The World Online
chapter-722

Out of the regimes in history that had Chengdu as its imperial city, the most influential would be Shu Han.

Liu Bei was also a relative of the Han imperial family and was in the proper line of succession. He represented the East Han Emperor and appeared in the wilderness. He had more speaking power than both Cao Cao and Sun Quan.

The number of strong generals under him was enough to defend it.

All factors considered, Gaia chose to put him there. Cao Cao and Sun Quan could just back out from the stage of history and seclude themselves in god knows what corner of the wilderness.

Probably one day they would be found by players and trigger some hidden quest.

After the system notification, Gaia immediately sent out a hotfix regarding the actions of Caiyun Xinan and the others.

Gaia ruled that if the Lords did anything detrimental to their own camp, their battle contribution points would become negative.

As for what constituted detrimental, Gaia would decide and did not give a specific description. With Gaia's intelligence, it would not make an incorrect judgement.

After this, not only would the Lords be sent out of the battle map if they acted up, the teleportation costs would also be paid out of the Lord's own pocket.

Moreover, the soldiers that the Lord lost in the battle could not be revived.

To make matters worse, if Gaia judged a Lord's actions as a negative act, it would ban the player from the next battle map based on the severity.

This ban could last from one to three battle maps.

During the entire game period, China would have a little more than 10 battle maps. The Battle of Red Cliff was already the sixth one.

To be banned because of such reasons was exceedingly cruel to the players.

As for the actions of Caiyun Zinan and the others during the Battle of Red Cliff, Gaia did not take any action. Gaia's principle was that before any hotfix came out any loophole could be made us of.

Be it Ouyang Shuo or other players, they had all made use of system loopholes before.

Caiyun Zinan and the rest were not exceptions.

...

At this point, the Battle of Red Cliff had finally come to an end.

Returning to Shanhai City, Ouyang Shuo passed Zhou Yu and Jia Xu over to Du Ruhui to let him bring them to familiarize themselves with the military structure and system of Shanhai City.

Since he had just arrived at the main map, even Zhou Yu needed time to adapt.

Ouyang Shuo believed that Shanhai City's strength would shock Zhou Yu and the others, and their loyalty would also greatly increase.

As for his arrangements for them, Ouyang Shuo would hold a military meeting tomorrow to settle it all at the same time.

As for Diao Chan, Song Jia would welcome her.

...

That afternoon, after Liu Bei acted after he had just entered the main map for half a day.

The Shu Han imperial court announced that Shanhai City was their enemy. Anything that related to Shanhai City would need to be removed in three days.

If not, they would be forcefully seized and closed down.

If he was not restricted by the system rules, Liu Bei would have sent troops to flatten the Shanhai City office in the imperial city to vent his hatred.

With that, Shanhai City became the first territory to be listed as an enemy of an imperial city.

It could be considered a legend.

The moment the news went out, the players were in an uproar.

Di Chen and the others were gloating while the Shanhai Alliance members were feeling depressed.

Anyone could guess that apart from the Shanhai City office, the Four Seas Bank branch would also be affected and needed to be removed.

With that, Huitong Bank received a huge favor as it could swallow up the Chengdu market.

It seemed like Ouyang Shuo needed to think of a way to console and make peace with the guild allies in Chengdu.

Although this would not hurt the four seas bank badly, it would suffer some losses. No matter what, it had just lost 1/9th of its market.

Luckily, China had nine imperial cities; if not, Ouyang Shuo would really cry.

...

The other players were just there for the fun.

What the players truly cared about was the meaning behind all of this. Liu Bei directly acting against Shanhai City meant that the interference of imperial cities on players was growing stronger and stronger.

The presence of the imperial city was not a cloudy question mark but a real dynasty. They had their own feelings, their own stand, and their own camp.

If their stands were different, they would point their blades at the players.

To Lords, especially those near the imperial cities, they needed to act warier. Such Lords were not small in number.

Di Chen, Zhan Lang, Chun Shenjun, Wandering Magic, and Sha Pojun all had such problems. If Shanhai City took down Yunnan Province, it would also have to face Dali.

This matter made Di Chen and the others feel uncomfortable.

All in all, the future of the wilderness would be that the Lord players would dwindle in quantity but the leaders would grow stronger.

The enemies of the Lords were not just other Lords but also the natives and even the imperial cities.

Apart from that, Mongol, Ruzhen, West Region, Western Xia, and Tibet; these were all uncertain factors.

The future wilderness would be a chaotic scene.

...

Shanhai City, Nanjiang Governor-General House.

Since Liu Bei had made matters clear, Shanhai City naturally needed to take preventive measures.

The four seas bank needed to return the money to the players within three days.

Meng Zhida took 15 million from the main treasury to handle this matter.

Although the Chengdu players trusted the four seas bank, without an actual bank, they would need to go to other imperial cities, which would be rather inconvenient.

Hence, most players would choose to invest their gold into the Huitong Bank instead.

Only the guilds that owned a large sum of funds and did not need constant use would choose to work with the four seas bank.

But that might not be the case either.

Who knows whether Liu Bei would try to suppress such guilds or not? After all, angering the imperial court was a huge no-no for a guild that wanted to rise in an imperial city.

In just a short while, the four seas bank nearly faced a financial crisis. Meng Zhida had no choice but to inform the various branches to chase the loans.

It would probably take a few months to recover from the side effects.

Apart from returning the savings, the four seas bank also had problems of the loans that they had loaned to the guilds and player chambers of commerce.

Compared to returning savings, this was much more complicated.

One must know that the ones who took loans were all people with financial difficulties.

It was not practical and would affect their reputation if they tried to take all the loans back. The only way was to get back as much as possible.

As for the amount that remained, they could only rush them in the future.

This alone used up a lot of manpower and resources. If people declined to return and tried to use Liu Bei to protect them, this whole matter would get much worse.

All in all, when Meng Zhida heard the news, his head felt like it was going to explode.

They needed Ouyang Shuo to personally write letters to all the guilds that cooperated with them to apologize. At the same time, he needed to strengthen the relationship between the two parties to lower the effects of this matter to the minimum.

The removal of the office worried Ouyang Shuo.

An imperial city office was never a simple office; it was the intel station of the Black Snake Guards. The Shanhai Guards and the Honglu Temple had all entered the imperial city through this office.

Removing it would cause problems aplenty.

The Black Snake Guards Commander Black Snake, Shen Bu Hai, and Zhang Yi had all acted to remove a portion of the intel personnel who were exposed.

More importantly, they needed to send the intel personnel underground and disguise themselves better to get in deeper before Liu Bei gained a stable footing.

In Ouyang Shuo's words, the more this happened, the more we cannot give up on the intel collecting work there. Even to say out of all nine imperial cities, the work at Chengdu was the most important.

Ouyang Shuo had never fought a war he was not confident in.

To place deep undercover agents and continue intel reporting would be a massive test to these organizations.

Black Snake himself had sneaked over to Chengdu to command

As for Shen Bu Hai and Zhang Yi, their goal was too obvious, and they did not move toward Chengdu; they could only command from here.

One move by Liu Bei had totally sent Shanhai City into a mess.

The only lucky matter was that the trade between the two was not close at all. On the contrary, many chambers of commerce relied on Shanhai City for ocean trade.

Hence, the animosity of Chengdu would not cause any effect on Shanhai City's trade in the short term.

In the long term, it would be hard to evaluate. The moment they could not use Shanhai City, they would turn to other territories like Xiong Ba's.

The prerequisite would be that Xiong Ba had opened up his ocean trading.

It was like giving a portion of your resources for free to the enemy.

At the same time, the animosity of Chengdu also broke the recruitment channel of talents and artisans from there.

All in all, the animosity of an imperial city was not a simple matter to deal with for a territory; the losses and negative effects were all round and deep.

If Shanhai City was not massive, it would not be able to take such a blow.

After arranging everything, it was already 5 PM. To calm down this entire mess, the entire Governor-General House had been incredibly busy.

After things calmed down, Ouyang shuo immediately sent someone to find Zhao Kuo.

To be on the back foot was not his style. Since Liu Bei had declared war, he naturally needed to show his sword and counter attack.

If not, they would think that Shanhai City was easy to bully.