Chapter 608: The Four-Man Electricity Theft Group (Part 3)_2

"Killing innocent children might be possible, but it's too inefficient. Instead, they chose to deceive the devils, using a special ritual to fabricate the souls of children. After attracting the devils and trapping them, they could utilize the power of those devils."

When Constantine spoke of this, he seemed unfazed. However, Hal turned to look at Shiller who glanced back at him and said, "Why are you looking at me like that? This just proves what the human race is capable of. I'm no different."

Constantine nodded in agreement, "If you ask me, deception is what humans excel at. We've an abundant wealth of tricks up our sleeves. Even the most cunning of devils can occasionally be deceived by us."

"However, such tricks are now obsolete. Once a devil has been tricked once, they won't be fooled again. At most, they'd lose a bit of their power. So now, they've developed numerous other versions, but we really can't employ them."

"I managed to contact a ritual practitioner who can use this version of the trickery technique. He taught me how to fabricate the soul of a child. The other required materials are simple, except for one thing that's a bit challenging – it requires breast milk."

"That's easy enough." Shiller turned to Bruce, "Wayne Enterprises should be able to solicit breast milk from the public under the pretext of medical research. As long as the price is high enough, we should be able to gather enough quickly."

"There is another problem..." Shiller turned to Constantine, "Can the fabricated child's soul sing?"

"Certainly not, it's only a lure. So, I would have to use another kind of magic to manipulate the voodoo doll to sing."

"Do you need to control them constantly? What happens if you get tired?" Shiller posed another question. Constantine took a deep breath and said, "Although I don't need to control them all the time, you are being too greedy, not even willing to allow me a moment's rest..."

Shiller turned his head away, not looking at him, then said, "On a highly efficient production line, no one can rest, including me."

The others all shook their heads, clearly a little overwhelmed by him. Even efficiency-minded Bruce thought it was a bit extreme.

Luckily, the ones being exploited by Shiller weren't them. The ones ultimately suffering were still the owls.

After several days of preparation, Constantine began to produce the raw materials at full effort. To prevent Constantine from being worked to death, Shiller had Hal heal him with Green lantern energy on standby.

Whenever Constantine grew tired, Hal would apply a healing technique on him. Revitalized, he was once again bursting with energy. Under such inhumane exploitation, Constantine produced thousands of voodoo dolls within a few days.

Then, he began casting a puppet-controlling spell on each doll. This was the same spell he previously used to control ghosts. Once cast, he could make the voodoo dolls sing independently.

After placing these dolls in the center of the formation and restarting the same process, their efficiency increased manifold. Still, Shiller was not satisfied.

He was dissatisfied because he had to manually reset the array each time, then re-infuse energy into the Ark Reactor. Although he wasn't worried about getting tired or bored, it was still a waste of time. In his extreme efficiency-driven production model, any waste was not permitted.

So, he pressed Constantine into further reformation, asking him to establish an automatic energy transmission route between multiple arrays. This route would then be connected to the Ark Reactor, thus enabling a fully automatic energy extraction plan from the Dark Owls.

Poor Constantine was truly in trouble. Despite numerous attempts to escape, discarding even his sunk costs, Shiller always managed to drag him back.

In the end, Constantine gave in and started to work on optimizing the power lines between the various arrays.

It is widely known that optimizing connections is the most challenging part in automation. Constantine took over a week to figure it out, but eventually, spurred by Shiller's prod, came up with the most efficient model.

Eventually, this enormous device for automatically extracting Dark Owl's energy was completed. The efficiency of the entire production line reached a peak when it was running, to the point where a single storage module in the Ark Reactor wasn't sufficient, and Bruce had to add a few more on the fly.

If looked at from the spirit realm, the entire Living Hell had turned into a gigantic oil drill. Endless arrays connected to form a red-glowing sphere. Countless Dark Owls flew towards it like moths drawn to flame, their energy being efficiently extracted into the Ark Reactor via some vein-like conduits.

Until one day, all the owls had vanished. Standing in the control room, Shiller turned to everyone and said, "… It seems, this plan has run its course."

"Not surprising." Bruce concluded, "Even if this system operates automatically, considering the rate at which this device was pulling energy, they were bound to notice quickly."

"I lean more towards, they ran out of power," Hal speculated. "If they could've detected it, they should have when we completed the automation. After all, the sudden extraction of so much energy—if anyone had been monitoring that—they would've hit the emergency brakes."