Star Moon Kingdom, White River City.
With Zero Wing City's sudden rise, a great many free players from the surrounding kingdoms had gathered in front of the Zero Wing Guild's headquarters, all hoping to join.
While the current situation between the Zero Wing Guild and Heaven's Burial remained unclear, given Zero Wing City's trajectory, it was only a matter of time before it surpassed Heaven's Burial's Ancient Rock City.
After all, Zero Wing City's teleportation function and the rare items sold by its numerous NPC shops were far too enticing.
Not only players from the Star Moon Kingdom, but even free players and renowned adventurer parties from neighboring kingdoms couldn't resist wanting to settle permanently in Zero Wing City. Those adventurer parties and guilds who hadn't seriously competed for private residences during the Zero Wing auction were kicking themselves with regret.
Some were even publicly willing to pay premium prices to buy, but unfortunately no one was willing to sell.
And as the Zero Wing Guild's momentum continued to soar, Shi Feng was hard at work inside the Candlelight Trading Firm, frantically crafting Radiant Light sets.
The six-piece Radiant Light set was a Gold-grade set for level fifty, extremely difficult to craft with complex processes. However, as Shi Feng crafted more and more, he grew increasingly proficient. Coupled with the effects of his third-tier Strange Fire — the Thunder Purple Fire — his crafting speed had been drastically reduced.
What would normally take a Master Blacksmith close to an hour to complete, Shi Feng could now finish in just forty minutes. Moreover, his actual success rate had reached over sixty percent — out of ten sets crafted, six would succeed. Of the remaining four that didn't, the quality was simply lower.
Originally meant to be Gold-grade, due to minor flaws in the process they ended up as Mythril Rank or even Iron Rank. Only about one in ten was completely scrapped.
Mythril Rank and Iron Rank might seem like failures, but for current level-fifty expert players, they were still quite good equipment — especially as part of a set, half a rank above same-level gear in quality.
Shi Feng had no intention of keeping this type of equipment secret, so he dumped them directly into the guild warehouse, keeping only the qualifying products for himself.
Just as Shi Feng was preparing to craft his twenty-seventh Radiant Light set, Watercolor Rose suddenly contacted him.
"Guild Leader, Heaven's Burial has made their move. Lei Jingyang is leading them, commanding a massive force of demons and expert players to ambush our people on high-resource maps. They have way too many numbers — we're completely outmatched. A lot of our guild experts have already fallen. I've told them to retreat immediately, but it seems Heaven's Burial was prepared for this. It won't be easy to pull back." Watercolor Rose anxiously sent several video recordings to Shi Feng, her expression indescribably grim.
In the videos, expert teams from Heaven's Burial were leading twenty to thirty Lord-tier or higher demons, attacking Zero Wing Guild members everywhere.
While demons didn't match evil beasts in defense and HP, they possessed far higher intelligence. Even a single level-seventy Lord-tier demon was enough to give a twenty-person expert party a serious headache, let alone twenty to thirty Lord-tier or higher demons. A hundred-person expert team would be virtually wiped out upon encountering them, and only a thousand-person team could put up some resistance.
To truly kill these demons required either a hundred-person expert team led by the Conqueror Squad or one led by a second-tier class player. Even then, killing them was quite troublesome — if facing too many at once, they might even need to activate burst skills.
But the number of demons exceeded four to five thousand. The Conqueror Squad and second-tier-led expert teams were already overwhelmed, let alone having the capacity to send reinforcements.
In just under half an hour, the Zero Wing Guild's death toll had exceeded five thousand...
"Heaven's Burial really is cautious," Shi Feng muttered, his brow furrowed.
Within the Star Moon Kingdom, the Evil God Temple was subject to the kingdom's military crusade — any sightings would be met with immediate suppression.
And because of the Orc Empire, the Star Moon Kingdom's military was spread across numerous locations throughout the kingdom, making it relatively easy to leverage their forces.
However, Heaven's Burial only deployed highly mobile demons, operating in scattered groups. Even if the kingdom's military showed up, they would probably manage to take down only a few before the rest fled.
Causing significant damage to the demon army was virtually impossible.