Chapter 761: The Wretched Crown

King Baal was quite disgruntled watching how his troops were failing so terribly. It appeared they had not taken heed of the previous mistakes the Lords and Ladies had made beforehand.

Yet, Baal refused to believe that with their number superiority, this situation wouldn’t change. This had always been the way they fought, so as always it was only a matter of time until the defenders would exhaust their resources and their manpower. Archduke Kiva concurred with that particular line of thought, yet Prince Stolas would beg to differ.

“If Moloch has managed to build all these high-end technological gadgets and weapons, he surely must have a way to reproduce them again. Considering the sheer scale of everything, I can only theorise that as long as he has the manpower, his technological edge will definitely pull him through this protracted war.” Stolas thought to himself and felt restless.

For some reason, he was beginning to put his hopes into Moloch initiating the counterattack rather than merely holding the defence line. Alas, from a strategic point of view, it was rather evident that this would only bring further losses for him.

How was Stolas supposed to know that on the defenders’ side, this was actually the most productive dungeon raid ever for the defenders? Jin had already earnt close to 500,000 Yuan in a single day, the highest profit he had ever made from just customers alone.

Though the sales were extraordinarily high, it was mainly because the cultivators were doing repeat runs at discounted prices throughout the day to rake up their points so that they could get better prizes.

Not only that, their purchases from the online Pandamonium store were numerous despite Pandarens knowing that it was expensive. That convenience they enjoyed through paying the extra money was undisputable. Let’s not forget that the offline stores were bringing in money as the Pandarens stocked themselves up with weapons, armour, potions and other accessories for the next run.

Also, the Tree Mall itself was earning a ton lot as a whole because of Jin’s current dungeon event. Every shop owner was pitching in to promote Jin’s dungeon instance and telling their customers that if they bought a dungeon ticket, certain discounts to their shops would be available.

It was the same for Jin’s store too as Yun had a list of promos for the customers who had purchased items from the Tree Mall too.

This did create a slew of new customers just to test out the dungeon event that everyone was talking about even though it inadvertently placed a strain on the System’s processing capability.

The System had also captured so many demon soldiers that it needed to reorganise its spatial ‘inventory space’ to keep all those soldiers for processing. If not for the Phantom Soldiers which the Graveyard Core created, it was possible that the System might have an overflow of demons which needed to be sold immediately for the sorely needed space.

Of course, it did inform Jin about the numbers and the Dungeon Supplier was already choosing which demon soldiers to use for conversion by the Graveyard Core, waiting for the right opportunity to mount a second counterattack to temporarily reduce the numbers in the System and the battlefield. It was all part of Qiu Yue’s plan in case the battle got dragged way longer than expected.

It was plainly obvious that sheer brute force was not going to work when Jin’s tacticians had already thought of all the various scenarios to counter most of the brute force tactics that King Baal and his other generals were keen to use. However, there was one thing that Moloch feared despite all the planning, and that was actually Archduke Kiva.

After the dogfight between the Wyvern Goblin Knights and the Bat Bottleflies, Moloch was somewhat concerned that the cunning Archduke was going to throw similar platoons out in the field.

Of course, he was confident that Jin’s monsters were more than capable of winning against them, but at what cost?

Also, there was the issue of King Baal’s high-grade artefact, which Archduke Kiva had ‘made’ for him. It was also one of the reasons why Moloch had been demoted into a useless lord, covering a dungeon cave that held onto some crappy quality gold ore.

It was the Crown of Beyond Depravity.

The one and only artefact which was created using leftover defunct dungeon cores via some forbidden magical technique. Such a method which even the Church of Afterlife was adamantly condemned publicly about.

However, King Baal had not been using its powers at all as ‘humbly’ suggested by Kiva since it would create suspicions and might cause the elite agents from the Church of Afterlife to come after him.

Yet King Baal requested for such an artefact to be made solely because of the Harbinger threat as he had never forgotten how it had taken away his parents as well as the lives of uncountable others. Still, it was not until Kiva introduced his family’s sacred jewel to complete the crown, making the person who used it, turn into a power-hungry tyrant.

Not many people could handle the ‘completed’ Crown of Beyond Depravity and for good reason. Those cores had once been the property of other owners, and most of the dungeon cores had been robbed through severe bloodshed.

By not going through the proper method of requisitioning the dungeon cores, those metal balls were haunted by the souls imbued by the previous owners. Without Kiva’s family jewel to act as a conduit between the souls and the wearer, it merely acted as an attribute increasing artefact.

The user who wore the crown literally had to pass a ‘sanity’ check each and every day to assert control on the artefact. Even when Kiva first modified the enhanced Crown of Beyond Depravity, he had troubles controlling it and nearly lost his life permanently from attempting to use its powers as the voices kept telling him to kill himself to appease their grief.

At the time Kiva had actually considered it to be a good way to kill the reigning King and also designed an overtly ridiculous excuse to make him sign a complicated invoice, but in actual fact, it was a contract disguised with a lot of hidden clauses.

Stating vaguely that if King Baal was ever gone, Kiva would take over the Demon Metropolis and Moloch who at the time had been one of the few advisors King Baal actually trusted had managed to notice it.

Unfortunately, it had been a little too late. As when the Minotaur Lord entered the royal chamber, King Baal had already donned the crown before Moloch ever had the chance to caution him against it.

The powers the crown granted immediately captivated Baal’s attention, and he treated Moloch’s advice as a sign of jealousy. The yearning for strength had made Baal go for a series of reckless conquests and slowly it caused the once logical and fair tempered King to turn for the worse.

Eventually, Moloch saw no other choice but to steal the Crown of Beyond Depravity. He devised a devious plan, hoping that his King would wake up from that unending nightmarish journey for power once it was gone.

Unfortunately, the Minotaur Lord was unaware that the crown had grown into a living parasite, calling out for its master when Moloch thought that he had successfully tricked Baal into releasing the artefact.

And guess where it happened? At the max security prison which Moloch designed specifically to steal the crown away.

Moloch thought that the highly dangerous prisoners he released would have an effect against King Baal, but he later found out that the crown still transmitted power to its master. In a series of unfortunate events, it allowed King Baal to catch Moloch red-handed running away with the crown.

Ironically Archduke Kiva took the chance to remove the most scheming and yet loyal advisor, branding him a traitor for wanting the crown to himself.

The only saving grace was that King Baal’s heart was not yet fully corrupted by the Ravenous Lord of Hunger. He was lenient enough to transform and demote Moloch for his act of treason. However, with Moloch out of the picture and forbidden from ever leaving his dungeon, Kiva took the time to pour ideas and deceitful words of hatred in hopes of removing Moloch permanently.

For he knew that the cotton minotaur would one day rise and wake his King up from the bad dream.