After finalizing the discussions with Iris, Cipher left for his office, where he worked on a few things before finally retiring to his quarters. After freshening up, he sat at his study desk. Today had been quite the day, but now it was his favorite part - shopping time.
After the battle, he now had thousands of points to splurge in the system shop.
He summoned his status screen:
[Name: Cipher]
[Level: 196 (75,000/196,000)]
[Species: Human]
[Class: Cheater]
[Health: 10,000/10,000]
[Mana: 1200/1200]
[Strength: 100]
[Stamina: 100]
[Agility: 100]
[Intelligence: 120]
[Stat Points: 3]
[Cheat Points: 12,220]
[Skills (14/24): Resurrection (SSS), Pain Tolerance (S), Mana Manipulation (A), Mana Disruption (A), Battle Instinct (A), Aura (B), Unwavering Will (B), Regeneration (C), Battery (C), Phantom Step (C), Dagger Throw (D), Mana Recovery (D), Voice Transmission (D), Assassinate (E)]
[Unique Skill/s (1/2): Heavenly Demonic Sword Art (Unique)]
[Cheats: Cheat Shop (Max Level), Absolute Appraisal (Max Level), Aimbot (Max Level), Fly Mode (Max Level), True Sight (Max Level), No Cooldown (Max Level), Auto Loot (Max Level), ESP (Level 4), Infinite Inventory (Level 2), Fast Travel (Level 1), XP Multiplier (Level 1)]
[Owned Cards: Class, Blank & Export]
During the fight earlier, he had completely annihilated the Immortal King’s army - killing fifty C-ranks and a hundred D-ranks. From this, he’d gained five major levels, a hundred stat points, and eight thousand cheat points. For the stat points, he had put twenty points each into Strength, Stamina, and Agility.
As for the remaining forty, he put it all into Intelligence.
He opened the cheat shop. The cards available were Soul and Seed. The packs were a Code Pack and a Mega Code Pack. This was huge. And the voucher was Overstock. It had been over fifty Chapters since he’d encountered this voucher, and it had finally returned.
The voucher gave an additional card slot. With an additional card slot, he got more initial cards and also got more value from rerolls. He wondered if this stacked. If he could collect five Overstocks, then every reroll would give five cards to pick from - just like a Mega Pack but better, since he could buy all of them.
He decided to buy it immediately. But before he could, he thought of another idea.
He first bought the Seed card, and then bought the Overstock voucher. Instantly, an additional card slot appeared with the Merge card. And more importantly, the slot where the Seed card had been actually refreshed, revealing a Commit card. Well, he had managed to exploit a reroll out of the system, but he didn’t get anything useful.
He took the Merge card.
He then moved to the packs. He opened the normal Code Pack. The cards inside were Delete, Patch, and Optimize . Although he really wanted the Patch card, he decided to go for Optimize instead. After that, he opened the Mega Code Pack. Inside this pack were Debug, Export, Fork, Commit, and Optimize .
"I actually hit another Optimize?" Cipher exclaimed in shock, quickly picking the Optimize. It was then that he noticed he’d actually hit the Fork card too. He took it as well.
He then looked at the reroll button. He was rich and even had Overstock - this time he would splurge a little. He needed at least another Fork and Merge. He rerolled. The cards were now Import, Malware, and Merge . He had hit the second Merge so soon. This was the benefit of having extra card slots. He bought it and the Import card.
He could always find a use for the Import card.
Looks like my luck is quite good today, he thought. He pressed reroll once again and the cards refreshed. The new cards were Delete, Class, and Rework . This time the luck wasn’t so good. Still, even though they weren’t exactly what he was looking for, he decided to pick Rework and Class. He had another use for Rework, and as for Class, you could never have enough Class cards.
He rerolled again. Now the cards were Refactor, Blank, and Export . He took both Blank and Export and rerolled again. He was going beyond the three rerolls he had set as a maximum, but he really needed that Fork card. He needed it to upgrade his Mana Recovery skill.
Now that he had so much mana, it was all going to waste when it could be recovering faster and being converted into Demonic Qi. Every time he didn’t upgrade his Mana Recovery, he was wasting mana.
The new cards were Exploit, Mirror, and finally, Fork . He had finally hit it. He bought the Mirror and Fork. He then looked at his points. He had splurged quite a bit - almost 4,000 points were gone. But it was all worth it. He smiled as he looked at his card collection.
[Owned Cards: Mirror, Rework, Fork (2), Seed, Merge (2), Optimize (2), Class (2), Blank (2), Import & Export (2)]
...
Cipher selected the Mana Recovery skill and forked it. He then merged the two forks, making it D+ Mana Recovery. He forked it again and merged, upgrading it to C-rank Mana Recovery. The description was still the same as before, though this time the effects applied up to C-rank stats.
This meant that with his current 1,200 mana, he would recover 0.5% of 790 while out of combat, and 1% of the same number while sleeping. This meant he should be able to recover his max mana in about an hour while out of combat or under half an hour while sleeping.
But this was just the beginning.
Cipher picked the Optimize card. The Optimize card had two features - first was reducing the cost of a skill by 20%, and the second was increasing the efficiency of a skill by 20%. He wondered if this would work here. He applied the Optimize card. Instantly, the numbers changed.
Now the 0.5% had changed to 0.6%, and the 1% had changed to 1.2%.
He used the second Optimize. The 0.6% changed to 0.72%, and the 1.2% changed to 1.44%.
"It compounds too?" he thought. Maybe he should be finding Optimize instead of multiple Fork and Merge cards, with how expensive they were. With these new numbers, he could recover his maximum mana in just a little over half an hour while out of combat and just seventeen minutes while sleeping.