Within Zero Wing's headquarters in Stone Forest Town, the moment Shi Feng completed the promotion, an enormous magic circle materialized across both the ground and the sky above Stone Forest Town. The circle blanketed the entire town, causing everyone within its bounds to grow tense.
"What's going on?" Yuan Tiexin gazed up at the magic circle in the sky, his eyes full of bewilderment.
He didn't understand magic circles, but this was undoubtedly the largest one he had ever seen. The surging mana was even visible to the naked eye, and its staggering presence made even Legendary monsters pale in comparison.
Just as everyone was growing alarmed by the spectacle, a system notification chimed in the ears of every player inside Stone Forest Town.
System: Stone Forest Town has been promoted to Basic City. Players will be teleported out of Stone Forest Town in thirty seconds.
Once the system notification sounded, everyone in Stone Forest Town froze in unison, staring at the prompt in disbelief, certain they had misheard.
"How is that possible?"
"Stone Forest Town has been promoted to a city?"
…
No one could believe it was real. The members of Heavenly Secrets who had only just arrived were particularly dumbstruck.
"That's impossible! For a town to advance into a city, it needs not only fully developed defensive structures and enormous reputation, but also a massive player base to sustain it over a long period. Stone Forest Town was only just transferred here — how could it possibly advance to a Basic City?!" An elderly man with hair half-white practically roared the words.
Every member of Heavenly Secrets present shared the old man's outrage and disbelief. In fact, when it came to town development, few people in all of Heavenly Secrets carried more authority than this elder.
His name was Feng Shui Yi Lao — one of the top five Town Architecture Masters in all of the Divine Realm, and a figure universally recognized as such.
A Town Architecture Master was, in essence, an architect. On the surface, this subclass didn't seem all that impressive, far less glamorous than Forging, Alchemy, and the like. But as the Divine Realm had developed, every major power had come to deeply understand the role Architecture Masters played, and placed ever-greater importance on them.
The reason was that guild towns frequently required advanced structures to progress, and town planning was critically important. Done well, it could dramatically accelerate a guild town's growth. The towns designed by Feng Shui Yi Lao advanced more than thirty percent faster than those of other architects, and he had even designed several advanced buildings on his own.
In terms of his standing within Heavenly Secrets, even Yuan Tiexin — who had campaigned across countless battlefields — couldn't match him. On matters of town development, his voice carried more weight than even the guild's vice masters.
It was precisely for this reason that Heavenly Secrets had sent Feng Shui Yi Lao to Stone Forest Town in the first place — to develop it further and hopefully accelerate its promotion to a guild city.
But now it was obvious his trip had been entirely in vain…
Before anyone had recovered from the shock of the system notification, they were all teleported out of Stone Forest Town. The Zero Wing members who found themselves outside the town quickly regained their senses, and then they erupted into celebration.
"A second city!"
"We have a second city!"
"Even the super guilds probably don't have a guild city on neutral territory right now!"
Guild cities were no longer unfamiliar to players. Many guilds had their own guild towns, and all of them were striving toward city status. To date, only a handful of guilds across the entire Divine Realm possessed a guild city, and every single one of them belonged to the upper echelons of the great powers.
But now Zero Wing didn't just have one guild city — they had two!
Most importantly, this second guild city was located in a place like the Bottomless Abyss. The entry fees alone would bring in a staggering income. And compared to a guild town, a guild city was vastly larger — accommodating a million residents would be no problem at all, let alone five million.