"What's cruel about it? The enhancement success rate had been this high since the game launched! All equipment dropped for free; there was no way the drop rate for basic gear could be any higher."
Hikari sat in the captain's cabin, pounding the table before him as he spoke with utter conviction.
"This game didn't even impose stamina limits on dungeon runs. You either grinded or got lucky. Wasn't that already the fairest model possible?"
"Anyone who still thought it was cruel was either unbelievably unlucky. People like that should be grateful to have a channel where luck balanced out. Without this game, who knew how much worse their everyday luck would be?"
"Or they were players with average luck who didn't intend to work hard and defy fate. Those players simply weren't part of this game's target demographic, okay?"
When the twenty-two Sequence Zeros left the Material World, Extraordinary beings lost their path to advance into the High Sequences—or rather, there was no longer any need to replenish High Sequence Extraordinary beings at all.
When the Sequence Zeros had NPCs in the virtual world serving as stable anchors and no longer needed to spend additional effort maintaining real believers.
When Yahweh's consciousness had been thrown into the ritual by him and completely refined away, when there was no supernatural power beyond Earth and no longer any law of Extraordinary Characteristics convergence upon it.
How many Extraordinary beings would remain in this world?
Reaching Sequence Six or Sequence Five would already be considered remarkable, and that was under the assumption that the Sequence Zeros could not truly place all their anchors in the virtual world.
Any further advancement would require rituals, inevitably—or necessarily—causing some degree of impact. They would be arrested.
Beyond that, the materials needed for potions would begin