Afterlife Dream

After being defeated twice by the Twelve guild, the Dominion guild became more and more aggressive in their approach. The entirety of Dominion, save for their guild leader HinoKun, went as far as ambushing our Fire Golem Raid at 10.00 on the fourth day. This was presumably done out of revenge because the top levels from Twelve did come over to Lava County to murder the remaining Dominion players who failed to steal the run from us on the third day. Our top levels were not available to help because they were doing the Dark Fairy raid at the same time. As a result, Dominion succeeded and we all had to swallow our disappointment and leave. The ones who were most disappointed were naturally the two helmless members in the guild.

Fueled by a vengeful spirit, the entire Twelve guild ambushed Dominion on their time slot at 16.00 the same day. The Fire Golem raid entrance cave was cramped with almost a hundred players murdering each other while engaging in a heated clicking competition to get into the raid first. I could not describe how happy we were when we won. Even happier when two helmets dropped after the Fire Golem was killed. With only one more day left before the raid was forever deactivated, we were overjoyed and decided to celebrate a little at Oakstone Tavern before resting for the night.

One raid was officially off from the chart. The guild hence focused more on the level 70 and 90 raids. After the players leveled up some more, Twelve would attempt running the 110 raid with only guildmates. The 120+ raids were unfortunately not on the menu for the time being unless Twelve and Dominion decided to join forces one more time. Which was unlikely to happen after the many confrontations at the raid areas.

Aside from running level 60 and 70 raids every day, I was given only one more task, which was to level up. There was unfortunately no more Paradise Island Party Quest to exploit for the experience. When mini-bosses started to raid the land, players by chance discovered that the experience gained from killing a mini-boss was not bad at all. Also, it was definitely more interesting than killing regular monsters for experience. Not to mention that the monsters in Paradise Island were beyond annoying.

We had the banana-throwing monkeys.

We had the hardworking crabs that liked to pinch your feet.

We had the croaking frogs that jumped at you as soon as you are within their line of sight.

I believe I made myself clear.

Each area apart from Dai City had to come up with a method to immobilize their mini-bosses for the night. It became an even more critical task after Fairy Forest was thoroughly destroyed by the Undead Tree Stumps.

Marsh City successfully contained the Giant Mushroom inside a cage that Kitty and Wolfhound modified at least ten times for three days.

The other areas struggled for some time to come up with a viable method to restrain their mini-bosses, but one by one they managed to do so. Paradise Island on the other side took a little longer to achieve the same feat. Why? Because Paradise Island had to deal with three kinds of mini-bosses that appeared at the final stage of the party quest randomly.

The main challenge was to devise a trap that could work for all mini-bosses. This was not easy to achieve as General Aardvark behaved differently from Lieutenant Gorilla, which again behaved differently from Sergeant Ostrich. One was a proficient digger with two sharp sets of claws, one had a brutal physical attack, and one had a powerful kick that could bring a tree down with one attack.

Cecilia and other residents wrecked their heads every day to come up with new designs, build them, and test them. They mainly worked at night because players were mostly around during the day to kill the bosses. Not so during the night. Thanks to the lacking competition, even those who adamantly said that they did not want to level up ended up leveling up. Cecilia emerged in front of us one day, having completed the Fourth Job Advancement Test and becoming a Bow Lord.

"I blame all of you!" she exclaimed, seething in a fabricated rage. "I have broken my oath to not level ever again!"

Aurendiria threw herself at Cecilia while shouting, "Oh my God, Cecil!!! Congrats, congrats!!! I am soo happy for you!"

Ingenious grinned at Cecilia.

"Now you have no choice but to help out at the level 120 raids too."

"Yea, yea," the tall girl rolled with her eyes. "I can't believe that you are making me do this."

We gathered for dinner at Oakstone Tavern that night to celebrate Cecilia's fourth job advancement, but Cecilia had something else she would like to show everyone. She led us to the mini-boss spawning spot. The last one was killed almost two hours ago, so a few players had already gathered around the area to kill the next one. The flat patch of grass was usually empty, but this time a huge, complicated trap made of branches and vines stood tall on top of it. A shiny, thick metal plate formed the bottom part of the trap.

"Behold!" Cecilia announced dramatically into the crown as she whipped her left arm into the air and pointed toward her unique creation. "This is the latest trap made by the Paradise Island Protectors. Feast your eyes on the indestructible bottom that forces General Aardvark to stay put in the cage, the flexible but strong arrangement of vines and branches that will absorb every physical attack that all three mini-bosses have in store!"

We all started to clap.

"Awesome!"

"Woohoo!"

Cecilia and other residents who referred to themselves as the Paradise Island Protectors had been spending a lot of effort and using up every bit of creativity in their brain cells to work on these traps.

When they finished their first trap, they invited everyone to come to the inauguration ceremony. It was a very simple but sturdy cage. Sergeant Ostrich spawned and kicked it open with one single kick, sending the gitters flying and crashing a hundred meters away from the spawning spot. After that first fail, they no longer invited others to come to take a look at their traps.

Since they were confident enough to gather people to show off their newest creation, I was pretty sure that it was working perfectly.

A few minutes later, Lieutenant Gorilla spawned inside the trap. It let out a deafening roar before it started to punch at every part of the trap that it could reach, but the trap stood strong.

"Not bad," Ingenious praised.

Cecilia leaned in with a grin.

"General Aardvark spawned in it last night, then we went to sleep after monitoring it for half an hour. This morning when we woke up, it was gone but the trap still stood. Are you sure it is only 'not bad'?"

Ingenious broke into laughter.

"Fine, Cecil. I will give you what you want. It is MARVELOUS. Very, very good job."

The Paradise Island Protectors' new creation held out pretty well. It was so good that even the lower-level players that we brought from Fairy Forest found the courage to attack the trapped bosses. It soon turned into a gangbang scene just like what we saw in Dai City.

This was bad for me and my peers who until then had the privilege to monopolize the mini-bosses because we could survive their attacks. We started to get lesser cuts in experience so we had to resort to the most traditional way of gaining experience: killing monsters for hours.

Thankfully, I had friends who were very interested to grind with me, especially because I brought with me Heavenly Blessing which at the maximum level allowed them to gain 50% more experience when killing monsters. Unfortunately, I only have it at level 14 so I could only grant them 35% experience increase. Meh, they said. Better than nothing.

When we started, I was level 76. DragonTalon was level 77, HellWitch was level 92, Lazarus was level 88, Livina was level 89, and ZhaoYun was level 93. We decided to head to Chinatown to grind. Chinatown was the area reserved for level 90+. It had a lot of grinding maps so players could just pick a map to kill monsters for hours.

HellWitch and ZhaoYun had been training in the area previously, so they led us toward a map full of wolves with bluish-grey coats. It was effectively a grassland area with four levels of terrain elevation. There were rope ladders to connect one terrain to the others. The lowest terrain had the most mobs and it was fairly huge in size, so HellWitch and ZhaoYun split the area between them. Livina took the second level, Lazarus took the third level, and finally DragonTalon took the highest level. My job was to go up and down to provide them with buffs.

We had only grinded for fifteen minutes when trouble came knocking at the door.

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