Chapter 820: Equipment Upgrade System
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
The Rolling Rock Canyon was in the Pingst Flatland, a Level 240 to Level 270 map. The next tier would be the last, which will be the Level 270 – Level 300 maps.
Zhang Yang and the majority of his party member had only managed to enter the Level 210 – Level 240 map, yet they were all expected to infiltrate into a Level 240 – Level 270 map. It was either the system wanting the quest to be extremely difficult, or that the system had no intention of allowing players to even finish the quest in the first place.
Naturally, in a higher level map where all the monsters are at a much higher level than you, it would be impossible to escape a tough battle. As such, even if Zhang Yang’s party is the strongest party in the entire game, they cannot escape the fate of being killed repeatedly. In fact, at one point, the party was taking turns, dying and reviving.
The map was designed in a way that it was not suitable for a large party to train in. That or, they would all be killed before they could even touch the final boss. It would probably take the party close to one month to reach the boss at their current rate. The problem was the fact that a world boss would require a massive number of players to fight it. It was no longer a raid, at then, they had the disadvantage of numbers and the Level Suppression system, at then, it was more like a torture session from the boss instead.
When everyone finally made the hurdle over the field of monsters and made their way to the Rolling Rocks Canyon, everyone stood at the peak of the canyon, staring downward with absolute despair when they saw what lay before them.
In the canyons, all monsters there were Level 250 elite tier demons. Some even had their Levels marked with three question marks! They were obviously much higher than the 30-Level gap, at around Level 260 or Level 270, even. Due to the annoying Level Suppression system acting up, a single elite tier Level 240 monster would be at the same difficulty as an Ascended tier boss. The wider the Level gap, the further it would be for the monster to be able to detect the players. Zhang Yang’s party could not help but attract the attention of 7 to 8 monsters at a time, 10 to 20 even!
The party could make it easy with their Transformation skill but…there’s the case of time and the massive area of coverage. That, and the difficulty of the monsters. The canyon’s massive size, coupled with more than 10,000 counts of monsters, will absolutely make the entire killing spree long and draggy. Yes, it would be easy for them to handle the monsters via Transformation, but in 30 days, they would only be able to activate their Transformation skill 10 times. That’s only a total of 20 hours of active Transformation time. In that 20 hours of super-charged mode, how far could they make it to?
Zhang Yang sighed eventually. He knew that it would be demoralizing for his party to see the leader having a bad time before the killing even starts. He could not help it. The system was playing god with them, as if they were ants trying to kill an elephant. It could be possible if there were a million of them! Finally, after considering all the negative factor, Zhang Yang turned his back away from the canyon and said, "We’re done. Let’s go home."
Before even waiting for a response, Zhang Yang took out a [Teleportation Scroll] and used it. There was not even chance for them to try. It does not need to take Einstein to calculate the probability of their failure. Without a word of protest, everyone followed Zhang Yang and went back to the Holy City.
The devil side of Zhang Yang prevailed as he told everyone in the party to keep quiet about the difficulty of the canyon. He wanted everyone else to experience what they had seen. Let the fools try it themselves and experience the pain firsthand. Even though they were fools, they should know that a Level 240 – Level 270 map is not something that a normal player could try. However, why would such a quest still attract ambitious players to venture into the abyss? It was due to the reward! Only when they hit a snag, they would obediently nodded their heads and turned back to shore.
In fact, the next 4 to 5 days, all guilds from all corners of the world had given it a try themselves and all of them, not a single one did not fail to turn back after venturing into the canyon.
The Level 200 dungeon, the Elemental Nest, was a 50-man dungeon. There were 6 bosses in total. As the dungeon name implied, the bosses were all elemental types; wind, water, earth, fire, shadow, and light. It was almost the same as the elemental bosses that Zhang Yang’s party had just slain back then.
Due to the difficulty of the Hardcore mode of the dungeon, Zhang Yang had initially intended to skip the dungeon. However, since they had obtained many "upgrades" in the past month, they were all technically ready to tackle the dungeon. They had amassed a total of 40 Ascended tier equipment, at 2 counts of equipment per person on average. Even the Holy tier equipment had over 30 counts as well. Coupled with several newly maxed aura skills, the party’s strength was upgraded to make Hardcore look like Hard mode!
No matter how difficult the Elemental Nest is, the bosses inside were all merely Holy tiers. Those who equipped Holy tier equipment should not have much problem fighting a similar tier boss. Moreover, some of them even had Level 240 Ascended and Holy tier equipment. Hence, when Zhang Yang and his core party members decided to join the exploration team of the dungeon, they had taken less than 10 days to conquer the dungeon and obtain the First Clear Achievement.
In the midst of their achievement, the bastard Zhong Xiu Hua had appeared from thin air. In the past, he had made a mistake and someone had managed to capture his in-game ID tag through the forums. Hence, many social justice warriors had decided to publicly tag him as the STD Prince. As such, the guild, Eternal Flame had been branded as the Red Light District. Their fame and popularity had fallen to a point that not even one of their members dared to reveal themselves in public, since all of China was practically laughing at them.
Weirdly enough, even though they were the laughing stock of China, many players were still crying for a spot in the guild! The reason was actually rather simple. Flowers that grow nearer to the sun get the light. Their main motive was to get close to Zhong Xiu Hua in his time of need to get "friendship" points and reap the benefits later.
Zhong Xiu Hua had a ton of problems needed to be solved, hence he was unable to find any spare time to whip out malicious plans and schemes to sabotage Zhang Yang and Lone Desert Smoke. So, Zhang Yang was rather relaxed for a few days. He took the tranquility of peace and grinded his Level to his heart’s content and crafted potions.
On other news, Luo Yu Rou’s ever-growing womb was sending Zhang Yang over the edge. As days passed on, the anxiety kept on growing until Luo Yu Rou herself had to calm Zhang Yang down when he had a panic attack. At the same time, Luo Yu Rou’s self-directed movie "Star Wars" was completed and was ready to be aired worldwide, both in the game and in the cinemas.
As per agreed, for Luo Yu Rou to have accessibility to the ‘God’s Miracle’s Engine to make the movie, Dream Tech would want 1 gold coin per ticket, both physical and digital tickets sold. It was a fair deal, considering the fact that almost both non-players and players would enjoy the movie.
Players would have a more fulfilling immersion of the movie since they could log into their gaming helmets to watch the movie with a true 360-degree view. It was far better than whatever level of immersion any cinema in the world could offer. As such, with the launching of ‘Star Wars’, many other movie companies had started to shift their production into ‘God’s Miracle’. God’s Miracle was now the keystone of several major studios.
The most famous player in ‘God’s Miracle’, Zhan Yu name, was tagged as a guest cast in the movie ‘Star Wars’, and it became one selling point of the movie.
A miracle was born and the movie had managed to give birth to a bunch of diehard fans. It was a major success, since Luo Yu Rou was in the movie herself. Her acting skills, paired with her utterly sexy poses and daring shots made everyone who worked with her be her "slaves".
Instead of her acting ability, Zhang Yang was more profoundly surprised at the flaming popularity of the movie. Even though physical ticket sales were only limited in China, the digital ticket and in-game movie viewers had reached as high as 2,200,000,000. All critics who had readied their pens and paper threw them in disgust. They could not even write anything that was wrong with it!
Luo Yu Rou, or Daybreak Phoenix had instantly become an overnight phenomenon. Her fame and popularity had skyrocketed to the entire world. It was not a surprise. Her sexiness, elegance, style, appearance, was the combination of the purity of an angel and the lustful seduction of the devil!
Obviously, not many knew about her carrying the offspring of Zhang Yang. Everytime she felt a strong kick in her womb, she would transfer all the pain that she endures by biting Zhang Yang during their lovey-dovey session in bed. Although he was in pain every time she did that, Zhang Yang felt that it was a fair trade, besides, as a woman, her bites were nothing but nibbles on his iron-like skin.
When the game patches the new Demon Descent event, the producers of ‘Star Wars’, "Yang Yang Movies" has made a total of 11,800,000,000 gold coins profit. In reality, their profits were not as high as the world’s highest profit, although, they were still amongst the top 10 highest earning movies.
As the director, scriptwriter, and even an actor of the movie, Luo Yu Rou was highly sought after by many of the other major movie companies in the world. However, since Luo Yu Rou had not created a real in-game character, no one was able to really make contact with her besides emailing Yang Yang Movies.
With the popularity of the first movie, Luo Yu Rou had gotten all hyped up and had voiced out her intention to start preparing for the second movie. She believed with the heat of the first production, her second movie will receive a better profit than her first. She believed that the numbers would go up as long as her movie quality would keep their edge.
Back to the game. Since Baa'ljilr the Imposter could not be defeated, the Demon’s Descent will inevitably launch at the given time.
One month later…
‘Server Announcement: Baa'ljilr the Imposter has successfully created a fully functioning Teleportation Gate. Impending doom approaches. Warriors! The world shall face the greatest threat we have ever known! The first attack wave of Demon Soldier, led by Demon Lord Kenzack will arrive in the Pingst Flatland. This is but the first step to their large-scale invasion!’
‘Server Announcement: To aid Warriors against the incoming Demonic Army, the Great Weapon Smith, Mazza Mazza will open his Weapon Upgrade service to all players. For more information, please head to the Holy City Anthylor and talk to Mazza Mazza.’
Server Announcement: The Demon Army will soon attack all major cities in the world. Warriors, please make haste with your preparation!’
Once the stream of server announcement had ended, Zhang Yang had finally realized that the system was going to start using the Weapon Upgrade system to earn money…
As such, when he had made his way to Anthylor and talked to the greenish goblin, Zhang Yang had found that each upgrade would cost 100 gold coins. Furthermore, all equipment that was upgraded would not gain any tiers!
To put in comparison, Mazza Mazza’s equipment upgrade service does not have cooldown. Players can continue to upgrade their equipment provided that they had enough gold coins and equipment. On the other hand, the Tesseract that Zhang Yang owned had an hour long cooldown time in between upgrades. Despite that, there was still a chance to allow lower tier equipment to gain tiers. The system had made the Tesseract having a cooldown system to prevent players from making a large profit from it.
All and all, Zhang Yang felt that the developers were smart enough to introduce the equipment upgrade service at that time. It was a means of earning money, as well as controlling the economy of the game. The system will "discard" older equipment as well, as well as take in the in-game currency back into the game.
Naturally, when the system had first introduced the weapon upgrade mechanism, countless players had flocked over to the NPC to try it out. Since Mazza Mazza was an NPC, he could talk to all players at the same time without a problem. Players could interact with him even though there were countless of other players around, simply by standing close enough to him.
Zhang Yang gave it a try as well and found out at the mechanism of upgrading equipment were the same as the Tesseract. However, there was a minor difference which Zhang Yang felt a little annoyed. The Tesseract had a 10% higher success rate. During the +1 or +2 phases, it would not affect those chances much. However, after the +4, +5 phases, 10% chance was extremely high!
That, and the fact that the Tesseract had an hour long cooldown! Zhang Yang sighed at the fact that he could not make much gold from that! Still, it was just a chance that had slipped by. It was not that he was not earning enough. In fact, he had so much money that he could not find a place to spend them! Besides letting the girls go off to a shopping spree that is…
In the end, it would not matter since the Tesseract was good enough to allow him and his teammates to enjoy it.
Although the system had promoted the equipment upgraded system by encouraging players to get ready for the Demon Descent event, it was just merely tricking players into emptying their gold coin pouch into the pool. Even plenty of low-level players had asked professional players to upgrade their equipment for them.
There were so many players that it would take more than 10 days to restore peace around Mazza Mazza’s shop.
By then, the Demon Descent event had started with the first attack from the Demon Army.