Time ticked by little by little, and before Shi Feng knew it, he had been waiting in the bar for over an hour.
Though he hadn't done much of anything, the gains were enormous.
As a place where players frequently chatted and exchanged information, the bar made it easy to gather a wealth of intelligence—especially anything related to the Fifth Zone.
After sifting through all the information and organizing it slightly, Shi Feng finally figured out what kind of place the Fifth Zone actually was.
It had to be said—this place really felt more like a real world.
Put simply, the Fifth Zone was nothing more than a shelter, one that let players stay closer to high-level monsters without wasting massive amounts of time traveling.
There were no teleportation arrays here. Every bit of player movement was done on foot.
The monsters here were ferocious and plentiful. When players went out to operate, they almost always moved in small squads—no one dared act alone. The few who could solo were elite among elites, known as Lone Walkers. It was proof of true strength, and they were deeply admired for it.
Beyond that, the shelter could effectively withstand monster raids, because the nights here were absolutely terrifying.
How terrifying?
Monsters would attack in waves, piling on in droves. Even a hundred-man elite squad couldn't survive outside the shelter.
Even inside the shelter, players faced an ocean of monsters and had to band together to fend them off.
If the shelter was breached, the players' range of activity would shrink accordingly. They'd be forced to retreat to lower-level zones, and any future attempts to hunt high-level monsters would mean an enormous trek from the low-level areas to the high-level ones.
The nights here were longer than the days. Out of a forty-eight-hour cycle in the Divine Realm, thirty hours were nighttime and only eighteen were daytime. The window for players to level up was painfully small.
That only underscored how critical the shelter was.
Without it, players would burn eight hours every single day just running back and forth to level up—and for farther zones, possibly over ten hours. How were they supposed to get any leveling done?
The Fifth Zone, as it stood, was one of the shelters in the high-level region.
Players here didn't need to waste vast amounts of time traveling. They could easily encounter high-level monsters, enter high-level Dungeons, take on high-level quests, and so on.
But precisely because of this, the players here were generally much higher in level.
Every single night, they faced a massive tide of monsters. Slaying those monsters not only granted huge amounts of experience but also allowed them to complete high-level quests, earning generous sums of money and equipment.
And the most precious thing for any shelter was the Soul Crystal. It could enhance the power of the shelter's magic array, drastically weakening the monsters during raids and making them far easier to repel. Handing Soul Crystals over to the shelter rewarded players with massive Contribution Points, which essentially served as the shelter's currency—usable to purchase specific items that boosted a player's strength.
The first-tier forbidden spell that Warlock from the Iron Fist Squad had unleashed, for instance, was one of the fine goods available through Contribution Points.
So the players here craved Soul Crystals with a desperate hunger.
But to Shi Feng, this thing was genuinely useless. He wasn't planning to live here—he was just a passerby completing a quest.
"Still, even if Soul Crystals don't do much for me, they could be great for trading for gems." Shi Feng glanced at the three Soul Crystals in his bag and couldn't help but think of a promising money-making idea.
Gems here were far easier to get than on the outside.