke. "Ashley, cancel all sales of F-Rank Mana Stones. For the next few weeks we will not be supplying F-Rank Mana Stones to any other cities. If possible, even pay attention to the price at which other cities are selling their stones and if the price is low, place a buy order on as much as you can get without hopefully causing a stir."

Ashley was surprised by this news. Until a few weeks ago, Wilson was desperately wanting to sell the city's F-Rank Mana Stones, but no other city was willing to buy them as they were practically useless, but now all of a sudden Wilson wanted to stop selling these stones and even buy from other cities? Looking at the television screen, Wilson was watching, Ashley tried to imagine what had happened with this game for her boss to have such a big change of heart, but she didn't ask any more questions and started to perform the task he had given to her.

When the other cities heard that Sandstone Bay was suddenly buying Rank F Mana Stones, many managers of these cities ridiculed Wilson for being an idiot and wasting money on something useless. Some even began to mock Wilson, even taunting him with a discount if he would offer to buy in large quantities, which to their surprise, Wilson accepted without a second thought.

'Let's see if you guys will keep laughing when this game arrives in your towns… haha,' Wilson chuckled as he looked at the messages from the other city managers on his desk.

As a C Rank Developer, Wilson was proud of what was happening now in his city. Because of the problem where the city had lost the talented Developer in the past, even if it didn't happen in his tenure, he was still quite ridiculed by these managers from other cities. But Wilson didn't care about their insults; the time when he could take revenge was very close, especially when he saw the other revenue opportunities that Residual Devil could generate for the city. With how interesting this game was, he became more and more interested in the reaction these other managers would have in the future.

[Bonus Chapter from Power Stones: 2/3]