The Great Thief

The second skill was Summon Eye Tentacle. The difference with the previous one was that at the top of this tentacle was a living, moving eye, which looked horrifyingly evil.

This skill came up 45 seconds into the battle. Within 5 feet from the black cloud surrounding C’Thun, eight Eye Tentacles extended out. After each tentacle extended outwards, it would be attacked by surrounding players, but it would also send them flying.

These eight tentacles were equivalent to the smaller monsters. After they appeared, they would begin to actively use their skills to lash out at players, dealing 700-800 damage to those players around them.

Summon Eye Tentacle was cast every 45 seconds. Regardless of whether these tentacles were defeated or not, C’Thun would summon new ones. Sky Moon’s plan to just control them but not defeat them was simply not feasible.

Afterwards, he arranged for people to purposely target and clear out these tentacles.

The tentacles had 25,000 HP each. If they reacted in enough time and their output was powerful enough, they could finish them off in a few seconds.

The first stage basically involved just dealing with these, as well as some minor skills, which really made Ruling Sword struggle.

Sky Moon was originally feeling smug, but now he was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Lu Li just happened to be away from the action, messing around with Water Fairy and simply not caring about commanding the Instance Dungeon at all. If Sky Moon complained to him, Lu Li would simply say, “I trust you, like when you killed Ouro. Uou definitely won’t let me down.”

Sky Moon had never come across such a thick-skinned, shameless person.

Actually, it wasn’t that Lu Li didn’t want to command, but there simply wasn’t the need. C’Thun at the moment was simply impossible to finish off.

Sometimes, all four skills in the first stage were used at the same time, without any reason at all.

When this happened, everyone needed to maintain a safe distance, avoid the red lasers, as well as attack the tentacles being constantly sent flying. The whole situation was a mess.

Even so, Lu Li couldn’t just call it a week here and just let everyone run off.

As such, they needed to keep persisting with this First Clear. They had to wait until the next week before the System would update C’Thun and at least apply some logic to when the four skills were cast. This would give the players a chance to pass the first stage.

Lu Li wasn’t truly being lazy. Being around with Water Fairy and making everyone envious was just the other people trying to place blame on him. He was clearly working very hard preparing for the Shadow Cup.

The following week was an extremely busy week.

Firstly, there would be a new Stronghold in the map of Winterspring. It was a beautiful place, and there were some great things to be found there too. Geographically speaking, it was well-located. If L Li needed to expand in the future, this was probably a place that Ruling Sword would definitely have to fight for.

Black Sea Coast, Grey Valley, Moonlight Forest, Felwood, Winterspring…

This was the path of Strongholds that Lu Li had established early on. His ultimate plan was to make Mount Hyjal the centre, occupying all the land to the north of the Plaguelands.

If Winterspring was occupied by someone else, then it would be a major thorn in his side, but it wasn’t possible to stop people from occupying lands. Even just the money it would take to accomplish this would be too great, let alone the other costs.

He thought he had a lot of money before, not knowing even how to spend it.

However, when it came time to use money, he helplessly found out that he couldn’t even buy one entrance ticket in front of these other major players.

But right then was the time when there was an influx of capital. Money came in like a flood, looking for a way to get out. The Stronghold war was one of these exits. They required all the supporting guilds to participate in this grand dinner.

With all of these rich clubs, you could imagine what level this Winterspring battle was at.

Even if Sorrowless wanted to be a part of it, he probably had to consider if it was worth it. And so, it was said that if you had money, you had power and could do what you want.

They had to wait for the authorities to step into the Stronghold battles and make changes before this silly act would come to an end.

They didn’t have to worry about the new map. Lu Li didn’t want to be sloppy about the two Strongholds that they owned. In the case that something really went wrong and Lu Li wanted to reclaim a lost Stronghold, it would be rather troublesome and difficult.

Of course, when Glory Capital made a big commotion about attacking Ruling Sword’s Stronghold but returned demoralized from their defeat, any club that wanted to dip their finger into this would have to assess whether they had enough power.

Afterwards, there would be the Instance Dungeon to focus.

They didn’t have to get the First Clear with Ouro, but they needed to First Clear C’Thun.

It was said that Ouro was the competition on which the most clubs were betting on worldwide, but actually, they were just betting on the meaningless title of who was more amazing. Ruling Sword got the First Clear on Ouro, but it only meant that performance in this Instance Dungeon had been excellent.

It didn’t mean that their power had already overtaken that of Glory Capital – Glory Capital had at least over 100 times more First Clears than Ruling Sword when it came to Wild Bosses. They had taken almost 60% of the Wild Boss First Clears in all of China. Because of problems with their scale and their power, Ruling Sword didn’t even have 1%.

But in the same way, they didn’t receive any material reward, not even 100 dollars. Talk about doing it for the glory of the country!

However, C’Thun wasn’t the same. C’Thun was the last Boss of Ahn’Qiraj Temple. As long as they could kill it, Ruling Sword would not only get a massive advantage in the rewards, but they would also receive the all-important forty portions of rewards for the First Clear.

Past experience told everyone that the harder the Boss, the more abundant the rewards.

Although Ouro didn’t drop Legendary-level equipment, he still dropped a Enhanced Skill Book, gave out eight Skills Points and six pieces of Epic equipment, along with other random, valuable items.

It was the same principle with First Clears. The harder it was to get achieve, the better the 40 rewards would be.

Finally, the Shadow Cup was going to start immediately.

In the last Shadow Cup, Ruling Sword were the champions. At that time, Lu Li had the advantage of being reborn, and their level and equipment completely overpowered the other teams. Regardless of whether luck played a role or not, it at least established Ruling Sword as a guild.

This time, Lu Li hoped that Ruling Sword would still be able to achieve a top placing.

At least it wouldn’t make people think that Ruling Sword was nothing more than a flash in the pan. That way, when the money was flowing freely, it would stem the tide of Ruling Sword members flowing away.

This time’s Shadow Cup was conducted in more or less the same fashion.

Like before, they were divided into fighting arenas, and there were group competitions as well. There were only three arenas now. For every person they killed, they received one point, so there were three points in total. Then, there were the group matches. Five people would enter, and there were over 400 maps. What was different from before was that there were no restrictions on the number of subs or their membership. As long as the clubs were happy with it, they could put on 100 competitors to be substitutes. The problem was only which sub would enter, so even if you had more, it didn’t make any difference.

These three events couldn’t be measured as being more or less important.

As for the first event, there was no pressure in defending the Strongholds and there wasn’t much chance that they could get involved in Winterspring. What Lu Li needed to do was to raise a bit of money, wait until someone got hold of the Winterspring Stronghold, then fight for it.

Of course, they had to wait for the Stronghold to be updated before they could do anything.

There was a common saying in China that doing too much was just as bad as not doing enough. Before the Stronghold war, Ruling Sword had an advantage in defending, and they were still able to withstand an all-out attack from Glory Capital. There were two times when Lu Li used his reborn memory to his advantage, and the second time he did so, it really was a very difficult fight.

It really wasn’t that Ruling Sword was stronger than Glory Capital. At the most, the top few dozen people at the core of Ruling Sword weren’t much worse than Glory Capital’s best. In terms of their

overall power, Ruling Sword was actually very far behind.

Sorrowless was someone who had unbridled talent.

For many years, there wasn’t any club which was even in a position to challenge them. Would Lu Li have liked to take their place, with just a few Instance Dungeon First Clears and two competition championships? Not unless he was like a main character in a stupid novel.

The main reason for their victory was because the Stronghold mechanisms at the moment were very favorable to the defender.

And it looked like the official channels realized this. This whole time, they were researching how to make some changes to the Stronghold mechanisms. They couldn’t make it too advantageous for the defenders, but they couldn’t make it too easy for the attackers to claim the Stronghold.

To do this, they launched an innovative new patch for Strongholds.

This new system was called Stronghold Battle 2.0. This was the shortest time ever in which Dawn launched a new Stronghold Battle patch, taking just under a week. The official channels were rushing out a 3.0 version. The current version wasn’t 1.0; it was already 1.5. They had gone through five minor updates.

The reason for so many was simple. This patch was simply a failure.

It could almost be called a bug. The defenders at that time suffered heavy losses. Almost half of the Strongholds changed ownership to a strong enemy they faced. The officials had no choice but to dejectedly rush to push out a new patch.

As one who was reborn, although Lu LI didn’t have the qualifications to join in, he had a very deep impression of that time.

As such, he would wait until that patch update before issuing a call to take the Winterspring Stronghold in his hands. Before this were to happen, all he needed to do was to accumulate power.

After this it was the Instance Dungeon. Lu Li didn’t actually plan to do all he could.

He let Sky Moon command because he knew that no matter what they did, they couldn’t defeat C’Thun.

If Sky Moon was able miraculously defeat C’Thun like he did with Ouro, then Lu Li would simply just hand over the position of commander to this guy.

They could only wait until the next cooldown before the System would update C’Thun and emasculate him, allowing everyone to finally defeat him. Lu Li also knew another way to make C’Thun easier; he would just reveal it next week.

As for the last Shadow Cup, they actually didn’t prepare well.

Everyone just tried their best and that was it.

This was the last large-scale competition of the level 60s. When the competition was almost over, the year would draw to its close. Hot on the heels of this was the level 70 cap and Dawn’s second role league match.