The sudden system notification left Shi Feng stunned for a good while.
All he'd done was renovate a mid-tier town, and yet his guild's reputation had skyrocketed by two hundred thousand points…
After all, promoting a one-star guild to two-star only required thirty thousand reputation, and going from two-star to three-star cost a hundred thousand.
The higher the guild ranking, the slower reputation accumulated.
When a guild was still at one-star, members could earn a decent amount of reputation simply by completing ordinary guild tasks. Given the size of major guilds, the number of daily tasks completed was enormous, so racking up thirty thousand reputation happened quickly enough. The real bottleneck in promoting to two-star was obtaining the guild promotion token.
However, once a guild reached two-star, completing ordinary tasks yielded virtually no reputation. Only high-level tasks counted — and those were exceedingly rare. So pushing a two-star guild to the hundred-thousand-reputation threshold was an agonizingly slow process.
Even a super guild needed a considerable amount of time.
Zero Wing's reputation had been accumulating at a pace that, for various reasons, matched that of the super guilds. By Shi Feng's estimate, they still needed roughly another month.
Now, with a two-hundred-thousand-point jump, they had far exceeded the hundred thousand required for promotion to three-star.
"A Bronze-rank guild promotion token?" Shi Feng looked at the bronze-colored diamond-shaped badge that had suddenly appeared in his inventory, faintly radiating a golden halo. It was clearly far more advanced than the silver guild base promotion token he had obtained before.
A Bronze-rank guild promotion token could promote any guild that met the reputation requirement by one full star, up to a maximum of four-star.
"What an impressive guild promotion token!" Shi Feng exclaimed.
As far as he knew, guild promotion tokens came in different tiers, each tied to a specific star rating. Promoting a one-star guild to two-star required a two-star promotion token; promoting to three-star required a three-star token. But a Bronze-rank promotion token could skip that requirement entirely, allowing a one- to three-star guild to level up without needing to grind for that specific tier's token.
Looking at the Bronze-rank token, Shi Feng even considered saving it for the jump from three-star to four-star.
In the Divine Realm, guild promotion tokens were far from easy to come by. A handful could be found through open-world adventures or treasure chests, but the standard way to obtain one was by claiming the First Clear of a major raid dungeon. After that, the chance of the same raid dropping another promotion token was less than one percent…
This was one of the key reasons guilds fought tooth and nail for those major raid First Clears.
Beyond boosting a guild's influence and reputation, securing a First Clear also accelerated star promotion. If another guild snatched it away, getting your hands on the next one became exponentially harder.
This was especially true for three-star guild promotion tokens.
Those required a First Clear of a level-50 Hell Difficulty raid, and unlike the two-star tokens — which dropped in raids near every major city — three-star dungeons were rare, appearing only once across a cluster of a dozen or more cities. If one guild claimed the First Clear, all the guilds in that entire region were left grinding that same dungeon repeatedly…
So three-star promotion tokens made inter-guild competition fiercer still, spilling over into city-versus-city rivalries rather than remaining confined to local guild wars.
Four-star promotion tokens were even more terrifying — only one or two raids in an entire Kingdom dropped them, and even in an Empire, the number was only slightly higher.
"I'd like to promote Zero Wing, please!" After a moment's thought, Shi Feng pulled out the Bronze-rank promotion token and handed it to the Association Steward.
A guild was a guild precisely because it offered perks that free players envied — perks that made it easier for members to level up and grow stronger. So the faster a guild promoted, the better.
"Esteemed Guardian, which guild base would you like to promote to three-star?" the Association Steward asked upon receiving the token.