After the alliance left, Baron and his team heaved a heavy sigh of relief. If it had not been for Li Guang, who knows if they would have made it out of that situation? They spent some much needed time to look after the wounded soldiers, repair anything that needed it, and strategized once again for the future. It turns out that the alliance would immediately start conquering as soon as they left. In doing so, they acquired much more land than they had previously had and left Baron alone for the time being.

Not long after, Baron, Guang Yu, and Yue Fei would start their very own conquests in the opposite direction to where the alliance was heading, not because they were avoiding them, but because they would be butting heads if they did so. Which would be bad in and of itself for the best and most streamlined conquests. This lasted for another month until Guan Yu met someone upon his conquest of the land that he had met before, Chen Di.

This fellow was someone that was a great help to them during the aerial tournament and was willing to become allies with them once again. For the next few months after that encounter, Chen Di joined Baron, Yue Fei, and Guan Yu in conquering land, and capturing soldiers to improve their standing and rank within this tournament. 6 months after the start of the tournament, the first major incident occurred that would be known by everyone within the simulation.

The Bair fighters, the one that was voted most likely to win this tournament, had finally started to make their first move. This was extremely surprising as this late in the game, anyone who started out now would have been at a complete disadvantage, or would have been completely run over by neighboring warlords all the same. Literally, no one was brave enough to do such a suicidal act and so the Bair fighters just stayed dormant for the first half of the year.

Once they started, there was no mercy in their actions. There was only one group that could be considered a neighboring state, this was the case as this group had been able to conquer all of the other groups, surrounded the Bair fighters, and just left them all alone up until this point. However, they had kept a sizable army that numbered over 100,000 at this point to keep an eye on the Bair fighters. That army was decimated within a day by the Bair fighters and they only took 2 more days to completely bring down the regional powerhouse that surrounded them and took over everything while killing all strategists.

What was strange about this wasn’t that the Bair fighters took so little time to achieve something that likely not even the Sun Alliance was capable of, but that they immediately went back into inaction right after they did the deed. With all of this new land under their control, it was a no brainer that they would need some time to get everything under control, but that was not what they were doing. The other warring states that were now around them took this chance to absolutely run for their lives while taking everything that they could with them.

Those groups that ran were by no means weak but in comparison to the Bair fighters? They were nothing but a joke not worth speaking. In only a couple of weeks, there was a dead zone around the new Bair fighter territory which was immediately absorbed into the Bair fighters land automatically. This would be all that they did for the next couple of months.

Over the months, the amount of territory stayed constant, but the number of strategists was steadily decreasing as were the number of groups left to challenge each other for the best rewards. New alliances were forged, old ones were broken, and all the while, the major factions just watched in amusement. For these strategists, being in a major faction was their ticket to success. Factions, especially prominent ones, gave great benefits in comparison to going about the Chinese community without a faction. Monthly salary in exchange for a bit of their time in running events, and all of that business. Discounts on events, blueprints, an internal blueprint auction from a collection of other members, etc.

Perhaps the greatest out of all the benefits would be that the alliance that you would be in an event like this. Bigger factions would lead to more talented strategists which meant that their power would only increase when teaming up with each other, which definitely means that they would survive longer in these tournaments and they would be able to claim better prized because of it. This was why many were willing to be part of a faction, but for the super influential factions, they had to have a screening process in order to make sure that their new blood was indeed worth the effort it took to recruit them.

This practice left even some talented people left out of the mix due to their high standards. Theoretically, a faction could recruit as many as they wanted to, but if they did that, their monthly expenses in the form of salaries would grow exponentially as well, unless the faction had a stable business to counteract that effect. Currently, the Sun Alliance had the most strategists that bore their faction emblem somewhere on their body with a whopping 2 million total count. Not to mention that they were constantly holding recruitment meetings all over the community.

In second place would be the Yellow Wang faction with 500,000 reported strategists, but they were far weaker than the Sun Alliance. Third place to tenth place is not really clear, but the most powerful among them would be the Middle Kingdom faction with 200,000 strategists. They were currently in decline but were still stronger than the Yellow Wang faction by quite a bit, also they had not recruited anybody in the past 200 or so years.