Chapter 10 - Golem Crafting
On a miserable looking hill near the entrance of the Magical Swamp…
Three dazzling lights flashed and Alice and her entourage dropped onto the ground like sacks.
Fearful that the Adept may still be watching, the defeated girl kept mum and merely stood up with a whine. If he heard her curse at him, he might strike her down right there…
Sparing her moaning and groaning compatriots clambering up a brief glance, she let herself wonder what Adept Anderson could have done to make apprentices with strong Physiques like them so weak.
A second later she moved her gaze away and reached into empty air, her arm disappearing into a spatial tunnel.
Urgency coloring her movements, she took out all sorts of bottles from her personal storage space and began to self medicate, secretly fearing whatever Anderson had done to her.
She took three potions, one to recover her Spirit, one to neutralize any poisons and toxins, and a healing one. The last one went down her throat first and started its job immediately.
Alice watched the hole in her arm shrink and disappear, smooth pale skin returning to the spot as though nothing had happened. Her abdomen felt the same, but she had a frown on her face as she waited for the inevitable ball to drop.
It dropped, right when the hole in her belly flashed green and stopped shrinking, thin and rapidly enlarging tendrils emerging from it and ripping the hole in her dress even further.
Alice grew shocked and afraid as the tentacles grew and grew until they were each the size and length of her arms. When they kept growing past that point, she regained her wits and reacted.
Wrapping her hand with silvery gray space elementium, she made her palm flat, held it a few centimeters from her chest, and sliced down.
The abnormal growth separated from her and fell, no longer waving about wildly.
Before the girl could celebrate, she felt a fierce drain on her energy and life force as a new set of tentacles began to grow in the old set's place.
Keeping her voice low, Alice reached into her personal space for another potion, chugged it, and disappeared in a blur of dark silver.
"Curse you… you damn rascals… I'm going to kill you all!"
☀☀☀
Alchemy Laboratory, Adept Anderson's Magical Swamp Tower…
12 Knowledge Points and 120 gold coins poorer, Greem was allowed to use the highest quality alchemy station open to apprentices for 12 hours.
Taking in the tidy, clean floors, smooth and shiny walls, well arranged racks and shelves, the body-refining adept felt his hard earned money was well spent.
His gaze roamed over the various magic implements and materials labeled and positioned appropriately, his extensive reading over the years allowing him to recognize and identify each one.
They weren't why he was here though. The brightly illuminated Magical Alchemy Station positioned in the room's center was the object of his purpose.
His large arms folded behind him, he drew closer to the magical version of an industrial crafting table and scanned it from side to side, noting how even his bulky form didn't cast a show on it.
He looked up to the arrangements responsible and found eight metal chains hanging from the ceiling, a bright glowing stone hanging from each of their ends.
Nodding to no one in particular, he scanned the station again to ensure he'd properly identified all the tools and formations. When every rune formation and image matched perfectly with the pages in memory, he immediately got to work.
His arms remained where they were, but a tendril of his Spirit moved and activated the flames under a crucible while another took out a black ingot from his waist bag.
Gently, he lowered the block of metal into the bowl-shaped contraption and summoned a small sack from the same bag. He placed it on a spot for handheld tools on the table and opened it, fishing out a yellow, thumb sized stone.
This was the core of a Ghost Nanny, one of the creatures that inhabited a few of the many muddy ponds in the swamp.
In the past two years, once every two or three weeks, Greem would lure a few of these creatures onto land and kill them before extracting these cores from their brains.
Being creatures formed from the corpses of people who'd died in this swamp years ago, there were quite a number of them. Greem's wanton, regular hunts hadn't dented their population in the slightest.
He had almost 30 of their cores in the black sack, plus those of three Giant Alligators. They'd serve as sufficient practice material for his golem crafting plan.
He'd obtained the book containing the knowledge on the subject a few days ago and devoured its contents, separating the wheat from the chaff.
Right now in his mind, there were over a dozen rune combinations, put together after thoroughly examining and understanding the "wheat."
Now it was time to put them to the test and see if any adjustments were necessary. All in all, he had work to do.
Floating the first core over to the suspension platform, he left it to hover there and dragged over the magnifying glass attached to a movable mechanical arm.
Carved with special formation, the glass could magnify items placed under it up to 500x their usual size. Were this a normal Alchemy Lab, he'd be getting one third of that.
This level of magnification was necessary to enable the microscopic carving of independent yet tightly interconnected magical formations on small sections of magic items as Greem was about to do.
On the thumb-sized soul container, he needed to carve a Summoning Rune to make it possible to summon the golem after the other runes were in place.
He also needed to add an Elementium Body Construction formation to ensure the summoned creature would have a solid shape made out of elementium.
Most important of all, the Mind Control Imprint System had to fit somewhere on the core, for that is where he'd leave an imprint of his soul so the golem would obey his commands only.
Other nodes and energy circuits would also have to be carved to make the constructed body freely controllable for the golem and also serve as energy storage.
Greem had his work cut out for him.
It would take many failures before he got this right. But wasn't that what the extra cores and time was for?
After taking a good ten minutes to look the core over from top to bottom, he adjusted it to the perfect position and angle before slowly dragging over the tool that would do the carving.
It was a pen shaped device with a formation that acted as a sort of dial. He used it to adjust the temperature and width of the beam to the appropriate level before bringing it over to the core.
Leaning forward slightly, he lined up the magnifying glass, the prepped cutting laser, and the core, all in that order before tightening his control over his mind, thoughts, Spirit, and body.
Satisfied with the preparations, he nudged the formation in the carver, and a heat beam, the size of one-tenth an ox-hair, hit the core and made the spot red and soft.
Once a thin indentation appeared, he slowly moved the beam, carving a straight and narrow line that devolved into a curve after some time.
In that manner, he carved rune after rune, crisscrossing them together to form seven magical formations that joined to form a single one that encompassed the whole core.
With that complete, he moved on to the second step and started to connect the formations.
This required him to fill the thin indentations with the molten Black Magic Iron so that magical energy could flow through the formation and bring the golem to life.
It is at this juncture where he experienced failure.
An impossibly tiny droplet of the liquid metal spilled out the carvings and ruined the nearby runes, messing up the entire system of formations.
His emotions as still as a lake, Greem wasted no time and swapped out the core for a new one before starting the process all over again, this time a little bit faster now that he'd gotten a hang of the first part.
His first golem would take a few tries to get right.
☀☀☀
The next morning, 11 hours later…
Staring at the hovering talisman blinking red like a siren, Greem listened to the message currently being passed onto every apprentice in the tower.
"All apprentices should report to the lecture hall at once. Anyone who fails to reach it within fifteen minutes will no longer be my apprentice," Adept Anderson's familiar voice came through.
Moving his gaze away from the no longer flashing talisman, Greem observed his latest failure for a moment and tossed it into the bin.
Simultaneously, a chain of cores, all covered in completed, gray formations flew in a straight line into his waist bag.
The black sack, its contents greatly reduced, also rose off the tiny tool bench and flew straight for the bag, its strap tightened by Greem's Spirit.
After failing six times in a row, he finally succeeded and his hard earned win streak continued from there, only to be broken by the sudden call.
His face as fresh as it was yesterday and eyes white without any red lines of fatigue, Greem set every tool back where it was supposed to be, cleaned up the station, and left the same way he came.
Unlike the normally quiet and empty hallways he was used to, he inadvertently joined a crowd of rushing and frantic apprentices. Those near him who noticed his presence grew even more frantic and hurried along.
Remaining calm and collected, he followed them to the lecture hall at a much slower pace, not really bothered since he knew what was to come.
As soon as he stepped past the large doors of the halls, all the eyes trained on the crimson haired beauty in a striking dress of the same color shifted to his tall, hulking form.
The familiar blend of envy, incredulity, fear, a small amount of hate, and if you'd believe it… worship, washed over him harmlessly.
Similarly unbothered by such ample attention and exposure, Mary kept her arrogant and seductive smile as she raised her hand toward him and beckoned with a finger, the red of her fingernail standing out against the pale digit it was attached to.
A faint smile on his face, Greem shook his head at the vampire's antics and strode in her direction, joining her on the long, empty bench, leaving her no longer by her lonesome.
He sat down and she scooted closer, pressing herself against him as she ran her green eyes down the entire hall, charming all the male apprentices and causing the female ones to shudder and look away.
Ignoring her attempts to "mark territory," Greem let himself enjoy her supple form pressing into his side and finally shifted his gaze to where he could sense the hate.