In hindsight, calling the fight at the sky bridge, a battle against the humans and demons would be a gross understatement. The attrition for the sky bridge between demon armies and cultivators would eventually become a lesson to remember for future demon history books as both parties were held in this major chokehold point.
Jin had never expected it to last for more than an hour, let alone four. Initially, the cultivators were holding their ground until more demon reinforcements appeared from the safe zone and marched quickly towards the sky bridge. And when larger sized monsters emerged from the Demon Metropolis similar to the Horned Armoured Knights, the cultivators had to fall back for the Orc Artillery Company and the Royal Snake Mortar Squads to lay a barrage in order to allow for some breathing space.
Even a ten-second break had become precious to the cultivators.
While Jin felt it was oddly weird that Qiu Yue had yet to ask any of his other monsters like the Orcs to come out and help the cultivators, he realised why the Empire Building Sub System User must have done so after pondering over it for a minute or two.
The sky bridge could only hold so many defenders against the seemingly never-ending invaders. Thus, Qiu Yue felt it was vital to use the cultivators first while the hype for this battle was still present and the morale, as well as the general situation, was on their side.
As much as the cultivators might enjoy this new kind of sensation, it was ultimately a dungeon run to them. Admittedly it was more realistic than anything else they had ever experienced, but they still would have to continue with their life once their revivals ran out. (Jin was naturally hoping they would buy more, but his cultivators’ money wasn’t infinite.) Therefore it was a wise decision for the Red Panda Cultivator to delay sending out their own monsters to reinforce the defence line.
Qiu Yue could have assembled ‘flash strike’ teams to interrupt the stream of invaders coming in, but the effect would be minuscule in the grand scheme of the whole battle and potentially waste the cultivator’s money because each teleport cost money to enter.
After all, they had to somehow make a profit to regain the losses from overconsumption of resources in building these defences, the fortress city and subsequently the resurrection of the monsters in the future.
Thus, Moloch and Qiu Yue agreed to activate Lord Wolte’s broken graveyard dungeon core to summon the phantom soldiers from the dead. The only problem with this method was that the System would then be unable to capture them as its own. The dungeon core would utilise the dead bodies and convert them into souls.
Basically, the System would be left with a batch of souls instead of proper foot soldiers and demons in its arsenal. (And the demon army would be resurrected as per normal back to their respective churches. Its was a weird out of the loop rule which the System was unable to overwrite.)
Yet, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Despite how ‘almighty’ the System appeared to be, it was far from its past peak performance, and it did have its limits. For example, it could not possibly hold that many demon soldiers without suffering any consequences.
While it was true that the System wished to hoard every single soldier for Jin’s future use like the retrieval of the Mecha Brain or the fight to recapture the Northern Region in the Farming World, it had to act rationally. Thus it had used a strict selection method about which monster to keep with its ‘limited’ capacity by highlighting to Qiu Yue the types of monsters to be converted into Phantom Soldiers.
Although this would not be such an issue if Jin were to be more decisive and use the monster merger function, the System respected its user’s choice upon seeing the current results of his monsters. Nevertheless, it continued to influence him to give it a try every once in a while.
——
The demon army suddenly faced an attrition battle at the sky bridge and also surprise ambushes from the phantoms of the fallen soldiers who charged into their own flanks. It startled the soldiers fighting against their own kind, yet this bought precious time for the defending frontline.
The cultivators felt the intensity on varying levels. Most enjoyed this particular raid scene a lot, and since this was supposed to be a one-time event, they decided to buy a few more tickets to continue. Of course, Jin wouldn’t just sit there doing nothing.
He had to make some immediate changes on the spot to entice the public to buy as many as possible of these tickets. He had to find a delicate balance between earning some cash to make up for the one they used for the defences and not overcharging his customers since they badly needed them to continue the fight.
In the end, he chose to offer substantial discounts to returning customers in a discrete way after seeing how fierce the fighting was on the bridge. Upon spending two hundred over Yuan, Jin had programmed the System to give out a ‘secret’ individual discount code to their Pandamonium app’s inbox allowing them to buy their tickets by using the promo codes. And this repeated with every 100 Yuan spent, hopefully ensuring he could aggressively promote the current dungeon raid.
However, he did not know there were other forces at work, aiding him directly for this particular event. Ever since the emergence of the Tree Mall, a number of dungeon supplier reviewers had been keeping an eye on Jin wishing to see for themselves what kind of dungeons he produced.
Thus, with Jin hyping this event so hard for the past few days, those reviewers had decided to enter on their own accord to experience if the raid was living up to the hype.
Even though it was not uncommon for dungeon suppliers to ‘buy’ or be sponsored a review, Jin’s store was different. He rejected every single ‘influencer’ who wanted a free pass to see the dungeons since he claimed that his dungeons were already cheap enough for them to review and worth every penny.
Some threatened with a negative review, but Jin shrugged them off at every encounter and even challenged them to write badly (A certain fox was quick witted enough to send a few anonymous emails containing undeniable data about their person. The message seemed to be clear enough to know not to mess with Jin.)
So, to this date, reviewers who came to visit only had praises for Jin and these new arrivals were not an exception. The battle on the sky bridge had been so intense that the dungeon reviewers could not help praising them in their Meibo and blogs despite their defeat. Some even daringly made Tock Tik videos during the dungeon scenes, writing hashtags to talk about their experience in Jin’s dungeon raid and it raised the level of awareness that this particular raid was a limited event.
In addition, Kraft was smart enough to anticipate all these things. He had asked Kiyu to send their own snippets of the battle to the dungeon supplier reviewers who had written a positive post for no charge and allowed them to do whatever they wanted with it.
Ultimately, Jin and his colleagues were not expecting this rise in numbers in the short run, but the reality was quite the opposite. By the end of lunchtime, the System detected a drastic increase of first-time customers coming to check out this limited time defence raid since it was suddenly trending in the region’s social media for quite a bit.
Jin could not believe that the drastic increase of customers was due to the effects of his sideline promotions and wondered if there were other forces behind the scenes working to push his promotion hard. Was it the Tigers? The Snakes? or maybe even the Tiger Triad whose leader was undoubtedly capable with computers.
Whatever the case, it would have to wait for another time to reflect over it. Right now, they needed to concentrate on the current situation as battle reports were coming in that the cultivators managed to recapture and push the demon armies away from the middle of the sky bridge thanks to the increased participation of the new blood.
