They moved in perfect formation, creating square-shaped units. Their pace was uniform, yet pushed to the absolute limit.
Two minutes.
With forty thousand players in each passage sprinting at a hundred-meter pace, they poured out of the channels.
A hundred channels carried a total of four million players, who charged out like a tidal wave—comparable to the undead army formed by the Undead Legion.
“Whoosh!”
The channels closed.
Chu Fu wiped the sweat from her brow. By then, she was already half a kilometer from where she had been moments earlier.
The second batch of forest-spirit channels opened!
Another hundred forest-spirit channels appeared.
Once again, each channel held forty thousand people.
The cycle continued without pause.
More than twenty minutes later, the army of players occupied an area a full ten kilometers by ten kilometers.
Then, everyone lined up in perfect formation and stood at the mouth of the rift, waiting.
How many players were there?
The number was terrifying to even say aloud.
Nearly fifty million.
Every one of them was a player from an official guild on one of the major servers.
All the guilds had now reached Level 4, allowing them to accommodate forty thousand members.
Some players were not part of any guild, but the Analysis Bureau had stipulated that no more than fifty thousand people could pass through at once. Otherwise, too much time would be wasted.
Now, the players from all one thousand servers had gathered together.
Chu Fu opened another forest-spirit channel specifically for Shen Chi.
Shen Chi disappeared from the mechanical version of the map and reappeared in the Land of Death.
At that moment, the top-tier boss representing the Origin-tier dungeon had only a sliver of health remaining.
Shen Chi arrived, fired one shot from his mecha, and tagged the boss for a bit of damage.
The Origin-tier dungeon was cleared.
[System Announcement! Congratulations to player “Who Wants to Be a Vegetable” for leading the Thorn Guild and its allied players in clearing the Origin-tier dungeon: Source of the Undead Calamity (Origin)! Reward: 10 points to all attributes (stackable)]
Players across the globe were already used to it.
Even those who were green with envy had no time to dwell on it. All they could do was feel bitterly jealous.
They hated that they weren’t from China.
Meanwhile, inside the Land of Death, nearly fifty million players received attribute points simultaneously.
At that moment, a scene that had never occurred before unfolded.
The dark clouds in the sky seemed to descend, transforming into wisps of energy that poured into everyone’s bodies.
The aura of death that filled the air seemed to vanish.
Some kind of energy had been completely absorbed by all fifty million players.
It was divine power.
The God of Death’s divine power naturally transformed the Land of Death, making the environment more suitable for the Undead Legion.
The sky was eternally black, and the ground was black as well, filled with the stench of decay.
But on closer inspection, all of it was energy.
Dark elements, death elements, and the mana in the air were all manifestations of divine power.
When the reward was excessively massive, how could it not amount to plunder?
The energy absorbed by the players drew away even the gray mist in the sky and siphoned off the dense aura of death from the ground.
The entire world instead regained its color.
Yet the players keenly sensed that this place had changed.
It was just like… the real world.
No elements drifted through the air anymore, and the atmosphere could no longer contain the substances needed to restore their strength.
Everything had become ordinary.
When a god wanted to reshape the environment for its own race, it was like a human furnishing their house. It required money too.
And now, the players who had invaded the Land of Death had become thieves, siphoning away all the energy within it.
Stealing an enemy’s energy was equivalent to weakening their strength.
This move was absolutely correct.
The dungeon ended, and everyone withdrew.
“Wheelchair Brother, you keep fighting. We’ll start the next round right away!” Chu Fu said.
“Mm. I’ll be back immediately.”
Shen Chi once again entered a forest-spirit channel and returned to Longdu City on the future map.
In a higher-dimensional space, the Mechanical God watched Shen Chi disappear before the rift, then saw him return.
What had he gone to do?
The data was unclear. Without knowing the necessary variables, the Mechanical God merely recorded everything mechanically, one fact at a time.
The Undead Reaper also was not monitoring every move humanity made from the higher-dimensional plane.
As gods, they had placed countless pieces on the board they controlled. There was no need to keep their eyes on a single game.
Little did they know that, before long, the pieces on the board were about to make a world-shaking move.
The instant the dungeon ended, nearly fifty million people streamed through the rift and left.
Like an army of undead, they transformed into a sea of humanity.
But they were definitely faster than those foolish skeletons.
The only sound at the scene was the synchronized rhythm of their footsteps.
Every player’s eyes were filled with determination and excitement, and they desperately suppressed their surging emotions.
Only after reaching this point could they truly be said to have boarded the high-speed train.
They sprinted ten kilometers, spreading the entire formation out, and waited for the next round.
…
Elsewhere, Chu Fu and the players from Thorn City returned to Thorn City and waited for the next wave.
The players from Thorn City were not as well-trained as the Chinese players, but their attributes were far superior.
Even new players were carried along, so their speed was not slow either.
To accommodate them, their forest-spirit channels would remain open the entire time.
That was more than enough for them to pass through and claim their attribute rewards.
“I got attribute points the moment I arrived. Sure enough, waiting for Thorn was the right choice!”
“Don’t panic. There’s plenty for everyone today. Don’t log off. If you’re using a gaming helmet, hurry up and log off to put on an adult diaper.”
“What? There are more events like this?”
“Didn’t you hear that so many cities are defending themselves? Of course we’re going to take all of it!”
As the dungeon in Longdu’s eastern district ended, the players in Longdu’s western district—who had spent half a day delaying the final wave of undead instead of killing them—quickly wiped out the monsters and entered the first rest period.
Then everyone charged into the spatial rift.
A diamond-grade mecha carrying a plant spirit entered as well.
The plant spirit flew out of the mecha.
The next moment, it formed a gigantic forest-spirit channel twenty meters wide.
Chu Fu and the members of the Thorn Guild entered it.
Then Chu Fu opened a new forest-spirit channel.
Connection point: outside the eastern district of Long City.
A hundred forest-spirit channels opened.
The one thousand forest spirits previously sent to other cities were recalled. The one hundred forest spirits that had not been needed for siege defense were brought back.
This time, Chu Fu did not need to do anything extra. The one hundred forest-spirit channels transported more than forty million players, and they passed through even faster than expected.
It took only fifteen minutes for every player to pass through the forest-spirit channels and enter the Land of Death.
As a result, this clear was even faster.
[You have cleared the dungeon: Source of the Undead Calamity (Origin).]
[Dungeon completion time: 18 minutes, 34 seconds.]
[System Announcement! Congratulations to player “Who Wants to Be a Vegetable” for leading the Thorn Guild and its allied players in clearing the Origin-tier dungeon: Source of the Undead Calamity (Origin)! Reward: 10 points to all attributes (stackable)]
The announcement appeared again.
From then on, every twenty minutes, Chu Fu would trigger another system announcement.
The overseas players grew more and more uneasy as they watched.
What kind of grand gaming strategy was China carrying out?
They were farming like this?
What was the point of balance anymore?
Weren’t they going to become absurdly powerful while everyone else turned into weaklings?
“Where’s the administrator of our nation? When are we starting the city defense battle? I want to claim the dungeon’s stat points!”
