Chapter 55: Acknowledgment

Jiang Qiao opened the Sacred Souls leaderboards, which held the rankings for player levels as well as the rankings for the combined guild prowess.

These two were both leaderboards that Jiang Qiao created on a whim, and players could check out their ranking from the Stone Slabs of Honor in front of the Lionheart City Palace.

The player that was ranked first on the player level leaderboard was still FreeMilk, and in a few days she had already leveled up to Level 38.

The player in second place was an elemental mage called Zanshin who was only Level 35.

Jiang Qiao wondered whether FreeMilk had been grinding for levels ever since she first logged into Sacred Souls.

‘Do liver emperors on the leaderboard not have to eat or sleep?’

Jiang Qiao remembered such a complaint on the forum, and after a bit of thought he figured that they could just have survived on IV drips.

The reason why Jiang Qiao didn’t implement the function to refresh the players’ minds from the mobile version of Sacred Souls onto the VR version because it was way too surreal even for Tiangong-13.

That being said, FreeMilk truly hadn’t gone offline ever since the day Sacred Souls started.

This made Jiang Qiao suspect that this player really was playing games with an IV drip…

Leaving this healer’s insanely long online period aside, Jiang Qiao moved his attention to the guild leaderboard.

The guild leaderboard was ranked according to the overall prowess of the guilds, and it was calculated based on several factors such as the number of members, their levels, the number of sacred relics they owned.

The first on the leaderboard was the Jumping Nucleons guild, and it had been that way ever since the start.

There were a total of 245 members with an average of Level 32, which was quite a scary number considering that the total number of players Level 30 and above was barely 700. A third of this total was were members of this guild.

The reason why the Jumping Nucleons guild could recruit so many elite players was because of the popularity of SC Nucleons that was behind it. Most players joined the guild because they wanted to fight alongside professional players.

Jiang Qiao could understand how the players felt, and if the word went out that Zhao Mingwei was in Jiang Qiao’s guild, he would probably receive dozens of requests in a heartbeat.

Of course he wouldn’t do something like that as No Name was purely a friendship-based guild. The reason why he created the guild in the first place was purely to test the guild functions and have fun playing the game.

This was completely different from the Jumping Nucleons guild that had their eyes on being the number one guild from the start.

This number one wasn’t only in terms of the number of members, but the average skill of the members too. They wanted to grab the first place in all the dungeons records and the popularity within players too!

Jiang Qiao felt the ambition of this guild, and the other professional game clubs definitely knew of this ambition too. According to the competition between guilds and clubs, they wouldn’t let the Jumping Nucleons guild have their way.

Like the Abyssal Shrine guild in second place, for example.

Compared with this guild that was joked as the evil organization, Jumping Nucleons was much more down to earth.

There were 432 members in that guild with an average of Level 21, and the popularity of the club behind it was the on par with SC Nucleons.

The competition between these two guilds extended into Sacred Souls, and Jiang Qiao guessed that a few more guilds and clubs were going to build their forces in this game sooner or later.

Jiang Qiao didn’t have any plans of stopping this competition from happening, and only planned on watching the show go on. This competition would become a motivator for these guilds to continue becoming stronger, and these guilds would be an important force for Jiang Qiao in the future.

“I need to find a way to get them to fight…” Jiang Qiao continued to look through the guilds in the leaderboard.

The guild in the third place was a guild called Sinking Dreams Wedding Committee. Jiang Qiao raised an eyebrow when he saw this name, but after seeing the guildmaster’s ID and the members he knew why it was named this way.

The guildmaster was the live-streamer ModaoSwordsman, and one of the admins of the guild was a Level 5 warrior called SinkingDreams.

Jiang Qiao knew that this warrior was one of the most popular live-steamers on Raccoon, and one fun fact about her was that she was already thirty-seven years old with ten of millions in her bank, but she never had any boyfriends.

Her audience and even some haters wanted to dig up some dirt on her, but even after getting her past data from middle school until she graduated, they couldn’t get any news on any men that were even close to her.

In the player community, SinkingDreams had the nickname of the Ice Cold Iron Virgin, and even ones called the Pure White Auntie, the Maiden Grandma Dreamie. She had also gotten several nicknames along this vein due to having a penchant for playing violent characters.

This wasn’t what caught Jiang Qiao’s eye, however. What caught his attention was how they had a whole 600 people, and in terms of the number of members, it was enough to beat both Jumping Nucleons and Abyssal Shrine.

…Well, their average level was only Level 13, but still!

This was a guild made completely from fans for the sake of entertainment, but Jiang Qiao still couldn’t ignore this force.

Looking down the leaderboard, Jiang Qiao saw the guilds of the seven great game guilds in Hua Nation, like the Kings guild which was created by the game club that Zhao Mingwei was in.

“You want these guilds to fight amongst themselves?” Ocean Blue somehow had a chill down her spine as she listened to Jiang Qiao muttering to himself, perhaps a little traumatized by how he wrote Floria to ‘death’.

“Ah, don’t put it like that! I just want the competition between them to become even more intense.”

“Isn’t it already intense now?”

Ocean Blue didn’t know a lot about managing guilds and about the game clubs.

“There isn’t much competition right now. It’s just the top two guilds fighting over the dungeon records and not much else.” Jiang Qiao spoke the truth. All the competition was between the top two guilds, while the other guilds either weren’t strong enough nor interested enough to compete.

But in Jiang Qiao’s opinion, their competition was quite casual.

“What do you plan on doing to make them fight? Give them strong epic equipment as rewards?” Ocean Blue thought that Jiang Qiao wasn’t really like a creator god, but more like some villain plotting behind the scenes.

“Epic equipment could only be used to make a single person stronger, what these guilds want is popularity! To leave behind a lasting impression on the players, and such.”

“Ah, then how…”

“We’re going to start from the dungeon records. Increase the influence of the dungeon records, as well as increasing the rewards of the Divinity War…”

Jiang Qiao knew that what the large guilds truly valued was a first kill record and dungeon records on a worldwide scale that would be kept in the history of the game. This was an honor that was worth them to contest.

“Are you sure they won’t kill each other?” Ocean Blue thought a while, and used a more severe term.

“The hatred between players might get extended to real life to the point where they might fight, but for the competition between these large guilds mostly stay on the degree of just quarreling. They won’t do anything because they have their pride, and most of these professional players know each other anyways.”

Jiang Qiao knew that while the fans of these professional clubs quarreled a lot, the actual players themselves were acquaintances and even good friends.

“This is in preparation for the War of Divinity too. Floria’s quest gave the players motivation to level up to Level 50, but to the frontline players, what they wanted wasn’t a love simulation experience but a sense of honor…Well, some of them love Floria too.”

As he said so, Zhao Mingwei messaged him asking if he had accepted the main quest with Miss Doll.