Chapter 17
In D.I.O., users could gain a new skill by engaging in a certain activity or building knowledge. When it came to the Rank 9 users, the ignorant, these players literally knew nothing about the skills. In order to raise their skill, they needed ability rather than hard work. For example, the following amount of cultivation was necessary for Rank 9 users to reach Rank 8.
Even if they failed, users still earned cultivation points from attempting the Hand Skill. However, they definitely needed to achieve ‘success’ to reach a higher rank. The users must circulate the internal energy through the regular acupoint, then focus on the power to perform the forceful Hand Skill. They had to repeat this a hundred times successfully without any failure each time. Otherwise, no matter how many times they tried, whether it be a thousand times or ten thousand times, their cultivation points wouldn’t go up.
As a Rank 4, Yongno had the following cultivation points.
As a user progressed in rank, their capability gradually became a more significant requirement for them to level up their skill rank, rather than the effort they put in. Of course, it wasn’t completely impossible for users to put in the crazy effort and reach a higher rank, but it worked only when their skill was suitable to their current rank. However, if they didn’t even have the skill, then it was impossible. Although there was a ‘small’ problem - this process also took a lot of time - as long as they had the skill, they would one day go up a rank. However, starting from Rank 5, the advanced level, it became more difficult for users to go further up since it was mandatory to have skill cultivation points of [the next level of mastery].
Whenever users reached a higher rank, their cultivation points, which they earned from making a perfect success, were increased by ten times. If Rank 9 users succeeded in performing acceptable skills for their current rank a hundred times, they reached Rank 8. However, if they tried to enter Rank 7 from Rank 8, they had to successfully operate the suitable Hand Skill to their current rank a thousand times.
Likewise, if Rank 7 users were looking forward to going up one rank, to Rank 6, they had to make a perfect success ten thousand times. Reaching Rank 5 from Rank 6 required a hundred thousand times of success, whereas Rank 5 to Rank 4 demanded a million times of success. The next was ten million, a hundred million, billion, and finally, users should go through ten billion times of successful cultivation process if they wanted to reach the letters-ranked ranks such as Master Rank, Rank A.
But that wasn’t all. If users sought to achieve beyond the higher levels, they had to make a hundred billion times of successful cultivation to reach Rank AA, followed by a trillion times for Rank S, and ten trillion times for Rank SS. For the Rank Ultimate, commonly known as the Grandmaster level of the most perfected skill, users had to experience a hundred trillion times of successful cultivation, which was literally an impossible amount of work.