Chương 65: Chapter 66: The Choke Point Blueprint

By the turn of the second week, Ethan's dual-track industrial loop had expanded into a relentless, high-precision smuggling operation. The lower-fissure grey golems churned out hundreds of cheap, common grey utility mugs and storage flasks for his public alibi. Hidden deep within the dark corners of the lower rock pocket away from the golems, Ethan used his own hands to throw the remaining Serpent Vases and Krater Bowls out of the volatile Dmei-Adamah clay vein.

He worked slowly, piece by piece, spreading the work across the entire month. During this month, Ethan didn't neglect his body. He routinely logged out daily, spending forty-five minutes on physical activity—cranking out push-ups, sit-ups, air squats, and brutal towel-wringing sets to clear the neural fatigue from his central nervous system for his next work cycle.

Every three days, he loaded his timber hand-cart with hundreds of his golems' cheap grey pottery pieces, meticulously burying one or two completed composite luxury vessels directly beneath the piles of common grey mugs. He wrapped his jaw in clean white linen, took his cart down the mountain tracks, and entered the market plazas under his Northern Migrant Potter disguise. To any casual merchant observer or city gate guard, he was just a nameless, harmless transient peddling cheap kitchen tableware.

He peddled the grey pots at the lower stalls, and quietly wheeled his cart into Merlion's procurement booth, delivering the hidden luxury vessels to the warehouse counter in steady increments and extracting his silver shekels stage by stage throughout the month. Every time Ethan returned from the city gates with his cart emptied of grey clay, he returned to the upper limestone cave to checked in on Hilkiah. He refilled the water skins with fresh mountain runoff, and left fresh barley rations beside the old man.

Hilkiah remained deeply tucked within a passive rest state for the first three weeks, his critical health points slowly and steadily creeping upward under the cave's hidden parameters. The old priest didn't question the outlander's long mid-week absences. He simply watched from the shadows of the charcoal pit as Ethan silently tended the fires, a cold, unspoken bond of mutual survival locking between them. While Merlion Holdings had to abide by the system enforced Berit.

That didn't stop them from trying to dig more about this hidden potter. They deployed scouts to tail Ethan's timber hand-cart as he left the city gates, hoping to discover the hidden coordinates of his mountain workshop or other trade secrets that he could be hiding.

Unknown to them, Ethan had already sense them with his high perception stats and deliberately routed his cart through volatile level 35 monster aggregation zones and narrow, un-rendered wadi shadows, breaking their line of sight and dropping his corporate tails in the dark ravines every single time before sliding back into his limestone cave node.

By the time the countdown to the festival reached exactly three days, Ethan had delivered his final composite vessels to the pavilion, and Merlion Holdings held a complete, twenty-piece of luxury pottery that was structurally flawless to their eyes.