(Heartfelt thanks to 'Xin Yi Sui', 'GS Chaoshi', 'Nicholas Caesar', 'Fei Ye | Sleepless City', '2B Descends', 'Mo Yu Linshang', and 'Invincible Origin' for their rewards!)
Gentle sunlight poured down from the horizon, illuminating the seemingly endless plains and dyeing the earth with a dazzling golden hue.
At a certain moment, a group of riders quietly appeared at the edge of those plains.
They wore completely mismatched equipment. Rather than a single group, they looked more like several separate parties forcibly gathered together for a joint operation.
There were roughly two hundred of them.
And almost all of them were men.
Yet they all shared one thing in common.
Around their necks hung metal plates.
Some wore metal plates made of silver.
Some wore metal plates made of gold.
Some even wore precious platinum plates, which gleamed brilliantly beneath the sunlight.
In this world, there was only one kind of human who wore metal plates like these.
Adventurers.
Every rider galloping in from the edge of the plains was an adventurer.
Moreover, they were all at least Silver-ranked adventurers.
Among this group of Silver-ranked adventurers, there were also Gold-ranked adventurers and even Platinum-ranked ones.
It was an extremely rare sight.
After all, it was generally believed that, whether in the Kingdom, the Empire, or the Theocracy, adventurers ranked Platinum and above made up only around twenty percent of a nation's adventurers.
In the Kingdom, there were approximately three thousand adventurers.
By that ratio, there were only around six hundred Platinum-ranked adventurers and above in the Kingdom.
Put that way, perhaps it did not fully convey just how precious Platinum-ranked adventurers were.
But compared with the population of the entire Kingdom, it became much clearer.
The Kingdom's total population was estimated to exceed eight million.
Among those eight million people, there