27
Cheng Yang decided to give the other two official positions to his three friends so that they could lead more leisurely lives.
After some thought, Cheng Yang made Liu Hau the Captain of the Guard and Yu Kai the General Building Manager. Relatively speaking the authority of the Captain of the Guard isn't very high. They only controlled the gates to the village but undoubtedly it is an important job. If the person in charge isn't reliable, it could cause a disaster.
Next Cheng Yang set up the exact permissions for the two building managers. Although the two officials are able to directly manage the territories buildings, as long as he restricted their permissions, he wouldn't have to worry too much. He put especially strict permissions on Old Lee, after all, he had only known him for two days and they weren't very close yet.
Cheng Yang set up the permissions to allow his officials to facilitate class change ceremonies but didn't allow them to strip a person of their powers. He also reserved the right to blacklist people from entering buildings. As long as someone is blacklisted, even if his officials wanted to give them powers, they would be unable to receive them.
There was only on thing left to do, activate Divine Grace!
When Cheng Yang activated Divine Grace, power once again overflowed from the Territory Altar. The power rushed into Cheng Yang's body, washing over each of his cells. He could feel his body getting stronger little by little, and his thoughts were crisper.
Ten seconds later, the effects of Divine Grace ended and Cheng Yang couldn't wait to open his status pane.
Cheng Yang
Phoenix Village Lord
Class: Mage
Level: High-Grade Apprentice (2.7%)
Age
19
Life Span
200
HP
84
MP
147.6
Physical Attack
4
Magic Attack
26.7
Physical Defense
7.2
Magic Defense
4.8
Attack Speed
4
Movement Speed
10
Innate Abilities
Receive 30% more stats in the Magic Attack attribute when you level up
When Lord of a territory, all building effects are increased by 30%
Movement speed is increased by 150%
Skills
Meditation (High-Grade): Meditate to absorb experience fragments and level up
Magic Missile (Standard Grade): Attack targets within thirty meters with a ball of condensed magic power | Damage: 29.2 | Cost: 5 MP | Cast Time: 1.5 sec | Proficiency: 1%
Equipment
Ebony Stave (Green Bronze): A stave made from high quality wood and engraved to allow for better mana channeling | Increases Magic Attack by 1 | Durability: 42/50
Corrupted High Priest's Robes (Black Iron): The robes of the high priest of the St. Luantha cathedral corrupted by demonic magic | Increase Physical Defense by 2 and Mana by 10 | Durability: 56/60
Pointed Velvet Hat (Green Bronze): A pointed hat made from a fine red velvet | Increase Mana by 8 | Durability: 45/50
At the moment, Cheng Yang was capable of insta-killing Low-Grade Immature monsters. He could easily face ten monsters at that level and win without a single wound. If he had enough potions, he would be invincible among Low-Grade monsters.
Cheng Yang was very critical of his stats. Aside from his Magic Attack and Movement Speed, the rest of his stats were very average.
There was one other thing he was concerned about, his skills.
Just based on his status as a High-Grade Apprentice Mage, he was qualified to learn a new skill, but he had nowhere to learn them.
Cheng Yang knew that only two ways of learning a skill existed. The first was to obtain a Skill Book and the second was to learn a skill from the class change statues. Most people will never see a Skill Book in their lives since their numbers are very limited. As such, almost all skills were learned from the corresponding class change statues in his past life.
Class change statues in territories wouldn't start with any learnable skills and they would only be available once the statues reached a sufficiently high level. From this point of view, performing a class change ceremony in a safe zone had a big advantage since all of the basic skills were available from day one.
Of course, there were more benefits to performing your class change ceremony in a territory. The cost of learning new skills was cheaper and as long as you kept leveling up the class change statues, you could unlock higher level skills. Of course, unlocking high-quality skills for a class change statue wasn't easy since the item needed to unlock each one was priceless.
The class change statues in Phoenix Village were all Standard Grade right now. In order to unlock new skills, they needed to reach High-Grade.
Cheng Yang felt fortunate that, after using the Divine Grace, his training progress hadn't been reset. Even so, due to the bigger experience bar required to level up again, his progress was more than halved.
Cheng Yang closed his status pane and prepared for his daily training. Although using Divine Grace rapidly increased his strength, it was not a consistent source of power. He didn't know when he would next be able to use it, so diligently training in the traditional method was incredibly important.
Although Cheng Yang had a High-Grade Meditation skill, eight times training speed, and access to a buffed Meditation Hall, he was barely able to progress. His experience only increased by 2.3%. If Cheng Yang hadn't used four times cultivation speed, his improvement would be little to none. His experience was at 5% right now and at a normal pace, it would take nearly 200 days to level up again.
If Cheng Yang wanted to advance any faster he would need to unlock sixteen times training speed, but even if he could the consumption of Experience Fragments would be too great! Every hour you needed to absorb eighty Experience Fragments. This meant you needed to absorb three hundred and twenty Experience Fragments every day! This was a level of consumption almost no one could afford.
The next day, when he woke up, Cheng Yang saw his four team Captains meditating alongside him. The reason Cheng Yang allowed them to share a residence with him, in addition to the housing shortage, was because it was convenient when he needed to discuss things without the public listening.
"Yoko, since you are the Lord, you should really build yourself a private Meditation Hall." Yu Kai encouraged Cheng Yang when he woke up.
"Of course you'd say that." Cheng Yang snickered, "You're used to living in your own house, aren't you."
"Tch, you know me too well Yoko…" Yu Kai said with a bitter expression. "Forget it, there are people sleeping outside right now. Damn apocalypse!"
"Yeah, the wood we brought back yesterday is only enough to build four more Meditation Halls, it's far from enough. We'll have to train another batch of new soldiers today. Once we increase the team size to forty people, we can start being more aggressive with monster hordes."
Yu Kai beamed, Having more people under his command was always a good thing. Especially so in the apocalypse where the number of soldiers in a group represented how safe it was.
"Yoko, we only have a single Priest each. We're going to need more. It doesn't matter for small battles but if we start getting into large scale brawls, it won't be enough." Liu Hau, who had woken up a moment ago, interjected.
"There's no way around that." Cheng Yang sighed, "The Priest is a hidden class and has a lot of limitations regarding the number of people who can become one. Having any at all is something to be grateful for. To train more, we need to level up the Priest statue and there's no way to rush that, we can only wait. When you choose the team you want to bring into the instance dungeon today, remember to bring your Priest. I've already warned you but as long as you're careful, there shouldn't be any issues."
Liu Hau and the others nodded.
When they left the Meditation Hall, Yu Kai, Liu Hau, and Lau Hui each selected three additional party members then entered the Blood Soaked Cathedral instance. Old Lee and Cheng Yang worked together to select the newest batch of soldiers.
These people didn't truly need either of them present to perform a class change ceremony, so long as they had the needed Experience Fragments. In order to avoid things spiraling out of control, Cheng Yang hid this fact so that other's wouldn't try to perform a class change ceremony without him knowing. For now, everyone that wanted to needed the approval of either Cheng Yang or Old Lee.
The process went very smoothly and after filling up the quota for every statue, Phoenix Village had a total of 225 soldiers. In addition to the team Captain, each team had forty-five people in them. The reason Cheng Yang was able to produce so many Professionals was due to Old Lee's innate ability increasing the number of people who could become soldiers.
The quality of the new soldiers dropped from the previous groups. Not a single person had an S-Rank Innate Ability and even A-Rank Innate Abilities were rare. The majority of the soldiers had B-Rank Innate Abilities which would be considered extraordinary anywhere else. As long as they could survive, these 200 odd soldiers would be the backbone of Phoenix Village in the future.
At this time Cheng Yang officially made Zhao Chuan his deputy captain with the same authority as himself. Zhao Chuan then took Cheng Yang's team outside the walls to kill monsters and train the new recruits.
Unlike before, Phoenix Village covered an area of nine square kilometers and without new walls, the land in which monsters could respawn and contribute to the territory Experience Fragments was much larger.
At present, the area covered a kilometer away from the borders of the village had expanded by three times and reached areas that Cheng Yang's soldiers hadn't cleared before. Outside of their area of influence, the number of monsters was allowed to increase unchecked. The smallest group of monster you would find in these areas was just ten or so whereas the largest could be well over a hundred. Those numbers were no joke!
The team Zhao Chuan led didn't dare to even approach the larger hoard but killing the smaller ones with only ten to twenty monsters was a relaxing exercise. When Zhao Chuan and the others looked back at the village, they could see the other four teams going out as well. Aside from a dozen or so soldiers left behind to keep the peace, the full military force of Phoenix Village had gone out to clear the area.