C. It might've been a trap to use the token.
But Lucien dismissed that thought almost immediately.
If someone held that kind of power, there was no reason to wait this long just to make contact.
No, this wasn't a ploy. It didn't add up.
But the knowledge that was related to the card. What level of background must a person has to be linked to it?
Back in the house, Liam caught a faint flicker of movement on his panel.
The numbers had ticked upward again, the universal essence rising ever so slightly.
Leaning back in his chair, he let out a slow breath, fingers drumming once against the wooden armrest.
His eyes half-closed, his divine mind reaching into his divine mind.
His gaze slipped through the dungeon walls like a ripple through still water, peering into the inner workings of the space.
There.
A shape moved swiftly inside.
A figure darting between the terrain.
Liam watched quietly for a moment. Then his lips moved with a mutter, almost amused, "He's quite relentless..."
It was a relief, in a way.
The one he had chosen wasn't incompetent after all. If anything, he was proving himself more useful than expected.
If only he could enter more often... the energy he brought in was needed. Liam wouldn't say no to a few more visits.
Still, his attention shifted. There was another matter on his mind.
He turned his focus to the eggs, specifically, the next one he wanted to hatch.
Ideally, something carrying the bloodline of a golden core stage beast. That would be a huge leap in strength... if he could find one.
The red mist was approaching, signs of warp believers were discovered in this city, and none of these things made him comfortable.
If anything, he required more strength to be stable.
But Liam was realistic.
Eggs like that weren't just lying around.
Out here, close to the borderlands of the great wilderness, it was already rare enough to find decent materials, let alone something on that level.
Foundation building eggs were rare, but they weren't hard to get if given enough time. However, Golden core level was different.
Sure, the great wilderness itself might offer better odds. But the problem was the danger.
A golden core monster's nest wasn't the kind of place someone just walked into.
…Or was it?
His thoughts paused. Then shifted again.
"What about a two-way search effort..." he muttered under his breath.
He rose slowly from the chair, eyes lifting toward the wall like he was looking far past it, beyond the stone, the streets, and even the city's edge.
"Send a group of suicide puppets into the great wilderness. Let them scout for a golden core beast's nest. If they find an egg, they grab it and transfer it into my divine mind immediately."
He could picture it. In theory, it was clean. Efficient. Almost like cheating the system.
But of course, the problem lay in getting close.
A golden core beast's divine sense wasn't something to underestimate.
To bypass it, he'd need either a puppet strong enough to distract the creature or a method to perfectly suppress the puppet's presence.
The first option was risky.
He could manually operate a puppet and make it fight at the level of a perfected foundation building stage.
But if the beast noticed him before he got near the nest, there wouldn't even be a fight, he'd be eliminated on the spot.
As for the second… skills that concealed breath to that extent were extremely rare.
Most were kept locked away within powerful sects, passed down only to trusted disciples.
Liam scoffed quietly. "Tch, who says I need to do it alone?"
He didn't have to face the monster head-on.
He just needed a window, a gap.
A moment when the beast left the nest unattended or was distracted elsewhere. That was all it would take.
Throw enough puppets into the wilderness and eventually one would find that moment. And when it did, if the main puppet carrying the golden imprint got its hands on the egg, then that was it.
Checkmate.
"A two-way strategy it is..." Liam nodded slightly to himself.
"Ilya searches through the market, finds what she can. Meanwhile, I send puppets out into the wilderness to rob a nest."
Without wasting time, he sent a puppet to relay the message. Ilya would need to prepare. A request was passed along, for a large batch of second-grade materials.
The reason was simple.
More puppets.
The more he had, the better the odds.
As for the spiritual plants scattered across the dungeon surface, Liam didn't even need to micromanage that.
He left it to the head puppet among the five stationed there, ordering it to handle seed replenishment and keep things running.
Everything was moving now.
One thread tugged another.
Simple instructions were never an issue, and with the kind of puppet cores Liam worked with, things hardly stayed simple anyway.
His creations weren't like the regular spiritual puppets seen under other puppeteers.
They didn't just move when told, they understood. As long as the commands weren't too intricate, they followed them without error.
Since the spiritual field ran on automation, Liam had barely needed to monitor it.
It just worked.
Occasionally, though, he'd make his way over, stepping into his own secluded plot tucked into the farthest corner.
That was where he practiced, quietly refining his skills with spiritual planter arts.
The puppets handled the rest.
Tier 1 fiery blade grass wasn't exactly difficult for them to manage, and Liam was confident that, with more time, he'd be able to create puppets capable of managing tier 2 plants as well.
What held him back wasn't technique. It was always the same thing, resources. The lack of them was the only wall slowing his progress.
Then, a week went by.
In that time, Liam had been keeping a very close watch on Lucien's movements inside the dungeon.
Lucien was relentless. Like a machine, he stepped into the dungeon at dawn and wouldn't leave until long after nightfall.
Day after day, the pattern didn't change.
Liam couldn't even guess how many times the dungeon refreshed itself under Lucien's nonstop killing.
But one thing was certain, this man had slain thousands within just one week.
It wasn't just dedication, it was obsession. And Liam was all in for it.
Thanks to that frenzy, the amount of universal essence gathered had been staggering. Liam managed to push the permission gauge up to 5%.
The way it worked was… odd. There was no fixed conversion rate that he could make sense of.
Sometimes, it felt like 100 points converted to just 0.1 percent, other times it jumped far beyond that.
It might've had something to do with the quality of the essence points themselves, but the system didn't break them down individually, just lumped them into one figure.
The lack of clarity irritated him, but he couldn't deny the results. As bizarre as the system was, he welcomed it.
Confusing, unpredictable, and yet incredibly rewarding. Liam wouldn't have it any other way.
That same week, Ilya had sent over nearly a thousand second-grade materials to him.
He was genuinely caught off guard. He even dispatched one of his puppets to ask her directly, not to criticize, but to check if she was sure that sending over that much stock was the right call for the Purple Cloud Pavilion's long-term interest.
After all, Liam wasn't treating the Pavilion as a temporary base.
He had long-term plans, ones where he would continue working quietly from the shadows to strengthen it.
Most of the profits earned had gone straight into funding his craft.
Still, with those materials, he managed to produce even greater returns.
His puppetry had caught on, word had spread across the city, and even into the surrounding areas.
His name wasn't known, but the results spoke for themselves.
Custom orders had started trickling in from all sides, quiet requests through unofficial channels. Ilya, though, rejected every single one.
In just that week alone, using the thousand second-grade materials she provided, Liam had crafted nearly a hundred second-grade puppets.
Seventy were kept for his own private use. The remaining thirty were marked for auction, scheduled for tonight.
Among them were thirty puppets rated at the early stage of the Foundation Building realm.
That many second-grade puppets, grouped together, were no ordinary sale.
They were being reserved specifically to accompany the final auction item, a mysterious piece no one outside had seen yet.