I Am the God of Games

The Follower System obviously wasn’t just a random idea Xi Wei had while stalking his believers.

In reality, he had already been mulling the idea over ever since he redesigned the Pantheon Computer.

Since most current frogmen were still believers of the Aquatic Lord, even if Xi Wei absorbed the divinity of the Aquatic Lord, as long as he didn’t inherit the god’s deific properties and divine order, he still wouldn’t be able to gain many followers from the frogmen.

Along the same line of thought, it would be difficult for him to give blessings to the frogmen too. Xi Wei couldn’t even show the full extent of his Divine Grace to the frogmen either.

To make a simple comparison, say the Path of Faith between Xi Wei and other players was 5G, and that various video clips, photos, and powers could be shared between them instantaneously, then the connection between him and the frogmen was basically dial-up internet, even a low-resolution image could take upwards for half an hour to load, and even then there were a high risk of an “Unable to load” error popping up.

Even though you couldn’t give Divine Grace purely through the Path of Faith, doing so without it would require extra Divine Power, and using that many resources on a normal frogman felt somewhat…wasteful.

So to more efficiently farm divine energy, Xi Wei decided to use his already existing believers, the players, to act as a halfway point.

As long as the frogmen swore their loyalty to any player, a contract would immediately be formed, the basic point of the contract was that their divine energy will be transferred from the “Aquatic Lord” over to that player’s main deity, the “God of Games”, for safekeeping.

The contract needed agreement from both parties involved, in this case that would be the “Aquatic Lord” and the “God of Games”.

The Divine Order of the Aquatic Lord was currently in Xi Wei’s control, so the contract would take effect immediately.

If it were this easy to gain the divine energy from the believers of other deities, this could lead many to the question of, “Does this mean all I have to do is defeat a small deity and create contracts to gain total control of their divine energy?”

The short answer, no.

This “loophole” was pretty difficult to exploit.

The first and most important factor to Xi Wei’s success was that there wasn’t any previous hostility between the Aquatic Lord and the God of Games, the two stood completely independent from each other in a silent agreement of peace, so the Aquatic Lord didn’t have time to react and retaliate when Xi Wei struck.

Next was the problem of having the frogmen “willingly” pledging their loyalty to Xi Wei’s believers, divine energy wasn’t something you could force out of someone, the true faith of an individual and their willingness to give it to you was of the utmost importance, without it there wouldn’t be any effect.

Lastly, Xi Wei attacked the Aquatic Lord at the perfect moment, right before his divinity’s ascension, if Xi Wei acquired god’s divinity later into that process, his targets may have already gained self-awareness, causing the contract to be unable to form. If he had attacked earlier and the god’s divinity hadn’t ascended to this level, they wouldn’t have been viewed by the contract as a proper “deity”, again rendering the contract useless.

It was under these series of coincidences and Xi Wei’s explicit use of a loophole that he was able to do an under the table job of acquiring divine energy from the frogmen.

The divine energy gained from the frogmen was used by Xi Wei to fully absorb the Aquatic Lord’s divinity, it was sort of like borrowing money from someone to buy a rope to strangle them with. In a way, Xi Wei did feel bad for the poor Aquatic Lord…

After the Follower System came online, players who participated in the Douseed Crusade event were quite intrigued, rushing to persuade a frogman to become their follower.

Although the frogmen were pretty weak in combat, occasionally losing to even the most basic Skeletons in solo combat, because they were similar to the Felynes in M*nster H*nter in the fact that they didn’t take up a party slot, players could use them as bait or meat shields during their raids, since they could be revived with a little bit of gold…

Plus, the frogmen were still pretty low-level, even Croakatoa was only at Level 5, who knows how strong they could become in the future?

Even Princess Leah, who, after regaining her rationality, hid in a corner in embarrassment and skipped the banquet, couldn’t help but run out to convince Croakatoa to become her follower after the system announcement was made.

She was pretty disappointed when she found out Croakatoa had already become Eleena’s follower.

So she changed her target to the village elder.

Do not underestimate the village elder of the frogmen with his rickety old bones. In reality, he had the highest damage out of all the frogmen during their last fight with the Society of the Secret Eye, swinging his walking stick around with the precision of a trained swordsman. You wouldn’t be able to tell from his usual frail appearance, but he could almost overtake a couple of low-level players.

After a long stretch of silence, the village elder told Leah that he had already been chosen by the gods to become the leader of the frogmen tribe. The princess could only hide her face as she turned away after receiving a daily quest from the Elder System that helped players farm reputation… To have a system like that under his control, it meant that he was an “overlord” recognized by the God of Games just like Angora and old man Vanke, Leah couldn’t just take one of his overlords away.

After the untiring diligence of players, they finally⁠—failed all of their attempts.⁠⁠

And after many failed attempts, players concluded two main issues.

The first was that they didn’t have enough reputation built up. The Reputation System had only just been implemented in the Frogmen Village, their relationship with players was only at the basic Friendly level, meeting the requirements to recruit as a follower. However, the only person who successfully did so was Eleena who was already at the level of Admiration among the frogmen, after all, she was viewed as a Saintess by the frogmen, her base reputation was off the charts…

So players thought that the higher your reputation, the higher your success rate of recruiting a follower.

The second problem was the language barrier, the already recruited Croakatoa and the unable to be recruited village elder were the only two frogmen who spoke Shumonian. The rest of the frogmen weren’t too intelligent, and without Croakatoa or the village elder acting as interpreters, even if players incorporated hand gestures and body language, it would only end as an unwinnable game of charades, neither party getting any point across.

When players went in to recruit, the frogmen not only ignored their requests, a bunch of them would gather around and watch in amusement as players made a fool of themselves.

If friendly fire had been enabled, it was certain that many players would have stormed the village in their frustration…

The solution to these two problems wasn’t difficult, in fact it was quite easy, it was all in two words…

Daily quests.

Prestige not high enough? A daily quest is just the thing you need!

Daily quests granted some prestige. If you do them long enough, you would end up at Admiration level for sure.

Language barrier? I’m sure the overlords still have a daily quest for you.

After you’ve built up enough reputation you’ll be able to unlock a special mission from the village elder, after that mission is completed you’ll receive a unique item called “The Frogmen Whisperer”, it’s a small necklace with a frog the size of your fingernail, equip that and you’ll be fluent in the frogmen’s language.

Basically, when players first read the system announcement, it felt like the benefits of followers were written all across the screen in tiny writing, but once they looked into the fine-print, the whole page was basically filled with “daily quests”.

Players who weren’t interested in participating in manual labor promptly backed off gaining a follower, the ones that remained were those that either didn’t think there was much difference in doing routine quests in the Frogmen Village and in the Unnamed Town or that were real die-hard fans of the frogmen tribe.