30

Performing a class change ceremony in a safe zone had a few advantages. First of all, the safe zones didn't have limits on the number of Professionals they could produce. As long as you could make it to the safe zone, you could become a Professional. Secondly, each class change statue had a bank of one thousand Experience Fragments that people could borrow to pay for their class change ceremony. The new soldiers would be unable to enter any of the other buildings or buy new skills until they repaid their debt to the statue.

Yuan Jianzhe didn't know that people could create villages and thought that the only way to become a Professional was in the safe zone that the gods had gifted to Cloud City. Of course, he didn't believe that this was the only safe zone. He figured that most cities had one. After all, god didn't mention Cloud City but spoke more generally about all mankind.

As the army entered the safe zone, Yuan Jianzhe arranged for the soldiers who had just experienced a tragic battle to perform class change ceremonies. Each soldier that did so breathed a little more life into Cloud City.

Four hundred Professionals were created in this first wave, and all of them were affiliated with the army.

After they depleted each statue's stored Experience Fragments, Xiao Cheng spoke to Yuan Jianzhe, "Commander, I think we shouldn't allow civilians to become Professionals for the time being. We only have around ten thousand soldiers while there are at least a hundred thousand civilians, maybe more. If they were to all riot, we wouldn't be able to maintain control over the situation."

"What do you mean?" Yuan Jianzhe asked, wrinkling his brow.

"I mean that we should secure these four statues and only let people in the army become Professionals. After everyone in the army is a Professional, then we can allow small groups of civilians to become Professionals on the condition that they join the army. In this way, we'll be able to maintain control over the city."

"I'll leave it to you, but the Experience Fragments gained by the soldiers must be used collectively by the army. We need Experience Fragments to buy food from the Grocery to ensure the survival of the populace and to transfer more soldiers."

Xiao Cheng immediately began to execute his plan. The soldiers who had just performed class change ceremonies left the safe zone to go hunt monsters, while those that didn't stayed behind to ensure civilians couldn't get close to the class change statues. Once the first wave of soldiers collected enough Experience Fragments to pay off their debt, the next wave immediately performed their class change ceremonies.

Cheng Yang exited the instance dungeon at the same time as Liu Hau's group.

"Looks like you got lucky today." Cheng Yang exclaimed upon seeing that both of Liu Hau's group had three pieces of equipment.

Liu Hau smiled, "It was quite the harvest, what about you Yoko? Did you get two or three?"

"I had a good haul this time, I found three pieces of Black Iron equipment." Cheng Yang snickered.

"Nice, nice, you got three…" Liu Hau casually answered before freezing in surprise. "What did you say? Black Iron equipment?! How did you find Black Iron equipment and three at that!"

Cheng Yang enjoyed watching Liu Hau freak out, it was one of the few interesting things that he could watch during the apocalypse. "It was actually really simple, I challenged the Hard Difficulty. Since it was the first clear, it's only natural that I would get so many great pieces of equipment."

After saying that, Cheng Yang handed Liu Hau the skill inheritance crystal.

Liu Hau grabbed the crystal with an expectant look. When he read the description of the item, his eyes nearly popped out of his head. "Yoko, you're amazing! This is why you're the boss of the group!"

Yu Kai and Lau Hui wandered over in curiosity. Lau Hui reached out to take the orb, but Yu Kai grabbed it a step faster. After reading the description, Yu Kai passed the crystal to Lau Hui. "Yoko, have I ever said how lucky I am to be your friend?"

"Not enough." Cheng Yang beamed, "If you want your team's Priest to learn the new skill, you're going to need to have your team pool Experience Fragments. If you rely on just the Priest doing it themselves, it'll be over a week before they can buy it.

"That's a great idea, I totally agree." Lau Hui nodded vigorously.

Yu Kai rolled his eyes, Lau Hui clearly just wanted to help his girlfriend out. However, none of the team Captains rejected Cheng Yang's proposal. Since each team had forty-four people each, one only needed to donate nine Experience Fragments, which wasn't a burden for anyone.

"How many Experience Fragments can you earn in a day?" Cheng Yang suddenly asked.

The other two team Captains looked towards Yu Kai who sighed. "If you don't count clearing the instance dungeon, each person can earn about fifty to sixty. Of course, a big reason it's so low is because all of the monsters we're fighting are in groups of two or three. Most of our time hunting is spent walking. Now that we're able to fight against bigger groups of monsters, our daily earning should go up a bit."

"I have a proposal." Cheng Yang said. "Right now we're at an advantage because we were able to become Professionals so quickly, but Phoenix Village has a fatal flaw. There are just too few Professionals. If we don't want to be destroyed by outside forces in the future, we need to make sure we keep our current advantage. Right now, I have over one thousand Experience Fragments, and as long as you have that many, you can unlock eight times training speed. I plan to use eight times training speed every day, but there is a way for you to do that as well. I can lend you my thousand Experience Fragments after finishing my four hours of training for the day. After finishing your training, you can pass the Experience Fragments to another team Captain and then finally return them to me. In this way, you'll be able to level up in just ten days. Of course, it will require you to consume three hundred and twenty Experience Fragments every day, but if you can clear the instance dungeon once a day, it should be fine."

Yu Kai and the others were all smiles. They had all tried out four times training speed and were excited to see just how good eight times training speed would be.

"Yoko, that is a really good idea, especially since Experience Fragments are best used for training. If we used them to buy things instead, it would be quite wasteful. After all, no amount of items would be better than leveling up. It's just that… this won't negatively affect your training will it?" Liu Hau asked.

"Don't worry, it won't affect me in the slightest because when you gift Experience Fragments, you don't lose any and it will come back to me every night anyway. This method for increasing people's strength will be widely used in the future. The only downside of using this method is that if someone refuses to gift the Experience Fragments to the next, there is no way of getting them back. Even if you were to kill them, their Experience Fragments would just disappear."

Although they didn't say anything, all of them understood that by doing this, Cheng Yang was demonstrating his absolute trust in them.