40 - Guardian iMonster

Allowing several people to feed a single iMonster could set a very dangerous precedent.

I knew how greedy the nobles were in feudal times like this.

There were fair and honest nobles, but they were the exception, not the rule.

So I had to find a way to protect the commoners from those nobles.

Both to protect the commoners from the nobles forcing them to feed the iMonsters against their will, and also to protect the nobles from using the iMonsters when they became powerful in the future to threaten the commoners.

The first countermeasure I came up with, mainly to deal with the second problem, was that the iMonsters wouldn't attack those who fed them, so if a noble used a commoner to feed the iMonster, the iMonster would never do anything to endanger that commoner's life.

Despite this measure, the nobles could not make the iMonsters attack the commoners after the commoners had fed the iMonsters once, and the nobles would also be careful who they fed the iMonsters to.

A weapon wouldn't be effective if it couldn't attack whomever its owner wanted, so the nobles would probably avoid putting anyone in charge of feeding the iMonster.

To prevent the nobles from using threats to force the commoners to feed the iMonsters, I decided to create a counter-threat.

If someone was forced to feed an iMonster and the God of the Internet saw it, the person would be banned from the Internet and would never be able to access it again, in addition to the iMonster being deleted.

Of course, there was still the possibility for the noble to pay a few copper coins for the commoner to feed the iMonster, but this would not only make the commoner safe for the iMonster, but it would also generate extra income for the commoner.

To ensure that the commoner wouldn't be forced to feed the iMonster for a very small amount of Copper, I added an option for commoners to report nobles for abusive practices, with a list of tactics that I considered unfavorable to commoners that guaranteed their right to report that noble.

This list even included a minimum price the noble had to pay per PIC, which was 1 copper coin per PIC.

If the noble paid less than that, or used threats or coercion against the commoner, the commoner could report that noble, and the noble would lose access to the Internet for the rest of his life, and his iMonster would be deleted.

If the nobles realized that they would not only lose access to the Internet, but also lose an extremely powerful weapon, I think it would discourage them from using violence to threaten commoners.

Once this list was made and all the functions were ready, the cost of updating the app was only 500 Divine Power Points.

The biggest cost was linking all the iMonster apps with the apps of those who would feed the iMonster, the rest of the features were easy to do.

So the new update was soon available.

When I looked at John in the small village near the capital of Arcantor, I saw the big smile on his face as he gathered the whole village to announce the new update and explain to them that they would now be safe in case something unforeseen happened.

Of course, the more powerful the iMonster, the more Divine Power it required to summon, the price of which was ten times the iMonster's level in food cookies, something hardly anyone could afford on their own.

But with the help of an entire village, if everyone prayed just to buy cookies for their iMonster with the PIC, they managed to collect over 500 cookies!

An amount that was enough to keep the iMonster active for several hours, to help defend the village, or even to help them hunt, greatly reducing the risk of the village's hunters getting meat, and possibly even increasing their income with the hunting materials they could possibly get.

So, after a vote, it was decided that everyone would feed John, the village leader's iMonster.

The iMonster he chose was a beautiful orange firefox named Pyroxy.

From the screen of his Internet book, John had already grown fond of the creature, and when he saw how happy it was to receive so much food from everyone in the village, the smile on John's face became even bigger.

Since they were feeding the village Pyroxy, everyone had access to it in their [iMonster] app, in addition to the personal iMonster they had, so they had 2 monsters to interact with in the app!

Only those who fed the iMonster could tell it to spend its energy, be it training, playing, or other actions.

In this way, the iMonster created intimacy with these people, even if they weren't officially its owners.

Even though they could pray 3 times on average to feed Pyroxy, they didn't do it, because everyone only fed it once a day for the safety of the village.

Since they didn't urgently need its help, this frequency was more than enough.

While the people in this village were very grateful to me, I was curious to observe other places away from Arcantor.

In the other small villages visited by my 'merchant emissaries', everyone was buzzing with happiness about this new feature, just like in John's small village.

While the people in these small villages were excited, there were people elsewhere who had many doubts...

These people were the nobles who ruled the cities.

Seeing a duke, a man who ran a city of more than 40,000 people with few internet users, a smile appeared on my face.

=== 3rd POV ===

This man was one of the nobles Adrian had noticed, perfectly fitting the stereotype I had of nobles in a medieval world.

A fat, greedy, fearful, proud man, and many other not-so-good adjectives he could think of.

But this man wasn't stupid, so he could see very well how useful these new features of [iMonster] that the God of the Internet had introduced were.

Thinking about the population of the city he controlled, he made a quick calculation and realized that it wouldn't be difficult to train an iMonster with the strength of a Master Mage in a short time, and it was even possible to have an iMonster with the strength of a Wise Mage!

He was an Arcane Mage himself, but he knew that with his talent, he would never be able to become a Master Mage, let alone a Sage Mage.

However, with the new iMonster feature, Shane Russell could control a Sage Mage in the palm of his hand! 

A much better way than having to ask for help from the Sage Mages of the Arcantor Magic School who lived in his city.

The problem was that he would have to spread the word among the commoners, something he didn't want to do.

Even if he saw that he could get Internet Coins for spreading the word, he only needed 100 Internet Coins to buy the magic book of his level, and he had plenty of time to finish studying that book and buy the next one.

So he preferred to keep it in his hands for as long as he could, to the point where he even ordered the city wizards who already knew about the Internet not to spread it to the commoners.

But now it was different... Shane could no longer keep it a secret.

With the benefits he could get from the iMonster, Shane knew that keeping it a secret was very bad for the city in the long run.

Even if the God of the Internet made him pay 1 copper coin for every cookie the commoners gave his iMonster, a duke's coffers were too fat for that not to be a problem.

One gold coin was equal to 10,000 copper coins, and as the Duke of the Russell family, who had been collecting taxes from the commoners for so many years, he had an abundance of gold coins in his coffers, so he didn't worry about it and was willing to spend gold coins to command a powerful iMonster!

The next day, to the surprise of the people of Lunaris, Duke Russell appeared in person in the town square to give a speech.

In that speech, he preached about the God of the Internet and how he was a kind and merciful God, while explaining all the deeds and goodness that the God of the Internet had done, teaching ordinary people how to pray, and defining him as the person who invited them to the Internet, causing him to receive thousands of Internet Coins in a few minutes.

After that, he went to another part of town to gather another group and started preaching just like the last time.

Shane Russell wasn't the only noble who did this; all over the Arcantor Kingdom, several nobles preached about the Internet God and taught the people in their towns how to use the Internet, with a special focus on the [iMonster] application.

This was all done to prepare the people to feed their iMonsters, so that in a few days, each city would have powerful guardian creatures to protect the safety of the people.

And for an unknown enemy army approaching the border of Arcantor, the lack of this information would make this expedition much more dangerous.

Even if they were guided by a powerful god, what they would face inside Arcantor was something they could never have imagined.