1366 Requirement(34)
Chapter 1366: Requirement(34)
To complete the second quest, Laney needed to reach the doors of Gring City. She would then need to return to Fring City without any casualties or battles along the way.
Since Laney fulfilled the requirement, the pattern on the back of her hand confirmed that she had completed the quest.
At the same time, a phenomenon played out in front of her.
The battle didn’t go overwhelmingly in Laney’s favor and came with great costs. When she left for the mission, she had 2734 people with her, but after its completion, less than 500 remained.
Of those 473 survivors, three hundred were those with yellow recruitment tokens, one hundred seventy-one with white recruitment tokens, and one with green and red recruitment tokens.
The next moment, recruitment tokens began to fly out of the guards. Following that, all the white recruitment tokens disappeared; yellow recruitment tokens turned white; green turned yellow; and red turned green.
At the same time, the people she had recruited were also freed from the contract. Laney would have to recruit them again.
Before Laney could do anything or come out of shock, the Level 234 man spoke out.
“Leave here immediately.”
Without the effect of the recruitment token, the negative effects due to the aura of resentment around her began to affect the lower level recruits.
Because of the deaths during the second quest, resentment has grown. So the negative effects intensified even further.
Laney immediately acted and left the scene while the recruitment tokens in the air flew into the space inside the pattern on their own.
In her hurry, she didn’t even notice that the pattern was glowing. Only after reaching a safe distance, she decided to check the pattern, and as usual, her eyes fell on the glowing pattern.
When Laney tapped on it, a familiar screen popped out in front of her. Her eyes jumped up in surprise after finding that there were visible changes in the bonus section.
[…
Bonus: Flying Adventurer, Inferno Blade
…]
The reward for her completing the second quest was an attacking skill, and she then tapped on it. As its name suggested, the user of the skill could combine the sharpness of the blade with the lethality of fire to create a single person attack.
The reward wasn’t much considering the difficulty of the quest, but the devil in the details lay in the usage of the skill.
Since it was a bonus reward, the energy required for her to use [Inferno Blade] was less than ten percent of what it would usually demand. At the same time, its damage wasn’t nerfed.
During the second quest, when Laney was surrounded by more than a hundred people, the difficulty would have been greatly reduced if she had the [Inferno Blade].
In addition to its low energy requirement, the skill also added to Laney’s already great talent in Knife handling. Whenever the skill would be active, her skill would grow, helping her use the ability even better.
Laney smiled upon seeing the reward. She then moved her eyes down and was met with disappointment after not finding the third quest.
Laney then walked toward the pagoda and was surprised to find that the nine-story building was now eight-story. She was met with another wave of disappointment since the doors were locked and she couldn’t open them anymore.
Laney understood that the third quest needed to be activated before entering the training in pagoda. It was just that Laney didn’t know when the mission would activate.
Laney had a thought, so she went in search of Zoric to test it out for the reason behind the delay. Zoric was the Level 234 guy whom she had recruited for the second quest.
ραΠdαsΝοvel.cοm ***
The recruitment tokens didn’t benefit only the participant but also those recruited beings. If it didn’t work like that no one would join the participant, considering the difficulty of the quests and hence higher risks of death.
Those who survived the second quest ushered in a new wave of growth after returning to the city.
The ones with the white recruitment token were rewarded with money that would usually take them decades to earn. The ones with yellow tokens earned even more, and they were also rewarded with an increase in their levels. The sole survivor of the green token received money and three levels, while Zoric gained a small piece of land in his name as well as five levels.
Considering the reward, Zoric treated Laney with a joyful expression. Buying the land in Fring City wasn’t possible unless the prize was from the quest. Even a single piece of grass inside the city was the property of whoever would complete the trial and become the city lord.
But Zoric now had a small piece of land in his name, and even if Laney won the trial and became the city lord, she would be able to do nothing. It was just that Zoric couldn’t sell the land to anyone other than those who had gained lands due to joining the quests of the past two participants.
“Do I need to sign another contract if I want to recruit you again?” Laney asked immediately upon finding him.
“Yes, but I will no longer ask only to intervene against the leader. I will only intervene when I want,” Zoric responded.
Even though he had gained an expensive reward from the second quest, he wasn’t going to change his way of working. As for rejecting Laney and living in joy with whatever he had gained, that was impossible.
Laney didn’t say anything in response to that but asked Zoric to help her. Zoric was going to refuse at first, but when he heard what kind of help Laney wanted from him, he accepted.
Laney thought that to activate the third quest, a merchant caravan should successfully travel from Fring to Gring City.
Since the intensely negative aura surrounding Laney could harm her if it were to influence someone stronger than her, she didn’t want to interact with more people.
Laney believed that the concept of resentment was added to make it difficult for participants to recruit talent for the quests.
Since it was a personal favor and not much difficult or time-consuming task, Zoric accepted Laney’s request. If Laney won the trial and became the city lord, that favor would be the greatest fortune in his life, and if Laney lost, he wouldn’t lose anything other than energy spent traveling some distance.
Time flew by, and three months passed in the blink of an eye.
Laney was training with her knife when she suddenly sensed a change in the pattern. She stopped her training and tapped on it. The next moment, the familiar screen appeared in front of her.
As she had believed, the third quest was activated after a caravan successfully traveled from Fring to Gring City and completed the first-ever trade between the two cities.
Laney’s eyes almost popped out in shock after reading the third quest. The difficulty had jumped severalfold compared to the second mission.
Time flew by, and years passed in the blink of an eye.
Laney stood in front of the pagoda, which was now only three stories tall. It had been almost six years since Laney’s trial began, and in that span, she had completed seven quests.
Laney had achieved the requirement to become a resident of the city, so if she didn’t want to continue any longer, she could give up on the trial and not die.
But the issue of giving up on the trial never rose in her mind. Laney on that day was entirely different from Laney at the time when she began the trial.
The changes she had gone through in that span were more drastic than her growth from a child to a teenager over twenty-five years.
The aura of resentment had deeply affected her, so she could no longer smile, and her eyes were always gloomy.
The reward for her completing the fifth quest was an ability that allowed her to slowly refine the resentment and turn it into power. If not for that ability, Laney wouldn’t even dare enter the training ground.
Inside the training ground, Laney would get waves of pain every three minutes before the ability, but after it, it had grown to three hours. But since the difficulty and the power level of the being had grown, the cooldown time of the pain had come down to one hour.
Laney had also grown in strength over the years. If Laney could exit Panagea and check the ranking leaderboard, she would find herself at the first rank, with the second-ranked adventurer being several levels lower than her.
Around two years had passed in the Sacred Dimension, and only in that time had Laney gained more than twenty levels, and the speed at which she gained levels was only growing. Due to that, she had become a source of envy for many.
***
A/N: Sorry, only one chapter. I am feeling slightly jittery, so I won’t be able to write the second chapter.
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