Chapter 19: Making Puppets

For a long time afterward, Owen didn’t rush to learn how to make puppets. Instead, he exchanged for a psychic power meditation technique and spent a whole month learning how to control his surging psychic power. During this period, the accumulated progress value was used to exchange for the tools needed by a Puppeteer. As for exchanging for Monster Summoning Magic, he was in no hurry because he found that being a Puppeteer was really interesting, far from the simple and primitive craft he had initially imagined.

Just by looking at the tools used by Puppeteers, one could tell they were not only very delicate but also had special attributes of spiritual conduction. Therefore, the progress value needed to exchange for them was quite a lot. It took Owen a whole month to barely gather enough.

However, his effort and wait were not in vain. After he had initially mastered psychic power, the Underground Dungeon Chamber had been transformed into a rudimentary Puppeteer workshop.

At this time, four pots of Lantern Grass were placed in each corner of the Underground Dungeon Chamber. The soft and bright light made everything here clearly visible. A large and heavy multifunctional workbench was placed in the middle, very conspicuous.

Puppeteers are very reliant on tools and materials, so a multifunctional workbench is essential. This would free Puppeteers from tedious and boring manual work and usher them into the era of high-precision processing. So although it cost Owen a lot of progress value, it was worth it.

After much preparation, he finally had almost everything ready. Looking at the accumulated progress value, Owen suppressed his excitement, sat in front of the workbench, and began to familiarize himself with its functions.

The workbench was very precise and had a variety of processing functions, from cutting and polishing wood to processing gears and bearings. It also had two mechanical arms that could bend steel bars and carve patterns on rice.

The only drawback was that there was no computer control, so all processing needed to be guided by psychic power. Therefore, if the operator was slightly distracted, the processed parts would be scrapped.

However, the higher the psychic power and the stronger the control, the higher the strength and precision of the processed parts. This was also the reason why one needed to awaken their psychic power to become a Puppeteer.

Now that everything was ready, Owen planned to make his first work.

To say it was “making” was more like “assembling.” After all, Owen definitely couldn’t design a puppet out of thin air right now.

Fortunately, the Puppeteer game couldn’t be so hardcore that even a graduate student wouldn’t be able to get started. In fact, each type of puppet had various models of universal parts that could be purchased and modified on the original basis. As long as it wasn’t too exaggerated and the requirements weren’t too high, assembling a puppet wasn’t much more difficult than modifying a toy car.

Now Owen faced many choices, the first being the material.

According to the different materials, puppets were divided into Nature, Mechanical, Biological, and Hybrid, using plant materials, metal materials, biological materials, and composite materials respectively.

Different materials would affect the final performance of the puppet. Whether it could achieve a one plus one greater than two effect all depended on the Puppeteer’s personal experience and talent.

Owen thought for a long time, deciding not to be too outrageous this first time and to make a decent one first.

The first was the spine, which determined the overall structure of the puppet, such as height, weight, reaction, etc. It was also the core of the entire puppet frame.

Among the several materials, Owen chose a universal model silver alloy mechanical spine. The characteristics of this spine were that it was sensitive enough and had high conductivity.

After it was exchanged, the silver-white mechanical spine lying flat on the workbench looked very high-tech, especially the dense metal wires on both sides. These metal wires would connect all the parts of the puppet’s body, acting as nerve conductors. This alone was quite incredible.

This wasn’t a puppet, it was clearly a futuristic bionic robot!

But in fact, both the system and this world still classified the puppet in front of him as supernatural rather than technological. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to exchange for such a high-tech item with his current progress value.

Secretly rejoicing, Owen then went on to select the skeleton model.

He chose a warm yellow copper alloy lightweight skeleton. The strength wasn’t high, but the toughness was good, the applicability was strong, and it was easy to process and shape.

Next was combining the two. Under Owen’s psychic control, the spine was grabbed by the mechanical arm and placed steadily on the metal skeleton.

Infused with psychic power, the mechanical spine automatically attached to the metal skeleton, and the dense metal wires on both sides were also pulled and fixed to various positions of the metal skeleton by the mechanical arm, acting as conductors.

For a complete puppet, a metal skeleton was far from enough. Puppets were very precise structures, so various metal parts were successively exchanged by Owen and installed inside the skeleton for fixation.

Although the puppet could still move without these parts, these complex parts and structures were necessary because they could convert energy into kinetic energy more efficiently and increase the puppet’s attack and speed.

But the most important thing was the puppet core. Without the core, this initially formed puppet was just a decoration.

There wasn’t just one core, but two: the intelligent core that determined the puppet’s intelligence level, and the energy core that determined the puppet’s energy reserve and power limit.

If Owen could still manufacture the metal skeleton and internal parts through drawings, then the core could only make him despair.

Because of their special functions, the cores were made of high-purity gemstones and crystals, as well as rare alloys, and the circuits carved inside were extremely complex and delicate. With his current psychic power, even if it was magnified ten times, he wouldn’t be able to make it. If it weren’t for the ability to exchange with progress value, Owen wouldn’t dare to choose this profession.

The fist-sized intelligent core was slowly installed into the metal skull by the mechanical arm, while the energy core was installed at the junction of the spine and ribs.

As Owen activated the core with psychic power, the puppet began to vibrate continuously.

This wasn’t a problem, but a way to activate the puppet itself. To put it simply, it was to make the metal skeleton and internal parts active.

After the intelligent core was activated, although it had a small amount of energy, it wasn’t enough to activate the entire puppet, so it immediately activated the energy core along the circuit.

After the energy core was activated, the released energy didn’t disperse but was guided into the spine, and after being adjusted by the spine, it was released to all parts of the puppet.

Under the stimulation of the energy, the metal skeleton and the precision parts inside vibrated continuously, but this vibration was more like a kind of running-in between each other. Until with a click, the puppet seemed to be integrated. The metal skeleton and the parts installed inside were perfectly combined, and there was no more noise.

The opened metal skull was sealed, and the expanded metal ribs also contracted back, firmly fixing the energy core and important parts in place.

Next, Owen added some composite armor to the key parts of the metal skeleton as protection.

However, from the overall perspective, the puppet in front of him looked more like a special model of Terminator.

Terminators all have a layer of artificially synthesized flesh and blood skin. Of course, puppets also have similar products, and there are even more special choices.