Doomsday Lord Ch. 27 | High-Grade Apprentice

Chéng Yáng opened the Management tab so that he could fill the empty Manager positions.

Naturally, the Player Resources Manager position went to Lǐ Wànshān. His Innate Ability significantly increased the number of Players that could be registered as Citizens, from two hundred to two hundred sixty six. To put anyone else in that position was moronic.

As long as he trusted them, it didn’t matter who he put in the other two Manager positions, so Chéng Yáng just gave them to his friends. Liú Hào became the Border Security Manager and Yú Kǎi became the Municipal Planning Manager.

There was only on thing left to do, activate Divine Grace!

When Chéng Yáng activated Divine Grace, power once again flowed unstoppable into his body. He could feel his body changing. Getting stronger. Faster.

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Chéng Yáng

Phoenix Village Lord
Class: Mage
Level: High-Grade Apprentice (5.12%)

Age	19	Life Span	150
Health	50	Mana	270
Attack Damage	4	Ability Power	40
Attack Resistance	8	Magic Resistance	6
Attack Speed	7	Movement Speed	7.2

Innate Abilities

• Ability Power is increased by 30%
• Increase the effects of Cultivation Chambers in your Settlement by 30%
• Movement speed is increased by 20%

Skills

Meditation (Core Skill)
Sit cross legged and focus your mind to recover and advance.

Magic Missile (Standard-Grade)
Gather Mana into a condensed sphere, then fire it.

Damage: 48	Cost: 6 Mana
Range: 30 m	Cooldown: 2.72 sec

Equipment

Ebony Stave (One-Handed)
A casting focus made from high quality wood and engraved to allow for higher damage and faster casting.
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Effects: +1 Ability Power, +1 Attack Speed

Damage: 3	Cooldown: 1.36 sec
Range: 1 m	Durability: 50

Corrupted High Priest’s Robes (Cloak)
The robes of the high priest of the St. Luantha cathedral that have been corrupted by demonic magic.
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Effects: +2 Attack Resistance, +10 Mana, +10 Health

Durability: 50

Corrupted Priest’s Biretta (Hat)
The biretta of a priest from the St. Luantha cathedral that has been corrupted by demonic magic.
—————————————————————————————
Effects: +20 Mana

Durability: 25

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With his stats, Chéng Yáng was capable of one-shotting most Low-Grade Immature monsters. He couldn’t be happier with his Attributes. They were rather average for a High-Grade Apprentice, but considering almost every monster around was still at the Low-Grade Immature level, he was basically invincible.

The concerning thing was that he had nowhere to learn new Skills. Normally, as you leveled up, you gained the right to learn additional Skills. As a High-Grade Apprentice, he had the right to learn up to four Skills. However, there was nowhere for him to learn them.

There were only two ways to learn a Skill. The first was to use a Skill Scroll as loot from an Instance Dungeon. These were only slightly less rare than special drops like the Cleric Idol so very few people could use this method. The second was the pay to learn a Skill from a Class Statue.

Until they reached the High-Grade level, Class Statues in Settlements didn’t have the ability to provide additional Skills. The Class Statues in the Safe Zones, on the other hand, had every Basic Skill available from day one. Unfortunately, after registering with a Settlement, a Player could no longer use the Class Statues in the Safe Zones.

For the foreseeable future, the Citizens of Phoenix Village would have rather static attack patterns. Of course, this small loss of versatility was more than worth the benefits becoming a Settlement’s Citizen provided. Moreover, if a Settlement got their hands on a Skill Inheritance Crystal for an Intermediate or Advanced Skill, they could sacrifice it at the Territory Altar, allowing any registered Player of the corresponding class to learn that Skill.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully. Since the rush to collect Soul Fragments was over, Chéng Yáng finally got around to establishing a proper guard rotation for the Players. Each of the five teams needed to spend five hours a day guarding the walls, except for Niú Bīng’s team which only had to do so for four hours since they had the overnight shift from 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM. Each team also got one of the five shifts off in order to cultivate.

With the major expense of upgrading the Settlement out of the way, Chéng Yáng tasked Lǐ Wànshān with filling the remaining Citizen slots such that each team had an equal number of each Class. Standard-Grade Villages could accept donations from Players, so instead of having new Players pay back the funds used on them to Chéng Yáng, they paid them back directly to the Territory Altar creating a virtuous cycle that made filling all of the slots trivial.

At 11:00 PM Chéng Yáng prepared for his daily cultivation. When he had used Divine Grace this morning, although his experience had rolled over, the progress had been halved. Even though he could rely on Divine Grace again when the Settlement reached the High-Grade Village level, it was important to maintain good habits and cultivate whenever one could.

His cultivation resulted in a roughly 3.2% increase in his experience bar. At this speed he would reach the Pinnacle-Grade Apprentice level in a month. Assuming, of course, that he could maintain the expenditure from eight times cultivation speed. Chéng Yáng didn’t even dare to think about sixteen times cultivation speed. He barely had amassed the Soul Fragments necessary for eight times cultivation speed, but his entire fortune was worth only a single hour of sixteen times cultivation speed.

The next day, when he woke up, Chéng Yáng saw Liú Hào and Yú Kǎi idling around his Cultivation Chamber’s courtyard. He shared his residence with his team leaders since there wasn’t enough housing to go around. It also made for a discreet location when he needed to discuss something without the hundreds of normal people listening in.

“Yángzǐ, good morning! It’s so odd sharing a living space with the Lord. You really should consider building a private Cultivation Chamber to establish your prestige!” Yú Kǎi buttered up his friend with a devious smile.

“You’re just saying that so you can also have your own home someday.” Chéng Yáng rolled his eyes, “A rich kid like you is probably used to living alone, huh?”

“Well, since you brought it up, team leaders should probably also have their own Cultivation Chambers” Yú Kǎi laughed, “Forget it, forget it. With so many people sleeping on the ground there’s no need to rush things.”

Chéng Yáng sighed.

“It will be hard to remedy that in the near future, the wood you found yesterday wasn’t even enough to build a Cultivation Chamber, but less anything else. Thankfully Old Lǐ should have finished filling the remaining Citizen slots during the night. With over two hundred and fifty Players we won’t have to worry about monsters when moving around in Huìmín.”

“Does that mean we’ll get more Clerics?” Liú Hào piped up, “Just one is too few, even just one or two more would be enough. I’m not asking for much.”

“If you want more then work harder at farming monsters.” Chéng Yáng sighed, “Cleric is a Hidden Class so there are a lot of restrictions on the number of people who can become one. The only way to get more is to upgrade the Class Statue, and to do that we need buckets of Soul Fragments.”

The trio chatted for a while, then left the Cultivation Chamber to start the day. As expected, Old Lǐ had faithfully fulfilled his duties and filled every Citizen slot.

The quality of the new soldiers had dropped again compared to the previous group. Not a single person had an S-Rank Innate Ability and the ration of A-Rank and B-Rank Innate Abilities had flipped. That said, not a single C-Rank Innate Ability had appeared. This large batch of Players would likely make up the bulk of Phoenix Village’s elite forces in the future.

Since the quality of Innate Abilities was dropping fast, Chéng Yáng ordered Old Lǐ to spend 400 Soul Fragments each day assessing people’s talent. Although he hadn’t definitively proven his theory that contact with magic halted the decline of an Innate Ability, he was willing to bet a small amount of funds on it. If this venture worked out, there would be one more batch of talented Players in Phoenix Village’s future.

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