Thirty-nine days had passed since the servers launched.
Qi Sheng compiled information on the players' current average level, mainstream Star Meridian combinations, and daily sacrificial power production.
While gathering information on trending Forum topics, he discovered something that left him unsure whether to laugh or cry.
As the game developed, all sorts of new builds kept emerging.
But these builds all involved different combinations of life souls, socketing different life souls into Star Meridians,
then using their primary forms to unleash the combinations' traits.
Only three builds had developed outside the game's established framework.
Forum players jokingly called them the Three Great Demon Cults.
First among them was the Apocalypse Technology Guild, also known among Forum players as the Arms Dealer Guild.
Players who joined this guild generally avoided the hunting-based progression route, focusing entirely on developing and upgrading weapons, as well as making money.
Guild members routinely advertised weapons for sale in popular threads. They were also one of the player factions that earned the most sacrificial power in the game, with customers across all the major guilds and even many solo players. Their recent growth had been tremendous, and they released more powerful new products every so often.
Because they went against mainstream gameplay, the Arms Dealer Guild was called a "demonic cult faction."
Second was the newly formed guild, Gene Ascension.
This guild had been founded by Yu Ze, a player Qi Sheng had recruited half a month earlier using an extra slot. Its members were all researchers from the Genetic Modification Department.
A post about Genetic Seed had thrust this group into the spotlight.
With rapid technological advances, Genetic Seed now caused somewhat less damage to the human body, while the body tempering experience gained from enhancement had increased significantly.
However, the problem of excessive pain