Shortly after wrapping up his business, Liam gave the next order without a flicker of hesitation.
"Send the loot," he commanded.
The puppet moved swiftly, transferring everything into the vast space of the divine mind, dumping the pile neatly beside the swaying field of fiery blades.
Not a moment wasted.
Once done, the puppet returned, disappearing into the divine mind's sea of silent thought.
Back in reality, Liam sank into his reclining chair, fingers tapping idly against the armrest.
His gaze drifted toward the space inside the divine mind.
Twenty-four thousand low-grade spiritual stones.
Not bad, considering it came from nothing more than a mortal gang. Frankly, he expected far less.
There were a few pseudo spiritual treasures tossed in too, but he barely spared them a glance.
At his level, anything beneath second-grade might as well be ornamental junk.
In this world, the treasure grading system was straightforward, mirroring the cultivators' realms.
First grade. Second grade. Third. And so on.
A clean, direct hierarchy.
Spiritual arts like puppet mastery or spiritual planting followed the same standard.
Their power and function scaled according to grade, no questions asked.
But techniques? That was a different story altogether.
Where spiritual arts were bound by established tradition, techniques thrived on exploration, pushing beyond the limits of what was written.
A monk could take something as basic as a fireball spell and stretch it, refine it, elevate it, until it far surpassed what its creator had envisioned.
It wasn't about how far a technique could go based on the book. It was how far the cultivator could take it.
There were three tiers of technique mastery: entry, intermediate, and expertise.
And as for how techniques were named? If a technique was common, used widely across sects and cities, it would carry the title "common" at the end.
If not? Then it stood alone, unique, without extra labels.
Realm didn't matter. Techniques could be used by anyone at any stage.
How powerful it was?
That depended entirely on the user.
Liam finished counting.
With a quiet exhale, he waved the loot back toward the puppet, which slipped again into the divine mind's vastness.
A convenient little thing, that space.
With it, storage rings had become practically obsolete for him.
His divine mind now served as a massive mobile vault, larger, safer, and infinitely more adaptable.
But gains like spiritual stones alone weren't enough anymore.
He needed something else now. Manuals. Inheritance slips. Ancient jade scrolls.
Anything that could further push the growth of his spiritual arts higher.
Only, such things weren't easy to find.
And truthfully? He doubted this region held anything beyond second-grade inheritances.
Third-grade or higher? That would require far more than patience, it demanded reach, strength, and high-risk expeditions.
Not by him, of course.
That was what the puppets were for.
They would go. They would dig. They would uncover.
All he had to do was wait.
"whatever," Liam murmured, resting his chin against his palm. "Time's the one thing I'm not short on."
So he waited.
And the days passed.
Then weeks.
Seasons changed.
The unpredictable weather of the cultivation world never failed to amuse him.
Sometimes, the sky cracked open with blazing snow. Other times, it rained fireflies.
Yea, fireflies in blue, dotting the sky like fireworks.
By now, months had gone by.
Night had once again settled over the land.
Liam reclined beneath the stars, staring at the blackened sky, a faint glimmer of moonlight spilling over his skin.
Funny, really.
There was no formal calendar in this world. No widely accepted measure of years.
People simply counted days.
Age? Count the days.
How long a herb had been growing? Count the days.
How long since a sect was founded? Count the days.
No records. No unified system. No civilization-wide timestamp to say what year it was.
Everyone had their own idea.
Some said it was the 66th year, because they were 66 years old.
Others called it 86, because they started counting later in life, or inherited someone else's method.
To Liam, it was laughable how much immortals missed the details, how even the most powerful cultivators overlooked something as basic as a calendar.
But then again… in a world where time barely mattered to those who lived for centuries, even eons, maybe it made sense.
Maybe it was just another thing they'd given up caring about.
He leaned back farther, arms behind his head, eyes half-lidded.
This world was broken in strange ways. But in all its flaws, it made one thing clear.
"Patience... Patience is the key"
The affairs of mortals, wars, plagues, petty politics, they no longer held any weight to immortals.
Not now.
Not after living far longer than most were ever meant to.
Beings like him simply moved on, above the tides of ordinary suffering.
Detached.
Liam stood still in the courtyard as his thoughts shifted, lost in their usual restless circling.
And then, like a quiet whisper from the sky, snow began to fall.
Fine white flakes drifted down, covering the city like a blanket of snow.
But curiously, the snow never touched him.
Each flake that neared his skin evaporated midair, vanishing into nothing the moment it got close, while the rest of the courtyard steadily turned pale beneath the slow descent.
Puff.
A soft breath left his lips, visible in the cold, drifting upward like smoke.
His body, though unmoving, burned from the inside.
His core furnace, his organs, operated like a blazing volcanic heart, radiating heat through every pore despite the chill.
His gaze swept across the courtyard.
There, lined to the side in eerie silence, stood ten puppets.
Their numbers had grown recently, he created them.
In addition, the transactions between him and Ilya's Chamber of Commerce had grown fruitful, especially with the initial capital he wrung out from the Blue Wolf Gang.
Or was it the Wolf Blue Gang?
"Was it blue wolf... or wolf blue?" he murmured, pinching his chin with a thoughtful frown.
A beat passed. He let it go with a shrug.
Didn't matter anymore.
His attention shifted as a presence entered his eyes.
A puppet materialized midair inside Ilya's shop, in a certain room, hovering before it landed softly.
Cloaked in deep black, its face hidden beneath a familiar mask.
A teardrop-shaped design curved down the cheek, its expression eternally weeping.
This one was different, his masterpiece.
Once and always his greatest creation, now enhanced, refined to the late stage of the Foundation Building Realm, thanks to the materials he'd accumulated so far.
Of course, that came at a cost.
Every other puppet remained stagnant, left behind at the early stage.
Even those minding the farm within his divine mind still lingered in the Qi Refining Realm, just fulfilling their menial tasks.
The cloaked puppet returned wordlessly to its place in the line and froze.
Its mission was complete.
Liam's mind synced to its perspective. Through its eyes, he had been watching Ilya's movements closely for weeks, carefully, and patiently.
And now, finally, someone unusual had appeared.
A young man.
Sharp features, a youthful face, a confidence too smooth to be naive, and yet there was caution in how he moved.
Tonight, he stepped into Ilya's shop.
It was still open, late into the cold night, and the moment he arrived, Ilya herself received him.
The receptionist downstairs hadn't been enough.
The deal they were striking, clearly something layered and sensitive, was beyond what idle staff could manage.
As for how sure Liam was that this was the man he'd been waiting for?
Maybe fifty percent.
But that was enough. Just enough to make a move. To gamble.
"Is this a sign to gamble?"
Perhaps...
At present, the two of them were still upstairs, speaking behind closed doors.
Liam didn't feel much when another "protagonist" got close to one of his potential heroines.
Profit first, personal matters later.
"Young…" he murmured to himself. "Hidden strength…"
"And a strange spiritual energy fluctuation... left eye. Possibly a golden finger of its own."
That was his read.
However, how correct his intuition was, that depends.
"once I get a hold of this person… if he is the one I'm looking for," Liam muttered, his voice low, almost amused, "then it's back to egg hunting again."
A thin smile traced his lips.
"Next egg. Afterwards... a new target for the dungeon."
He nodded once, twice, several times. Each nod steadier than the last.
His plan was clear.
And he was going to follow it through.