First: Raise the guild to Level 4.
Second: Establish the Thorn Branch Guilds.
After this hunt for the divine envoy, nearly half of the S-rank talent players within the Thorn Guild had reached S-rank.
There were also a large number of unaffiliated players from Thorn City who had awakened S-rank talents, but the Thorn Guild was already full.
Not to mention the A-rank and B-rank talent players, who also had great potential.
The Thorn Workshop was growing larger by the day, yet many of its members still did not belong to a guild.
Without a guild, they had no warehouse or contribution-point exchange system, which put them at a disadvantage.
Besides, the War Soul Guild had invited them repeatedly, but they still refused to leave Thorn City.
This clearly couldn’t continue. Chu Fu decided to establish branch guilds under the Thorn Guild.
She planned to establish three guilds, but the branch leaders had to be people she trusted.
She intended to discuss it with everyone.
In fact, she wanted Shen Chi, Xie Lin, and Jiaojiao Bu Jiao to each lead one of the branch guilds.
After all, the three of them were also major shareholders.
Unexpectedly, both men refused.
“I’m a technical specialist. I spend more time at the workbench than fighting monsters. I don’t want to manage a guild!” Shen Chi said.
Xie Lin was even more direct. “It would interfere with my swordsmithing. I’m not doing it.”
Chu Fu was speechless.
“Then what do Jiaojiao, Sister Suture, and Manager Feng think? Would any of you be willing to lead a branch guild?”
“Will we still be in the same team afterward?” Jiaojiao asked reluctantly. She couldn’t bear to leave Chu Fu. If becoming a branch leader meant disbanding their team, she absolutely wouldn’t agree.
“Of course!” Chu Fu said. Jiaojiao was such a wonderful person that Chu Fu couldn’t bear to part with her either.
“Then I’ll do it!” Jiaojiao said.
“I can do it too!” Suture Saint said.
In just two short months, Suture Saint had gone from being a doctoral student to becoming a powerful healer respected by everyone.
Strength brought confidence.
If she wanted to become a guild leader, she was more than qualified. At worst, she could hire someone to handle the work.
She could even establish a secretary team.
After all, she was incredibly wealthy now.
Once the decision was made, all that remained was to put it into action.
One billion contribution points from the town defense battle could be exchanged for a Guild Token. The highest-ranked boss of each level also had a chance to drop one.
In the future maps, even the Titans would directly drop Guild Tokens.
Moreover, because the Dark Gold Plan had caused gold prices to fall, bosses had become easier to kill and dropped more Guild Tokens.
As a result, the price had stabilized.
A single token could be purchased for roughly nine thousand gold coins.
Chu Fu accessed the guild funds and bought them directly.
The three women immediately established Thorn Guilds Two, Three, and Four.
They first recruited the S-rank players from the Thorn Workshop, as well as the S-rank talent players among the unaffiliated players.
A Level 1 guild could accommodate only five hundred people.
As long as a new guild stronghold was built in town, the guild could be upgraded to Level 2. In other words, upgrading from Level 1 to Level 2 only required money.
After some discussion, the three of them established strongholds near the Herb Valley, the Logging Camp, and the Mine Vein. Once the strongholds expanded, they would be able to cover the surrounding resource points.
That would allow them to monopolize those resources.
After all, these were rewards from the town defense battle and rightfully belonged to the Thorn Guild.
Upgrading a guild from Level 2 to Level 3 required reputation. Chu Fu was the city lord herself, so she issued several simple collection quests. The guilds reached Level 3 in a single day.
Level 4 was different.
Although the Level 4 quest was also issued by Chu Fu, it was a quest mandated by the system.
[Guild Upgrade Quest: Travel to the Level 30–40 map, hunt Titans, and obtain Titan Hearts (0/100).]
This presented a major problem.
Each city spawned roughly ten Titans attacking the city every day. If they only hunted the Titans in their own city, it would take ten days to upgrade a single guild.
The problem was that each city had many guilds.
“I finally understand why my brother made so many enemies. Don’t tell me upgrading a guild to Level 5 will require Elemental Spirit Crystals?”
Chu Fu could only say that she was going to have to compete for them too.
…
Level 30–40 Future Map.
Inside Thorn City.
Everyone entered once again.
Not only that, but the flood of players left even Chu Fu astonished.
It felt as though every player in Thorn City had come.
There were no dungeons in the Future Map, but bosses and monsters were everywhere.
The beasts, goblins, and undead legions were all above Level 30.
It was worth mentioning that because they had killed the werewolf Tuge, the strength of beast-type monsters had fallen by 100%, making them exceptionally easy to defeat.
The players immediately began focusing on beast-type monsters, and their leveling speed naturally increased by a great deal.
Chu Fu had already reached Level 39 and would soon be unable to enter this map.
The Future Maps allowed lower-level players to enter higher-level areas, but higher-level players could not enter lower-level maps.
That rule prevented them from monopolizing resources meant for lower-level players.
The Primordial Gate made sure that all players developed at different paces.
Therefore, Chu Fu could no longer go to the town defense battle to fight the goblin Origin-tier dungeon.
Those few attributes were no longer worth her time.
“Everyone, get in the mecha!”
Shen Chi smiled as he summoned his mecha.
When they saw the colossal machine, everyone was stunned.
It was actually a hundred-meter-tall mecha, grayish-white in color. Most striking of all, its design was far more savage than ordinary mecha—and it resembled a werewolf!
“Is this the mecha you made from the divine envoy’s corpse?” Chu Fu asked as she examined it.
When the divine envoy died, it had not dropped any equipment. Everyone had been too captivated by the reward that granted an increase to all attributes to pay attention to what Werewolf Tuge had dropped.
In the end, Shen Chi had simply placed Werewolf Tuge’s enormous body into the vacuum machine.
The upper echelons of the Thorn Guild had secretly divided up the spoils after returning.
Every part of Werewolf Tuge’s body was valuable.
Its blood could be used as medicine, while its flesh could be made into food that granted attributes.
Its heart and other internal organs were fed to the giant insects used for Gu cultivation.
Its claws and bones were made into the mecha.
Xie Lin took the fangs to forge into a sword.
Its hide and fur were given to Zhimengzhe to make equipment.
Not a single drop or scrap had been wasted.
“This is a newly constructed mecha,” Shen Chi explained. “Because it’s made from wolf bones, it can’t fuse with my own body. Instead, it’s a large mecha containing a smaller one.”
The hundred-meter-tall mecha formed the outer shell, while Shen Chi’s twenty-meter-tall mecha was inside. That inner mecha could still fuse with his body and shrink down.
What difference was there between this and wearing two sets of equipment?
Mechanists really were completely dependent on their gear.
Everyone climbed into the wolf-shaped mecha. There was much more room inside than expected, and the central area resembled a small shopping mall, with enough space for a great many people.
The interior had also been constructed from spatial stone. No matter how violently the mecha moved outside, the people inside felt no shaking at all.
Shen Chi had even built a lounge, study, kitchen, small workshop, smithy, and plant cultivation room inside.
Anyone who didn’t know better might have mistaken it for a small fortified base.
It was astonishingly comprehensive.
Everyone’s horizons had been broadened.
Soon afterward, Shen Chi piloted the hundred-meter-tall mecha as it raced across the map.
Before long, they found their first wandering Titan.
It was a juvenile Titan, only twenty meters tall. The moment it saw the wolf-shaped mecha, it froze in confusion.
How could there be a creature in this world that was even larger than itself?
