Dual World Apocalypse: My Harem Gives Me 10x Rewards

Adrian needed blood, and he had two ways to get it. First, kill the creatures, drag their corpses to the egg, and salvage them on top of the egg. That way, the egg could absorb all the blood it needed.

The second method was the rational one. Make Sera focus on making pottery utensils, and then use them to store blood. As usual, there was a problem with that.

Air drying the pots wasn’t going too well. However, now they had the lava ridge. Maybe it could help Sera.

Just like that, he sent Sera a text to stop doing anything she was doing and just focus on making pots with the help of lava.

Was it an over-the-top idea? Definitely.

Will it work? No idea.

But for Adrian, it was better than using a method that they knew had a high probability of failure. It would require some trial and error, so Adrian would have to keep salvaging corpses inside the lava ridge.

With everything in the settlement taken care of for the moment, Adrian returned to the surface. Compared to the hot air inside, the outside felt like he had stepped into a room blasted with air conditioning.

"Should I go looking for that boar in the orchard?" he mumbled, looking at the sun.

The blob of fire had already begun its descent. It seemed the day was going to be over sooner than he expected.

In the end, he opened the chat channel once again. Only to see that the number of players in the region had dwindled drastically.

"Roughly seventy-four thousand players remain," he murmured. "That’s... a lot worse than I thought it would be."

With that thought, he opened his missions tab. Currently, he only had one task.

xxx

Type: Advancement Quest

Name: Evolution

Task:

⬦ Slay 3 alpha-grade beasts. (1/3 beasts slain)

⬦ Expand your tribe. (9/10 tribe members recruited)

⬦ Recruit one non-human, humanoid being into the tribe. (1/1)

⬦ Defend your settlement from enemy attacks. (3/5)

Reward: Tier-2 Advancement

xxx

"Just need to recruit one more person in the tribe, and another task would be done," he nodded. "If possible, I want to complete this task before leaving, but it seems I’ll have to wait for a while."

Still, he wanted to recruit someone to tame his OCD a bit. So, he opened the ranking list to see if someone high up required assistance.

As long as they did, he could find a way to rescue them and get that annoying task over with. However, when he opened the rankings, a surprise was waiting for him.

"Why are these names greyed out?"

Although he asked it, deep down he knew the answer. The players with grey names were dead. It only surprised him for a moment until he remembered the attack on the settlement.

The birds attacked the settlement because an aerial attack was the settlement’s weakness. The only reason they managed to survive was because of the recruitment cards he used moments before the attack.

The system could not have adjusted its strategy in time, and hence, they won. It could be attributed to the fact that he got lucky. If he hadn’t gotten lucky, he wouldn’t have met with Nysa, nor would he have accepted her offer. Then he wouldn’t have gotten the card to recruit Root either.

In short, he would have been screwed.

Others, no matter how high up the rank they were, did not have Hannah’s luck by their side. If they were attacked based on their shelter’s weakness, it made sense for so many of them to have died.

He wasn’t the only one who had noticed it either. New names had popped up in the chat to point out the obvious to everyone.

"It makes sense. In the previous days, as long as one didn’t go too far from the shelter, they wouldn’t encounter monsters. Now, it’s the monsters that come invading your place."

Other than those comments, some people were also leaving their wills behind in the chat. As if anyone from there would make it back to their world alive... with the exception of Adrian, that is.

Apart from all that, Adrian was wondering how the alliance was holding up. They had so many members, which meant the monsters attacking them would also be more than the rest.

The strategy of people joining numbers for strength would have spectacularly fired back at them. Yet, there were no messages in the regional chat regarding them.

It made Adrian wonder if they were even real or not.

While he was thinking that, an announcement was made.

[Global System Announcement]

[Players can now willingly offer Enslavement Contracts or Partnership Contracts through the private message feature.]

[Once both parties sign the contract, they will be able to freely travel between each other’s bases using a special card that they will receive free of cost from our side.]

[This feature is designed to encourage cooperation and alliance building in the coming days.]

[Player can also use the new declaration page to seek contracts by mentioning their desired terms.]

The message was worded beautifully. However, the intention behind it was clear. At the rate the numbers were falling, it won’t take long before less than ten percent of the original number remains.

If that happened, the game might stop being fun, and this ’cooperation’ boost was a strategy to mitigate that. But that wasn’t the part that made Adrian frown.

"Great... just great," he muttered. "Now anyone can do what Hannah does with her crystals. Sure, they can only move between two bases, unlike with Hannah’s crystal, which could take them to any location."

He felt slightly slighted. The teleportation crystals had felt like a special advantage for his settlement.

Now, with this new system feature, other players could form contracts and move between bases just as easily. It took away some of the uniqueness his settlement had to offer.

Still, he knew it wasn’t the end of the world. Hannah’s crystals were still much better than any method the system would give the others.

Adrian did not have much time to worry about his ’disadvantage’, as a few moments later, his inbox exploded with notifications. Before he knew it, the message stopped loading, and a 99+ icon appeared right on top of the messaging section.

Since he was one of the region’s top tankers, they naturally wanted to sign a contract with him.

Suddenly, he was being offered all sorts of things. From favors required entanglement of two people to one-sided ownership favoring him.

To make things even worse, both men and women were ready to abandon their ’pride’ just to be protected.

"I wasn’t planning on making a declaration, but at this rate, I have to just to make them stop spamming me with messages!"

He made the declaration as absurd as possible. The first requirement was that only women could apply to join his tribe. The second was that she should be a virgin and wasn’t entangled with men. The last condition was regarding their age, which he set at twenty-five.

Why the last condition? Because he wanted to turn away as many people as possible.

He didn’t do it because he couldn’t tolerate another man’s presence in the tribe, but because he knew that after seeing his message, most men wouldn’t want anything to do with him.

It would be the same for the women too, but he had underestimated their desire to live because the second his recruitment declaration went live, all hell broke loose, and the chat was flooded with messages,

"...damn it."

***

Author’s note: I’m attaching the updated settlement layout here.