Loser System and Berserker Me

Chapter 174: Clearing Mobs

The terracotta soldiers trudged through the Tibetan Plateau like a mudslide. The towering cliffs, the treacherous paths, and the thin mana couldn’t stop their footsteps.

But they couldn’t find a single living enemy.

After taking down Great and Little Patola, emulating Gao Xianzhi’s historical feat, Shu Yichao thought that since he had nothing better to do, he might as well attack a couple of Tibetan towns to unwind a little.

But after taking down a few towns, he found that there were no other targets.

Someone had struck faster than him.

Just as Miazova had guessed, the Tibetan army was clearing settlements on the Tibetan Plateau under the Tsenpo’s orders. They could hardly believe it when they first received the orders, as such opportunities to make a fortune were hard to come by.

Clearing away wild camps—yes yes, we all get it.

Kill everything, burn down all the houses, and steal all their fortunes. We can do whatever we want, no holds barred.

The higher-ups would usually stop them from plundering from the people, but this time, it was said that the Tsenpo herself had ordered it. To be honest, it sounded too good to be true.

The Tibetan soldiers were stunned, but they quickly cheered in frenzied joy. They hurriedly gathered their comrades together to chop down bewildered Tibetan nomads.

Admittedly, it is different from the Tsenpo’s order of ‘migrating the people and the livestock’, but the primary aim is to clear away the wild settlements, right? By that standard, we have achieved resounding success!

So, Shu Yichao and Miazova only saw bloodshed wherever they went.

“Wow, where did this Pol Pot pop out from?” Shu Yichao was rendered speechless.

He’s even more vicious than me.

A normal necromancer would have been overjoyed to stumble upon so many corpses without making a move themselves. It was like Jack was a son of Pol Pot—jackpot.

But Shu Yichao was not a normal necromancer, or rather, Beacons of the Otherworld was a weird game with baffling mechanics.

An undead player’s Soul Summoning, theoretically speaking, reanimated corpses and turned them into allied undead troops, but which game would take the trouble to generate corpses for its players?

Not to mention that the corpses needed to be regularly cleared lest their sprites lag the game!

To make their lives easier, the developers conveniently declared that undead players could only reanimate units that they had killed. The Soul Summoning talent was intended to be primarily used in battle anyway.

These mechanics led to rather ridiculous dynamics.

Beacons of the Otherworld had a campaign, where players played a necromancer scouring for dead bodies to expand their army. Due to the game classifying undead units as living units, some of the clumsier players ended up getting chased all around the map by so-called corpses.

Of course, the developers turned a blind eye to the players’ retort as usual.

Soon, the players began to exploit this unique mechanic.

Shu Yichao still remembered the day now known as the ‘Ghostslaying Festival’.

The Ghost King, a fervent undead player who had claimed many champion trophies under his belt by then, encountered a little-known newcomer in a competition.

Before the game, the official prediction was that the Ghost King had a 99.87% chance of winning. He was an unstoppable force who had cast his Eternal Blight over multiple major competitions, so no one thought this game would have been any different.

The crowd was about to be taken by surprise.

The newcomer, instead of developing his base, sent out troops right from the start to hunt down units. He slayed everything in his path, leaving rivers of blood in his wake.

The Ghost King was caught off guard. He could neither gather enough living beings to develop his city nor reanimate enough skeleton troops to deal with the enemy.

In the end, the newcomer won 3:0.

Everyone realized that this was a viable tactic too.

That marked the inception of an interesting phase in Beacons of the Otherworld. The holy faction started going around massacring innocent people, whereas the undead faction was the one who went around saving others.

So, Tsenpo Ling’s ‘map clearing’ tactic unexpectedly stopped Shu Yichao from snowballing on the Tibetan Plateau.

“I won’t be able to push further,” Shu Yichao murmured.

If he couldn’t summon enough troops on the frontlines, his only other option was to mobilize troops from the back lines. The problem was that his terracotta soldiers only had a week’s lifespan, or else the unaffordable maintenance fee would fall like the Sword of Damocles.

Even if he matched all his terracotta soldiers with steeds, he wouldn’t be able to venture deep into the enemy’s territory within a week, not to mention most of the time would be squandered on traveling.

“Time to retreat. I won’t be able to topple the enemy here, so I should strike somewhere else.”

So, Shu Yichao had no choice but to release his troops before the week was up and look for a closer target to strike. With a tap, his humongous army of terracotta soldiers vanished without a trace.

“Let me see who else is there… If I’m heading toward Dayuan—eh? What are those red dots? Why are there so many of them?”

Shu Yichao was baffled to see the sea of red dots at the foot of Tianshan.

“Who cares who they are? They are delivering charcoal in the middle of a snowstorm.”

…

At Kunlun’s Iron Gate Pass…

“Eh? They v-vanished?” a pale-faced, red-eyed Tibetan soldier murmured in disbelief. “They vanished! They really vanished!”

All the skull-faced terracotta soldiers had disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Utmost relief surged through Tibetan soldier’s heart. He dropped to the floor and started bawling his heart out.

“It’s finally over! We can finally rest now!”

Cries could be heard within the Iron Gate Pass.

It had been so difficult. They had never thought that it would have been such a difficult battle at the Iron Gate Pass, even with the aid of an archmage.

There had been no end of the terracotta soldiers, and their attacks had been ceaseless. Regardless of day and night, they just kept coming!

The Tibetan soldiers could only grit their teeth and hold on. It didn’t take them long to deplete their arrows, rolling logs, and boulders. Their spears and swords swiftly wore out too. Food and medicine were being depleted at an incredible speed.

Other than the short breaks they had to eat and rest, the Tibetan soldiers spent all their time fighting on the battlefields. It reached a point where many soldiers reflexively marched to the city walls like a zombie upon hearing the whistle, and they would groggily swing their weapons.

It had been so tiring. This high-intensity labor wrecked their bodies.

Big-sized and brawny Tibetan hunks had been reduced to sacks of bones. Some soldiers fell asleep right after their shifts and never woke up again. There were even soldiers while fighting, suddenly fell as still as a statue—death by exhaustion.

Cries of soldiers echoed from the Iron Gate Pass.

Even the lofty Archmage of Holysnow felt relieved at having survived the ordeal. Others couldn’t see his complexion under his veil, but the legendary archmage was as pale as a sheet of paper.

Hu!

Taking a deep exhalation, the Archmage of Holysnow shakily retrieved a potion bottle, wanting to take a sip. Yet, no matter how he tried, the sharp headache he was suffering from prevented him from lifting it to his mouth.

Fortunately, the little snowmen he raised helped him, thus sparing the archmage from laughable rumors that he was suffering from an aneurysm and couldn’t even drink a potion.

“What a calamity.” The Archmage of Holysnow shook his head. He wanted to close his eyes right away and sleep for three days straight. “It should be over now.”

He fervently prayed that was the case, but he knew that was unlikely. Who knew when the next wave of terracotta soldiers would arrive?

“When will reinforcements arrive?”

The exhausted archmage heaved a sigh. At this rate, he might become the first archmage in the world to die from exhaustion.

Just then, the earth began shaking again.

“…”