The First Legendary Beast Master

Chapter 1954 How To Hide Names

While the Guild's branch leaders from the Divine War worlds conferred on the course of action to take with Karl's branch, the man in question was already preparing to cause them a new round of headaches.

"Alright, so, we've got this lovely pile of Nature Element stones, and one enthusiastic young Forest Lord, plus a skilled dragon.

So what I'm thinking is that we use the magic of the lovely Miss Skadi to outline an Epic Grade area healing spell on the stones, and then I will do the rune work so that my name appears as artisan. But we leave it incomplete, so that Rue can bump it to the Supreme Rank without putting her name on it.

If we do it right, they should just say that they were created by the Darklight Host.

Then, we can grant them to potential allies, and there is little risk that an area healing relic will be turned against us in a way that will be detrimental to the Guild."

Rue frowned as she calculated the feasibility of that plan.

Making the items should work just as Karl predicted. And she couldn't see the healing effect being all that dangerous, as they could simply [Nullify] it once they knew that it was being used against them.

That would greatly lower the danger level, but the Clans that they granted the items to could display them as a Clan Relic in their Guild House, placing the whole area under a continual healing effect that would allow for faster recovery after challenges, or during dangerous cultivation techniques.

It was deviously brilliant.

Valuable alliance gifts were practically mandatory between powerful Guilds. That much was a given. But the fact that it would be an active healing artifact would remind every member of every allied Guild that it was their alliance with the Darklight Host that was the source of their blessings.

Even when they weren't the cause of the majority of them.

People tended to associate good luck with obvious things, and a constant healing effect over their compound was the sort of positive reminder that people would associate with other good things.

"Alright, I will agree with that plan. I can't have people knowing for certain that I'm here, or we're going to end up in another war right after we finished one against the Valalan League's spies.

That's just not good for business.

Nobody will want to be associated with a crafting guild that's always embroiled in challenges and wars. The moment that we lose one, our items will become anathema to dozens of Clans who want to curry favour with the winners.

And everyone knows that's a possibility when you deal with a controversial Guild.

It's best that we build up the alliance carefully, and without the sort of fanfare that might alert others that our power base was growing fast enough to become a threat to them.

Which means we will also need to skip a few of the most powerful potential allies, because they already have their eyes on controlling the entire region.

For example, if the Almeixei Sect or their allies get wind of what we're doing, they're going to come to cause trouble.

And then we will be right where we didn't want to be."

Karl sighed. There was so much more to politics between groups in the Immortal worlds. Tens of thousands of factions, all with different styles, needs, philosophies, even different pantheons.

And somehow they were supposed to navigate all of that?

He could see why so many of the Supremes struggled to build a Clan, even when they had a decent amount of personal power. There was so much else at play, and so many other aspects involved in trying to recruit acolytes for the Clan under normal circumstances that it was more than one person could handle.

Karl was happy to delegate most of the responsibilities to other members of the Clan, especially the Pack Elders, who had centuries of experience with it, so getting members wasn't the biggest problem for him.

It was the part where he had to go personally win over the leaders, so that they would all get along amicably enough.

He could expand it to the ones that were allied to the New Home Merchant Clan easily enough, but most of them could already be counted as allies, or at least regular customers, after they had learned of the Darklight Host's shops.

It was pushing further than that, into regions that weren't directly allied to the New Home, that would be the issue.

Karl's first thought was to simply skip the immediate region on the peninsula. The Almeixei Sect controlled most of the Clans to the west of them already, and trying to poach them away, or expand an alliance to include them would only be seen as a provocation.

But if they went further abroad, they wouldn't be able to count on rapid response from allies when they were in trouble.

It was not an easy decision to make.

From everything that Karl had learned, building an alliance as a cohesive block was nearly mandatory if you wanted it to stick. But they were already working with groups like the Yizimon Clan, who were thousands of kilometres away, to clear dungeons and collect resources.

They were getting personal visits from customers who couldn't get what they wanted from the Blue Elves shipments, and those were even further away.

So, they might actually be able to connect an alliance over vast distances, if they could just set enough portal arrays that the members could move freely between the clans. The issue was that those Clans were often not allied with each other, and had no alliances with the New Home Merchant Clan, so opening a full time portal was a dangerous proposition.

Not many Clans would be willing to open a long distance portal that would link to areas outside their own alliances.

Even the portals between major cities were rarely more than one or two cities apart.

If you wanted to make a long distance trip, you either flew over dozens of territories, or you hopped from portal to portal until you were near your destination.