Chapter 613

Whether the efficiency of energy acquisition is high or not can be compared to oil.

The global daily oil production is calculated in tens of millions of barrels. The daily oil production in the Saudi Arabia region alone is about 10 million barrels. As of March 2022, the global daily oil production is about 100 million barrels. Although it is 1989 now and production temporarily cannot reach that high, it is certainly not small.

It was said before that the size of the dark owls is about the same as real owls. 100,000 owls sounds like a lot, but if you squeeze them together, it might not even be the production of one minute of global daily oil production. How can such efficiency work?

So, Shiler began to organize everyone to further improve production efficiency. The main plans were still those few: on one hand, compressing time costs, and on the other hand, full-process automation.

In terms of compressing time costs, because these children really have a hard time concentrating for a long time, and if they aren't willing to sing themselves and just mumble the pronunciation, there's no way to attract owls.

Moreover, it's also hard to guarantee that these children will all show up on time; one moment someone has something to do at home, the next moment someone is sick. And the essence of doing this is actually to protect the children, so one cannot put the cart before the horse and exploit them. In this case, the time cost is incompressible.

Using human employees has such disadvantages, so everything fell back onto the head of mechanized development. If machines could replace humans, then as long as there is enough energy, it could work continuously, and there would be no problem of absenteeism or poor condition.

In this regard, Constantine was almost driven crazy by Shiler. He said: "You want to use magic for machines??? Listen to yourself, does that sound reasonable?!"

"They don't even have souls! Even if they could emit that kind of syllable through a recording device, it's impossible to attract owls!"

"That's why I need you." Shiler looked into Constantine's eyes and said: "What you need to do now is to research how to manufacture something that won't get tired, and then let them trick the owls."

Hal looked at Constantine with some sympathy; he had never seen Constantine look so disheveled and haggard.

Usually, Constantine might be a scumbag, but he still took care of his image; otherwise, he wouldn't be able to flirt everywhere. In the past, he was always a British yuppie, and when he was serious, he had a unique charm that made people unconsciously attracted to him.

Although he would occasionally appear crazy and decadent due to excessive drug use, it still gave him a kind of punk aesthetic, and there were still people who bought into that.

But now, Constantine couldn't even be called punk anymore; between him and Robinson Crusoe, there was only the distance of a homemade spear.

In the plan Shiler proposed, the most tiring person was Constantine, because he had to set up magic arrays in all hundreds of grids around the school room. He hadn't closed his eyes for over a week; his whole person was unshaven and incomparably haggard.

If it weren't for Shiler promising to give him 10% of this energy, he wouldn't do this kind of work. And by now, even if Shiler promised to give him 10% of this energy, he didn't want to do this work anymore.

Constantine cursed: "You damn capitalist, vampire! Giving me a little benefit, and you want me to work myself to death for you like this..."

Shiler held up a finger again, waved it in front of him, and said: "Add another 10%. You alone can monopolize 20%. Hal and I can only share 10%, and Bruce doesn't even have 1%."

Constantine was really going crazy. He felt a devil named Greed had found him again. He could almost see the black flames burning behind Shiler, which made him even crazier than any demon.

He gritted his teeth and said: "This is what you forced me to do. It seems I must go talk to my old friend."

After saying that, Constantine left. Shiler didn't know who the old friend he knew specifically was, but he knew that probably some demon was about to have bad luck.

Two days later, a more haggard Constantine returned, and at the same time, he brought back a small voodoo doll. He said: "I contacted all the friends I could contact, and finally found a method."

He put the voodoo doll in his hand, then placed it in front of the few of them, and said: "This is a kind of evil art from Africa, a bit like the kind of magic used by the Other Mother; they are all aimed at children."

"In African tribes, they will put the souls of children who died prematurely into a special kind of voodoo doll. Special devils will sense this soul, then send power into the voodoo doll's body, and exchange it for the soul. The tribal priests can use this energy to cast magic."

"But where are we going to get the souls of children?" Hal asked: "Don't tell me, you want to..."

"I never thought of that; I'm a good person." Constantine sighed and said.

Bruce glanced at him, seemingly a bit surprised, but what Constantine said was the truth. Whether judging by his actions or his heart, Constantine was actually really a good person. On matters of principle, he was as unshakeable as Batman.

"I contacted the devil who would respond to this kind of magic. He told me that human priests are really very cunning. Modern medicine has developed to this day, and there are fewer and fewer infants dying prematurely, but the priests still want to continue using magic, so they came up with another way."

"Killing innocent children might be possible, but the efficiency is too low. They chose to trick the devil, using a special ritual to forge the soul of a child. After attracting the devil over, they then trap them there, and this way they can use the devil's power."

When Constantine said this, he didn't feel there was anything special about it, but Hal looked at Shiler. Shiler glanced at him and said: "Why are you looking at me? This only shows that humans are just like this; I'm not special either."

Constantine nodded deeply in agreement. He said: "If you ask me, the thing humans are best at is cheating and swindling. We have many tricks in this regard; even cunning devils will occasionally fall for it."

"However, their kind of trickery has already been phased out, because once a devil falls for it once, they won't fall for it again. At most, they'll just lose a bit of power. So, now they have developed many other versions, but we won't need them."

"I found someone to contact a priest who knows how to use this version of trickery. He told me the method to forge a child's soul. Other materials needed are relatively simple, but there is only one point that is a bit difficult, and that is that it needs breast milk."

"That's easy to handle." Shiler looked at Bruce and said: "Wayne Enterprises should be able to solicit breast milk from society in the name of medical experiments. As long as the price offered is high enough, it should be collected very quickly."

"There is one more problem..." Shiler looked at Constantine again and said: "Can the forged child's soul sing?"

"Of course not. That's just a bait, so I have to use another kind of magic to control this voodoo doll to sing."

"Do you need to control them all the time? Then what if you get tired?" Shiler raised a question again. Constantine took a deep breath and said: "Although I don't need to control them all the time, you are really a bit too greedy. You don't even want to give me time to rest for a while..."

Shiler turned his head away, not looking at him, and said: "On an extremely efficient production line, no one can rest, including me."

The few of them shook their heads one after another, obviously a bit unable to stand him. Even Bruce, who liked to pursue efficiency, felt that this was really a bit too extreme.

But fortunately, the one Shiler was exploiting wasn't them; in the end, the one having bad luck was still the owls.

After experiencing a few more days of preparation, Constantine started manufacturing raw materials with all his might. To prevent Constantine from working himself to death, Shiler also had Hal use Green Lantern energy to heal him on the side.

As long as Constantine was tired, Hal would give him a healing spell, and this way, he would be full of energy again. Under such inhumane exploitation, Constantine manufactured thousands of voodoo dolls within a few days.

Then, he began to cast the puppet control spell on each doll, which was the same kind he used before to control ghosts. After casting it well, he could let the voodoo dolls sing by themselves.

Then, placing these dolls in the center of those magic arrays and starting the same process again, the efficiency doubled several times over, but Shiler was still dissatisfied.

The point he was dissatisfied with was that every time he needed to manually clear the magic arrays, and then go to infuse energy into the Arc Reactor. Although he wouldn't get tired and wasn't afraid of boredom, it was still a waste of time. In other words, time is money, and under an extremely efficient production mode, not a bit of waste is allowed.

So, he forced Constantine to start technical reform again, letting him build automatic energy transmission lines between several magic arrays, and then connect the lines to the Arc Reactor. This way, the plan of fully automatic extraction of the owls' dark energy could be realized.

Constantine really had bad luck. He had tried to run away several times, not even wanting the sunk costs, but was still caught back by Shiler.

Finally, he also gave up and started burying his head in researching how to set up the energy paths between the various magic arrays.

As everyone knows, optimizing lines is the biggest difficulty in automation games. Constantine was stuck on this for over a week again, but in the end, Constantine, whose full potential had been stimulated, still came up with the most efficient version.

Finally, this huge piece of equipment for automatically extracting dark owl energy was made. When the entire assembly line started running, the efficiency reached its peak, and even one storage module of the Arc Reactor wasn't enough, so Bruce temporarily added a few more.

If viewed from the perspective of the spirit world, the entire Living Hell had become a huge oil rig. Countless magic arrays connected into lines, forming a sphere emitting red light, while countless dark owls rushed toward there like moths to a flame, and in the end, all were annihilated in the light of the magic arrays. The extracted energy pulsed along energy channels like blood vessels into the Arc Reactor and was stored.

Until one day, all the owls disappeared, and Shiler, standing in the monitoring room, turned back and said to everyone: "... It seems this plan ends here."

"Not surprising." Bruce gave a conclusion. He said: "Even if this kind of rule operates automatically, judging by the efficiency of this equipment extracting energy, they will react very quickly."

"I'm more inclined to think they ran out of power." Hal said thoughtfully: "If they could discover it, they should have discovered it as soon as we completed the automation. After all, suddenly extracting so much energy, if there really was someone watching, they would definitely have an emergency shutdown."

"As early as the first time I devoured energy, I knew that this kind of rule should be unsupervised." Shiler shook his head and said: "And the reason why it stopped this time is probably because the energy was drained by us."

The reason why Shiler dared to extract this kind of dark energy so unscrupulously without worrying about Barbatos paying attention here was because he discovered that this kind of energy shouldn't be Barbatos's original energy, but had undergone some kind of special processing.

That is to say, they weren't wooling Barbatos in real-time; the dark owl priests had already finished wooling the sheep for them, and had even woven the wool into a blanket. What they were actually stealing was the blanket in the inventory.

As for why Shiler felt this kind of rule was unsupervised, it wasn't just because when Aisha and the others devoured energy before, the dark owls actually didn't react, but also because, according to Gotham's historical records, the era when that owl nursery rhyme was popular had passed a long time ago.

In modern history, this song was no longer popular, and there were no children who would sing it anymore. That is to say, this set of rules had been abolished for a long time.

And being awakened again and still being effective might be because the battery thrown here still had some residual power, and Shiler's goal was to drain this residual power as quickly as possible.

Perhaps some people would think, since the battery had already been abandoned, wouldn't it be fine to steal electricity at any time? However, this brings up Shiler's previous arrangements in Metropolis.

He had long known that there were owls in Metropolis, so he deliberately gave the medal to Pikachu, then borrowed Clark to tell Lex about the agents' illegal intrusion, and then let Lex go find the CIA agents.

Shiler, who had experienced the incident at the Metropolis Mayor's mansion, was of course very clear that after Benjamin died, the person in charge of the CIA's station in Metropolis was replaced by a female agent named Kayla, and Kayla was a KGB agent, and also Alfred's student.