Inside Guguan Town.
Feng Huimin was getting scolded, enduring the young master's explosive temper.
But suddenly, her face flickered through a riot of colors before she quickly lowered her head, making sure Wan Huanyu didn't notice anything unusual.
In front of her, a system notification appeared!
【Player "Who Wants to Be a Vegetable" has added you as a friend. Accept / Decline.】
Why add her?
Could it be...
Feng Huimin's eyes darkened, and she silently accepted in her heart.
And so, among her five thousand-plus friends, one more person appeared who didn't belong to Huanyu Studio.
Chu Fu immediately greeted Feng Huimin warmly.
"Manager Feng, hello! I really admire your intelligence and commanding skills. Would you like to join our Thorn Guild?"
There it was!
Feng Huimin understood immediately.
After all, wasn't it said that the highest level of job-hopping was snatching other companies' projects?
Snatch the project, and your value naturally gets seen.
Although this time, Feng Huimin's actions did cost Huanyu Studio a huge sum of money, they also threw Chu Fu's plan off track.
Otherwise, they were planning to kill Wan Huanyu all the way down to level zero.
Feng Huimin used the "corpse-dragging" tactic to rescue him, which really opened everyone's eyes.
The game had only just started, and to come up with such an idea—there was no doubt her understanding of the game was anything but weak.
Chu Fu had high hopes for this commander.
Feng Huimin replied without missing a beat.
"Thank you for your appreciation, but I also hold a key position at Huanyu Studio, with an annual salary of ten million. (Hinting that she's expensive.)
I honestly can't convince myself to jump ship to a guild that's just been formed. (Your organization is still young, and if I go there, I'd want to be the boss.)
Besides, adding me right now makes me reasonably suspicious that you're trying to sow discord. (Keeping a card for herself, in case the other side truly is trying to sow discord, at least she can explain herself to Huanyu Studio with a paper trail.)"
Inside the dungeon.
Chu Fu read the exchange and couldn't help but smile with pursed lips.
There's a chance!
She immediately typed out a message.
"What? A manager as capable as you, Feng, only making ten million a year? That's just one gold coin a month, right?"
"But in our team, core members earn more than one gold coin a day."
"Of course, you might say in-game currency isn't worth much—what really matters is the real-world money it moves."
"Then all I can say is, your rank at Huanyu just isn't high enough."
"Do you know how I escaped when Wan Huanyu and Guan Youlong came after me?"
"If you don't know, I suggest you look into it."
"If you know everything and still choose to stay at Huanyu Studio, then I have nothing more to say."
"You have talent at Huanyu Studio, but neither your gear nor your talents have improved. But I can guarantee that at Thorn Guild, at the very least, you'll get a seat at the table."
"Once we hit level 20 and enter the city, it won't be first-kill races anymore—it'll be speed-run dungeons. The faster your team clears, the more attribute points you get."
"With Huanyu Studio's current state—relying only on numbers, with poor quality, weak strength, and slow dungeon progress—after level 20, they're bound to hit a dead end!"
"Besides, there's one thing you need to remember."
"The enemy of Huanyu—is me!"
Chu Fu looked at what she'd just typed and laughed to herself with a sinister cackle.
"Hehe, I feel like I'm the villain, sweet-talking a confused young lady!"
Shen Chi watched Chu Fu's theatrical antics and gave a knowing smile.
"If she really does come to Thorn, she'd be a huge boost to the guild."
Thorn Guild was, after all, a makeshift operation.
They had money, they had strength, but they didn't have standardized management.
Whenever something came up, whoever had time would pitch in.
It was honestly wasting a lot of their fighting potential.
If there were a professional manager to organize all of that, things would be much more efficient.
After Chu Fu left her message, Feng Huimin was probably still mulling it over, as she didn't reply.
And Chu Fu didn't push.
Because soon enough, Feng Huimin would know exactly what she needed to do.
...
An hour later.
The Holy Healing Angel resurrected all the players.
The players of Huanyu Studio filed back into the guild headquarters one by one to collect their basic supplies.
Besides equipment, there was also food and medicine.
With ten thousand people dead, the losses were a headache for Feng Huimin to sort out.
Right then, she really felt like washing her hands of this entire mess.
Of course, while the cat's away, the mice will play—she pushed aside her reply to Vegetable for now and got busy.
She had no choice.
Too many people were coming to her.
And just as she was in the middle of distributing equipment,
suddenly, she felt a shadow fall over her head.
It wasn't the kind of shadow cast by clouds. She even saw, on the ground, the shadow of a steel humanoid mech.
In an instant, a bad feeling rose in her heart.
Mech—Dumpling Skin—launching rockets from a wheelchair.
She snapped her head up.
And saw watermelons falling from the sky by the dozens.
"DODGE!!!"
Feng Huimin screamed.
But it was too late.
Watermelon bombs came crashing down on the guild warehouse.
Not only that, the mech was also firing shells.
This time, Chu Fu and the others never even landed—they fought purely from the air, bombing wildly, and players fell in waves.
The guild warehouse had durability too.
It wasn't affected by poison damage.
But it had weak defense against explosive damage, meaning mechanics hard-counter structures.
Under the relentless bombardment,
the guild warehouse was blown wide open.
Countless pieces of equipment inside were exposed.
Shen Chi used his gold-tier vacuum device to suck everything up—all the gear, all the materials—gone!
"They've got a guild cafeteria too! Blow it up, take all the food!"
Shen Chi turned around and flew above the cafeteria.
The cafeteria was a must-have for a tier-2 guild. After all, once players reached town and hunger was unlocked, the game became more realistic by the day. Guild players' amenities had to keep up, so the cafeteria was a necessity.
"Boom! Boom! Boom!"
Watermelon bombs rained down from the sky.
The lifestyle-class players inside were blown to bits.
"Workshop! Look at them, they're really building up—they even have a workshop already! Blow that up too!"
Xie Lin pointed at another building and shouted.
The workshop was where all the lifestyle professionals liked to gather—blacksmithing, tailoring, and other trades. You could rent a room there, which increased your chances of crafting successfully.
Demolishing it would surely yield the materials stored inside.
"Wow! The medicine workshop—blow up the pharmacy too!"
Chu Fu kept pointing things out.
Indeed, the progress of their server, which had been merged for eleven days, was way ahead of theirs, which had only been merged for two.
Their guild was actually shaping up nicely.
Not to mention, they even had guild structures!
"Take out the guild crystal! Once it's dead, the entire guild base is wiped out, and they'll have to go back to town to buy a new one!"
Buying that plot of land cost several hundred gold coins, after all!
Wan Huanyu was in for a massive loss.
