Barton leaned closer, squinting at the mission details and map. He muttered, "A website? All flashy nonsense. Still, this map is marked pretty clearly—better than us stumbling around in the dark last time."
"Fine. Let's do it!"
After completing the mission, Barton watched indifferently as his teammates skillfully uploaded a blurry video of "him swinging a giant axe and hacking down ghouls," along with the ghoul claws they had collected.
When the points arrived the next day, along with three gold coins and a cavalry saber radiating a black gleam placed before him—
Though he said nothing, whenever he asked when the next operation would be, his eyes would always drift toward his teammates' tablets.
"Maybe this thing isn't so annoying after all."
Scratching his head, he privately admitted to his teammates that he had indeed been just "a little bit" stubborn before.
The operation of the Demon Hunter Guild's website was quietly changing the ecosystem of the ancient demon-hunting profession.
It offered unprecedented convenience, resources, and avenues for advancement, beginning to link solitary wolves into a more organized, more efficient collective.
And deep within Morik Manor—
Unknown to anyone, the puppet evil spirit that served as the foundation and support of the entire guild website was also quietly changing.
Whenever a demon hunter completed a mission through the website, submitted materials, gained or spent points, an extremely faint force—a mixture of the baleful aura produced by hunting, the power of rules from fulfilling contracts, the flow of information from knowledge exchanges, and fragments of years condensed from desire and hope—
All sorts of intangible, formless powers crossed space through the omnipresent network connections, absorbed and filtered by the "Network AI Butler" module at the puppet evil spirit's core before ultimately flowing into the evil spirit's energy cycle.
These forces