Chapter 228: The Pale Princess

“Oh, the newcomer is actually an Edict Wizard.” Annan murmured, somewhat pleased.

He had never encountered an Edict Wizard so far. The emergence of Longjing Tea was undoubtedly a strong supplement to his lineup.

Annan didn’t know when it happened. It could be when Annan saw the essence of his soul in the magic mirror, or it could be when he injected Sage’s Stone for the first time.

—It could even be when Annan received general information about these professions.

In short, when Annan was about to recruit new players, he realized that his backend interface had been upgraded.

First of all, he had more varieties of initial professions that could be delegated to the players.

In the beginning, he could only offer the players the basic profession — [Swordsman]. Moreover, the skills pool available for the players was relatively minimal.

Now, Annan not only had more professions for the players, but the skill choices for them to choose were also drastically enriched.

If we were to take the “swordsman” profession as an example…

When Old Goose’s group of players entered the game, they only had four skills: [Basic Swordsmanship], [Parry], [Charge], and [All-out Blow]. Annan couldn’t make more skills available to them even if he wanted to.

For now, in addition to these four default skills, the previously grayed [Military Swordsmanship] branch had two new skills available, [Solid Footwork] and [Backs to the Wall].

In addition to that, there were new changes to the [Bodyguard Swordsmanship] that was already available to Annan previously. The skills [Charge] and [All-out Blow] were no longer available but instead replaced by [Disarm] and [Parallel Comprehension].

Now, the good news was that the players could even select the wizard apprentice as a starting profession!

It was a free promotion ticket to guarantee Bronze Rank attainment for the players because the wizard apprentice’s only promotion route was [Wizard]. Therefore, they could advance into it without meeting any other requirements.

Moreover, the wizard profession itself was a powerful and reliable profession.

Annan was even worried for a while if all the newcomers chose the [Wizard Apprentice] profession.

It wasn’t that this situation would be terrible. On the contrary, having more players adopting wizardry or magic could solve many problems more comprehensively at the beginning stage.

However, Annan needed some players to be the frontline.

We are short of Tanks!

Except for Hyphen (Sister Yiyi), no one could tank at all!

“Tanks are really a noble profession.” Annan couldn’t help but complain.

He spent the last two days doing nothing but learning all the spells available to wizard apprentices in the system. It was just like before Lin Yiyi and the others advanced, Annan didn’t have the skill lists of their professions’ advancements at all in the backend interface. Even now, he could only gain access to the spells available in the wizard apprentice phase.

Presumably, after the players had advanced to Bronze Rank, Annan would be able to see the Bronze Rank spells as well.

He also was unsure whether to grant the players freedom to choose from the eight wizardry schools or to randomly roll a starting spell for them.

[TN: Roll refers to the DnD mechanic where the player will roll a dice to see the results they will get.]

In addition, the current players could even choose the [Priest] profession.

But there was a problem. Annan gradually realized that if you chose the [Priest] profession, you couldn’t specify your faith as the “Silver Sire”. Instead, you would be granted a faith at random.

The faith randomization did not include only the upright deities, but also the false deities.

Annan quickly understood that this mechanism was to take into account the player’s relatability to the deities.

Rather than the faith given in a random manner, the system would analyze the players’ personalities with a psychological test before dedicating a faith to them.

Annan took some consideration before settling down with the autonomous talent assessment system in the profession distributing system.

If the player had received military training beforehand, when he selected the swordsman profession, he would be acquiring [Military Swordsmanship] by default instead of [Basic Swordsmanship]. Similarly, if the player knew how to use batons, shields, etc., he would be granted [Bodyguard Swordsmanship] by default.

If the players choose the [Wizard] profession, they would be given the top three schools of magic compatible with them. In this case, Annan had specially fine-tuned the rules. If they weren’t proficient with a certain school, he would weaken the spells granted for that particular one; if they were adept to a particular school, they stood a chance to acquire the most difficult spell of that school in the apprenticeship stage.

Annan decided to guide the players into choosing a wizardry school based on the magnitude of spells and their compatibility to that particular school of spells. Even if, logically speaking, the magics shouldn’t be differentiated with its strength but compatibility.

This also explained why Annan prohibited the players from choosing an alternate profession at will.

Sure enough, there must be some professions that work well at certain stages. But after leaving the character creation stage, the players wouldn’t have a good opportunity to test the compatibility with their professions.

If they honestly chose the wrong profession, they would simply get a secondary option. If they were really suitable for the alternate profession, Annan could find an opportunity to send them on a difficult mission. Then, he would grant the designated players a secondary profession without penalty, so that they could focus mainly on the better choice..

Among this batch of players whose default starting profession was swordsman, there were players like Lin Yiyi and Delicious Wind Goose who were quite compatible with the said profession. Unfortunately, there were cases that said otherwise.

Sure enough, it wouldn’t be fair for those players being forced into the path of no return and had no freedom of choice.

Although the players couldn’t get comfortable with the swordsman profession might be few, their opinions and feelings were equally important.

So, Annan devised a new plan. He would activate an in-game event as an excuse for the players who had the need of changing their profession.

“I should enter a nightmare after falling asleep this time.” Annan murmured.

The “Influence of the Death Howl” buff on him should be on its final countdown already.

Annan had yet to find a way to remove the influence imposed upon him.

However, he wasn’t scared but excited with this novel element. It was like discovering a limited-time dungeon instance in the game, and he couldn’t wait to play it.

Annan glanced at the backend interface one last time before falling asleep.

Lin Yiyi and Delicious Wind Goose seemed to still be recruiting, but the players whom Jiu Er and the Child each recruited had already created their characters.

“Longjing Tea, Edict Wizard… Well, let’s spawn him into the slums.” Annan murmured, typing quickly to finish up the newbie plot that belonged to Longjing Tea specifically.

“And this player… Hmm, the name is Citalopram? 28 years old. The character seems pretty good-looking. Hmm, thebeautification effect is merely 30%. Not bad! Judging from the character’s age, is Citalopram’s profession in reality a doctor?

“Huh? Priest…” Annan was slightly startled when he saw this profession.

“The faith is… the Pale Princess?”

Annan heard from somewhere that She was a false deity.

The Pale Princess was the deity of ghosts and spirits. She was a legless ghost wearing a white wedding dress and a princess crown while holding the head of her lover.

She and the Venerated Skeleton belonged to an organization called the “Necropolis” more than two hundred years ago to fight against the burial priests under the Bone Burying Church.

Unfortunately, Annan’s knowledge of Her was limited to this.

Salvatore’s book didn’t have much information on the upright deities, let alone on the knowledge of false deities. Annan only had a rough idea but didn’t even get to see a sketch of it.

Annan was a little curious about this new false deity.

Does the Venerated Skeleton have more information in regards to the Pale Princess?

Should I summon Him as a foreign aid?

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Credits to MindMatrix for editing this chapter and improving the readability.