When I decided to follow in my older brother's footsteps and become a gamer, my parents weren't very happy.
Although they acted this way with me and didn't act this way with my brother, I can understand their side, after all Nathan has come home with serious injuries several times, and unlike him, my grades at school have always been good.
If I really wanted to, I could easily get into college, but a few years ago I knew it wasn't for me.
Something inside me always felt that studying was boring, a waste of time, that even if I had a lot of money following this path, I wouldn't be truly happy.
When Nathan became a Player a door opened for me!
Seeing him get stronger after playing for hours, seeing him come home with money and lots of interesting stories to tell made me realize that this was what I wanted for myself.
Not because of the money, but because of those interesting stories! I wanted a thrill for my life that I'm sure no traditional college could give me.
So despite my parents being against it, the choice I made was to become a Player.
Although training was very boring, boring to the point of making me reconsider following this path, I still kept improving myself until I felt I was ready to enter my first Dungeon.
The experience almost ended in tragedy, but fortunately our Tank was experienced and managed to control the situation well, so that no one died.
I was one of the players who almost died in this dungeon, but the thrill and adrenaline of the battle was incredible.
Too bad that afterwards I had to stay at home for two weeks to treat my injuries if I didn't want to pay a fortune for a healer.
Two weeks just training non-stop was exhausting...
To distract myself I decided to try streaming during this time.
Livestreaming games was something that came about recently. Apparently an entrepreneur figured out how to copy the visual information that the Player Core sends to the Player and play it back on the computer.
After finding a way to send this to the computer, recording videos became natural, and with streams already popular on social media, unlocking a function to stream games wasn't too difficult either.
As I had nothing to do while recovering, my first week of recovery was spent entirely on playing games and streaming them, but that wasn't working out very well.
As boring as it was to play, watching someone else play, doing the same things over and over again just for a few points was just as boring.
Every now and then a normal person would show up, curious to see what games the Players were playing to get stronger, but after watching for a few minutes, everyone left disappointed.
The most people watching me that I managed to accumulate was 3, all of whom were friends or relatives that I told I was streaming and came to support me.
Seeing that no one was really interested, I was about to stop, until R-Day happened.
On Sunday, 7 days after I got injured in the first dungeon I raided, while I was looking for different games on the websites of various colleges, thinking that at least new graduates might have enough creativity to do something new, I was completely disappointed.
Every game I saw and tested was practically the same.
Until on the last page of the list of games for this year's graduates of Nova Forge Academy there was a different game, with only 3 Players online and a completely different name from the others.
Curious, I started reading the game's page and everything I saw really interested me.
Downloading the game and understanding how it worked got me more and more excited, until I decided to play a game against another Player, which I thought was really cool.
I had to wait a few minutes to find an opponent, but when I did find a [Worthy Opponent], it was a boy about my brother's age with black hair, green eyes and a confident calm.
Unlike me, who didn't understand the game at all, my opponent was very helpful, explaining how the game worked, giving me tips on how to combine cards to get more powerful effects and how to take advantage of my Warrior Hero.
The more he showed me the complexity of the game, the more interested I became.
It was obvious that I suffered a crushing defeat at his hands, but even at my current level, being Runestone's first Diamond Player, I still couldn't beat him, which only made me more certain that he was Runestone's Game Creator!
'How brilliant does someone's mind have to be to think of every little detail and form a game as interesting as this?' I thought in awe.
Unlike my streams of other games that nobody wanted to watch, the more I played Runestone, the more people flocked to see me play.
My first day playing it gathered a maximum of 20 viewers, the second day raised that number to 80, on the third day the number jumped to 150, and even though it was the fourth day, the number had already passed 200 viewers, climbing steadily!
I had so much fun doing these streams that I would wake up, open the Stream while planning my deck, get into the game and play for 5 hours, then go out to eat and plan changes to my deck with the cards I'd won in that time, meditate a bit, play for another 5 hours and go to sleep.
Surprisingly, I was even making money doing this!
To encourage me to play more, or even to ask me questions about their decks, the spectators would give me money! Not to mention that even the advertisements they passed on to these viewers earned me a few cents!
Yesterday, with an average of 150 viewers, I received a total of $30!
It's not like that amount was going to make me rich, but since I wasn't healed enough to raid another dungeon yet, it was nice to get some money.
“Guys... after analyzing the earnings I received at different Ranks in the Runestone, I think I understand a bit how much each Rank earns.” I began to explain to the viewers one of the Players' biggest doubts.
“Using the Gold Rank as a basis, if when I was in the Gold Rank I received a 100% boost, the earnings when I was in the Bronze Rank were only 80%, while now that I've become Diamond the boost has gone up to 120%!”
[Really?! Geez, I already felt that the Silver earnings were good enough, so a Diamond Rank Player gets what I get and 50% of that extra?!!]
[Woah! I thought I was already satisfied with the boost I got in Gold 3, I guess I'll have to dedicate myself more to climbing to Diamond...]
[This game looks so interesting, what game is it?]
-----[In response to the comment above, if you're a normal person like me, with no affinity for Mana, give up, only Players can play this game...]
[Do you have any tips on how to get to the diamond, Owen?]
[How I wish I could play this...]
Reading the comments, I felt a bit bad for the people without an affinity for Mana.
After the knowledge of Mana became popular in the world, many people thought they could become Supernatural, only to be disappointed later to discover that they had no affinity for it.
It's no wonder that the supernatural wasn't public to the world before the dungeons, only a small part of the population had an affinity with Mana.
According to research carried out around the world, only 10% of the population had a low affinity with Mana.
These people were those with between 2 and 10 MP at the age of 18, which was the case for me and the other players.
If it had been before the dungeons appeared, we would just have been ignored by the Supernatural world and died without knowing we had Mana.
Those who would attract the attention of the supernatural world were those who today in our country were recognized as potential Game Creators, limited to just 1% of the population.
These people had between 50 and 100 MP at the age of 18, with the more MP a person had at that age, the greater their talent.
The development of Game Cores meant that people with high talents, the Game Creators, created ways for even people with low talents, the Players, to become strong enough to fight monsters.
This possibility of using a 10x larger population to fight the monsters while keeping the truly talented safe was what created the envy of other countries and played out in an international negotiation to try to get us to sell our technology.
So the only thing I could feel about the people who didn't have Mana was pity, not pity because they didn't have Mana and couldn't get stronger, since the life of a person without Mana was no worse than that of a Player, but pity because they couldn't play Runestone...
Politely ignoring the whining of ordinary people in the comments, since I couldn't do anything about it, I focused on the comments of valid questions about the game and continued the stream.
The information I gave was very important in getting players even more excited about playing Ranked Games, and that was good for me, since the more people who played, the more fun the game became!
Not to mention that now I no longer had to wait several minutes to find opponents!
What I didn't know was that my dedication and passion for the game surprised a very special person, my first opponent in Runestone, the creator of the game!
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