Doomsday Lord Ch. 25 | Standard-Grade Class Statues

As usual, Chéng Yáng woke up bright and early. Since the Blood Soaked Cathedral had already been cleared today, he directly woke up his team leaders and the rest of the sleeping Players.

“Today we’re going to continue rescuing people from Huìmín. To expedite the process, half of us will continuously patrol the stretch of land between Huìmín and the Settlement. This way, normal people can travel between the two unaccompanied. The people on patrol will also need to bring in any edible monster corpses for the normal people to butcher. A good rule of thumb is that if it walks on two legs its no good. Only bring back things that walk on all fours.” Chéng Yáng explained, “Our secondary goal is to collect food, equipment, and wood. The wood is especially important since we’ll need it to build things.”

The Players easily agreed. The new Players were happy to contribute to saving the lives of their fellow Huìmín residents, and the old Players were fine so long as they could gather Soul Fragments and increase their strength. After they left, Chéng Yáng pulled Lǐ Wànshān aside.

“Old Lǐ, I have a special task for you. I’m hoping you can talk to some of the normal people and convince them to transport goods between the Settlement and the edge of Huìmín. This will allow the Players to focus on finding things in the ruin and dealing with monsters. Tell anyone that volunteers that they’d be next in line after the people we chose yesterday.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

As the Lord of Phoenix Village, Chéng Yáng left those troublesome matters to his subordinates. This allowed him to spend his time solo farming in other areas until the last round of Research on the Class Statues finished.

He didn’t have a mechanical watch, so by the time he had returned, the Research had already been completed. When he checked the corresponding tab in the Territory Altar system pane, there were a few changes.

---

Mage Research Subjects

Phoenix Village
Standard-Grade
20/50 Registered

Research

Mana Compressing Techniques
With enough training, its possible for a Mage to compress Mana, allowing them to fit more into the Mana nodes they already have.

Cost: 100

Time: 8 hours

Advanced Mana Purification Techniques
A continuation on previous techniques. These advanced techniques allow further purification.

Cost: 100

Time: 8 hours

Ironskin Tattoos
By expanding on already inscribed Stoneskin tattoos, their power can be increased without sacrificing their current expenditure efficacy.

Cost 100

Time: 8 hours

Advanced Mental State Training
When a Mage experiences the power of a high level existence, they can later borrow it through visualization. This new barrier is stronger than one created using willpower alone.

Cost: 100

Time: 8 hours

Mana Circuit Tributaries
Small amounts of Mana are stored in a person’s flesh. If additional Mana circuits can be carved into those area and fed into your main Mana circuits, the flow will increase.

Cost: 100

Time: 8 hours

Organ Reinforcement
By wrapping your internal organs in a thin layer of Mana they become capable of handling even highly accelerated speeds, removing the natural limits we usually impose on ourselves.

Cost: 100

Time: 8 hours

---

The other Class Statues underwent similar changes.

Since there were slots for new Players, Chéng Yáng grabbed twenty of the previously chosen people and performed their Transcendence Ceremonies. Most of those present had already had their talent appraised, so it was rather cheap.

Since he was saving for the level up fees for the Settlement, Chéng Yáng only allowed the bare minimum number of people to become Players. There would be time after the Settlement leveled up to fill the rest of the open slots.

Chéng Yáng spent an hour training the new recruits, then sent them to participate in the ongoing operation in Huìmín.

Now, all he had to do was wait. By his estimates, at the latest it would be 7:30 PM when the necessary funds were gathered but it was likely to be a few hours earlier. Now that they had cleared all of the nearby herds, he could only rely on the natural spawn rate.

---

Xiāngyáng was in absolute chaos.

Since early that morning there’d been non-stop gunfire throughout the city. This was the sound of the Xiāngyáng Garrison of the People’s Liberation Army closing in on the Safe Zone.

The military had actually recovered mere hours after the earthquake. Although the apocalypse had affected them as well, they had access to high munition weaponry that could completely shred your average monster. A police issue pistol would take a few seconds to kill a monster, but an automatic rifle could kill one instantly, and, unlike the police, their arms and munitions were stored in warehouses, not high-rise buildings. Thus, even after the warehouses collapsed, it was easy for them to access their equipment.

They hadn’t acted immediately due to a disagreement between the military executives. Many believed that they should immediately rush to Xiāngyáng to stabilize the situation but it was treason for the garrison commander to unilaterally impose martial law thus there was a deadlock for some time.

The tipping point was when the engineer corp declared that the damage done to electronic equipment was irreversible. This meant there was no way to receive the go ahead from someone higher up the chain of command. Faced with the choice of treason or the deaths of the civilians in Xiāngyáng, the garrison commander, Yuán Jiànzé, chose treason. He could beg for leniency later, but there was no way to bring the citizens of Xiāngyáng back to life.

That was yesterday afternoon. Computers, cars, and radios weren’t the only equipment they lost to the apocalypse. Almost all modern weapons, even some guns relied on electricity to function. The only things they could use were traditional firing pin weaponry.

The irony of the situation is that the garrison had just gotten updated tanks the year before, replacing their analogue tanks with newer digital versions. At the time they’d been ecstatic to replace the clunky old tanks, but now that the new ones were useless lumps of metal, they could only yearn for the glory of an analogue war machine.

Without vehicles of advanced weaponry it had taken them until this morning to fight their way over from the garrison. As they moved they needed to station soldiers to watch over their supply lines and kill any monsters that spawned, further slowing them.

When they finally arrived in the suburbs of Xiāngyáng, they were able to see the full scale of the disaster. Similar to Huìmín, the ground was littered with half eaten bones, dried blood, and rotting gizzard.

A rich smell of carrion had begun to permeate the city, and if it weren’t for the fact that Players were immune to normal diseases, humanity may have been doomed to die from plague.

At this point, the military began to lose hope. With the destruction so widespread, what could they accomplish? Moreover, there weren’t that many people in the garrison, a little under twenty thousand even accounting for civilian staff. It would be far from enough to cover the entire city, much less secure it.

It was only after they started finding civilians that they regained hope. As they marched through the streets, the civilians hiding in the ruins would rush out to them crying with joy. It was from these civilians that the military learned about the Safe Zone, and how monsters couldn’t get in.

This gave them a goal to work towards. If they could break through the monsters surrounding the Safe Zone, they would be able to resolve the problem of where to put civilians that would keep them safe.

With this goal in mind, the military adopted a new strategy. Instead of running supply lines back to their garrison base, they began to transport the supplied into the city. This would allow them to preserve their power and resolve any logistics issues in the coming war. Like an inchworm, they would clear new areas, then move their supplies forwards. Kilometer by kilometer they inched towards the Safe Zone.

As time passed the crowd surrounding the military grew and inevitably some people tried to cause trouble for the soldiers. It was then that the citizens of Xiāngyáng learned what it meant to be under martial law. Most people were lightly beaten then sent on their way. Anyone that went to far and dared to attack a soldier was executed on the spot. Yuán Jiànzé had no quibbles with using force to maintain public order. So many people had already died, what was a a few more? If they couldn’t break through to the Safe Zone everyone would die. This was simple pragmatism.

The military reached the Safe Zone late that afternoon. Rather than immediately engage the enemy, they chose to set up a defensive line. It would get dark soon and without floodlights it would be too dangerous to engage in large scale warfare.

Since they had time, they sent a group to rendezvous with the Xiāngyáng police force and draft them. If they wanted to win tomorrow, they needed more manpower. The police were the obvious option since they had proven their moral character and had comprehensive weapons training.

As the sky darkened, the military prepared for a long time. There were too many of them to hide underground, so they were forced to endure attack from monsters the entire time, often while not being able to see them before they had already killed someone.

Tomorrow would be a new dawn, but the night would be long.

---

The day passed quickly for the Citizens of Phoenix Village. In total, they had rescued another eight hundred people from the ruins Huìmín. After tripling the personnel involved, the operation became routine. They no longer had to fear monsters or waste time escorting normal people back. This allowed them to push closer and closer to the city center where more people lived.

They were also able to procure a large number of supplies. In addition to simple cooking tools, they obtained large amounts of food, which was transported back to Phoenix Village by some of the braver civilians. Anything with a long shelf was confiscated and locked away in a Cultivation Chamber. Food shortages would be frequent so it was important to ration anything that could last a while. As for perishables that had survived until now, they were directly distributed to the civilians in the Settlement.

As a result, the atmosphere in Phoenix Village was quite cheerful. Although the civilians didn’t have any privacy, or anything to do, they had full stomachs and nothing to worry about. It was quite easy for them to lie in the sun and pretend like the world hadn’t ended.

Unfortunately very little Wood was collected, a few units at most. Unless they found a wood processing plant like Lǐ Wànshān’s lumber mill, they were unlikely to make significant progress anytime soon.

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