Chapter 3: The First Golem [Golem Prototype v1]

"A mage?" Ryan inquired, looking at her stout figure and the spear she held in her hand. "She looks more like a warrior than a mage", he thought.

"Let's go to the village first, there is a lot to explain and staying out here isn't the best of choices since the NullBorns roam everywhere, and there are some hostile spirit beasts too."

"Wait. Spirit beasts?" He asked, his curiosity piqued.

"Come, there is a lot to uncover. I'll explain as we move, " she said as she led him towards the camp.

"As children blessed by Gaia, we have an affinity for different elements that make up the world. Everything in this world is made up of energy. Some call it aether, some know of it as just magic, we call it mana. Not everyone's mana is similar since its properties change according to their respective elements. Theoretically, you could sense and manipulate all the elemental mana since their origin is the same, but we are all attuned to different kinds of elemental mana since birth."

"Like me, for example, I'm attuned highly to the wind element, I have high sensitivity towards mana that leans towards the wind element, helping me sense, gather and manipulate it according to my will," she explained as the wind elements around them gathered into a pale white ball oh the palm of her hands, swirling wind elemental particles constantly being pulled from the atmosphere.

"Also, wind element doesn't just mean that you can only manipulate wind. It just means it's easier to sense and manipulate than the other elements. Every element is related to each other in some intricate way," she said as the previous ball of wind energy now transformed into the shape of a miniature cloud. Drip. Small beads of water fell from the clouds as the wind energy transformed into water.

Ryan's eyes went wide as his mind began to race, churning out ideas and theories regarding the elements.

"Do you know what you are attuned to?" she asked.

"Terra." He said. He remembered that the screen had shown him previously that his attunement was Terra.

"Terra?" She tilted her head, looking confused.

"Why, what happened?" he asked.

"Terra is a vague concept; it encompasses a lot of things, some say it even embodies life itself. But I haven't heard of someone awakening the terra element before," she said. "Let's go talk to the people in the camp, maybe they know more about it."

As they were walking, he asked again, "You said you were a mage before. What's that about?"

"It's a classification system we assign to people depending on how they use their elemental mana," she explained. "Some people mainly embolden their bodies directly, like covering their bodies in layers of their respective elements, increasing their physical abilities like toughness, speed and damage."

"Some, like me, who eject mana externally, we identify them as mages," she said as a white ball condensed on her hands, but this time, instead of holding it, she faced her palm towards a nearby boulder. The white ball left her air like a bullet as it smacked the boulder, shattering it into pieces.

"Talent is a great help when first sensing and gathering mana, but how you use it changes everything." This time, instead of a ball, an arrow made of wind appeared on her hand, spinning rapidly, and then it shot towards one of those runic stone trees, penetrating it and leaving a small clean hole.

"Close your eyes. Try sensing the mana around you", she said. "You should feel an attraction towards what you are attuned to."

Ryan closed his eyes and tried to visualise the energy she was referring to. He imagined strands like what happened when she made the balls of wind mana.

At first, there was nothing. But then, yellowish golden strands began to emerge from the ground along with faint greenish strands from the nearby wildlife.

He tried gathering them into his palm just like Lira did when creating the balls of wind. Slowly, the strands of mana gathered on his hand, but unlike Liras whose mana swirled and spun, his was more solid, almost like a structure made of stone or metal. 

As he more and more elemental mana condensed on his hand, he could notice that although the mana looked solid, looking closer, it almost looked like a string of numbers and letters, like strands of code making up a program. 

He remembered when he passed out near the waterfall, a voice telling him something.

["You are not of this world, yet Gaia has accepted you. Learn... survive... and awaken your code."]

"Awaken your code?" he thought, watching the lines of code making up the mana gathering on his hands. As he pieced together everything, a sudden realisation dawned on him. 

The experiments that he and the researchers were desperately trying to do in their previous world was to prove that human consciousness, which is primarily a bunch of electrical signals in the brain, could be split from their body, essentially turning the person into an immortal, choosing and replacing their body as they willed.

"Lira said that terra incompassed life as well", he thought. "Our experiment was to turn life into code and vice versa, and since everything here is made up of mana and mana is made up of code, this might be what we were trying to achieve all along."

With this newfound knowledge, he looked at his hand. Golden and greenish energy concentrated on his hand, the golden mana on the outside making up the structure, and the greenish mana pulsing inside like a core of a machine or a soul of a being.

He suddenly had a bold idea, he could see and understand mana unlike others. Since the main idea of manipulating the elemental mana was visualisation and seeing how seamlessly Lira could change the wind mana from a ball to an arrow, he thought he could probably do the same too.

All this while Lira observed, her face went from calm to surprise and confusion. Looking at Ryan's hands, she saw something she had never witnessed. Mana, gathering on his hand, but instead of the usual formless nature, it was solid like a cube with the outside made of golden strands and the inside pulsating green.

Slowly, Ryan visualised the mana gathering in his hand to take the shape of a small robot that he used to have in his previous world, used as an assistant for daily chores like setting reminders for tasks and groceries.

In his hand the mana and particles from his surroundings converged, golden mana along with white particles from the stone like trees and greenish strands from the trees and grass. Slowly it took shape of a humanoid creature with a bulky frame made entirely of the same whitish stome that made up the trees.

As he gathered more and more mana from his surroundings the creature grew larger and larger until he couldn't hold it in his hands any longer so he moved it from his hand to the ground before him, his hands outstretched. His creation grew in size until it reached to almost 10 meters in size as he started feeling his body being drained of stamina. 

He panted slightly out of breadth. His creation standing tall like a towering statue its eyes suddenly glowing white. A faint vibration was felt as the hulking statue began to move, the vibrations growing louder like the roar of a machine. 

Its body started moving as its gaze met Ryan's. 

[Awaiting commands lord.] 

Its monotone mechanical voice sounded in his head.