Frost Spring Great Forest, Stone Forest City.
After Shi Feng killed Zhutian Luanshi, he led the Hell Legion straight to Stone Forest City without making any stops in the Ten Saints Empire.
The moment Shi Feng and his group stepped into Stone Forest City, they were struck speechless by the sight before them.
Stone Forest City had originally been nothing more than a guild town. In a level-100 neutral map like this, one would normally expect only players — very few NPCs ever visited guild towns. Yet the current Stone Forest City was absolutely teeming with NPCs. People came and went in an endless stream, many of them NPCs, and one could even see NPC merchant caravans queuing up at the city gates. The bustling scene was in no way inferior to a genuine NPC major city.
Beyond the sheer number of NPCs, the quantity and caliber of players present left even Hell Scream stunned.
A casual glance down the main street revealed no fewer than dozens of Tier 3 experts…
In the current Divine Realm, even among the great superpowers, the number of Tier 3 experts had exceeded a hundred, with some factions boasting several hundred. Yet across the Divine Realm as a whole, Tier 3 experts were still exceedingly rare — no matter which city they walked into, they were always the center of attention.
But here in Stone Forest City, they were as commonplace as any ordinary expert player, no more remarkable than the Tier 2 powerhouses around them…
"So this is Zero Wing's guild city?" The tall Thunder Beast stared at the scene before him, completely dumbfounded.
Their Hell Legion fielded a full three hundred Tier 3 experts — a number that would leave anyone jaw-dropped no matter where they went. Yet in Stone Forest City, Tier 3 experts were practically on every corner. The number of Tier 3 experts along a single main street in Stone Forest City exceeded a thousand…
At that moment, it wasn't just the members of the Hell Legion who were stunned — even Qing Shuang and his companions, visiting Stone Forest City for the first time, were utterly awestruck.
In the Dark Cavern, Tier 3 experts were coveted by every single shelter. A shelter might not even have a hundred Tier 3 experts in total.
Yet a random street in Stone Forest City had more Tier 3 experts than their entire shelter…
"Qing Shuang, you really should have told us! If we'd known our guild had a guild city like this, we would have joined Zero Wing ages ago." A Tier 3 Warlock who had recently joined the First Shelter gazed at the Tier 3 players filling the streets and clicked his tongue in disbelief.
Before he had come to Stone Forest City, even though he knew that Hell Scream and the others weren't formally guild members, the ability to organize over three hundred Tier 3 experts was already enough to command deep respect. After all, even the Aurora Shelter — ranked in the top ten of the entire Dark Cavern — didn't have three hundred Tier 3 experts in its entire population.
But when comparing Aurora Shelter to the Stone Forest City before them, they might as well have been two entirely different worlds. He almost felt as though they hadn't even been playing the same Divine Realm.
The number of Tier 3 experts in Stone Forest City alone was probably several times greater than the entire count of Tier 3 experts across all of the Dark Cavern…
Perhaps for ordinary players, having more Tier 3 experts in a city was no big deal. But as a city administrator, he didn't look at things the way ordinary players did.
The value of one person versus another was vastly different, especially when it came to a city.
The benefits that a Tier 3 expert could bring to a city far surpassed those of a Tier 2 expert — particularly in terms of resources. The resources a Tier 3 expert could acquire were simply incomparable to what Tier 2 experts could gather, because the resource zones accessible to Tier 3 experts were places Tier 2 experts couldn't even approach. Resources that were extremely precious to Tier 2 experts were mundane to Tier 3 experts.
And whenever a Tier 3 expert resided in a city, even if they weren't a guild member, they would inevitably sell a great deal of resources within the city, which in turn attracted even more powerful players.
Beyond resources, the most important factor was leveling!
Currently, the mainstream player base across the entire Divine Realm had already surpassed level 100. After reaching level 100, the experience required for each subsequent level was far greater than before, requiring players to take on more powerful monsters to earn more experience. This meant teams needed to be led by Tier 3 experts.
This was precisely why players in the Dark Cavern preferred to develop within the more powerful shelters.
With Stone Forest City boasting so many Tier 3 experts, the rate at which players here could level up was something the various shelters in the Dark Cavern could never hope to match.
If the players of the Dark Cavern knew that Zero Wing possessed a guild city like this, they would probably flood into the First Shelter and join Zero Wing in a mad frenzy.
At this, Qing Shuang fell into a long silence, at a loss for words.
He had always known that Zero Wing was no ordinary guild, but he hadn't imagined they could be this terrifying…
What Qing Shuang and his companions didn't know was that Shi Feng's display of overwhelming power in Demon City had prompted numerous superpowers to send experts to Stone Forest City. The superpowers of the Ten Saints Empire, in particular, had not only dispatched large numbers of scouts into the city, but many of their top leaders had personally made the trip to Stone Forest City.
As a result, the city's population had exploded, and the number of Tier 3 experts had reached an unprecedented level.
Meanwhile, in a top-floor VIP suite of a high-end restaurant not far from Zero Wing's headquarters in Stone Forest City, several Tier 3 experts — all at level 108 or above — were calmly watching Shi Feng and his group enter the Zero Wing compound while savoring the city's signature and exorbitantly priced restorative delicacies.
If Shi Feng had been there, he would have been thoroughly startled.