After Shi Feng finished speaking in the second-floor VIP lounge, Senior Steward Loran nodded and went to retrieve the knight order's records.
Before long, the NPC senior steward returned with a thick roster and placed it on the stone table.
"That many?" Shi Feng eyed the hefty list on the table, unable to hide his surprise.
The last time he had come, Steward Lanro had only produced a single sheet. This time, it was an entire book — the difference was quite stark…
In the Divine Realm, all kinds of information could technically be recorded on a single piece of paper, with players simply pulling up the data when they needed it. However, the number of pages still reflected the scale to a certain degree.
If the recruitment pool was under thirty thousand, it all fit on one sheet. A few ten thousand more would only add a few extra pages. Only when the number exceeded a hundred thousand would they use a book.
Zero Wing had already conducted recruitment drives across multiple NPC cities. In theory, the pool of candidates who could be recruited was mostly exhausted — at most they might have picked up another fifty or sixty thousand. Yet now the number was well over a hundred thousand…
"Honored Bronze Inheritor, there weren't many applicants at first," Steward Loran explained slowly. "But after a number of other races suddenly appeared in your Stone Forest City, the number of applicants surged."
"Already? That fast?" Shi Feng was mildly surprised.
He had originally expected it to take a few days for the effect to kick in. Stone Forest City had only recently been upgraded, and given the Nature of the Free City title, the effects shouldn't have manifested this quickly.
But it seemed he had rather underestimated the power of that city title.
"At present, a total of 112,672 individuals have applied for knighthood," Steward Loran explained, not entirely understanding Shi Feng's murmuring to himself. "Of those, 83,241 are human, 27,412 are orc, 1,836 are elf, and 183 are giant. This is the complete dossier on every applicant received over these past days."
"Nearly thirty thousand knights from other races. If the major superpowers from my previous life found out, they'd go insane," Shi Feng muttered after hearing the steward's report, unable to contain his excitement.
Recruiting knights of other races in the Divine Realm was notoriously difficult. Their populations were far smaller compared to humanity — if a superpower managed to attract even a few thousand other-race applicants, they would have been overjoyed.
Yet this time, nearly thirty thousand NPC applicants from other races had shown up. That number was absolutely staggering. Even a two-star lord who toiled for an entire year might not manage to recruit that many NPCs of other races.
What was most precious was that even the scarce elf and giant races had sent applicants — and in considerable numbers. That far exceeded his expectations.
Among the non-human races in the Divine Realm, the orc population was second only to humanity. Generally, the vast majority of NPCs recruited from other races were orcs.
That was not to say orc knights were weak — quite the opposite. Orc NPCs were extraordinarily powerful, born warriors with keen senses and robust physiques that no human could match. Apart from human heroes blessed by the gods, ordinary human fighters of the same level were simply no match for orc warriors.
The reason orcs had been driven away from the Divine Realm continent's fertile lands and could not compete with humanity came down entirely to human learning ability and capacity for innovation. Because of that, orcs had been forced to eke out a living in the comparatively desolate reaches of the Realm.
If one could assemble an orc army into a frontline fighting force, their prowess in close-quarters combat on the battlefield would be virtually unstoppable.
Shi Feng then opened the recruitment roster Steward Loran had brought and began to study it carefully.
He had originally intended to select some newly recruited high-potential knights to replace weaker members of his knight order. Now it was clear there was a great deal more to be done.
Time flew by, second by second. Shi Feng spent over twenty hours poring over the roster — with more focus and attention than even a boss fight.
"Good thing I brought enough gold coins, or I wouldn't even have had enough for the severance pay," Shi Feng said with a rueful smile when he was finished.
If he had simply gone with his original plan to swap out a few order members, that would have been one thing. But recruiting NPCs of other races was different.
The arrangement was a lifetime appointment.
In other words, once recruited, they could not be replaced. That meant every recruitment of an other-race NPC had to be done with the utmost care — otherwise, aside from raising one's lord level, there would be no way to recruit additional knights ever again.