Chapter 16
Mark woke up and for the first time in a long while, he actually felt well rested and not at all a little bit sore as he usually did the moment he opened his eyes after he slept. It was around nine in the morning which was earlier that the usual time he awoke. He knew that it was because of the additional two stats that he added in Vitality. Not only that, he was utterly exhausted last night since he went on an adventure the whole day yesterday with a little bit of trauma at the end of it. He stood up, went to his bathroom to freshen himself up and thought of what he should eat and looked at the big Mac meal on his inventory but he felt a little disgusted. He went to the kitchen to see if he can scrounge up another type of breakfast. The only thing that he saw was a couple of eggs, three tomatoes and couple of slices of bread.
After frying the eggs and tomatoes and toasting the bread, he ate his breakfast with relish. He thought of saving a copy of the breakfast on his Inventory for Replication but the meal was, although good, was not good enough for keeping. He planned to keep a copy of great meals on his Inventory so he would not worry about his meals, once his Inventory was big enough. A good thing was, that as most Inventory goes, time inside was frozen.
Mark plans for today were not dungeon diving. His plans were, to solve his money issues with Replicate, quit his job, purchase some things he needed and route his skills and stats wisely or as good for survivability as he could. He also planned to schedule an exercise regimen to make sure that when it comes to adventuring, his body would be fit enough. He cannot afford to be lazy like always because this was a matter of his immediate survival. People would argue that him being obese was also a matter of survival, but then again, before, he was not interested and found everything in his life lackluster compared to his otaku habits. He would also follow what he usually did when it comes to adventuring. As a gamer, when he played a new MMO or a Triple A Single Player RPG game, he usually stayed at the beginning area and exhaust its experience point before moving to the next then rinse and repeat until he was overwhelmingly powerful. He was very cautious and even though he could revive his characters when they died, he just did not want them to die. Sometimes his MMO friends found it weird, well, weirder than normal but he did not care. He was just like that when it came to gaming.
Mark planned to wait for three days until the Second Floor mob respawn, clear the area for some levels and skill points, then probably repeat three or four more times before moving on to the next floor. What happened last night when he went to the Third Floor was just a stupid impulse brought by the confidence he felt on the power of Void Bolt.
The first thing that Mark did after he left his apartment was to go to the bank to empty all two thousand five hundred dollars of his savings from his bank account. After that, he went to the men’s room for some privacy and put all of his money, which was in a pouch, inside one of the replication grid. One weird thing about his Inventory was the fact that he was unable to stack things, even a bunch of bills, but he was able to put different things in a container and he would be able to put it inside the grid as large as the container. So the pouch only took one grid. He went home to do some Replication testing with the money before going out again to purchase things. He needed to make sure that there would no problem with it. Once he arrived home, he went to the kitchen table to experiment. The first thing that he did was put a glass of cold water inside the Replication Grid and replicated it. The he tried replicating the replicated glass of water, and he was not able to. It confirmed his suspicion that he would only be able to replicate original items. Even though he would not be able to replicate replicated items, he was still able to replicate the original as many times as he wanted as long as he had MP. He tried mixing the replicated water to a glass with some original water to check if he would find a loophole but he was unable to replicate the glass of water with the mixture of replicated and original water. Next, he scrutinize the replicated money thoroughly to check if there was any sign that it was fake and he was unable to determine anything. He already tested it out with replicating his smartphone but he needed to make sure.
Since it was still early, Mark knew that his neighbor Jenny was still at home so he went there with a hundred dollar replicated bill. He asked Jenny to check if the bill was real or fake and the reason he gave was he found it on the ground while walking. He said that she can keep the bill if she just examine it and tell him if it was fake or real. Jenny inspected the bill thoroughly, even calling her boyfriend to check and they assured him it was real. Mark gave the bill to Jenny and thanked her. She happily put the bill between her breast and smiled at him.
Mark went home and went to his bedroom to get his mother’s jewelry and replicated it. It was only some gold necklace, earrings and rings. He then went to the nearest Jewelry store and sold them off for a measly eight hundred dollars. Together with all the money that he had, the total amount of his original money went up to around three thousand five hundred. He felt that it was not enough, so he replicated all of it inside the men’s room and spent it all on Jewelry. Using Uber, he went to another store to sell all the gold then did it three more times until the total amount of original money was around twelve thousand.