Chapter 294: Sub-plane Development

The White Dragon Lord skipped past the High Tier and Master Tier completely, turning his gaze toward the thirteen Legendary Rank puppets.

Blade Warriors, Diamond Golems, Blood-Spitting Fiend Puppets... and Metamagic Constructs.

The White Dragon Lord's pupils contracted.

Metamagic Constructs?!

The masterpieces of the ancient Great Arcanists!

One of the signature puppets of the Arcane Empire!

The famous Demigod Tier constructs!

The White Dragon Lord never imagined he would see Metamagic Constructs listed on the Council's blueprint exchange roster. He hurriedly pulled up the relevant data.

"Metamagic Construct blueprint: Sourced from the ruins of the Arcane Empire. Due to missing core technologies, its former glory cannot be reproduced. Modified by Merlin Heavenly Principle using substitute materials to lower production costs. Its combat power has been correspondingly weakened, now comparable to the Peak Legendary Rank."

Realization dawned on him. It lacked core technologies, but even so, a Metamagic Construct with Peak Legendary Rank combat power was more than enough to serve as one of White Castle's trump cards.

Glancing at the price listed at the bottom of the blueprint, he noted that Merlin Heavenly Principle had set a good example as the Council speaker—the cost was quite reasonable.

After all, highly advanced knowledge like this, holding a complete monopoly, never lacked interested buyers. Normally, the price would be jacked up as high as possible.

After purchasing a Metamagic Construct blueprint, the White Dragon Lord thought it over and decided to buy a Diamond Golem blueprint as well.

Diamond Golems were arguably the most widely circulated Legendary golems, found across many planes. There was naturally a good reason they enjoyed such widespread recognition.

Their physical and magical resistances were absurdly high. When melee professionals faced a Diamond Golem, it was like a mouse biting a turtle—there was simply no place to sink their teeth in. Magic casters fared no better; their only real option was to temporarily trap the golem using spells like Banishment or the Maze Spell.

If a Diamond Golem was inside a Magic Tower, magic casters had no choice but to run for their lives, as the Tower Spirit would simply dispel any restrictive magic. Because of this, Diamond Golems were widely considered the best guardian puppets for Mage Towers.

There were quite a few sellers for the Diamond Golem blueprint—five in total—and their prices were roughly the same. The White Dragon Lord decided to give his business to the Silver Dragon Scholar.

He flipped to the section on special-type puppets. There weren't many, only eighty-nine varieties, but every single one boasted incredibly high technological sophistication and unique functions. The Planar Explorer was among them.

He had no immediate use for them, and given their exorbitant prices, the White Dragon Lord merely browsed the selection.

Next, he purchased several representative low-level golem blueprints, such as the Clay Golem, Rock Golem, and Iron Golem.

These golems were just the icing on the cake for White Castle. However, if they ever discovered a material plane in the future, these golems could serve as export goods.

Developing a sub-plane was simple. Once it was deemed valuable, one only needed to establish a Portal, send in personnel to mine, and ship the resources back.

If it was a material plane, however, the situation became far more complicated.

Aside from mineral veins, material planes also held valuable Magical Plants and unique native species. All of this required manpower to catalog. If the plane was too vast, they would even need to issue commissions through the Adventurer's Guild.

And if the plane contained sapient life, it became even more complex.

First, they would have to evaluate whether to extract profit through military conquest or commercial exploitation. Conquest required deploying an army; commerce required goods tempting enough to make the native inhabitants part with their wealth.

Golems with formidable combat power were some of the easiest goods to sell. In this regard, the White Dragon Lord was planning ahead.

Before long, a magical servant delivered the blueprints he had purchased. Calling them blueprints was an understatement; they were more like thick tomes. The one for the Metamagic Construct was so massive it could serve as a pillow for a Titan. The craftsmanship involved in puppet making was truly that complex.

With the items in hand, the White Dragon Lord teleported back to the White Tower and immediately began his research.

He started with the functional mining puppets. This specific model was named Goldtooth's Excavation Assistant. Modeled after kobolds—a race renowned for their mining prowess—it used magical clay for its body and a low-quality Soul Crystal for its core. It was an exceptionally cheap puppet to produce.

A Soul Crystal was fundamentally a living creature's soul. Ninety-nine percent of puppets required them; the more powerful the puppet, the higher the quality of the Soul Crystal needed. High-quality souls were also one of the multiverse's hard currencies.

A Soul Crystal needed to be further processed into a Soul Core before it could serve as a puppet's core.

As for the source of these crystals, the Guardian Council had conquered a certain Necromantic Plane, providing a steady and endless stream of low-to-medium-quality Soul Crystals.

The White Dragon Lord quickly finished reading the blueprint for Goldtooth's Excavation Assistant.

"Mmm... bionics, arm force generation techniques, the body's center of gravity..."

"The downside is that it only has two arms and two legs, so its efficiency is a bit low. I just need to add a few more..."

With the help of his Gold Finger and the backing of White Castle's vast wealth, the White Dragon Lord's Alchemy had long reached the Master Tier. Modifying a few basic puppets was a walk in the park.

In truth, it wasn't just Alchemy; the same applied to his potion-making and forging.

His Gold Finger possessed computing power comparable to a supercomputer, integrating functions like a recorder and a microscope. If it had been bound to an ordinary human, it absolutely would have helped them rise to the very top in the field of magic.

But on the White Dragon Lord, his own extraordinary innate talent overshadowed the brilliance of the Gold Finger.

Still, the cheat wasn't going to waste. He had developed a way to control the Magic Tower using his Gold Finger. Once he upgraded it to a Floating Tower in the future, the system would truly shine.

It took him a full month to finalize the new blueprint. By then, Goldtooth's Excavation Assistant had been modified beyond recognition, transformed into an eight-armed, eight-legged monstrosity.

For the lower body's eight legs, he used spiders as a template to enhance the puppet's ability to adapt to rough terrain. For the upper body's eight arms, he retained the physiological structure of a kobold. Since kobolds could rival Dwarves as miners, their anatomical structure was naturally highly optimized.

Each of its eight hands gripped a different excavation tool, ranging from advanced drills to primitive pickaxes. However, due to its increased functions, a low-quality Soul Core was no longer sufficient; it required a standard Soul Core.

Half of the production cost for Goldtooth's Excavation Assistant lay in its Soul Core, and a standard Soul Core cost ten times as much as a low-quality one.

As costs increased, so did efficiency. After running practical comparisons, the White Dragon Lord found that his modified puppet's mining output was six times that of the original.

When factoring in spatial footprint, work efficiency, and production costs, the upgraded puppet possessed an overwhelming advantage across the board.

Thus, the new puppet model was adopted. The White Dragon Lord named it Excavation Assistant No. 1.

Having designed Excavation Assistant No. 1 with his own hands, he naturally understood it inside and out. The White Dragon Lord broke its manufacturing process down into sixteen distinct steps, then handed the plans over to Gurgalu to distribute among the assembled Mages.

Each Mage would learn and specialize in just one specific component. Everyone crafted their assigned part, and when pieced together and activated, it would form a complete puppet.

At first, the group struggled to adapt to this production model, and their output failed to match their efforts. Slowly, however, they grew accustomed to it, and their production rate skyrocketed.

Another three months passed. The Portal the White Dragon Lord had ordered from the Council was delivered to his doorstep, and a massive batch of puppets had already been manufactured.

Choosing a day with pleasant weather, he erected the Portal. Just like the gateway to the Madilan World, the Portal to White Castle Plane No. 1 was constructed on the third-largest island—Glamorgan.

Operations on White Castle's first resource-type sub-plane had officially begun!

The White Dragon Lord led a group of subordinates through the Portal. To operate within a sub-plane without external aid required one to be at least a Master Tier Mage; melee professionals needed to be at the Legendary Rank to withstand the chaotic elemental forces. The thirty individuals following him were all Master Tier Mages, and notably, the majority were Murlocs.

Upon entering the sub-plane, the Master Tier Mages dispersed with their detectors. They carried ample survival supplies, and as for sleeping arrangements, a Magic Hut easily solved that problem.

With most of his subordinates off to scout the plane's resources, the remaining few busied themselves around the Portal. They were high-level alchemists tasked with erecting a Magic Barrier—one capable of sustaining ordinary mortals. This area would serve as White Castle's core hub in this sub-plane.

Resources gathered from all over would be transported here, undergo preliminary processing, and then be shipped back to White Castle in bulk.

This preliminary processing required puppets and a small number of technicians. The Magic Barrier was being established precisely to protect those technicians.

The core hub where the Portal stood was close to the center of the plane. The Cobalt Sand Ore vein wasn't far away. The White Dragon Lord flew toward it, intent on conducting a field test of Excavation Assistant No. 1's performance.

Upon arriving at the destination, he released the puppets from his Dimensional Bag. Scooping up a handful of Cobalt Sand Ore, he let the puppets analyze it one by one.

Thanks to their Soul Cores, these puppets possessed a limited degree of intelligence. They needed to familiarize themselves with the target material before carrying out specific mining tasks. Once they identified the Cobalt Sand Ore, for instance, they would only mine that specific ore, ignoring ordinary dirt and rock.

Of course, a puppet could identify multiple minerals simultaneously. Excavation Assistant No. 1 could recognize a hundred different types, whereas Goldtooth's Excavation Assistant could only manage around twenty. This was the advantage of a higher-quality Soul Core: greater information storage and more intelligent behavior.

Legend had it that during the glorious era of the Arcane Empire, those god-like Great Arcanists could even fabricate artificial souls, granting puppets the exact same sentience as living, breathing creatures.

The deeper his research into souls went, the more the White Dragon Lord marveled at their profound mysteries. A soul wasn't merely a simple body of energy; it possessed a structural complexity far exceeding any biological organ. Perhaps only a living brain could compare to it.

It was exactly because he understood so much that he increasingly felt his own ignorance.

Having finished their visual analysis, the puppets scurried forward on their eight thin, spider-like legs, crawling into the pit the White Dragon Lord had dug out like a swarming mass of ants.

The scraping and clattering sounds of mining began to ring out.

Excavation Assistant No. 1 utilized multiple tools: drills were meant for hard bedrock and tough ores, pickaxes handled smaller chunks, and for soft materials like Cobalt Sand Ore, they used iron shovels.

If they encountered abnormal high-energy reactions during excavation—such as a secondary mineral vein—the puppets would send a signal to their controller and wait for them to arrive and handle it.

Not long after, a fully loaded Excavation Assistant No. 1 crawled out of the pit. It dumped its haul into a metal box larger than the White Dragon Lord himself, then scurried back down on its eight legs.

Its efficiency was astounding. After just an hour, the massive metal box was entirely full.

Sealing its intake hatch automatically, the metal box sprang to life. Following its pre-set programming, it began to trundle toward the Portal.

Indeed, this metal box was a functional transport puppet named Morel's Transport Cart. Outfitted with treads on its underside, it would march straight toward the Portal the moment its container reached capacity.

Despite being larger than the White Dragon Lord, its technological sophistication was actually lower than that of Excavation Assistant No. 1, and it still ran on a low-quality Soul Crystal.

It took three hours for the White Dragon Lord to follow Morel's Transport Cart back to the Portal. After dumping its cargo into a designated clearing, the massive ore cart set off once more.

At this point, the Master Tier Mages sent to scout for mineral veins had yet to return. After all, it was an entire plane to cover, and their Flight spells were nowhere near as fast as the White Dragon Lord's own speed.

Leaving Gurgalu behind to oversee the sub-plane, the White Dragon Lord returned to the White Tower.

Three months later, Gurgalu sent word that the planar survey was complete. The White Dragon Lord crossed over to the sub-plane once more.

By now, the settlement and ore processing base around the Portal had been fully established. The sub-plane's raw minerals were already being converted into White Castle's wealth.

Based on the total energy levels detected by the Mages, the White Dragon Lord calculated that the profits this plane would generate would be roughly ten to fifty times the cost of exploring it.

The reason for such a wide estimation gap was due to varying mineral values. Ores like Cobalt Sand Ore had average energy reactions but immense value, while other minerals gave off massive energy readings but were abundant back on Nordhill, making them virtually worthless.

Taking a median estimate, that meant a return of twenty-five times his investment!

The White Dragon Lord couldn't help but click his tongue. Excluding labor costs, the sum of launching a thousand Dimensional Explorers, establishing the Portal, and manufacturing the puppets equated to one top-tier piece of Legendary equipment, plus a mid-tier piece of Legendary equipment.

Two pieces of Legendary equipment multiplied by twenty-five... fifty pieces!

If converted into low-tier Legendary equipment, the number would be even higher.

However, across the Nordhill Continent, the rate of legendary powerhouses actually possessing Legendary equipment was still remarkably low. One could only conclude that the 80/20 rule applied everywhere.

He lowered his head in thought. Perhaps it wasn't just an 80/20 split. Compared to the veteran factions, White Castle hadn't been founded that long ago, and it hadn't been long since he had grown powerful, yet he already possessed several Legendary artifacts in his collection.

When adding the value of this sub-plane into the mix... it proved that Nordhill was a winner-takes-all world.

Furthermore, this was just a sub-plane. If they were to secure a material plane...

With such terrifying profit margins, it was no wonder the major factions turned their noses up at domestic ventures in Nordhill.

At the same time, this made the White Dragon Lord somewhat suspicious of the Witches' Council's invitation.

Even if they didn't have any developable planes on hand, they could just keep exploring the cosmos. Was it really worth clashing with the powerful Cult of the Dragon over a few resources in the Desolation of Extreme Winter?!

The seed of doubt had been planted, but since he currently had no way to prove his suspicions, he could only set the matter aside for now.

After generously rewarding the Master Tier Mages who participated in the operation, the majority of them followed the White Dragon Lord back to Nordhill.

From the sub-plane's initial discovery to getting its development fully on track, exactly one year had passed.