The citizens of the Theocracy and the foreign NPCs believed that Sailesi was dead, but the Soul Returner certainly did not.
Ed had no intention of hiding it from them, so he used his official alternate account to upload information about the two major villains, Sailesi and Samuer, to the official website.
To ensure secrecy, he also bribed Nuowa to have the Elf King revise the Elf's Dream again, adding another layer of secrecy to the information about the two.
Not to mention that Nuowa has taken on two orders in a row and her complexion looks visibly better, Ed, after hearing Sailesi's statement, also felt a great weight lifted off his shoulders.
With the final Territory Secret Pact now fully digested, the territory of the Holy Tree Worship Church Theocracy now completely overlaps with the coverage area of Ed's Root Network.
This new nation not only inherited the original territory of the Theocracy in its entirety, but also expanded upon it.
While the large-scale, long-term missions are underway, many side missions are also progressing simultaneously.
Players skilled at finding hidden quests are now either engrossed in the Records Office or heading south to the Empire to search for clues.
Meanwhile, in the Wilderness of Chaos, a large number of players are expanding their territory day after day, bringing unclaimed pieces of Wilderness of Chaos into the hands of the Second Holy See.
With such a vast root system, Ed naturally conducted numerous checks, and the result was that Sailesi and Samuer had indeed run away, and there was no trace of the two of them within his root system.
Now that Sailesi has issued a statement, Ed has essentially confirmed his previous speculation.
What made his mouth twitch was that there seemed to be an error in Sailesi's statements: the names were misspelled.
It wasn't Ed Adrian who did those things, but Sailesi Richter.
It's just that no one can imagine something they haven't done. If Sailesi had made a statement in his condemnation like " Ed borrowing power from another world is like drinking poison to quench thirst," Ed might have admired his intelligence.
But now, this statement, which is simply a renaming of one's own misdeeds, makes Ed feel a bit intellectually challenged.
Learning how to conduct public opinion campaigns was a lesson Sailesi learned from the widely circulated fan fiction collection, "The Untold Stories of Sailesi and Antiya Lisi."
But the way things have turned out can only mean either that Sailesi is getting old and his mind isn't working properly, or that the statement didn't come from him at all, but from the higher-ups of the Skeleton Alliance who wanted to gain legitimacy for the war.
Having confirmed this, Ed began to formulate the next steps.
With a large-scale, long-running quest just concluded, as is customary, some buffer content needs to be released to allow players to recharge.
As for the main storyline of the next stage, he had already thought it through: now that the Theocracy has been unified, it is time to carry forward the fine traditions of the other world and continue to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.
The two southern countries are quite good, as both the Soul Returner and the Elf King have something in mind, Ed is naturally happy to create chaos within the Skeleton Alliance and the Starlight Empire.
However, Ed had his own plans during this buffer period.
He turned his gaze to the east of the Theocracy, where the lower half of the Wilderness of Chaos had been largely purified, and the Sea of Flowers had become part of the Theocracy.
However, the upper half of this strip-shaped region, with Klaf City as the boundary, has not yet shown significant changes.
As the first force to establish friendly relations with him, Ed felt he needed to give the Graycast Corridor a small reward...
Soon after, an event with a lower priority than large-scale long-term quests appeared in players' quest logs:
Special Mission: Wilderness Big Cousin
In the year 909 of the Royal Calendar, the era of chaos, disorder, and natural Calamity came to an end, and the world gradually returned to order, with only a few Calamity and calamities remaining...
Task content:
1. [Reclamation]: Obtain Stability Anchor and begin exploring the Wilderness of Chaos north of Klaf City, continuing to expand our territory.
2. [Guardian]: Protect the trade route between the Theocracy and the Graycast Corridor, using the Stability Anchor to ward off Calamity and unfriendly nomadic tribes.
3. [Prevention]: After the complete transformation of the Wilderness of Chaos, the Theocracy will officially border the Eternal Domain. Faced with this unfriendly force, we need to reserve a buffer zone and build fortresses near the border to prevent possible interference from the other side.
Recommended ratings: [Pioneering] 5+, [Escort] 10+, [Prevention] 15+.
Task Rewards:...]
As soon as Ed issued the mission, some players were quickly mobilized, but the number was not large.
Ed could easily guess the reason: this mission was only of a second-tier scale, and its appeal to players was certainly not as strong as that of large-scale, long-term missions.
Besides, after playing " World of Disorder " for so long, who doesn't have a dozen or twenty unfinished quests saved up in their quest log?
Furthermore, various rumors circulating among players suggest that the main event will take place in the south, so many players are waiting for the Empire and Skeleton Alliance storyline to begin and are therefore unwilling to go to the Wilderness of Chaos.
But while some people don't want to go, others do. This quest quickly became the most recommended quest for players below level 10, not only because the rewards were generous, but also because it allowed them to experience the exotic atmosphere of the Graycast Corridor.
Even though the proportion of players accepting the mission is not high, the number is still more than enough.
Currently, the number of players of " World of Disorder " has exceeded 500,000 and is slowly approaching the million mark. Many people are wondering why the game is still being marketed as an internal test at this point.
But that's no longer important, because in terms of both completeness and operability, " World of Disorder " is already a groundbreaking work.
For a game like this, distinguishing between closed beta and open beta doesn't seem to be that crucial.
As for the players themselves, they can be roughly divided into four categories based on their social identities: students, office workers, researchers, and regular soldiers.
Ed, with his superior computing power, is currently trying to make the distribution of players and NPCs within the Theocracy more even through subtle task adjustments, finding a player-NPC population ratio that can make life better for the locals without affecting the players' gaming experience.
Because of the rapid expansion of his territory, Ed now has an increasing number of experimental samples.
Besides guiding players to allocate the number themselves, there is actually another very good method that can be used, and that is... immigration.
It's time for other factions to experience the benefits of the Soul Returner.