One of the advantages Zhou Tian's current world has over Earth is the simplicity of the beings living there. Especially for creatures like monsters, who are relatively straightforward in nature, they might have many weaknesses, but in any situation, they do not change easily according to the circumstances.
Zhou Tian's recent performance has been quite eye-catching, but the Beastman leader doesn't regard him with any fear due to this. On the contrary, after Zhou Tian's accomplishments, he was immediately rewarded, and with each action, his strength had grown considerably.
His two actions, specifically his second attempt at attacking an NPC team, although not entirely successful, had caused significant damage to a hundred-strong NPC army, and Zhou Tian reaped significant benefits.
Putting aside the experience he gained, a few of the Beastman warriors under Zhou Tian experienced evolution as a result of that battle. Although the soldiers didn't undergo complete rebirth, there are now a few elite Beastman warriors among the formerly ordinary ones in Zhou Tian's control.
At the same time, Zhou Tian killed over a dozen NPCs and received a reward of nearly two hundred Beastman warriors. During Zhou Tian's second action, he killed dozens of NPCs, and the large battle results were naturally followed by great rewards!
As a result, the Beastman leader generously rewarded him, and the number of Beastman warriors under Zhou Tian's command reached a standard of nearly a thousand. At the same time, the number of Beastman warriors under Zhou Tian's control grew from several dozens to over a hundred each month.
You could say that through these two accomplishments, Zhou Tian has jumped from the bottom in terms of strength among the Beastman warriors to one of the top ones. Apart from his own slightly weaker strength, Zhou Tian now has the capability to challenge for the position of Beastman leader.
However, opportunities like the previous one are now quite rare. Now that the NPC village is aware of his existence as an enemy, they are surely not going to be as unguarded against the Beastman warriors outside the village as before.
In such an environment, besides training his Beastman warriors, Zhou Tian doesn't really have much else to do.
As a result, under such a seemingly boring environment, Zhou Tian stayed for several months. During this period, although Zhou Tian had a few conflicts with the NPC tribe, minor wars like before did not occur again. Instead, while he gained nothing from the NPCs, players whose whereabouts could not be confirmed encountered Zhou Tian several times. However, apart from those with great strength that Zhou Tian did not dare to provoke, he only killed two players with weak strength.
Of course, players are just players. Even if they are newbies, Zhou Tian still received abundant rewards when he killed them. Although the Blood Moon Lord did not allow him to upgrade to a Beastman leader, the experience rewards he received were enough for Zhou Tian to evolve once again.
As a result, after that evolution, Zhou Tian became a Beastman warrior with both fast and robust talents.
At the same time, after such a long time, through several minor merits and daily accumulation, Zhou Tian has managed to grow his troops to over a thousand, without suffering much loss.
Over a thousand Beastman warriors, plus the beast slaves who don't play a significant role, puts Zhou Tian's military power at over ten thousand. In that respect, Zhou Tian has essentially caught up with the Beastman warrior who he originally followed.
However, having developed up to this point, Zhou Tian has essentially reached a bottleneck. If Zhou Tian cannot evolve into a Beastman leader, regardless of his strength, it's unlikely that his power will progress much further.
Given the circumstances, Zhou Tian was not willing to have his development constrained so he naturally started to entertain other ideas.
If he wanted to improve himself, he must naturally make his merits. If he wanted to become the leader of the Beastman, he needed to make notable contributions as well. Under such circumstances, when Zhou Tian had the idea of making merits, he naturally started thinking about his 'neighbor'.
The merits for monsters came from a few sources and naturally, the significant ones were rare. Compared to the monsters that had existed for who knows how long, Zhou Tian had to have some astonishing war achievements to stand out quickly. Considering Zhou Tian's environment at that time, the biggest merit he could achieve, in his opinion, was capturing the NPC Village.
Zhou Tian had spent so much time in this world and had gained some understanding of the situation. For example, the tributes required for the new monster refreshment. The information collected by Zhou Tian suggested that apart from some unknown elements, the core was actually the casualties of the players.
Although Zhou Tian didn't understand how the monster side benefitted from the death of players, based on his previous experience, he was completely sure of the accuracy of his speculation.
As such, regardless of the level of the monster, killing players occupied a large proportion of their merits. Apart from this, to gain even more merits, one would naturally have to start from a larger perspective.
When comparing forces, they compare their combat power and territory. In ordinary battles, killing a few NPCs, although meritorious, would hardly catch the eye of those high-end bosses. In a situation like Zhou Tian's, if he wanted to attract attention, the merits he earned had to be achieved by considering the larger picture.
If it's useful in the grand scheme of things, except for killing the top NPCs, Zhou Tian only had the option of taking a city.
The monster siege, even in the game, is a setting. In the current real game world, monster sieges occur frequently.
NPCs usually want to counter-attack the monsters, and the Monster Camp doesn't want the NPCs to continue to exist. Thus, the cities and villages where NPCs gather are naturally quite an eyesore to the monsters.
However, the two major camps in the current world have a thorough understanding of each other till today. When both sides achieved a balance, with the help of the players, the NPCs didn't excel in counter-attacking the monsters, but the situations where the monsters could occupy cities and villages were also rare.
Thus even though Zhou Tian's neighbor was just a small village, if he could really take it, the significance of his merit would be quite rare even under the Blood Moon Lord. With such a great merit, given his low status, Zhou Tian knew that the Blood Moon Lord would definitely have to promote him.
Once he made up his mind, Zhou Tian quickly initiated his plan.
Taking over an NPC Village was no easy task. Lest to mention that there were quite a few soldiers in those NPC Villages, there were also a few powerful figures in those villages. Under such circumstances, if Zhou Tian rashly acted, he might fail to take the NPC Village and even risk losing his own life.
So, even though he had thought of taking over the village, Zhou Tian himself was quite cautious. Unless there was an extremely good opportunity, he likely wouldn't act rashly in the short term.