36. Golem Synthesis (2)

— Squelch!

Shin Junseok, gripping a scalpel reinforced with Sharpness magic, sliced the Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse open without hesitation. It had lain dead so long that it neither bled nor so much as twitched.

He scattered blue powder, ground from an F-grade mana stone, into the cut he’d just opened.

Then he carved the circuit into the stiffened muscle and bone.

“Engraving the circuit with Arachne’s thread raises efficiency by 12 percent.”
“At the cost of dropping durability by 37 percent.”
“Then won’t the mana circuit fail to hold up for long?”
“For an ordinary golem, yes. But what I’m making will be fine.”

Once made to ‘remember’ the process a single time, this golem would restore even its own mana circuit automatically. That was one of the Blood Golem’s advantages.

“Run the circuit only up to ten centimeters high. Stretch it any longer than that and it’ll short out the mana.”
“Understood.”

Mana circuit engraving is the foundation of golem synthesis, the equivalent of laying a building’s groundwork. It takes a great deal of time and labor, but that is exactly how important it is.

I’d do it if I could, but I don’t have the skill.

If it came to that, I’d think it over.
Sure I would.

Put kindly, mana circuit engraving is groundwork; put bluntly, it’s pure, unadulterated grunt work. Simple labor, and yet it allows for not a single mistake.

Ugh. Just watching it makes my own eyes feel ready to pop out of my head.

Yujin wasn’t just sitting and watching, either.

Blue Slime mucus and Twin-Headed Blood Serpent venom. Plus the Wolf Turtle’s shell.

When he pushed the blue mucus into the pitch-black liquid, it bubbled and seethed. Big bubbles broke with a pop, pop, and smaller ones rose after them, one and two at a time.

“Now.”

When he dropped the Wolf Turtle’s shell, hard as iron, into the venom, it lost all its rigidity and went limp and soft. Yujin stirred the dissolving shell and the venom together with an iron rod, working them into one.

Stirred lightly, it flowed smoothly; gripped harder, it set firm. Good. So far, a success. Even without the bonus from the Alchemist class group, he could manage this much flawlessly.

The Scraps can’t do this.

The heart of alchemy is timing and ratio. If just watching were enough, anyone could become a Grand Alchemist.

The temperature a catalyst was heated to. The order and timing in which several catalysts were combined. In alchemy, the tiniest difference produced an enormous result.

Don’t go saying that sort of thing out loud somewhere. You’ll get called a fool.

Oh Incompetent Constellation. Best you not go around telling people you granted your blessing to someone as outstanding as me.

Even with all the venom mixed in, Yujin’s hands never stopped. After steeping a branch of Rwaim, which carried a liquefying property, he boiled it down in the cauldron a second time.

Preparations are just about done.

Right on cue, Shin Junseok finished carving the mana circuit through the entire body of the Masked Demon-Beast.

“I thought my eyes were going to fall out.”
“Well done. To carve a mana circuit without a single error — splendid craftsmanship.”

Shin Junseok gave a careless “yeah, yeah” in reply, then turned to study the golem materials Yujin had prepared.

“To draw out each other’s properties through combination alone, with no special catalyst. To think there was a mixing ratio like this.”
“I’ll tell you the ratio, so look it over later. Right now this comes first.”
“Oh, right. But, partner. What do I do from here?”
“The golem-crafting process breaks down into three parts, broadly.”

Recognition. Bonding. Activation.

“First, you have to make the golem’s mana engine recognize the body.”
“Then isn’t the mana circuit alone enough?”

Quick on the uptake. Give him one line and he’s already leaping ahead.

It was close to the right answer, but Yujin shook his head.

“For an ordinary golem, sure.”

The Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse served to fix the ‘frame’ of the finished Blood Golem. A golem that took blood for its flesh, by its very nature, stood closer to a summoned beast or a spirit, something called up with a piece of nature for its medium.

— Thock!

“Bring it over here.”

Two Armored Skeletons came slowly into the lot, lugging a massive engine between them. The MIS-4, the mana engine he’d been given for taking on the Madam’s commission.

— Krrrrk!

He bored a large hole near the Masked Demon-Beast’s heart and set the mana engine inside.

“I’ll leave the final adjustment to you.”
“Yes.”

When Shin Junseok connected the mana circuit to the engine, Yujin laid his hand on top of it.

— Bzzzzt!

The inherited skill he’d chosen alongside Golem Synthesis. An ordinary mana circuit could never withstand a mana engine’s output.

“Now then, let’s get the engine running.”

— Thud, thud, thud, thud!

The golem’s heart throbbed, heaving out a heavy, ponderous sound. The instant it came alive, the MIS-4 drove the mana it generated straight into the reinforced circuit.

The moment the venom and solution soaked into the thread-engraved circuit met the engine’s mana…

— Fwooosh!

…it spewed acrid smoke and burned away on the spot.

Failure?

Doesn’t look that way to me.

Blue mana ran between the dark-red flames. As the Arachne’s thread melted, the circuit etched itself still deeper into the Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse, and the compounds he’d soaked it in beforehand fused smoothly with the engine’s mana.

“You’ve cleared the first stage.”
“The next will be far easier.”

Yujin rolled his stiffened neck from side to side, working out the kinks.

Three days passed.

The two of them threw themselves into the golem synthesis, resting only the bare minimum.

“At last, the end’s in sight.”
“Truly. I’ve witnessed a new horizon for alchemy.”
“My method’s heterodox. It runs along a completely different grain from the orthodox approach.”

The alchemical knowledge recorded in the Ring of Black Darkness was no ordinary thing. All of it bent toward raising the efficiency of necromancy. The fundamentals were similar enough, but the deeper one went, the more it held elements that warped the very concepts of alchemy.

“Same goes for golems. You — make a proper one.”
“Haven’t I learned plenty? Isn’t that enough?”

A strange gleam of light wavered between his exhaustion-soaked eyes.

Even as he assisted, hadn’t he kept grinning to himself, as if struck by some inspiration? Watching him embody Yujin’s knowledge in real time and reinterpret it in his own way sent an inexplicable shiver crawling over the skin.

This is exactly why he became the Grand Alchemist.

There was no telling how much further he’d grow on the knowledge he’d absorbed from this golem-crafting.

“Only the final stage left.”
“That’s right. Now we just have to activate it.”

Yujin checked over the MIS-4’s condition. It carried a defect unknown to this era: under load, the engine could let mana surge past its limit and wreck the ‘integrated control unit.’ To keep that from happening, he set a cap on its output.

Good. No problem with the engine, so let’s get started.

The moment he gave the MIS-4 a light tap, blue mana from the engine coursed through every nook and cranny of the Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse. So far, no different from simply switching the engine on.

“It’ll be a little different now.”

— Thud, thud, thud!

The engine’s output climbed sharply, and the Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse heaved. As if wrung out by some unseen hand, its arms and legs twisted and spun wildly, like dough braided for frying. That was the strong moss at work, a catalyst set in beforehand to raise the mana conductivity.

“P-partner? This is going right, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. No problem.”
“If we leave it be, it looks like it’ll fail to withstand the engine output and break apart, doesn’t it?”
“Recall the name of the golem I’m making.”

Blood Golem.

The Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse was the ‘frame’ that fixed the golem’s form, not its main body.

When the twisted arms and legs had shrunk to under a fifth of their size, he sprinkled monster blood, the last material he’d prepared, over the withered body.

“The blood isn’t falling to the ground!”
“The golem recognized that blood as the medium composing its body.”

Liquid, and yet possessed of firmness too. Blood that should have run downward under gravity instead held the shape of arms and legs, thanks to the catalysts Yujin had worked into it.

If I sprinkle the desert sand at this timing…

Yellow sand scattered across the bubbling, seething blood, fixing the monster blood into a shape close to a human’s. As he kept pouring the crimson liquid over that locked-in frame, it was reborn as a giant standing roughly three meters tall.

A collaboration of necromancy and alchemy. A golem that only a Necromancer could command had come into being.

Shin Junseok cocked his head this way and that, circling the completed Blood Golem.

“May I touch it?”
“If you don’t mind the poison.”
“Eep!”
“For your information, it’s Twin-Headed Blood Serpent venom — fail to treat it within ten minutes and you’ll lose the use of your hand.”

Yujin shot back the cynical reply and checked the Blood Golem’s status.

Take a look at the Special Notes, would you. Oh Incompetent Constellation.

It’ll climb to 6th Rank.

A golem’s combat ability varied greatly with the substance that made up its body, and the Blood Golem in particular shifted widely depending on the kind of blood it absorbed.

Right now I bought whatever 1st-Rank monster blood I could get, but as it fights, it’ll grow bigger.

Not growth, exactly. It just means it can get stronger, up to as much as the engine output allows.

With the MIS-4’s output, 6th Rank was the ceiling. Build the body from a rare metal like mithril on this same engine and it would top out at 5th Rank, yet the Blood Golem could reach higher than that.

Not that it’s feasible right now, mind you.

On the blood of 1st-Rank or 2nd-Rank monsters, it fell far short. For the Blood Golem to wield the combat power of something 7th Rank, he’d have to gather an enormous quantity of blood from monsters of that same grade.

And monster blood is hard to come by, since there’s no demand for it.

No. Do that, and the Blood Golem won’t heed me.

Too much of anything was worse than too little. That thing had a will of its own, in its own way.

“Blood Golem. If you’re awake, answer.”
“Yes. Master.”

A grating timbre, like metal scraping on metal. Kronos rattled the watch wildly, aghast at the Blood Golem’s reply.

It’s about the level of a computer AI. It only carries out basic commands.

The chief of the Titans, renowned far and wide for his arrogance, admitted his error without protest. That alone showed how deeply the golem Yujin and Shin Junseok had wrought had struck him. He had always believed creation lay beyond what mortals were permitted, and so the shock cut all the deeper.

Kronos’s reaction is warmer than I expected.

Rather than needle him as usual, Yujin gave Kronos time to gather his thoughts.

“Partner. Are you heading straight back to the borderlands?”
“No. I’ve got to wait for the Scraps.”
“Then I’ll do a little golem research while you’re here.”

While Yujin stayed absorbed in his exchange with Kronos, Shin Junseok had already gone and fetched a gas mask and gloves.

“Don’t overdo it. Even decontamination gear isn’t perfect.”
“I won’t push it too hard.”
“Take a look in the mirror. Do I look like I’d believe that?”

Shin Junseok had said it with both eyes gone bloodshot.

As if I’d put any stock in that.

Nodding along, Yujin figured that at this rate he might just have to use Life Drain on the man.

For the moment, yeah.

The Pantheon, you say…

— Gwahahahat!

Look at him go. No idea how he managed to hold back, with his mouth itching to brag this whole time.

Yujin let out a soft snicker.