Experimental Log of the Crazy Lich

“What are you busy doing? The battle’s already begun, so why aren’t you going outside?”

The liches gathered their mana and summoned a thick blanket of dark clouds that blotted out the sun, while skeleton mages summoned a never-ending sea of skeletons. With a fierce intent to do battle, the infinite amount of cannon fodder arrived on the battlefield. The fighting had reached its peak…. Just joking!

Although the first part of all that was true, it wasn’t important.

The undead indeed began their battle against Oak Town. But strangely, they seemed to be highly unmotivated. The battling wasn’t fierce at all. High-level undead troop types like Abominations weren’t even sent out.

Even though it was quite a common tactic for undead mages to summon a sea of skeletons to overwhelm their enemy with the force of numbers, the sea of skeletons still needed a sufficient amount of supporting, powerful troops to be at its most effective. Only summoning weak skeletons and having them attack by themselves would be no different from giving their enemy free practice targets and experience.

The defending adventurers felt that it would be a waste to even use arrows against this pure sea of skeletons. It was enough to simply have the treants toss large boulders. A single boulder rolling downhill would act just like a bowling ball, sending shattered bones flying everywhere.

“How boring. That’s just nothing but testing our defenses. There’s nothing worth watching at all.”

There would be no possible result because both sides were still testing each other right now. All they were doing was wasting a minor amount of ammunition and losing a very low amount of lives.

“What are you doing? [The Adventurer Review System]? What is this?”

“I’m just adding a new patch to the ‘Contract Heroes’ system.”

“A patch? What kind of hellish idea have you come up with now?”

“Well, something that’s obtained too easily won’t be valued. And, if everyone is treated equally in the Contract Heroes System, it’s actually unfair to those who work the hardest and have the most accomplishments. So, I created this VIP level system, where the best ’employees’ will obtain even greater honors and levels in the system.”

I even started laughing out loud as I said this. It was precisely of that spy’s appearance, as well as the large mercenary groups and adventurers remaining on guard against each other, that helped me discover many insufficiencies about my Contract Heroes system.

“Why are you laughing so evilly? Honor? Are you such a nice person? Why do I feel like you’re going to make others suffer again?”

“No, I just recalled something funny. So what do you think of this level system I came up with?”

“One heart, two hearts, three hearts, one diamond, two diamonds… One crown, two crowns? What’s with all these designs? Hearts, diamonds, and crowns? Is there a connection between them?”

“It is something you wouldn’t understand, a representation of the greatest honor! It’s a label that represents how much money you’ve spent. Although in the end, many people started grinding and making fake accounts, in addition to those professional counterfeiters, rendering it completely unreliable… at the very least, it was quite reliable when it first appeared.”

Actually, what pictures were used for the designs was unimportant. Although I evilly plagiarized the designs used in a certain Chinese application [1] 1 , Contract Heroes indeed needed a clear level system that indicated their level of reliability.

In this world, mercenaries and adventurers didn’t have a clear level system. How mercenaries and adventurers got hired relied completely on their past reputations and personal connections. This was precisely why that empty shell of a mercenary group from before that lost all but a few of its members still had people fighting over succeeding its name. The reputation that it established over the past hundred years was the greatest wealth of all.

Establishing a credibility rating system for adventurers and mercenaries would require a neutral accreditation party that the public and all the countries trusted in. Previously, this would obviously be impossible in this generation where so many countries existed in opposition to each other.

The Mercenary Guild? Many mercenaries would treat the Mercenary Guild as a neutral intermediary which provided services for them. In fact, the Mercenary Guild would often help retired and injured mercenaries find new jobs, provide water and food for mercenaries, fix and maintain their weapons, enchant their equipment, provide job opportunities for current mercenaries, and other such services. But most of the time, the Mercenary Guild relied on the mercenaries themselves to support it. They lacked any forceful measures against the mercenaries themselves.

This was what the royalty of every country wished to see. Not a single country wanted to see the neutral Mercenary Guild have its own power and independence. Otherwise, the power the Mercenary Guild possessed would become dangerous to their interests.

“Absolutely neutral, and we focus on providing services to all mercenaries.” This could basically be the catchphrase of the Mercenary Guild.

The end result was that all Mercenary Guilds and mercenary alliances lacked credibility in the minds of most adventurers and mercenaries. There was also no way for countries to recognize the validity of Mercenary Guilds from other countries. If you mentioned a particular mercenary group or adventurer, the most you could describe them with was “Oh, they seem to be quite famous” or “He sounds like he’s pretty powerful.” Vague words like these, but they were obviously unconvincing and unreliable.

The lack of a very clear review system wasn’t good for either the employers or the employed. After all, potential employers would also be afraid that the bodyguards they spent so much money on hiring turned out to be bandits that attacked their own employer or a group of weaklings posing as the strong. The mercenary groups would also worry whether their employer would treat themselves as nothing more than expendable cannon fodder. This was why the hardest missions with the highest requirements could only be found through personal connections or privately notifying a Mercenary Guild. The oldest and most veteran mercenary groups would only become stronger and stronger, and newly-established mercenary groups would find it impossible to receive high-level jobs.

Without a doubt, this limited the ability of the average mercenary and adventurer to improve themselves. But if there was a completely reliable and trustworthy neutral party that assessed all the mercenaries and adventurers, the situation would be greatly improved. At the very least, a mercenary group with over ninety percent excellent reviews would definitely look a lot better than a mercenary group that had more than fifty percent negative reviews… why did I feel like I was turning my Contract Hero into Amazon.com?

Reviewing a mercenary’s personal strength as well as paying the mercenary would be connected to the level system I had in mind. For instance, a mercenary who had a level of double crowns, the highest level in my system, would mean that he had performed lots of tasks for his employers and had a large number of excellent reviews. Naturally, this mercenary would be able to charge higher prices for his services and could be considered a very trustworthy individual.

“And this isn’t only for mercenaries and adventurers. Just take a look at the battlefield. Don’t you feel that something’s wrong about the situation?”

“Nah, I’m not interested in children’s games like this battle.”

Fine then. Although I was just saying so, I had indeed noticed that something seemed off about the situation since I really did feel that these small-scale battles, which were only meant to test the enemy, were quite boring.

“In the past, for the most difficult of missions, multiple mercenary groups would team up together. Naturally, they didn’t particularly trust each other or know how each other worked. So either someone everyone agreed on would be voted as a temporary leader or all the leaders would work together in a temporary alliance. Perhaps this is sufficient for small-scale battles, but there are also obvious limitations to this. If this continues for the Contract Heroes, there will be quite a number of disadvantages.”

Indeed, as the Contract Heroes system expanded and the “Heroes” became stronger and more numerous, the individual Contract Heroes not tied to any organization would become more and more important. For example, this defensive battle at Oak Town was basically the first time the Contract Heroes acted as the main forces, but in the future, Contract Heroes would be appearing at much larger-scale battles, perhaps even at a national level. It seemed far too outdated and inefficient to continue using the same old leadership system from before. This current battle was exposing quite a number of problems.

“Just take a look at the warriors standing on the frontlines. While they’re accepting orders on the frontlines, they’re still turning around to look at people on the castle walls. They’re probably looking for their real bosses’ orders, instead. Also, all the archers are actually ‘kill stealing’ to try and obtain more Justice Points, which means that they’re focusing far too much to fire at targets worth a large amount of Justice Points. This is far too much of a waste of important ammunition. As long as ‘Contract Heroes’ remain like this, no matter how powerful they are, they’re still nothing more than a loose pile of sand.”

Not even mentioning the fact that the Heroes had spies amongst each other working for rival organizations, they lacked trust in each other. They were all proud individuals who weren’t willing to be others’ subordinates apart from those they recognized. How could they possibly trust in others’ commands? The moment they met a dangerous task, pushing responsibility onto others and blaming each other for failure was the most natural thing to do. On the battlefield, lacking an “absolute authority” was definitely damaging.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be that noticeable if the battle was going well, but the moment a battle started going poorly it would be easy for internal conflicts to arise and people to resist orders. Maybe even the entire battle would be lost or traitors would appear, all because the leaders lacked absolute authority or were filled with selfish intentions.

At the very least, currently, the most obvious problem was that there were far too many commanders. There were quite a few adventurers and mercenaries giving orders. But all these people wanted to be leaders, not to win the battle, but to have their own subordinates safely and reliably earn as many Justice Points as possible.

So, apart from personal honor in my planned level system, apart from being able to give reviews to ordinary warriors, certain special individuals could also receive titles such as “Top-level Commander” or “Professional Commander” and so on. This would make it more convenient for them to take charge, and it would even help us create some classic examples and heroes, giving us more control over people’s opinions of us.

But when I explained all this to Harloys, she had a different opinion from me.

“Why not just use a military title system, with sergeant, lieutenant, colonel, and other such titles? Wouldn’t that be a better and more direct system?”

I could only smile wryly at this. Although Harloys was incredibly talented in magic, she didn’t know much about politics. For some things, I just couldn’t rely on her.

“That would be far too sensitive of a topic. It would sound like we created a personal army. What would each country’s royalty and church think of that?”

Yep, I was certain that the moment we used military titles for our system, our Justice Points system would immediately be targeted as a threat by every single country.

“Tsk, humans are so troublesome. I’m going to go out and take a look.”

“Let me know if there are any changes in the situation. Have a few people keep a good eye on those high-level undead, especially the two living individuals in their camp.”

Harloys turned around and left, leaving me alone with my frustrations.

Creating a review system would directly relate to the credibility and future of our Justice Points system. I needed it to have an obvious level system in order to make it more convenient to establish leaders that everyone would follow, yet I also couldn’t make it too rigid of a system that would make the various countries in this world sense danger. The more I thought about it, the more troublesome I felt it would be.

“Hmm, should I add in a ‘Thumbs-up’ system? A person can increase in level with thirty-two thumbs-ups. Or, after receiving some set amount of thumbs-ups, they’ll receive an official title… Wait a moment, there will always be things I can’t predict—I need to also think of a way to preemptively prevent career negative reviewer trolls from appearing!”

Note:

[1] TL/N: Taobao, China’s version of Amazon.