Eternal Emerald Dragon

Chapter 1616 - 1615 - Crack the Pillars

In the end, Lind did not have to do much. He was shocked as Gaia's dryad bloodline reacted almost in joy to remove the pill made foundation! It assisted a smooth transition back to a Body Refining Realm state.

Yet, such a being was heavily suppressed even with the wards on at full to keep out the Divine Qi. Mortals simply could not survive in the Divine Lands. A Soul Realm was the absolute minimum.

He quickly administered some peak grade 1 elixirs to purify her body and then spoke on what he had seen of her true state. Her dichromatic eyes shimmered in excitement as he guided her to feel her own body.

He let the trance take over as her mind fell inward and smiled as 3 Soul Cores condensed. Earth and water were expected, but light was rare in plant bloodlines. It had to come from her father.

He also saw it trace paths in her meridians unlike anything he had seen before in any plant cultivator or human. Only one race had such unique paths.

Aether children. It was rare for them to be able to pass down their gift to the next generation but it must have been highly compatible with the dryad bloodline.

It may even be why the 2 came together and had a child.

That left a dark mystery he knew would only anger him more. The aether child aside, dryads do not abandon their children. The entire race in humanoid form as hybrid children and not one was ever abandoned willingly.

He filed it away as they spent a week stabilizing her foundation and letting her temper her newly recreated Soul Cores. She had lost one compared to before but the current arrangement was much better.

Karu was not as shocked by his results save with how quickly he created a cultivation technique for the little girl to practice. There was no set technique for aether children, they just knew what to do but a hybrid of that state combined with the natural ability of a dryad seemed to stall each other out.

He had to invigorate both bloodlines to come together and begin to nourish each other to rise up in the cultivation path.

Thankfully he had a wide range of plant cultivation techniques and aether children were staples of his sects and empires.

Compiling something together for the child in her current realm was easy. The issue was when she returned to the Heaven Realm. He knew Secondary Elements was the accepted path even in the Divine Lands but he knew a better way.

He could nurture true Primary Elements for her but not in his current state. He would need to be able to flex his full power unhindered.

It was a future concern as now she was safe so they could begin to plan.

Gaia was only needed to interface with the slate so the risk to her was minimal. Lind and Karu would need to start to churn some profits then he needed knowledge only the pass could give him.

It was why he pooled all their wealth possible to get it. The Glass Palace had a massive foundation, protections, and general sheer strength to keep it going, yet he wanted to find the cracks in its pillars.

He would identify and widen those cracked carefully before striking the blow that would start to unravel it. There were great risks but a massive benefit if it worked.

The Glass Palace would not just fall, it would be consumed from the inside out. The very foundation that supported it would be used to bring it down.

The first crack was not surprising to him. It was the Fiends and the slave trade.

On the surface, things seemed fine, but the recent chaos was straining that bond. The Fiends were desperately trying to increase their power and number of thralls at the same time.

If they were truly buying the slaves, it would be unremarkable but they were the true masters of the slavers supplying them.

Money meant nothing to beings that simply had to wait to get more. Souls were all they cared about.

People were just livestock or resources, so paying for them never entered their minds.

The cracks there were tempting but too easy to counter attack into a dead end. The Bastard was distracted for the moment but not stupid. He likely had several dedicated eyes watching the Glass Palace and a few other places he had left as traps.

If he started with the Fiends, Lind might as well hang a sign up to advertise where he was. The same went for the legitimate slave market as well.

While criminal slaves did not bother him in theory, the reality was not kind. The word 'criminal' could be stretched to fit any need someone in power needed.

Divine Realm cultivators generally could not be enslaved but some still were by virtue of Master Tiers intervening.

The cracks in that business were myriad but fleeting. He needed something a bit more stable and he smiled as he finally found one.

The guilds for the various professions had general agreements to divide profits, resources, and allocation of labor relatively fairly but it hinged on the slave market working smoothly.

The first crack had created a new one that none suspected because it was not yet too bad.

The loss of slaves in the highly intensive refining and Forging was quickly rising to the surface. Demands for replacements or more skilled workers for inscribing arrays was constant.

He had no doubt many were punished but a certain segment of slaves were highly protected from physical punishment.

The demon foxes. They were communally owned by the Glass Palace and not by the guilds. The sudden loss of manpower across the city made the Palace redistribute the foxes.

Now, that loss of skilled help is starting to churn the anger of the professionals.

Lind could use that.

One thing cultivators failed to understand about their artifacts was that networking had a fatal weakness. For all the convenience the pass gave by connecting to a kind of information vault, it had very few protections against hacking.

Rather than breaking the array, Lind created an artifact to bypass the artifact entirely and attack what it allowed its owner to see. The financial knowledge of the Glass Palace and the guilds selling under them!

The already existing offers for new labor were what he started with. He set up false connections to real slavers but had double booked their sales to other clients. In other words, the pass showed a single slave ready to be taken to 2 different locations.

If they were both guilds, it was feasible and a good compromise, but one was a trading caravan while the other was a fixed blacksmith shop.

He set up thousands of those connections and there was no evidence to erase as all of it was authorized by the pass. All the Glass Palace would find was a valid stamp of approval from their most potent artifact but not whose it was!

The loophole would be discovered in time but without any kind of ID attached, they would not be able to track it back to him.

Cultivators respected power but many underestimated what forms power could take.

Once that was done, Lind perused the information at his disposal before a smile spread on his face.

Auctions were chaos incarnate but the supply of items was something regularly updated to raise interest. Yet, he noticed there was an ability of the pass to reserve certain items.

Key items were still forbidden and hidden but it did not matter. Lind tested to see if he could make multiple inquiries until it started a storm of interest.

There were others that held a pass and his inquiries spread to them. Auctions were all about building up hype and if interest spiked on public items, VIPs would come looking.

It was a nuisance, but that was the point as it began to spread. He was teaching the other pass holders what they could do!

Cultivators understood control arrays and linking them to create a closed network that could then be manipulated for defense, offense, and so forth, but no one prepared them for what would happen if an open network of information was pushed to the brink!

Not long after, millions of people suddenly understood they could do far more with the pass than simply passively scan information or place an occasional appointment for orders.

They could do things directly!

Such a simple thing but the arrays had no capacity for overload of inquiries from all passes, artifact controls, or other connections.

He wondered if anyone even noticed in the Glass Palace when suddenly entire links began to go dark.

It would be temporary but it now exposed the next pillar he would attack.

The Glass Palace had become complacent by relying on vast networked artifacts so that when they went down, they had no backups anymore!

"Stay with Karu. I will be back." Lind shifted his form to become a simple old man with wizened white hair and ragged robes. His rail thin limbs did not seem able to hold up the staff in his hands but it was enough.

Gaia looked stunned before he smiled and slipped away.

The backroom chaos had made a distraction, it was time to capitalize on it!