God-Tier Enhancement: My Upgrades Never Fail-Chapter 272: Episode _Legend of the Demon World (5)

7.

Simin’s Enhancement spree continued.

He took different items one by one, carefully pushing each to +15. He had already learned that there was a penalty to the Stat Points received for Enhancing items below his level, so he only selected items slightly above his own—but not too high—and he never Enhanced the same item twice.

By adhering to these simple conditions, he accumulated a staggering number of Stat Points.

Of course, it wasn’t easy.

No matter how high-level the Demon World was, +15 was still +15. These were Legendary items. On the continent, they were considered Mythic-grade, the kind of thing only those favored by the gods could create.

Being what they were, they still required a bit of sacrifice and ritual.

But that was no problem. He had Epia and a host of demons at his disposal.

Strictly speaking, they weren’t his subordinates. It was a temporary relationship of mutual benefit, but that was more than enough.

It was far more fun and rewarding to crank out a +15 every few hours—gaining the equivalent of three or more levels’ worth of stats—than to wander around picking fights with monsters that could kill you with a single touch, grinding out maybe 50% of a level after a whole day of tedious hunting.

On top of that, it felt like he was getting something for free, building a glass ceiling that no one else could ever hope to reach. He had given up on leveling, but this felt like banking the Stat Points he would have gained from a slow and steady climb.

It was satisfying.

’Yeah. This is what makes it worth playing a trash class with zero combat skills.’

The images of Epia’s battles, still burned into his mind, made him green with envy, but the stats he was gaining more than made up for it.

The best news of all was that, even after several days of this, BetaGo still hadn’t imposed any sanctions.

’As expected. So this doesn’t count as a bug.’

That was the biggest reason he had broadcast his Enhancement spree to the entire continent.

’Don’t half-ass it; give them a perfect pretext.’

If he could openly advertise to the entire continent that he was raking in Stat Points like this and still face no reaction, then that was a form of permission. A tacit ’go ahead.’

’...Seriously?’

He had more or less expected this. Based on his experience, minor, conditional gains like this had never been a problem in Fantastic World. The same applied to earning stats.

Gaining Stat Points by making +15s was a privilege reserved for the Legendary Legend Enhancer. And it wasn’t as if he was getting them for free; if he Enhanced items below his level or the same item repeatedly, the Stat Points he received dropped to a tiny fraction. He was working around those penalties to earn them.

Even so, he was reaping overwhelming benefits compared to other Users, which was why he had been worried.

The moment he realized BetaGo valued the process—breaking through the odds to make a +15—more than the result, his reckless move, which could have been seen as him kicking away a windfall, was validated as the perfect test.

’Time to turn the notifications off again.’

The Users would have once again been reminded of just how good an Enhancer he was. The number of high-level Users was steadily increasing, and the wealthy players who wouldn’t hesitate to sell real-world property to invest in the game would soon be contacting him.

A +15 that no one else could make. A +15 that only Han Simin could provide.

He had gotten the word out. That was enough. Going overboard was always worse than not doing enough.

Now the real show could begin. The true honey-gathering phase.

He suddenly found himself wishing it could last forever. He had plenty of junk items, and his stock of Enhancement Stones was more than sufficient. The only thing he lacked was time.

“Epia.”

“Mm.”

“How much time can you give me to make the +15s?”

She remained silent.

“I’m short on mana. If I want to keep making +15s, I have to continue doing this.”

She didn’t answer.

“Three months?”

She still didn’t speak.

“Eighty-nine days?”

“One week.”

The Demon King and her subjects didn’t exist solely for his benefit, nor were they maintaining the Demon World just for him. Even this was a generous allotment of time.

“Is there really no way to—”

Naturally, Simin wasn’t satisfied with her generosity. He wanted to squeeze out just a little more time.

Epia instinctively knew the most effective way to bring a man like him to heel.

“If you want to die, be my guest.”

“I’ll finish in a week. I won’t waste a single second.”

In his heart, he wanted to keep raising his stats forever, to become so strong he could break the game. But the world didn’t move according to his wishes.

*

One week, plus another week spent haggling, passed.

He made five +15 items a day, for a total of seventy.

’Wow. I’m going to drop dead.’

It was the ultimate test of grit. Including the time he’d already spent staying up all night gathering Enhancement fodder, he had now been in the Demon World with Epia and her top-tier demons for nearly a month.

“Such a relentless human.”

“He did nothing but Enhance, not sleeping even once.”

“How can a human do that?”

“He’s worse than a demon.”

In spite of themselves, they had grown attached to him. In that time, the demons had come to see Simin as a monster—and as a human they could not afford to look down on.

“Those pieces of armor and gear... there’s an ominous power bound within them.”

“Incredible. Equipment you’d rarely see even in the Demon World.”

“At that level... it wouldn’t be so bad to wear armor after all.”

His refusal to sleep wasn’t actually that impressive to them. By human standards, one was supposed to sleep a certain number of hours a day, but for demons, it wasn’t that important. If you wanted to survive, staying awake for days on end was common sense.

His equipment, however, was another story. From a demon’s perspective, each and every piece was astonishing. They had been worthless at first, but once the Enhancement was complete, they were impossible to dismiss.

Epia was even more affected.

’...You really came back to me? For real?’

The condition for completing the story quest was to Enhance the token of her pact with him to +15. But even without that, Epia was already 96.9% convinced.

“Epia. About that... we’ve pretty much proven it now, so could you give me just a little more time, for my sake?”

“No.”

’Yeah. Of course not. Figures. BetaGo, you son of a bitch.’

Naturally, that didn’t make the impossible possible. Just because BetaGo hadn’t imposed sanctions didn’t change the fact that this was still Fantastic World, another reality where nothing went exactly as planned.

He would just have to finish the Enhancement and get back to work.

It made him uneasy. He had a bad feeling that he had to do it now.

He pushed the anxiety aside and began preparing for the +14 Enhancement.

If he really wanted to, there was a way. He could run. If he risked his life to escape and managed to raise his stats even a little more, it wouldn’t be a losing proposition. But when he considered the odds of actually escaping Epia’s grasp, he lost the desire to try.

Besides, this wasn’t just any story quest. This was where he proved his qualifications for the trade that was his last hope of returning to the continent. Epia, who was almost certain he was the former Enhancer, probably wouldn’t cast him aside, but there was no point in making a reckless gamble.

He had gotten more than enough stats already.

’Three thousand, seven hundred fifty-two.’

It was such a huge number that there was no need to be greedy. In a normal game, it wouldn’t have been strange for the developers to invent some excuse to claw it all back immediately.

Converted into Stat Points gained purely from leveling, it was the equivalent of reaching over level 650.

Of course, stats also came from items, rose through class traits, and increased via achievements. As time went on, more and more ways to raise them were being discovered, but even so, this was an insane number of points.

He was honestly curious if dumping all of them in right now would be enough to go toe-to-toe with Epia and actually win.

’If I really could win, crushing her here and now wouldn’t be a bad choice. The law of survival of the fittest doesn’t just apply to demons, after all.’

However, Simin only entertained the thought, never intending to act on it.

Besides, there was no reason to throw himself into an unknown world just for the experience of being a Demon King.

And, as he always reminded himself, his base of operations was on the continent.

Even if he became the Demon King in the Demon World, so what?

There were no buyers here to convert anything into cash.

“I’m going in.”

So he obediently began preparing for the +14 enhancement.

The preparations had taken a long time. Now that they were done, he wanted to finish this quickly.

Without a second thought, he invested 1,000 points into Magic.

’This should be more than enough.’

According to information he’d gathered from the community, a Magic stat of roughly 500 corresponded to a 5th-Circle mage.

In level terms, that was around level 70—or as low as 50 if you rushed it.

That assumed you invested all your Stat Points into Magic, so a value of 1,000 would put even dedicated mages well over level 100.

In Circle terms, it was the 7th Circle.

At that level, the magic needed for something as trivial as an enhancement would be more than sufficient.

In fact, the moment he allocated the points, he felt magic power surge through him.

Simin hadn’t considered his previous Magic stat to be low, but feeling this new surge firsthand made him realize just how little power he’d actually been fighting with until now.

He paused, confused.

However, there was a side effect.

[You have reached a Magic value of 1,000.] 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

[You are blocked by the limit and cannot invest additional Stat Points.]

[The Magic value that can be raised with pure Stat Points is 1,000.]

[1st Magic Awakening is required.]

Mysterious holograms flooded his vision.

*

It was a system unknown to most users.

However, 『Fantastic World』 had plenty of players capable of deducing such systems without ever experiencing them firsthand—people who did nothing but pore over the game’s history books all day long.

With the user count heading toward thirty million, it was inevitable that some would want to dissect BetaGo’s lore down to the last detail.

Alongside these lore-diggers were theorycrafters who studied the game’s systems, unearthed hidden mechanics, and shared their findings for views and ad revenue.

Reconstructing history to infer quests!

It sounded like a joke, but in reality, many Epic and other high-grade quests had been discovered and distributed to the player base this way.

Of course, they weren’t free; people paid a fair price, which in turn proved that the information gained was anything but trivial.

One of the articles they had uploaded caught Simin’s eye.

– A Study on Stats: 『Fantastic World’s』 Overwhelming Realism. Do Limit Stats Really Exist?

*