“What we are creating is the simplest form of servitor. It is called a Golem. Because it will be made entirely of bronze, it will likely be small and somewhat clumsy, but it should respond to your commands. It will require an awful lot of animation mana to move since Brass is not naturally flexible, but I saw that you had an extra small animation core, so we should be able to activate it despite its flaws. Golems are not like automatons, they are not as flexible or as fast, but their advantage is they are very, very tough, and somewhat simple to create if you have a huge excess of mana to work with.” Kalika said.

We had dug a small, man-shaped trench into the earth of the cave. We all stood back a little as the breastplate and chausses slagged with whatever Kalika was doing to melt them, and we could feel the heat coming from the melted metal.

“Now, what you need to do is to drop the fire core into the golem. It will be using that both to control itself and to create fire. Once it has cooled a bit, you need to mark it with your knot for animation.”

I nodded, following her instructions, even though the heat radiating off the thing was intense. I [pushed] frost into a small knot I had created with thick cord, and then kept pushing until I was very low on mana and the knot would shatter at a touch. At her direction, I dropped the knot onto the molten metal, which burst into flames and cooled rapidly, leaving behind the animation knot where I assumed its back would be, right above where I had dropped the fire core, which had sunk into the molten metal.

She nodded and watched as the thing slowly turned darker. “Now, here’s where it gets tricky. Before it cools too much it might shatter, so to keep that from happening I need you to start pushing animation mana into it. See that core I had you fetch, the one from that skeleton? Swallow it.”

“Swallow it?” I asked weakly. I knew where it had been.

“yes, swallow it. It will start filling you with animation mana the moment you do, so you need to start pushing the mana for all you are worth as quickly as it forms into the golem. That will cool it and help it stay intact. You might get some burns, but it will be worth it.”

Cassie was watching with intentness into what was happening to her former armor, and Raphael was keeping his eyes open and watching the flock of Wyverns to see if they took any interest in what was going on in the cave. Shiana was flickering her eyes back and forth but didn’t seem to be focused on either activity.

I winced and swallowed the tiny orb, and started feeling incredibly full. Waves of mana were traveling through my body and into my core, and I quickly channeled a thread of mana and [pushed] it, using a small stick, into the cooling metal form before me. I could feel the skin on my hand burning as I did, as close as I was, but I remained focussed, ignoring the pain as the color deepened and finally turned to the orange finish of cooled bronze. Eventually, I started running out of the huge surplus provided by the gem and finished by adding normal essence to the goblin-shaped blob.

Do you wish to animate this hideously malformed blob of bronze instead of waiting until you can craft something truly beautiful? You do not have a limit on pet slots, but you certainly have a limit on aesthetics.

Yes. I told Mnemosyne. Sure, it was snarky, but it was nice to know that she wasn’t just my ‘YES’ man… woman… sprite.

Kalika whispered, “It’s alive!” with feeling. “Now just command it to sit up so that we can trace the fire runes on it to allow it to use its ability. It doesn’t have an aura as you do, so using the push knot should cause it to spew fire out in front of it.”

Stand up, I told the thing, and with a weird sort of half creak, it pushed itself up on its arms and then stood there, wobbling a bit unsteadily for a moment.

Lie down, I commanded, and the 3-foot-tall gingerbread man flopped backward, landing on the rocks with a clank. Raphael looked back at us irritatedly and put a finger over his lips. Shush. I nodded as Kalika whispered, “Now carve on the rune.”

It is not a rune, it is a knot. I thought, but I nodded, using my extra-sharpened temporal knife to gently peel out the [push] and [channel] verbs and the [fire] noun. It was kind of interesting that simply [pushing] some essence into this construct caused a channel to open between the golem’s chest, where the mark was contained, and his core, which I could see glimmering deeply inside of his bronze body.

Boy, that body was ugly. The hole was vaguely man-shaped, but there was flash everywhere. I didn’t get any feeling of ‘aliveness’ from Gingerbread Man, but I still couldn’t resist using my knife to carve a bit of a gingerbread man's face onto the rough head.

“If we test the fire rune now, we will bring all of the wyverns down on us at once, so let’s get this fight started and let him run out into the middle, away from us, to test the magical attack. That way, if he explodes, it will just hurt the flock and not us.”

With that stunning vote of confidence from Kalika, I had GB clump over to the traps and sort of hunker behind them. I was in the third, least-useful rank, and watched as Shiana leaned carefully over Cassie with her bow, drew back, and unleashed an arrow upwards past the lip of the cave.

Shiana dived back, and I heard screeching as a solid mass of wings and angry tails smashed into the barricades we had made. All sorts of scale colors were visible as Cassie started blocking stinger-tipped tails and swinging her hammer around madly. Her bear, beside her, seemed to completely ignore stingers as it swatted the wolf-sized wyverns out of the air.

Raphael was truly a picture of grace. He used his staff to knock one out of the air and then stepped on its neck, leaped over the stabbing tail of a second, wrapped his staff around the back of its neck, and then used the staff’s leverage to brace both of his feet against its belly, rolling backward and ripping his hindclaws down its vitals before tossing it’s dying body behind him with his feet. Using the roll, he popped back to his feet and took a step forward, using that weird spin for just a moment to knock back three wyverns that looked to be lining up for a shot at Shiana.

We continued in that vein for a few minutes, and I even took a shot at one of them that slipped past the bear. I whipped it with an essence-charged tail tip, and the thing just collapsed. I was either much more powerful now than I was before, or these wyverns weren’t as challenging as some of the monsters outside. Several of the traps had sprung, stabbing or missing wyverns, but there were at least a dozen in various states of destruction choking our position.

After a few more moments, I heard Kalika chanting beside me, and yelled “Down!” before ducking my head. A golden ball of light shot out from behind me, almost a foot across, out of the cave, and then erupted into dozens of golden electrical arcs, dropping many of the wyverns. There seemed to be a clearing, so I sent GB running out of the cave to where the majority of the remaining wyverns hovered and swooped.

“Burn them” I ordered GB, but instead of letting out a cone of fire, as I had expected, the little fellow started shaking and vibrating.

“Oh crap! He’s going to blow! Everyone down!” I yelled as loud as possible, and remarkably, everyone dropped as a huge fireball centered on my poor little short-lived golem exploded around him. The flames impacted against the barricade, setting off the remaining traps, one of which plunged a tooth into the neck of one of the few wyverns remaining in the tunnel, and with a last clank of Cassie’s hammer on a now-broken reptilian neck, and a few squeaks from dying wyverns, everything was now silent.

I slowly lifted my head, wondering if even his little bronze boots were still standing, to be met by an amazing sight. GB looked fine, if a little glowy from the heat, and was surrounded by a circle of charred wyverns, dozens deep. I could see that his fire mana was a little low, but it seemed to be slowly rebuilding itself.

Raphael, despite his grace and dodging ability, had managed to take a stinger to the thigh, and Cassie immediately moved to use her purify ability on the wound. He looked a little pale but in good spirits.

Shiana just looked cool as a cucumber, if a little irritated that some of her arrows had been incinerated. I had a plan for that, but it would take some time and a LOT of mana to make that many high-carbon spring steel arrowheads.

And Kalika? Kalika seemed to have picked up a new hobby, glaring at me. “What runes did you use, exactly?” she demanded.

I was starting to get a little irritated, it had worked, didn’t it? “I knotted [push], and [channel].”

“Channel? What on earth for? You know that it counts its whole body as its spell point, right? You basically TOLD it to use its whole body to disperse the fire. What kind of limiter did you use?”

“Limiter?” I asked, having no idea what she was talking about, but I was starting to be tempted to make a point of some kind. I didn’t like the implication that I was stupid, just ignorant.

If she facepalmed any harder she was probably going to leave a bruise. “A limiter. Either a rune or a command to tell it not to use up its entire fire mana pool in an attack.”

I was worked up enough that I wasn’t going to pull any punches. “Let’s get something straight right now. You didn’t teach me, you simply told me to do something and I did it. It didn’t explode, it didn’t kill anyone, we just got a few singes. You had me make something I didn’t even know existed, to do something I had never heard of, using magic in a way I didn’t understand, and then you made me swallow a filthy piece of bile I found slopping around inside the decaying brain of a skeleton that probably would have KILLED me if I hadn’t dumped the energy into this...golem thing as quickly as I did. I took every safety precaution I could think of, and we just wiped out over three dozen wyverns in minutes. What in the hell are you doing? This isn’t boot camp, you don’t have to tear me down and build me up into a perfect soldier, I just need some information! Stop being so damned mysterious, answer my questions, and explain to me what I am doing before I do it!”

I wasn’t exactly yelling, but I was being forceful. Kalika just looked at me for a moment before dropping her head and mumbling something I could not hear.

“I cannot understand you. What did you say?” I asked her.

“I said I don’t know! All I know is what a few channelers were supposed to be able to do, what dungeon cores can do, and that you have tremendously messed up energy patterns. I don’t know your knot language or how it works, I don’t understand your scroll, I certainly have almost no idea how your magic works except that it works with your aura, and I don’t even know where to get started except to find a circumstance that you can learn in! All I know is, my teacher and team got slaughtered hours before I met you, and suddenly Aen dumped a mandatory quest on me to ‘help Bran discover his powers’.”

Raphael stepped toward her as if to offer comfort, and she glared at him. “I swear Raphael if you try to touch me right now I will put a shock through you that will shut down half your body and make sure you can never please a woman again.”

Raphael immediately lifted both of his bloody hands and took a step backward, almost tripping over a dead wyvern, and said “Nope, hands-off. Got it.”

She looked at me again, a pinched expression on her face, and said “I know, you are wandering around in a giant Dark room without a light. Me, I am wandering around that same giant dark room with nothing but the flickering stub of a candle, and it’s killing me. I am sorry. You probably kept your golem from exploding without a limiter by channeling over its entire body, since if it had sent all of that power through just the mark it would have probably melted into slag, starting with the mark. I think I can still help you, but please remember that I don’t speak draconic, or use channeling, or any of that.”

I nodded, “Fair enough. You try to remember I am clueless, and I will try to remember you are clueless. You have my sympathy for the loss of your people, just please try to realize that I have lost my entire goddamned world, species, and life.”

Shiana managed to break the tension perfectly by saying, “Wait, all the kobolds are dead? When did that happen? Did they have their own world like the Elves did?”

A lot of laughs happened while Cassie tried to explain my displaced soul situation to Shiana, and I noticed that Kalika was listening very closely.

I got Raphael to help me gather up the corpses. Many of them were too burned to be of use, but Shiana started skinning the hides, and I started digging into the corpses for useful bits. Kalika just watched in amazement as I dug core after core out of the hearts of the dead beasts, since even the ones that were burned beyond recognition often still had a core. By the time we were done, I had dozens of ‘special bits’ including stingers and poison sacs, 15 untanned hides that were still useful, 1 ‘least’ core, 9 small cores, 8 medium cores, and 1 large core, most of which were ‘toxic’. Kalika assured me that they were every bit as valuable and useful as untyped, especially for cultivators, who could use them to gain insane poison resistance.

“Just those cores alone, a middle-ranked house in Mathoria would probably pay the majority of their wealth to obtain. I don’t mean all of them, just one small, one medium, and one large core. Once you get to the monsters that have large cores usually, they have so many types of abilities that they become tainted cores. Still very useful and filled with magic, but not nearly as single or double typed large cores, and untyped large or bigger cores usually involve plane hopping or taking out demigod-level monsters, like epic slimes.” Kiana explained.

“So how much are the cores worth in your world, Raphael?” I asked curiously.

He looked thoughtful. “Right now? Most of them are simply not for sale. The highest level new player right now is 23. Small typed cores sell for hundreds of gold apiece, small untyped cores double the value. A medium fire core, which is the only one that has been listed right now, sells for ten times the cost of a small fire core, so over 1500 gold pieces. It’s possible that the price could go down as more people hit the levels that can find them, but since they are expendable, it’s a lot more likely that the price will climb as people find more uses for them. As far as large cores, like the one you gave me, or Grand cores? I am planning on begging you for some salve to sell JUST so I can afford to list the thing at about 25,000 gold pieces. In my world, that’s over a quarter-million subunits, which is a… metric crapton of money where I live.

He grinned, “Or we can find some other way to make that kind of money that is more stable, and keep these for if they go insane price-wise.”

I nodded, “That might be useful. After all, I would hate for you to sell something like that and then, later on, find out you have to SWALLOW one to unlock your powers or new levels.” I said, smiling a little at Kalika.

Kalika smirked a little, “You know, you could always have him swallow one of these small poison cores right now. He’s not a cultivator, but if he survives it should give him a really strong poison resistance. If he survives.”

Raphael looked green for a minute, and then thoughtful, and then started nodding, “Let’s do that! I mean, Cassie has a cure, and Bran has an immune system builder, and something that can help if it like… shuts down all my internal organs. What’s the worst that can happen? I die, have to run back from the closest outpost, and we learn something very, very important.”

Raphael grinned, “I have never even HEARD of someone doing that. Enchanters stick ‘em in powerful potions and the hilts of swords to give them fire damage, but I bet no one has tried swallowing them yet!”

Nodding, I tossed him the least poison core. It appears that least was as rare as large, it was very tiny, but that probably happened because it was the first core that appeared, and quickly evolved into a small core.

He grinned, gave Shiana a thumbs up, and said, “If I live through this, will you give me a kiss?” to which she replied, “I promise I won’t kiss you if you are dead. That’s disgusting.”

He grinned one more time, tossed back his head, and swallowed the tiny gem. Having finally carved out some useful meat, I gave Shiana the nod to go ahead and loot.

Ugh, the piles of organs were staggering. A big pile of eyeballs, stacks of wings and rainbow-colored hides, teeth, skulls, poison glands, and spines. I offered to let the others loot, but they cheerfully passed on the opportunity, so I started sucking them into my soul space.

By Flame, Bran! Really! This is disgusting! I was getting a plot ready for some of those seeds, and a bunch of gigantic piles of yuck just appeared. This is going to take me ages to clean up… I have never eaten before, but I swear I want to throw up. Warn a girl next time! I am going to petition Flame for a special title for...this. Ugh.

I grinned, sorry, Mnemosyne. But it’s all really valuable.

I think I should worry, though, since Mnemosyne would probably find a way to get me back. She had proven capable of ejecting things from my soul space, so I might have to look forward to finding eyeballs in all sorts of disgusting places.

Raphael smiled, “Hey, that’s not so bad. I even got a unique title out of it! Huh. Paste-eater. Sometimes in kindergarten, there is that one kid that’s just not the brightest tool in the she...hurk!” He said, turning and losing his lunch against the recently cleaned wall of the cave.

I will not describe, in detail, what happened for the next half an hour, but suffice to say that the cave wall earned a lot of new decorations, including some in blood red, and Raphael wound up going through Cassie’s entire mana bar three times and using up two full bottles of my special internal tonic. We all wanted to see what could happen as he continued consuming poison cores, but by the end, he was the proud possessor of 100% poison resistance and another unique title, sharpened bowling ball.

I bet it hurt. Based on his groaning, I bet it did. Call me a little sadistic, but they had watched me doing the same thing through two evolutions and a foundation forming… It was nice to see, for once, it wasn’t just me sick as a dog.

Kalika shrugged a little, “Chuckle all you like, but when your core can handle it, it would probably be best if you went through the same thing. Only you regenerate, so you won’t have to start with a ‘least’ core.”

I sighed. “I know, but he deserves the title more. I know what I am going for, he just decided to swallow something we randomly dug out of a poisonous dungeon monster.” I grinned and then loudly stated, “Hey Raphael, I think dinner tonight will be stewed wyvern in a thick, creamy spinach sauce over fried toast. What do you think?” to which he turned and attempted to add more to his smelly spot with a gurgling huck.

Shiana asked Cassie, seriously, “Do you think it’s possible that the devil lords would actually eject a soul from their hells for being too evil for them to tolerate?”

Cassie shook her head and added, “Nope, I think it’s kind of absolute. Still, I have to admire Raphael’s courage. I bet he didn’t even turn down his pain levels before he started slurping down poison cores like half-rotten rats in a village dump.”

Another hurk came from the corner where Raphael crouched, and Kalika finally stood up and walked over to him. Her hands glowed green for a moment and Raphael slumped, finally relaxing a little and scooting away from the pile of grossness he had left behind.

“Look at the bright side, Raph.” I said, smiling a little, “At least your armor stayed clean, right?”

He looked down at his armor and then smiled weakly at me. “You are right. Wow. Good call on making it self-cleaning, bud.”

I shrugged, “My shirt is the same way, which will probably come in handy when we go a little deeper and I have to compress my core. I’ll probably make your little breakfast collection there look like a president’s bathroom.”

He turned a little green for a moment and then shook his head. “I do not envy you, brother. If this is what you have to go through to do what you do…” and then he looked thoughtful, “I take it back. If it meant supporting my family and protecting them, I would go through that a million times and worse.”

I sighed. Way to go and ruin the mood. “Well, you have 100% poison resistance now. That is probably going to be a really big deal at some point. We might even find more specialty cores so you can build up your other resistances, although I do not know if we might have to create special substances to keep you alive through it. I know I plan to go through the same thing you did when I can, and then you get to laugh and make jokes at my expense.”

He nodded and then smiled, a genuinely warm smile, “This is going to make some parties desperate for me. It might even make some girls clamor to get into my bed, yes?”

I nodded, “It should make you very unique and desirable, I think. Just don’t share your titles or what you had to go through to get them.”

He shot Shiana a look, and I leaned over to whisper to him, “That one won’t require so much to impress. Just ask her and make sure you are serious. She’s already dealt with one girlfriend collector. I don’t want her to have to deal with another, even if she doesn’t seem to understand. I will take it personally, and so will Gingerbread Man.”