Returning to her factory, Emily doesn’t bother docking Elisime and instead leaves her floating above the sprawling compound. She opens the ship’s cargo hatches and sends hundreds of instructions through her Logic Core, kicking her metal soldiers into motion to begin unloading the scrap they gathered for reprocessing.

Emily weaves a simple spell from wind and metal to allow her troops a slow, controlled descent and carves it into the air, leaving it with enough mana to last a day as she and Pod slip out of the ship themselves. She follows her troops while her apprentice separates off to go prepare the main workshop for her, taking Mensacus with him to return him to the mana gathering chamber until a new body has been made.

Dropping through an open hatch in the roof of one of her warehouses, Emily finds herself in a spatially-expanded storage hall with faint purple runes carved into the metal beams holding the space together. The runes pulse in time with the mana vein below, in a slow, rhythmic beat that almost seems to make the room shrink and grow with the changing light. The floor is split into several segments, with large dividing walls separating piles of metal.

Nearly half of the segments hold workable ingots, divided by mineral, while mirroring them are stacks of jagged, unrefined metal, both in the form of ores and broken shards of old constructs. There are a few almost empty segments, but they’re quickly being filled with the salvaged scrap from the recent war.

Emily approaches the unsorted bins and wraps the dense cluster of material with her mana and machina, shutting her eyes and focusing on her extra senses to pinpoint each individual material before flexing her will and tearing them apart. A cloud of cold electricity and metal flies through the room as she deposits the separated metals into the correct bins to be refined, and this continues for several hours as Elisime’s holds empty.

After sending the metal soldiers who are finished with their task, along with a resupply of bodies from the factory’s stores that have been produced while they were away, back up into Elisime on the strong magnetic updraft beneath, Emily heads over to the cliff’s edge to enter the main subterranean complex of the factory.

She releases a steady stream of machina and a hint of metal mana the moment she steps foot into the main building, sending it through the large Logic Core in a chamber of its own below her open workshop. The energy spreads from the central control point, bringing the factory alive as every working production line hums in response and speeds up in sync.

On an empty workbench beside the window overlooking the sea, Emily starts by pouring all of her new notes into the factory’s databanks and pulling up a hologram of them using the light-crystal projector set into the centre of the bench. Pod’s eyes spin as he peers over her shoulder, trying to track as Emily rapidly sorts through the useful information with a few abstract hand gestures.

She selects only her observations on golems and magical consciousness, including everything from her research on mana veins and Mensacus to her notes from Minerva’s tour of New Denntimo’s labs.

“I think I’ve reached a sufficient level to begin creating magical life myself,” Emily mutters, more to herself than to Pod as he struggles to understand the magical theory filling the air before him. “I should test the pure magic path before I attempt to forge Mensacus a semi-mechanical body: my first child deserves only the best.”

A small, prideful smile curls her lips, and Emily almost instinctively extends the emotion with a wisp of machina as she pulls several metals from her belt to get to work. She blends black and white iron with mythril and chromium in the floating hold of Forgemaster’s threads, while grinding tezerite and sandstone by hand before mixing them in a pot with clay.

Her first attempt at golem creation follows one of the core tenets of the Guide to Raising Problematic Offspring that she received for birthing her son: when choosing a material for a magical being’s core, the harder it is to stabilise and grow consciousness within, the stronger your child will be. With that in mind, Emily pulls out the cracked elemental core that she harvested when fleeing from Modo and tosses it up into the mixing liquid metal blend to let the unique blend of wind and sand infuse the mythril with its signature.

If I’m able to create a child attuned to sand, observing their use of the element should be the final push I need to unlock my manifestation after my time observing The Wall.

Emily keeps stirring the forming alloy, drawing strands of heated mana through it to burn out the unwanted impurities and watching its mass slowly reduce. She adds extra metal as needed, keeping the ratios consistent until the churning orb stabilises at her desired size. By the time she stops, its surface has turned to a consistent soft grey with a cold blue tint.

She keeps the metal soft in the hold of her spell as the unstable core slowly leaks mana, but the process isn’t fast enough. So, setting aside her finished clay mix as well, Emily equips the engraving claws in her left hand and charges them with unattributed mana to draw a mana gathering array onto the air around the metal, linking it to the well of raw mana far below that’s already filling the workshop with a light mist of potent energy. The array directs mana forcefully into the core without letting any out, using the pressure of the metal and mana surrounding it to keep it together as its natural rate of mana throughput in its damaged state is far exceeded.

Emily has to focus as the metal slowly changes colours, searching for any spikes of instability where the fragile balance holding the fractured core together threatens to shatter and applying direct pressure with mana to counteract them. They’re stuck in a battle invisible to the non-magical eye for almost a full day, unaffected by the sun setting and rising, and it finally ends with Emily shattering the gathering array and panting from exhaustion.

Her mana, machina, and stamina have all taken a serious hit from the sustained period of absolute focus, but Emily still refuses to even blink as she takes in the now beige metal orb, watching with bated breath to make sure expediting the process hasn’t caused any damage. She only relaxes after a few seconds of silence, confirming that the unstable core is still whole inside.

“What exactly were you doing there?” Pod asks as Emily takes a step back from the workbench she was hunched over to take a breath and let her resources recover a bit.

“Attuning the metal that will make up the golem’s skeleton to its attributes to improve their compatibility,” Emily explains, glancing over and seeing Pod in the middle of assembling what appears to be an ammunition cylinder for a grenade launcher. “I can’t use the sand element yet, so I had to get a little creative and force the elemental core to convert a lot of mana. It’s unstable, so it wasn’t an easy process.”

Pod nods and returns his focus to his weapon, so Emily turns back to the active Forgemaster and continues, the mana seeping through her skin already working to refresh her energy.

She brings the mass of metal closer and begins shaping it, forming a long central spine in multiple segments before drawing out four limbs. Jagged claws grow from the base of the limbs as the spine continues stretching out to form a long tail, and Emily builds a solid ribcage around the elemental core, keeping it contained but not constricted.

The joints require a little more delicate attention, but after forming a canid-style skull, Emily lets the metal cool and set, removing the heated element of Forgemaster and leaving only the metal threads to manipulate the skeleton.

“Pod,” she calls out without looking up. “Go to the lab and grab me three samples each of bloods D5 through 12, please.”

As the sound of her apprentice’s footsteps fades away, Emily glances at her left bicep and marks the current time before popping open the slot in her forearm to charge her engraving claws with a blend of powdered earth and wind crystals. She pulls up the basic runic formulae for wind and earth golems Minerva showed her and starts by picking them apart, cutting away the runic logic matrices designed to allow the constructs to follow simple verbal instructions and all element-specific runes to form two identical, incomplete templates, before reassembling one of them with a carefully selected blend of both elements, leaving the control functions empty and linking them back into the construct’s power source.

Pod returns hours before Emily completes the first array prototype, setting down twenty-four sealed jars on the workbench beside her in neat rows, each holding a few cups of a different desert creature’s blood. The moment she finishes designing the runic blueprint, Emily reaches for a jar of D5, a sand stalker, and pops it open. She pours the blood along the metal skeleton’s spine, letting the crimson liquid flow naturally across the beige bones until the jar runs dry, at which point she tosses it aside to begin carving at the base of the skull.

Brown and green runes are etched in a straight line to the tip of the tail, their glow covered by the thin layer of beast blood that seems to cling to the metal like skin, but before she can even move to begin marking the ribs, the elemental core seeped in blood begins to violently reject the chosen runes. The blood on the surface of the spine boils, and the dull runes fade away as if they were never there in the first place.

Emily immediately leaps to wrap the elemental core in a shell of raw mana to prevent the violent reaction from worsening its existing cracks.

“At least I know sand stalker blood is compatible to a certain extent; it saved the bones from shattering,” she mutters to herself, cleaning the bones with a wave of wind as she removes the runes she has just carved from her formula, racking her cortex to replace them.

Emily opens the Spellweave with a few of her cores, and calculates the viability of several hundred combinations of known runes with the rest, offloading thousands of calculations a second and taking advantage of the processing power of the factory’s Logic Core. She applies a coat of D6, thrasher blood, after finding a few possible options, and restarts her carving.

This time, Emily manages to cover up to four of the skeleton’s thirteen pairs of ribs before she suffers a severe rejection. Unfortunately, as the failing runes light up, the thrasher's blood instantly ignites, worsening the reaction and causing the runes to melt and deform, permanently marking the metal bones. Emily strikes off D6 as an option and cleans the bones before going through the slow process of remelting them and reforming the skeleton to completely remove the magical scars the failed etching has left.

She begins testing a different design while her cores process all of the data she’s gathering in the background to continue seeking the optimal formula. D7, amerax blood, proves itself compatible, while D8 through 10 all cause negative reactions of varying degrees.

The failed attempt with D10, ellelite blood, forces Emily to take a step back after her metal bones shrivel up like a man without water before turning to dust. She sits back until twenty-four hours have passed since she last checked The Clock and focuses on her connection with the Logic Core, feeding it more and more data from the Spellweave.

¯¯¯¯¯

Skill created: Parallel Processing

[Parallel Processing (active)]

[Cost:] Variable Machina

Through working in perfect sync with their creations, the User has learned how to link their mind to their machines to share the load.

-Grants variable % increase to mental processing ability based on connected machines’ processing power.

_____

The moment the skill popup passes her vision, Emily feels like a previously unrecognised load has been lifted from her shoulders as the need to consciously assign calculations vanishes and the tether connecting her to the factory changes subtly, letting her cores seamlessly blend with the Logic Core to use it like an extension of themselves.

A short while later, she releases the trigger waiting to activate The Clock and returns to the moment after she sent Pod away to collect the blood samples.

“Wait, scratch that,” she says, charging her voice with machina to send it straight into her apprentice’s earpiece. “D5, 7, 11, and 12, please.”

“Understood,” Pod responds without a word of complaint.

Emily adjusts the blend of wind and earth crystals she’s filling her arm with as she waits, reducing the wind content until it’s at a three-to-seven ratio with earth, a complete opposite to the elemental core.

She tests D11, the clear blood of a burrower ant, and watches her precious metal bones shatter when her array collapses at the tip of the final rib. The Clock activates immediately, and she excludes D11 from her requests this time.

D12, the blood of a fennex, a fox-like beast with two tails and a tendency towards fire, proves surprisingly compatible despite the elemental difference, leaving the bones with only a slight magical afterimage of the failed runes that Emily easily removes with a delicate blade of her own mana.

With three compatible bloods identified, Emily begins mixing them together and trying to identify the perfect blend as she continues to weave her runes. It takes over forty resets as she puzzles out a compatible formula before refining it further and further until the completed runework achieves an acceptable level for her second child.

Resetting back to the start for her final attempt with an untainted canvas, Emily requests the three blood samples she needs before mixing her crystal powders. This time, along with wind and earth, she adds trace amounts of the other four common elements before loading her claws.

Pod returns with nine jars of blood, and Emily carefully measures out the correct ratios before mixing them together and applying a thin coat to the golem’s metal skeleton. She pours the remaining majority of the crimson liquid into the clay mix she set aside earlier, leaving a thread of her attention to mix the thick sludge with a current of mana as she focuses on carving thousands of minuscule runes into the blood-soaked bones.

After almost half a day, Emily finishes applying the final few delicate strokes with her fingers and reaches for the clay pot that she hasn’t let stop moving since adding the blood. The thick sludge she scoops out takes on a sandy-red hue, and it greedily drinks in the cracked elemental core’s mana, clinging on as Emily presses it to the golem’s skeleton in clumps.

She carefully shapes her child as she builds out their body, filling in the gaps between their bones until they resemble a fox two sizes too big, with a large excess of clay building the illusion of a plump tail. Its eye sockets are empty, and its delicately formed feet seem to be missing any claws, but Emily still smiles with satisfaction, shattering the empty pot she mixed the clay in and using the threads of Forgemaster still latched onto the golem’s buried metal skeleton to curl its body up before reforming the pot around it.

She switches the vial in her arm with a new one filled with a blend of wind, earth, and fire before carving another complicated array onto the pot’s surface. The moment it’s completed, Emily leaves the workshop and takes the elevator down to the mana gathering chamber to bury the pot in the mana-dense rock beneath it.

She settles cross-legged above its burial position and begins meditating, drinking in the dense mist of mana filling the chamber and feeding it into the pot below with a touch of her own signature, waiting patiently for her child to finish gestating.