The Great Thief

Translator: Exodus Tales  Editor: Exodus Tales

The early Strongholds were all arranged directly by the System – neither the NPCs nor the monsters had anything to do with it.

If the System drew out a piece of land in the Plaguelands for a Stronghold and the players occupied it, the NPCs and monsters in the area would not attack it, no matter how evil they were. Accordingly, it didn’t matter if you were Alliance or Horde, as they wouldn’t defend for you either.

However, for Lu Li, things were different. This was an NPC he knew from a Story Quest.

To put it differently, he had helped the NPC at a crucial moment and had now established an offensive and defensive alliance.

Once they had captured a Stronghold in the Plaguelands, then Tirion Fordring would send Tyr Hand’s guards to help them defend it. Of course, for the sake of balance in the game, these guards were not that strong and there were not too many of them.

In fact, there were many similar opportunities in the other maps, but not all could be found so easily.

The System prompted Lu Li that he had completed in regaining land that belonged to Tyr’s Hand for Tirion Fordring. The other players who had participated in the recovery of Tyr’s Hand also received this prompt and were awarded a significant amount of Reputation.

In addition to the Reputation, Lu Li was also awarded Skill Points for completing the Friend of Tirion Fordring Quest.

This was Lu Li’s real reward!

After all, he had confidence in defending Strongholds, but acquiring Skill Points was something he couldn’t do, even though he had experienced rebirth.

Lu Li basically spent the next few days at Blackwing’s Nest.

In that week, Glory Capital had finally defeated the little Red Dragon. However, since Ruling Sword had the experience of their previous battle, they also did it on the same day. Soon afterwards, the other clubs began to defeat the little Red Dragon too.

Blackwing’s Nest, which had been a source of headache for many major clubs, was quickly becoming history.

However, for an ordinary guild, Vaelastrasz was still an insurmountable challenge.

It was only when the little Red Dragon was officially nerfed that Blackwing’s Nest would finally be accessible to casual players. The Instance Dungeon would then be well and truly relegated to history.

A game could be difficult, but not to the point that no one was able to complete it. Otherwise, there would be no players to play the game. In the past, there had been games that flaunted their own difficulty, and put out a reward for the completion of the game. However, those games had relatively short lifespans.

The next Instance Dungeon was Zul’Gurub.

Currently, only the lore of this Instance Dungeon had been released. There was no way to actually enter the Instance Dungeon yet. This Instance Dungeon was also quite difficult. The earlier stages of this Zul’Gurub and Black Wing’s Nest were comparable in the sense that they dropped rubbish items. Yet, the difficulty was comparable to the Molten Core.

Additionally, it was a 20-person Instance Dungeon, which meant that they wouldn’t have the strength or versatility of 40 players.

Even if you got the First Clear, there would only be 20 rewards, so Lu Li planned to wait a little bit before investing in trying to get the First Clear.

In addition to the upcoming Donghua Cup, his efforts would be focused on the newly opening Strongholds.

In the new week, two Strongholds were being opened.

One was in the Hillsbrad Hills of the Eastern Kingdoms and the other was in the Stonetalon Mountains of Kalimdor.

In fact, Lu Li wanted to win both locations. The foot of the Hillsbrad Hills was home to Ravenholdt Manor, which was great for him. Perhaps one day, he would have more chances to participate in the Story missions for Ravenholdt Manor.

The Stonetalon Mountains were connected to Grey Valley.

Grey Valley was the base camp of Ruling Sword, so if they wanted to expand outwards, it was only a matter of time before they had to win the Stoneclaw Mountains.

However, Lu Li also knew that this was just a pipe dream. Only two new Strongholds had been opened, but there were dozens of clubs who wanted to occupy them. Ruling Sword already had two Strongholds and were facing public criticism for it.

Sure enough, the money that Lu Li bid didn’t even afford them a chance to attack.

It had become more and more expensive for a successful bid. At the beginning, 20,000 gold coins was enough, but now, they needed 50,000 to even stand a chance.

This was in part due to the huge money-generating ability of the two Strongholds that Ruling Sword had. In these two to three weeks, Ruling Sword had relied on defending these two Strongholds to not only make back the original capital spent, but also to resolve their embarrassing financial crisis.

Before leaving, Lu Li had seen the financial statements. Although he didn’t understand the specifics, he could still understand that his guild now had tens of millions in assets.

Most of those profits had been generated by the Strongholds in these three weeks.

Of course, the income was so great because there were so few Strongholds. In the future, it would be difficult to have gain much income from them.

Even so, the prosperity of the Strongholds still attracted many large clubs. Even with clear-headed leadership, one couldn’t ignore the allure of occupying a Stronghold.

50,000 gold was already a huge sum of money just for the opportunity to attack one.

The ultimate winner of the Hillsbrad Hills was Grand Hegemony.

This club, which had been established in the 70s and 80s, was only now making its rise. When Lu Li took the First Clear of the Spider Lair, he had done it with players from that guild.

They later received many capital investments and started on their road to fame.

Grand Hegemony was different from other clubs. When an ordinary club received a capital investment, they would desperately save money to buy star players.

Those star players would then be used to win a few competitions. This was done in the hope that it would attract a large number of players to join, resulting in a rise in the club’s rankings. However, the problem was that the average professional player couldn’t win that many competitions and their price was too high.

For example, Fat Monkey currently doesn’t have a great record of winning with Ruling Sword, but he was still worth five million dollars.

The clever thing about Grand Hegemony’s dominance was that in addition to their few star players, they just had second or third-rate players. These were players that usually didn’t even qualify for competitions.

Stronghold battles weren’t the same as competitions as all 80 players needed to hold their own. This meant that the fighting power of Grand Hegemony in such battles was scary, and they quickly occupied the Hillsbrad Hills.

It was Peerless City that won the Stonetalon Mountains. After all, they had the combined strength of both Drizzle Court and Peerless City.

After the incident with Soul Eater, Peerless City had a bad public reputation. But now that they had taken the Stonetalon Mountains, it was a slap to the faces of all their haters.

The next phase was for the bidding and attacking of Strongholds that already had owners.

Ruling Sword’s two Strongholds were once again very popular, and the bidding prices for them were higher than for the new Strongholds.

However, it was Drizzle Court that eventually gained the opportunity to attack the Black Sea Coast. Ruling Sword obviously intended to split the money and avoid being attacked. Now, Lu Li could divert all of his resources into defending Grey Valley, which was being attacked by Wings of Dawn.