With 10 points, Draco could get some useful stuff. However, the thing he needed most right now was Divine Essence to level up his laws, and one Divine Trial point could be exchanged for 100 Divine Essence.
This confused him and made him feel worry. After all, don't forget that the average fellow was supposed to have only one law, whether player or NPC. Players needed Divine Essence and NPCs needed comprehension, so there were also items that assisted with comprehension in the rewards list that cost roughly the same amount.
If that was the case, then one only needed 100 Divine trial points to level up from a Basic Law to an Intermediate Law, a huge power boost. What would have taken a solo p;layer essentially 10000 kills of a Basic Law True God monster could now be achieved with 10 runs with a minimum B score on level 1 Easy Mode.
The sheer value was incomprehensible and if that was the case, then players could reach Intermediate Law within minutes of becoming a True God for the first time if they got a Divine Trial token and then farmed more from getting high ranks.
However, this did not make Draco happy because if that was the case, why would a player be limited to Intermediate Law? If the requirement was 10,000 Divine Essence to advance a law, they could keep farming diligently in within a span of 24 hours, become a True God with a Supreme law, now considering how to advance into an Origin God.
This did not align with the AI's usual methods of gatekeeping the game's balance to death. With other things, Draco could admit his special characteristics caused a break in the balance and even forced the AI to unveil or craft some new mechanics in order to keep him from growing too fast.
But this Divine Trial was the first time he was overwhelmed and confident that this thing existed long before him and was not centered around him. So how could there be such an easy exploit that even a toddler would think about? The AI was not that easy to cheat.
Not to mention that such a gameplay loop was not very interesting in the long run. There was a whole Divine Realm to explore, fight, claim territory, raise mortals and create one's Divine Pantheon. So much new content and exploration would be unlocked for the player by becoming a True God but after discovering this exploit, they would abandon it all and spend 100% of their time here.
That wasn't just boring gameplay but bad game design. Given how intricate Boundless was so far, it seemed very unlikely that such a core mechanic would be so flawed.
As such, it could only be one of 3 things.
Firstly, the most obvious one was that the amount of Divine Essence required per Tier of Law increased. It could be linear, like Basic Law being 10,000 and Intermediate Law being 20,000 and Advanced Law being 30,000. Or it could be exponential, with Basic Law being 10,000 and Intermediate Law at 100,000 as well as Advanced Law being 1,000,000 and so on.
…knowing the AI, it was most probably exponential if this was the case.
Thinking about how much time it would take to reach Supreme Law if this was the case, Draco's expression became awful. Even for a person with one law, they would feel the burn, much less a whore of rules like him and his two beauties who had multiple.
The second limitation might be that there was a finite cap to how many times one could redeem a certain reward. But no, looking at the reward menu, there was nothing like 'remaining stock' written for any of the rewards, even the Origin Grade ones that looked rare as hell.
The third limitation could be that there was actually a limit to how many Divine Trial Tokens you could get from clearing levels. Draco got 3 form getting a B score on Level 1 Easy Mode, but it might be a first time thing.
He might get none if he tried the same level again and got the same or lower score. He might even get none if he got a higher score, but he wasn't sure. It did seem a bit likely that the AI would control the amount of tokens in circulation, so it could be this.
Whatever the case, he only had 10 points now so it was not very useful to buy Divine Essence, not to mention he had to buy for three. His two beauties were relying on him to also increase their Divine Essences, and Draco would not let them down.
As such, he chose to enter the Level 1 Moderate Mode. He was once again whisked to the same battleground as before, and he first checked to see what limitations had been placed on him.
｢The First Level (Moderate Mode) – Origin Quest
Description: You have undertaken the Moderate Mode difficulty of the Divine Trial's First Level, Noble God. Prove yourself worthy. Defeat your allotted foes within the time frame and according to the limitations placed on you.
Limitations: Item usage is banned.
Provisions: Increased Divine Essence rewards.
Rewards: Divine Trial Score.｣
Draco nodded. It seemed that with each difficulty increase, there was a limitation that restricted the ease of the actual battle while the provision given was to make the rewards received after the battle much more fragrant and sweet.
This limitation… Draco agreed it was enough to raise the difficulty. Players were fucker who guzzled potions down mid fight like it was water, so the entire gameplay of any MMORPG was based around usages of items in battle, otherwise how could players close the insurmountable gap between them and monsters?
Not to mention that even NPCs would feel it. There were many items in the reward shop that were cheap and helped replenish Divine Energy. Draco even saw a few potions like that and had in mind to seek out their recipes to recreate them since he was a Divine Alchemist already.
After all, due to his reincarnation and skill, he didn't have to adopt the playstyle of keeping many potions on him. His Alchemy had been mostly used to assist him in other things. The only time it peaked in his life was when he had just awakened his bloodline and found that the Epic Rank Angel's Kiss Potion could restore bloodline energy along with HP, mana and stamina, so he and Eva guzzled them down to abuse their powers back then.
However, it became irrelevant after he broke through his 95% purity and Eva her 85% purity after they lost both their virginities in real life and merged their bloodline for the first time. 99% purity had basically given them near infinite energy at the time.
With their current Divine Energy consumption, it was totally viable to guzzle down potions that restored Divine Energy as well as buffed the recovery of it. He could also think about forging some supplementary equipment that allowed them to store Divine Energy within or to increase their capacity forcefully or even to reduce their consumption.
Of course, that was for later. Right now, Draco was faced with how the difficulty of the various levels increased in the most direct manner.
There were two Kuipers!
The two noble looking wolves were lying down and basking while glancing at Draco askance. They rose to their feet and seemed vigilant, measuring Draco up and seeing what his law would be like.
Having learned his lesson, now that Kuiper appeared, Draco directly became serious and got activated the Law of Movement Velocity and Attack Velocity on his person using Divine Energy while he quickly activated his Mind Blast skill along with imbuing it with the Law of Damage Enhancement and the Law of Malevolent Darkness.
｢Mind Blast – Active Skill
Effect: Send out a wave of mental energy that stuns all enemies within 5000 yards.
Duration: 15 minutes.
Cooldown: 3 minutes or 0.00005 Divine Points.｣
This was his first time using more than one law in an offensive method, and he was eager to see if two Basic Laws with 5% effectiveness amount to the same power as an Intermediate Law with 10% effectiveness.
Mind Blast was an AOE skill that was unblockable, so once it was launched, the two wolves were frozen in stupefaction. They had also taken damage from the two laws imbued, but it was not as great as Draco thought.
It was like thew two laws worked one after the other as opposed to in tandem, or additively rather than multiplicatively.
If put into mathematics, an Intermediate Law was 10% effectiveness. So assuming the enemy had 100 points of HP, and each percent of a Law's effectiveness was equivalent to 1 point of damage, then an Intermediate Law would deal 10 points, reducing HP to 90 out of 100.
A Basic Law would do 5 points, leaving 95 out of hundred. With the method Draco used of combining Basic Laws like this, in theory, it should have dealt the same 10 points of damage as an Intermediate Law, but was slightly lacking.
It worked like this, the first Basic Law took the 5 points since that was 5% of 100. Then the second Basic Law came in and did its work, but not on the initially hundred, but the 95 points remaining after.
This meant that instead of 5% of 100 being 5 points, it was now 5% of 95 which was 4.75 points. So an Intermediate Law deal 10 points of damage and Draco's method dealt 9.75 points of damage.
This did not seem to bad, but it got worse as the Tier of Law rose.
An Advanced Law had 15% effectiveness which meant 15 points of damage. If Draco were to use three Basic laws, that was 5 points for the first law, 4.75 for the second, and 4.5 for the third, totaling 14.25.
The diminishing returns increased per rank of law. So no, Draco could not technically reach the true effectiveness of a certain grade of law just by stuffing more Basic laws in, but it could certainly grant an advantage in the overall scheme of things.
Draco had always powered Mind Blast with Divine points so that he wouldn't have to waste Divine Energy, and then pointed at one of the Kupiers, unleashing Sinister Shot imbued with the same two Laws.
The beautiful thing about Laws was that you could use them infinitely and indefinitely with no cooldown as long as you had the energy to supply it. This was even more so for players who had the Divine points system, so it basically cost nothing to use them.
Draco also shockingly discovered a huge exploit. It turned out that when he used divine points to power a skill and imbue it with Divinity, then added in laws, he only paid for one law but could put in as many as he needed.
This was unlike using the Source Origin's Divine Energy where you had to pay for each law you used. This fact made his mind rumble and his thoughts with Eva and Shuangtian flew at a rapid pace as they discovered a combat system special to them.
While this was taking shape in his mind, Draco didn't stop and fired another Sinister Shot at the other Kuiper that was filled with the same two laws powered by Divine Points.
Remember, the special nature of Divine Points for players was that it could only be used for skills, but its benefit was that as long as you paid the cost, you could cancel the skill's cooldown and use it again while imbuing the skill with Divinity.
So if you had a skill that had a 30 hour cooldown, you could either wait the 30 hours to use the skill normally without any energy costs like how mortals or mortal classes did or pay the Divine Point cost to use it instantly with the benefits of Divine Energy.
And there was no limit to how many times you could do this in one instance, only that there was a slight delay of a few milliseconds between each usage.
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