Chapter 1104: Leaderboard Dominance
Translator: Nomyummi Editor: Nomyummi
Changing Spring's target shifted back to the guild leader chat group, where everyone was trying to cheat each other.
He wasn't someone who liked to chat through typing, so after there was nothing really important being talked about, he stopped paying attention to the group.
The guild leader chat group suddenly became quiet at some point. If one looked through the chat log, guild leaders talked less and less as time went on. Something urgent seemed to have happened and every guild leader suddenly left the discussion, one by one. Up until the end, one of the sentences was left hanging as if it had suddenly been cut off.
No way!
The strangeness in the chat group made Changing Spring realize that the tragedy of getting their raised monster stolen wasn't unique to just Blue Brook Guild. Where did those guild leaders, who suddenly stopped chatting, go? Could they all have received emergency alerts, reporting that their guild's wild boss was being stolen?
They couldn't all have been Happy, right?
Thinking of this point, Changing Spring suddenly felt frightened.
How? Their guilds had been searching for the raised monsters of other guilds the entire time. Even if they had focused more of their attention on Kansas City, they hadn't relaxed their searches for monsters in other cities. Why? Why was Guild Happy so efficient? How did they find out where every raised monster was located?
"What information do we have on Guild Happy?" Changing Spring couldn't help but turn his head and ask one of his subordinates.
"Happy? Information?" This subordinate stared blankly, "None."
"None?"
"We don't have enough manpower. Everyone's busy searching in the other cities for raised monsters!" The subordinate reported.
Changing Spring suddenly froze.
He suddenly realized something. Happy had found these raised monsters so efficiently through a certain method.
It was very simple: send a message in the guild and have everyone in the guild pay attention for any powerful monsters.
Why didn't the other guilds employ such a simple method?
One word: slow.
The guilds had moved too slowly. From when Lord Grim suddenly jumped to number one on the leaderboards to the guild leaders trying to cheat each other in order to set their own plans in motion. They figured that they had to be discreet, so that the others wouldn't figure out their plans.
In reality? Unnecessary! It was completely unnecessary. In this sort of situation, which guild wouldn't want to steal other people's monsters. Wasn't it pointless to hide their intentions from one another?
The guild had been thinking too much. Not only did they want to take advantage of others, they were also afraid to take losses, so they hoped to catch the others off guard and kill them in one go. They didn't want to encounter a well-prepared defense.
But it turned out that if everyone was being sneaky, no one was being sneaky. Everyone's intentions were laid bare in the end. Despite having reached this step, their thoughts still hadn't changed. They still hadn't thought of directly getting their entire guild involved in the search. News of just a single Kansas City had made them excited enough to all start chatting about it.
Ha, what a joke.
Changing Spring actually laughed out loud.
While their chat group had been bickering about Kansas City, everyone in Happy had already mobilized for who knew how long already. Happy might have already found all of their monsters' locations by that time.
The guilds had tried to catch each other off guard and do things in secret. Guild Happy, on the other hand, brandished their swords for everyone to see, directly calling out to everyone in the guild. And the outcome? Happy's large-scale movements actually became secretive, completely catching the other guilds off guard.
Because they had to act discreetly, they needed trustworthy helpers. The guild spies were naturally trustworthy, so with them temporarily being assigned elsewhere, there were no spies left, leaving them unaware of Happy's movements.
Was it their stupidity that allowed Happy's plan to work beautifully, or was it Ye Xiu guessing that they would act stupidly? Changing Spring didn't know. The silence in the chat group let him know that their guilds had paid the price for their stupidity. After having waged war with each other for so long, it was as if they were now all carved from the same mold. Changing Spring once again couldn't help but laugh.
In the chat group, someone had finally discovered how abnormal the chat group felt and typed in chat, breaking the ice.
"Happy." Herb Garden's Arisaema typed just one word.
Emojis followed one after the other.
Petrified…
Sweating....
Anger…
Fuming...
Sadness….
(Replace these with QQ emojis for better effects)
Everyone suddenly had a gut feeling that there was an 80-90% chance that everyone had been duped by Happy. Whether or not someone had escaped from Happy's clutches was no longer their concern.
Everyone ran to check the leaderboards.
Everyone had been checking it constantly. If someone had instantly shot up like Lord Grim had, they would have definitely noticed it. No one had noticed anything when Happy had cleaned up another raised monster because it was Happy's team that went. Lord Grim killing the seaweed monster alone gave him 625 points, which would obviously make him shoot up the leaderboard. The seaweed monster was equivalent to killing 6 monsters, but for Happy's team, since the points were divided amongst everyone, the point increase wasn't as big. These ups and downs happened all the time in the leaderboards. It was nothing particularly noteworthy.
They hadn't noticed Team Happy's rise in the leaderboards until they, who were originally at who knew where, had squeezed into the top 200, top 100, top 50, top 30 rankings. And from this, they realized that Happy hadn't stolen just one raised monster.
Misty Castle's raised monster had been stolen first, but instead of telling others, Misty Lock had kept it a secret. Now, the fruits of their efforts had been reaped. Even though Misty Castle lost their raised monster, seeing the other guilds suffer lifted Misty Lock's mood. And relatively speaking, the earlier a raised monster was stolen, the smaller the losses were.
After these emojis were spammed, the chat group returned to silence. No one knew what to say. Condemn Happy? Condemn Ye Xiu? Everyone was dealing with shady business. The only difference was that Happy had succeeded and they had failed. Condemning Happy or Ye Xiu was the same as slapping their own faces.
This time, the guild leaders didn't explode in fury amidst this silence. They simply left. They told the unfortunate news to their teams. The teams didn't criticize them too excessively either. It was just that, after Happy had swept their pots clean, sending their characters up the leaderboards, the outcome was too stunning. Who knew how many pro characters had been left in the dust by them.
On the leaderboards, of the first ten places, Team Happy had stolen away five spots, monopolizing the top three.
Lord Grim, Deception, Dancing Rain.
After those three, it was Huang Shaotian's Troubling Rain, who was spamming the pro player chat group in anger.
At this point, there weren't many monsters left. Many players weren't able to find anymore. The fluctuations in the leaderboards became less and less frequent. Even though the system showed that there were still 21 ghosts left, the Heavenly Domain was so vast. Twenty one was too few. Many players didn't want to waste their time wandering around for a chance to encounter one. Some of them directly logged off, while others started doing their normal day to day routine.
Most of Guild Happy's players had left to do their own things too. However, their most trusted members were all called together.
The play had come to an end and now it was time for the audience to go?
Ye Xiu didn't think so. He believed that the other club guilds didn't think so either. As the end neared, there were fewer and fewer monsters. As soon as a monster was discovered by a guild, that guild would certainly start raising it, and it would be easier to protect too. After all, the event could practically be considered over already.
As a result, Ye Xiu had called Guild Happy's most loyal members and tasked them with watching revival points. If a guild was going to raise a monster, a revival point must be used. Watching a revival point would reveal their activities. At the same time, an announcement was made in the guild chat. Players who hadn't logged off yet should be mindful for any monsters, as well as movements from the other guilds.
For normal players, the event had ended, but for the club guilds, it was just the beginning. The remaining targets might be the key to their comeback on the leaderboards. These 21 monsters became the deciding factors for their victory. The guilds were sending out their forces, searching or monitoring their competitors' movements. There weren't just Happy's players at the revival points. All of the parties involved had made arrangements.
It was just that this time, even with their enormous resources, they failed to make any progress.
21, 20, 19, 18…
The number of ghosts continued to decrease, but these ghosts were killed by players, who just happened to encounter one on accident.
Soon afterwards, announcements were made by the various guilds in the global chat: spend money to buy the location of these ghosts.
After one guild sent it, the other guilds followed suit. How could a club guild not afford these types of rewards? With everyone offering rewards, players either compared offers between several guilds or looked for the one they liked the most. The guild leaders didn't directly shout out an exact offer in the global chat. If not, if everyone kept raising the bar and entered a price war, when would it stop?
Although they were unwilling, in the end, midnight struck. The system announced that today's Ghost Parade was over. There were still 17 ghosts remaining, but when the system event ended, the system automatically removed them from the map.
Yes, after the guilds started offering rewards, no one managed to find any of the 17 remaining ghosts all the way until the system removed them. The leaderboards didn't change.
The drops from killing ghosts was one portion of the rewards for the event. The other rewards came from leaderboard rewards. The leaderboards were split into daily rankings and overall rankings. The daily rankings would reset every day, while the overall rankings accumulated over the course of the event. When the day ended, the rewards could be given out. The rewards would obviously be given out according to the rankings on the leaderboards. There was no luck involved. Someone at a lower ranking wouldn't get better rewards than someone at a higher ranking.
An event was an event. Just killing ghosts gave good rewards. The leaderboard rewards were even more resplendent, especially the top ten rankings. The system publicly announced those in order to excite players. Five of Happy's characters, Troubling Rain, Cloud Piercer, Demon Subduer, and Peaceful Hermit received brilliant rewards.