223: Chapter 223 Before the Defense of the Royal City

At first, [Red Lotus] was somewhat unwilling to become Liu Xuan's mount.

However, as soon as Liu Xuan accepted it and it felt the stat bonuses granted by the [Contract of Resilience], that trace of dissatisfaction immediately vanished into thin air.

Holy crap, a ten-fold HP bonus! No wonder that guy [White Night] enjoys being a lackey so much.

[Red Lotus] was still at its original level, and its HP was already as high as 3 million. After this wave of bonuses, it directly skyrocketed to 30 million!

This caused its attitude to do a 180-degree turn.

"Big Brother, is the ride steady?"

"Big Brother, is my back too hot?"

"Big Brother, should I go slower?"

[White Night] watched [Red Lotus]'s fawning behavior and didn't even want to speak.

It saw itself in the other party.

After taming the mount, Liu Xuan temporarily had no special tasks, so he spent the following time leveling up.

Originally, there were quite a few high-level fire-type monsters here in the [Great Crucible], but this was [Red Lotus]'s territory. It didn't seem appropriate to go on a killing spree here, so he decided against it.

He would farm somewhere else.

... Two days later, at the Royal City.

The third round of the [Promotion Defense Battle] was about to begin, and Liu Xuan, Zhang Meng, and others were chatting on the city walls.

Because Liu Xuan had entered the city alone to solo it, he never used the explosives as originally planned, so the city walls and gates were preserved.

They had already tested it; the city gates had health bars, and the HP varied depending on the degree of damage.

But even the lowest one had over 60 million.

Don't think that's a lot; normally, the Royal City was a level 60 monster zone, it was just that Liu Xuan had cleared it too quickly.

People from other countries were only level ten or twenty now and couldn't break the city gates, but that was their own problem.

Now that the gates were hard to break and the walls were over a hundred meters high, the attacking side basically had no way to get in.

Unless they could fly.

Even Zhang Meng and his group couldn't get in when they first arrived at the Royal City; it was only after Liu Xuan activated the gate mechanism from the inside that they were let in.

So, Zhang Meng and his group just needed to wait on the city walls, fully prepared.

As for Liu Xuan, he had previously made a deal with the system to seal four damage-reflection passives in exchange for the opportunity to deal damage with basic attacks during this defense battle.

Today, he was prepared to "enjoy" himself.

Over these past two days, he had leveled up twice and gained two new passives; he was now level 44.

[Berserk Instinct: When you achieve a kill streak, each kill will temporarily increase your Agility by 5%. This bonus disappears 10 seconds after the kill streak ends.]

[Ample Armaments: For every skill you possess, the free attribute points gained upon leveling up increase by 1.]

The former provided a kill streak buff; as long as the interval did not exceed 10 seconds, the more he killed, the higher his Agility would be.

In other words, as long as he killed fast enough, his movement speed and attack speed would become faster and faster.

Given the efficiency with which Liu Xuan farmed dozens of monsters at a time, he could multiply his Agility several times over in minutes.

Especially in this [Promotion Defense Battle], with 50,000 enemies on the other side who would keep being replenished, he could keep this kill streak buff going indefinitely as long as he wanted.

The only pity was that he could only use basic attacks this time; in the future, he wouldn't be able to enjoy the Agility-to-attack-speed bonus from this passive.

As for the second passive, [Ample Armaments], Liu Xuan did the math. Up to level 44, he had gained 43 passive skills from leveling and 2 passives learned through skill scrolls—namely [Fraudulent Trick] and [Ancient Species].

So, that was a total of 45 skills. [Ample Armaments] would increase the attribute points gained upon leveling up by 45. Counting the original 37, this meant that Liu Xuan could now gain 82 attribute points per level.

Moreover, as his level got higher and higher in the future, the attribute points granted would also increase.

"This battlefield supposedly has no level cap. If I reach several thousand or ten thousand levels, wouldn't I get tens of thousands of attribute points per level?"

But that was just wishful thinking. Leveling up was hard enough now; let alone ten thousand, even reaching level one thousand would be difficult.

Besides the two passives, over the two days, Liu Xuan's Bone undead had successfully fused into fourth-level bosses: [Bone Lord], [Bone Priest], [Bone Commander], and [Bone Archmage].

Taking the [Bone Lord] as an example, its stats were now terrifying.

[Bone Lord (Boss)] Level: 44 (Follows Summoner) Attack: 10000 HP: 6000000 Armor: 450 Magic Resist: 350 Tenacity: 70% Skills: [Slash: Deals 5 basic attacks to the enemy, with each attack having a 20% chance to inflict "Bleeding" on the enemy. CD: 10s.] [Cleave: The Bone Knight's attacks deal 45% damage to other enemies near the main target.] [Revenge: For every attack the Bone Knight receives, damage dealt increases by 20%, stacking up to 1000%.] [Bone Armor: Automatically casts when HP is below 30%, generating a Bone Armor shield equivalent to 40% of maximum HP. CD: 5 minutes.] [Death Charge: Charges at a single enemy within a 30-meter range, knocking back enemies collided with along the path and stunning the target for two seconds. CD: 30s.] [...] [Bone Fusion: When you possess 10 Bone Lords, they will automatically fuse into a Bone King.]

With over 10 skills, this was already the panel of a powerful boss.

As for the [Bone Priest], its healing skills almost all included percentage-based effects, healing the current Liu Xuan and other summons for hundreds of thousands per tick.

It even possessed an ultimate skill, [Life Infusion], which could directly restore a target's HP to full.

However, when it came to what would be most helpful for this [Promotion Defense Battle], Liu Xuan felt it might be the [Bone Archmage].

Because its ultimate skill was: [Army of the Dead: Summons a skeleton to assist in battle from all nearby corpses. The summoned skeletons can only exist for five minutes.]

The small skeletons summoned were very weak; perhaps because they were summons of a summon, they were classified as "minion" type.

Their HP was pitifully low, basically dying upon a single touch. Even with Liu Xuan's bonuses, they were about the same as ordinary mobs.

Furthermore, they could only exist for 5 minutes. But! Their low HP and automatic disappearance were actually a good thing.

Because Liu Xuan discovered that they could also trigger [Undead Emperor].

[Undead Emperor: Whenever your summon reaches its time limit and disappears, or dies, randomly summon one of: Bone Warrior, Bone Mage, Bone Archer, or Bone Priest. These four types of summons cannot trigger this passive themselves.]

In other words, these skeleton minions summoned by the [Bone Archmage] could significantly increase the generation speed of various Bone undead.

What was most terrifying was that Liu Xuan discovered that after reaching the fourth level, these Bone undead could actually continue to fuse.

10 [Bone Lord]s of the warrior class could fuse into a [Bone King], and the other priest, archer, and mage classes also had their own next levels.

However, the time required to fuse them would be too long.

A single [Bone King] was equivalent to 10,000 [Bone Warrior]s fused layer by layer; under normal circumstances, one couldn't even hope for it in a month or two.

But this [Promotion Defense Battle] was a good opportunity. Liu Xuan conservatively estimated that the total number of attackers could reach one to two million.

As long as the [Bone Archmage] summoned more skeleton minions, Liu Xuan could get a huge boost from this!