The shockwave faded, and the dust settled.
Looking at the horde of deceased crypt spiders, as well as the skeleton soldier who was still clutching tightly to his bone spear, Roan finally lowered his wand and nodded in satisfaction.
‘Not bad. He’s good at kiting. I can continue using him for a long time toe.”
Twilight’s bottom had been clenched up throughout the entire bombardment of stones. He clutched dearly onto the bone spear as if it was his own straw of hope, and he exhaled in relief and got off the bone spear after double confirming that the spell was over.
‘Is this true prower?’
While they were fussing over the crypt spiders’ attacking patterns, the Demon King ughtered these arachnids with a mere wave of his hand.
‘Damn… I was determined to be Cmity Online’s number one thief, but maybe that’s not the right job to go for?’
Twilight was not the only one who thought that. Dragonthousand wondered the same too.
The Demon King’s ability to summon cmities at a whim was deeply imprinted in her mind.‘Should I try bing a magic swordsman? But I should graduate from skeletonhood first.’
‘I should be able to gather enough contribution points to raise my Soul Tier within the next two days, but I wonder what are the jobs avable.’
At this point, none of the yers knew what they thought to be Cmity Online’s power ceiling was nothing more than the Northpeak Shaft’s power ceiling.
Roan essed his character page to check his gains from the battle, only to find the experience points he earned were much less than anticipated.
“…I only earned 20,000 experience points from 300 crypt spiders? Is it due to our level gap?”
Through Youyou, who was in charge of distribution contribution points, Roan could easily find out what each yer had been up to.
All in all, Autumnleaf and Twilight had farmed 90 crypt spiders to advance from LV0 to LV3, which meant they had each earned 30,000 experience points from their hunt.
Inparison to that, Roan’s growth was meager.
“I guess I have to challenge stronger monsters if I want to earn more experience points. Alternatively, I could also make it up with quantity.”
Roan took a blue potion from his cloak, uncorked it, and downed its contents. A surge of warmth flowed into his abdomen and diffused throughout his body before finally converging in his head.
His exhaustion disappeared, and his depleted mana recovered to the brim.
Thanks to that, he was able to quickly pull himself together. Then, he cast an enigmatic gaze upon the yers.
“Time to clear this area.”
He took out four test tubes and passed them to the skeleton soldiers.
“Go and draw the spiders here… You know what to do.”
…
Twilight’s earlier demonstration was enough for these skilled yers to understand their job. They poured the potions over themselves.
Roan was very satisfied.
‘I’d expect no less from pro gamers. It’s much easier to deal with them. They are nothing like those fools with ridiculous usernames who are always up to nonsense, like hacking my domain core or taking advantage of my cat.’
That was why it was important to have the bigger picture in mind!
‘If only more yers would just work with me to make Necropolis big, you could have any cat you want when the timees! If you can’t kidnap one, you can opt to be one yourself!’
The yers were just soul entities anyway. Reincarnating them was as easy as changing jobs in an MMORPG.
The yers didn’t haveints about the situation either.
It was normal for NPCs to order yers around like servants during a quest. Veteran yers like them had long grown ustomed to that. If anything, they liked how the Demon King got straight to the point. At least he wasn’t the type to nag or give obscure riddles.
This game was alreadycking in guidance for new yers. It would be ridiculous if they had to guess what NPCs wanted on top of that.
In the hours toe, Roan demonstrated true efficiency to the yers, shocking them with his callousness.
Under Roan’s instructions, the yers split up and ventured deeper into thebyrinth. They left marks along the way while luring as many monsters as they could back into the hall.
The tens of thousands of ratmen who fell into thebyrinth wouldn’t fall prey to a single hall of spiders. There were far more crypt spiders lurking in thebyrinth beneath Northpeak Shaft!
The sudden abundance of food greatly stimted the crypt spiders’ desire to procreate.
As the skeleton soldiers smeared with pheromones entered their territory, thezy spiders quivered excitedly, reminiscent of Orcknight meeting a subus. They merely stopped short of screaming “Mine, mine!”.
It was hard to tell whether they knew what they were pursuing were skeletons, whom they couldn’t do anything with even if they caught them… maybe except for getting a chock full of ashes on them.
Anyway, the yers got an early ess experience of being a subus.
After they lured the spiders into the hall, it was time for the Demon King to unt his skills.
If there weren’t too many spiders, he would hurl bone spears with a wave of his wand and kill them one by one.
If there was a huge horde of spiders, he would first hurl a bone spear to mark a safety zone before unleashing his AOE spell to ughter them. <em>(T/N: AOE refers to area-of-effect, which refers to skills or spells that can deal damage over a wide area.)</em>
He would also asionally drink a potion or sit down to meditate.
During these times, his zombie would fight on his behalf, swinging his greatsword to y the crypt spiders chasing after the yers.
‘Isn’t this game too advantageous to mages?’
Autumnleaf was envious. If only this game had a cash shop, he wouldn’t hesitate to pump real-life money in!
What he wanted wasn’t too much.
As long as it could cast spells, he wouldn’t mind turning into a spider or a slime!
Time ticked by.
The spider carcasses in the hall were stacked into little hills. Dark red and pale yellow fluids flowed like streams, making this spider-web-filled room look even more grotesque than before.
As more crypt spiders flopped over and died, Roan’s experience points soared, but the yers also received a share of the pie too. They didn’t receive many experience points from each crypt spider as they didn’t deal too much damage to them, but that waspensated by quantity.
Even if each spider only gave them two digits worth of experience points, that multiplied by a thousand still amounted to tens of thousands!
The experience points ceiling for an LV3 was 30,000.
Before Autumnleaf knew it, he had already filled up the experience bar. An unexpected transformation happened when he overcame his LV3 bottleneck.
“W-what’s going on?”
An eerie green light manifested out of thin air and enveloped Autumnleaf, engulfing him with a sensation of unprecedented power.
All this while, his skeleton soldier avatar felt not much different from his real-life body—just without skin and flesh—but the earlier level up changed things. His reflexes and strength were nothing like before.
Just then, a sticky ball of white fluid flew at him.
Thus far, this attack had required his full concentration to dodge, but this time, he managed to pull off the same feat with a casual duck.
The crypt spiders were also stunned by his changes. Their scuttering footsteps slowed as they reassessed whether it was worth the risk pursuing the troublesome sack of bones before them.
Making use of this opening, Autumnleaf quickly retreated before examining his body.
It could be his imagination, but his brittle bones appeared to have be much thicker than before. His weak joints had also stopped creaking as if someone had oiled it.
He quickly checked his character page, and there was indeed something amiss.
【ID: Autumnleaf
Race: Skeleton
Soul Tier: Iron (Level Cap: 10)
Level: 4
Experience Points: 18/40,000
HP: 300/300
MP: 100/100
Constitution: 3 (+1)
Strength: 6 (+1)
Agility: 3 (+1)
Intelligence: 1 (+1)
Psyche: 1 (+1)】
All his stats had gone up by 1!
In particr, his mana pool, intelligence, and psyche were no longer 0!
Autumnleaf was overjoyed to see his updated character page.
At the same time, a light-green notification window popped out.
【Server Announcement: Congrattions to Autumnleaf for bing the first yer in this server to reach ‘Iron-tier’! May other yers work harder to usher prosperity to Necropolis!】
Autumnleaf was both delighted and embarrassed by the announcement.
Even though the server announcement reflected the developer’s sincerity, if there was a choice, he would have preferred to conceal his username. He didn’t like to be too high profile.
Meanwhile, Dragonmyriad, Dragonthousand, and Dragonhundred, who had just lured a wave of spiders over and were currently resting, looked at the announcement with envious faces.
“He beat us to it.”
“He has already earned 1000 contribution points?!”
“Looks like it.”
They had nned to score a few early achievements to build Dragon Odyssey’s reputation in Cmity Online. That would aid them in uniting the closed beta yers together.
It was a pity to have missed this opportunity.
Dragonmyriad: “It can’t be helped. I remember they had been farming crypt spiders since yesterday. It’s no surprise their contribution points are way ahead of ours.”
They had tried farming crypt spiders too, but their farming efficiency was too low, and there were even casualties. These skeletons were just too weak; even their real-life bodies were stronger.
On top of that, this game had a limited number of closed beta slots, and the slots were distributed by random. This prevented him from mobilizing his guild. The only support he had was from Dragonthousand and Dragonhundred, who managed to obtain closed beta slots too.
After weighing the pros and cons, they decided to farm the easier ratmen first.
That allowed them to grow faster, but it unfortunately capped the contribution points they could earn in a day too. Looking back, it might have been the wrong choice to opt for the easier path.
On the other hand, Twilight thought nothing about the server announcement. If anything, he thought it should have appeared much earlier.
Autumnleaf had already advanced to Iron-tier early in the morning; the only thingcking was his experience points.
“…Seems like just raising our Soul Tier isn’t enough. We have to raise our levels too.”
This was fairer to most yers.
Given that it was possible to trade crypt spider carcasses, it should be safe to say that it was possible to ‘buy’ contribution points and hell coins. It was only impossible to do so now because there were too few people on the server.
There were bound to be such private trades in the future. This was unavoidable in such games.
Experience points, on the other hand, had to be personally earned.
While it was possible to hire a stronger yer to help out, it would be all for naught if the yer couldn’t dish out any damage.
Seeing the three ‘Dragon’ yers getting all revved up once more, a certain demon king revealed a triumphant smile.
That earlier server announcement, rather than a reward to Autumnleaf, was more like a reminder to thezy bums in the server to work harder.
‘Take a good look! All of you started out as the same shitty skeleton, but why is it that someone can reach Iron-tier in a single day whereas the others have stagnated at LV3?’
‘If none of you are working hard, how can I grow my demon king domain and be stronger? If I have to do everything myself, what use do I have for you fools?’
Roan uncorked another blue potion and downed its contents. Then, he raised his arm to wipe the corners of his lips.
To his astonishment, he noticed a crimson smudge on his sleeves in his peripheral vision.
‘Huh? A nosebleed?’
<em>Drip, drip.</em>
While he was in a daze, red droplets fell beside his shoes.
“Demon King, you should take care of your body… If I’m not mistaken, such potionse with side effects, right?” Youyou looked at Roan with concerned eyes.
This was already his seventh bottle, and he instinctively understood that excessive consumption of potions wasn’t a good thing.
“I’m fine. Maybe the excessive spellcasting overloaded my psyche… It’s not necessarily the potion’s problem.”
‘Is my constitution too weak? The underworld’s demons gulp down many bottles of this potion—at a monstrously concentrated level at that—in a single sitting, yet they are still fine…’
Looking at the blood dripping on the floor, Roan felt slightly fearful.
“…I guess I’ll rest a bit first.”