Chapter 371: Mystery of the Puppet Race

Joo Joowon could not help wondering whether Kang Taewoo had really come out to experience life. Alternatively, was it a special NPC who had fallen on hard times and possessed a complicated background?

That did not seem likely, though. Astral Diviner were highly sensitive to changes in destiny. If they came into contact with some kind of special existence, fate would naturally send them a warning. This was a unique ability possessed by those favored by fate after they stepped into the transcendent realm.

Yet Joo Joowon had not sensed anything unusual when he first came into contact with Kang Taewoo.

That was, of course, if its appearance was excluded from consideration.

"Ugh, that’s spicy!" Joo Joowon exclaimed as he gnawed on the rabbit head while browsing the forums.

Small and obscure races were rarely mentioned on any forum. Either they had little worth discussing beyond their small populations, or they were kept tightly under wraps because they served as elite troops or trump cards. In either case, it was almost impossible to find any useful information about them.

Unlike some well-known races, whose secrets were practically nonexistent unless the information was being kept under extremely tight wraps, these obscure races were different. For the more familiar races, their secrets had almost been completely exposed to the public.

After searching for quite a while, Joo Joowon still could not find any useful information. There were only a few players who had mentioned that having a member of the Puppet Race in their territory was rather creepy to look at at night. Members of this race apparently never slept. They only entered a long slumber when they died.

There were also some players with professions such as Puppeteer who had posted bounties, hoping someone could capture a transcendent member of the Puppet Race and hand them over.

From the looks of it, their situation did not seem particularly good.

Just as advancing as a Mechanist required more advanced equipment and the ability to manufacture things such as mechs, advancing as a Puppeteer also required mastery over puppets of a higher level.

Compared with other races, members of the Puppet Race were practically tailor made puppets for Puppeteers. They had an exceptionally high degree of compatibility with the profession.

However, any intelligent being would find it difficult to accept becoming a marionette controlled by someone else, even if they were puppets themselves.

Perhaps this was also why members of the Puppet Race were almost impossible to find on the forums.

Were they considered special and excellent "materials" by certain types of transcendent beings?

Joo Joowon switched to the NPC recruitment interface and directly set the race filter to the Puppet Race. After searching, he discovered that the total number of recruitable Puppet Race NPCs did not even fill ten pages. He could not help clicking his tongue in surprise.

After all, each page displayed only fifty NPCs available for recruitment. In other words, there were fewer than five hundred Puppet Race NPCs in total.

For other races, even if he entered something like "Dragon," he could easily find a hundred pages of results. The same was true if he searched for "God," "Angel," "Demon," or "Zombie."

In short, almost every category that Joo Joowon considered rare actually had a considerable number of recruitment candidates. As for more common races, there was no need to mention them. Their results stretched so far that he could not even see the end of the list.

This was a very unreasonable situation.

Unlike players, whose available slots were fixed, becoming an NPC was much easier. Basically, as long as someone joined a territory, they could automatically obtain an NPC identity template.

If they no longer wanted to remain in their original territory, they could simply list themselves on the NPC recruitment interface. The recruitment interface was essentially a job market for finding talent.

Furthermore, in game worlds that had been operating for a long time, creatures that had not been recognized by the game were practically nonexistent, apart from players, experience monsters, and NPCs.

Of course, conspiracy theories about the game were not uncommon in any world. However, compared with the convenience offered by the game’s functions and the improvements they brought to one’s strength, how many people could continue resisting these things under the game’s growing influence?

Therefore, the longer the Age of Apocalypse operated in a world, the fewer beings remained who had not been digitized.

Joo Joowon had seen discussions on the forums about how only certain high-level worlds still had powerful individuals who continued to resist the game.

This was because the talented geniuses born in these worlds could genuinely reach heights of power that others could only look up to, all without relying on the game’s functions.

Not everyone had the ability to resist the game in this way.

Moreover, it was only a matter of time before even these worlds were infiltrated.

Ordinary people made up the majority of every world. There simply were not that many extraordinary geniuses with exceptional talent.

So, did the Puppet Race belong to this kind of situation?

Most likely not.

Joo Joowon felt that they were more like an ethnic minority. Perhaps they even came with a built-in debuff that made reproduction difficult?

He really could not imagine how two dolls were supposed to produce offspring.

Although the Puppet Race was similar to Earthfire in some ways, there were actually many differences between them when examined more closely.

Earthfire was a spiritual life form born from nature and nurtured by the world itself. It was merely one small branch of the Spirit of Nature category. There were countless beings belonging to this branch. Flames, flowing water, white clouds, and all kinds of other things could give birth to Spirit of Nature. Even if a refrigerator gained sentience and became a spirit, it would still fall under this category.

Therefore, logically speaking, there should have been no reason for dolls that gained sentience to be classified as a separate race known as the Puppet Race.