Well it sounds like you have enough info now that your problem is solved? If so, wonderful :-)
...but your post still leaves *me* with all kinds of questions, like why you need AnyEvent DNS to work if you don't have any network adapters in the first place, or how you're going to use a name server by host name if you don't have an initial default nameserver to resolve that with :-) I'll point back to my first post here about how if you know what name servers you want to use (like Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 or google 8.8.4.4) you can just pass those directly to AnyEvent::DNS and skip messing with Net::DNS::Resolver. Then if your network is connected, you can reach 1.1.1.1, and if it isn't, it should time out within AnyEvent rather than Net::DNS::Resolver.