NOVEL NEXT Chapter 233 Spend Money! Spend Money! Spend Money!
In January of the Sky Era Year 118, it should have been a day worth celebrating. Yet due to the fall of Tulip City and the subsequent siege on Gesya City, such significant events had left everyone devoid of festive spirits.
This included Rocky as well.
Of course, he wasn't worrying about Gesya City—that wasn't his concern. His worries were about the development of new Armor.
After Rocky returned to Thunderhawk City, the new Armor designed by Hammerfire entered its manufacturing phase, and at the same time, Orton and others began to modify and improve Armor Technology. This dual approach was pushing forward the Rune Armor project.
It was after this that Rocky's troubles began—the problem was simple, yet it consisted of just one thing: spending money.
The development of the new Armor was much more complicated and difficult than Rocky had imagined. In fact, by the end of December 117, Hammerfire had already produced the first version of the White Demon Armor and then conducted the first trial.
Rocky did not participate in this trial. On one hand, he was recovering from injuries, and on the other hand, it was just a preliminary test. The main purpose was to check the strength of the Armor because the Mana Runes had to be directly inscribed on the Armor itself. Furthermore, it provides much more Mana than traditional old-fashioned Armor. In such cases, whether the Armor made with traditional craftsmanship could withstand the Runes, and whether it could handle the vast amount of Mana provided by the Runes, all had to be tested.
And the result of the test ended in failure.
According to the initial design, the White Demon Armor was supposed to have three levels of Runes inscribed: twenty Level Five Runes, fifty Level Four Runes, and one hundred Third-level Runes. That was what everyone thought and did. However, as soon as the Runes were inscribed on the Armor and activated, the Armor failed because it could not withstand the vast Mana the Runes provided and was rendered useless...
This failure was undoubtedly significant for the Rune Armor project. Before this, including Orton, who was most knowledgeable about Runes, most of the planning was theoretical. Many ideas were merely possible in theory, so through this failed trial, everyone inevitably gained a deeper and more thorough understanding of Runes.
However, this meant that the Armor had to be remade.
With no other choice, Aileen made another trip to Eternal City, spending nearly three hundred thousand Gold Coins to purchase materials sufficient to produce at least two sets of Armor for Hammerfire.
With the new materials, the second version of the White Demon Armor was quickly produced, and then it exploded...
The second version of the White Demon Armor also ended in failure after the trial, but this time, the failure was not due to the Armor unable to withstand Mana. In fact, after the first version of the White Demon Armor failed, Hammerfire and Orton and others improved the Armor's design, both in terms of the raw materials used and by reducing the number of Runes inscribed on the Armor. Thus, when the second version of the White Demon Armor was produced, it not only withstood the Mana provided by the Runes but was also able to operate normally with the Runes as its driving core.
But even so, the new Armor was not yet a success. Although the new Armor could now fully rely on Runes for operation, at best it was only a set of Rune Armor, far from being a true Armor. To transform it into a real Armor, it was necessary to mount Armor Technology on it to meet combat requirements.
It was precisely at this step that another problem arose.
As previously mentioned, the new Armor was designed based on the Fourth Generation Armor, and the technology it carried was also an improved version of the mature technology of the Fourth Generation Armor. But when the Armor truly started operating with Runes as its core, Orton and others discovered that the Mana provided by the Runes far exceeded the maximum capacity of the old Fourth Generation Armor.
This brought about two issues.
First, the technologies applicable to Fourth Generation Armor, now supported by a more abundant Mana, would undoubtedly possess greater power, and could even extend to some new technologies that previously existed only in theory but were difficult to realize. However, the same abundant Mana also made the previously presumed mature technologies very unstable.
Second, if they wanted to stabilize the improved technology, it was actually quite simple: they needed to control the Mana output of the Armor, which to Orton and his team was so easy it could be solved with a flick of their fingers. But once the Mana output was reduced, although stability was achieved, it meant wasting the abundant Mana provided by the Runes.
Finding a balance that would allow the technologies carried by the Armor to perform to their utmost potential while remaining stable became a challenging task that required repeated trials.
Through trial after trial, the second version of the Armor was quickly scrapped. The third and fourth versions of the Armor also failed one after the other, and only after the fifth version of the improved Armor was produced did the trials make some progress.
However, by that time, after five versions of Armor had been continuously produced, the one million Gold Coins Rocky had provided for research funding were completely spent...
There was no helping it, the research was just too expensive, no, not just expensive—it was burning money!
Rocky once had Aileen calculate the cost. Excluding the equipment for Armor production, just the materials alone for the first version of the White Demon Armor cost ninety thousand Gold Coins—meaning ninety thousand Gold Coins worth of materials were needed to produce a single set of White Demon Armor.
And that was just the cost for the first version of the Armor. In reality, after the first version failed, Hammerfire made all-around improvements to the Armor, particularly in the materials used, which caused the cost of the raw materials for the second version of the White Demon Armor to skyrocket to one hundred and ten thousand Gold Coins.
The third and fourth versions of the Armor also underwent various degrees of improvement, with the cost of production continuously rising. By the time the fifth version of the Armor was produced, the research effort that everyone had painstakingly poured their hearts and souls into, if we just considered the raw materials required, had already reached two hundred thousand Gold Coins!!
What does two hundred thousand Gold Coins represent?
The most expensive Mass Production Type among the Fifth Generation Armor only cost around one hundred and seventy to one hundred and eighty thousand Gold Coins, and the price of Specialized Armor from the Fourth Generation was generally around two hundred thousand Gold Coins. And these were retail prices—if calculated by production cost, even the top Special Armor of the Fourth Generation had not exceeded two hundred thousand Gold Coins to make!
Such an enormous expenditure had completely exceeded Rocky's imagination and more importantly, his capacity to afford it, because even though Hammerfire had already manufactured the fifth version of the Armor, the research was still not over. After a series of experiments, he had started improving for the sixth version.
But at this point, Rocky could no longer afford any more money...