Blacksmith of the Apocalypse

Having dealt with his own equipment Seth also spent some time revising the equipment of his friends. Some of the items he had made of the stronghold seemed lacking at this point. Especially after getting his hands on a multitude of high-grade materials, he would have felt bad if he did not improve those that seemed lacking.

Only then, did he dive into the creation and modification of vessels. Al'Salzar became a rare sight at Minas Mar. She was either going around the city or locked up in her own laboratory.

Seth left her to her own devices, it was just a shame that he could not get her advice whenever he needed it anymore. This left him on his own with his skills and knowledge, to find a way to adjust her design to make it usable for ordinary souls.

On top of that were the techniques of <Golem Artisan> he tended to explore further.

<Telepathy>, he had gained with his new ring, was a great help for this, since he could finally communicate with the ego souls and gain their consent for the experiments. After his experience with the skeleton key and the raging monkey souls, he had realized the problem with ego items.

Back then on the battlefield, he had harvested the souls of 25 people, 10 of which had kept their ego. Of those he couldn't help back then, they had consented to get a chance to survive.

Now that he could finally communicate with them and explain the situation, he had the consent of five to be used for the experiments.

Seth saw the importance of being transparent with them, so they would be willing to work for him once he managed to build vessels for them.

The soul that completely refused to communicate with him was the Pseudo-Swamp Dragon. He knew that the soul had an ego, but his attempt for communication was left unanswered.

For his experiment, Seth had long since decided to start from the blueprints of the great sorceress. The approach of <Golem Artisan> called for very strong souls and squandered much of this power in the creation of a body.

This was why Seth wanted to start off of Al's efficient design and first adapt it to ordinary souls. Once he felt confident in his understanding of the subject, he wanted to increase the scale and incorporate <Golem Artisan> into the process.

However, things never were as easy as they looked on paper.

During his work, he quickly realized that he would not go as he wanted. Al'Salzar was special, similar to Evee since she had originally gone through the ritual to become a lich. A lich was attuned to having its soul and body split.

With her power, knowledge, and special conditions, she was able to work around some flaws, that came with the accidental application of <Golem Artisan>.

When it came to normal souls, Seth needed to transform them first to even make them eligible for the process. Otherwise, they would be unable to operate the vessel from within the nucleus.

Having no other choice, Seth started off practicing <Golem Artisan>. The skill was a mix of what Seth had been doing to enchant souls and the technology usually used on Automatons and Golems.

As he studied the blueprints, Seth understood that the previous <Spirit Blacksmith> had also come across the property that allowed an infused soul to generate a body, as long as there was enough power, and materials supplied.

Unlike Seth, the previous holder must have had a high attainment in the technology of automatons or golems. Which is to be expected, to be able to create a skill like <Golem Artisan>

Level one of the skill used a spell array to engrave a soul with a rudimentary set of golem controls that helped it generate a body and listen to commands of the maker. The obvious advantage to a regular golem was that it did not need a physical power core.

In theory, unless the Golem was blasted to the point that the soul disintegrated, it would not die and simply regenerate its body. In this case, it was even more powerful than Al's design, since she could be quite easily killed, as long as her core was destroyed. In the end, she had kept the weakness of a Lich in her original design.

The drawback was the abysmal power consumption. Seth tested it a generic medium-sized soul and the result was an earth golem the size of a doll. Its body was made up of hardened earth and its stature was stocky and a little chubby.

It was actually really cute. He made another one and gifted them to Fin and Mina.

He was sure they could appreciate them. And he soon regretted giving one to Fin. The fairy brute had immediately bragged about the little guy to the children in the tower, and Seth was stuck with making another 20.

Spending 20 souls on making toys was a lot better than facing the tearful eyes of a group of children and trying to explain why he did not want to make toys for them. In the end, he had no reason to regret it, since the skill leveled up thanks to the practice.

With level two came more complex sets of orders and material choices, like stone. Seeing the limited options of orders for the golem, Seth immediately understood why having an ego soul could make things a lot easier.

Before he continued his experiments, he prepared better materials.

Since medium souls only did this much, Seth accepted his fate and started to go bigger. He wanted to see, what they could do when he went a size bigger.

He condensed most of the small souls as they had lesser uses than medium-sized ones. The result was six big common souls, which equaled roughly 600 small ones.

With this method, he knew the approximate size of the souls he used. Going by Seth's experience, souls were judged as "big" with a mana reservoir of 1000-9999. This was a huge margin and when it came to naturally collected souls, he could only roughly guess at which end of the spectrum they were.

Knowing the exact size of the souls was important because the performance of the golems depended on it. Equipped with these, the experiments continued.

First, Seth transformed a big soul using the setting for an earth golem. To test it he had to move locations since there was not enough earth in his workshop. Before he left to test it outside, he made another big soul, this time to become a stone golem.

Outside of Minas Mar, Seth pulled his mantle tighter around himself and used a little <Pyromancy> to heat himself up. The mountains had never been warm, but lately, the climate had gotten colder. Winter was coming.

Placing the golem souls on the ground, he gave a command and they started taking shape. With the earth golem's soul in the center, a vortex of loose earth started breaking through the snow cover and condensed around the soul.

For the stone golem, loose rubble and small rocks started to tumble around and collected at the place where the soul had taken root.

Compared to the medium soul, the outcome was vastly different. Befitting a 10-times bigger soul, the earth golem scratched a size of 4m in height and 3m in width. The stone golem on the other hand was a little shorter and slimmer, with roughly 3m in height and around 2m in width.

They were however similar in appearance with wide shoulders and thick arms reaching all the way to the ground. These guys were far from cute, with their rough humanoid faces and uncanny proportions.

These guys were definitely not weak, but when Seth thought of what kind of creatures dropped big souls, then the Golems could not compare. One of them would be unable to compare to something like a Titanoboa from Deltan.

But this was only when it came to overall strength. If one considered that these golems could keep regenerating and probably had a higher defense, it might come down to what opponent they met. Since they had some utility, it was not a total waste of resources.

Feeling the icy wind and snow, Seth already had an idea what to test next. These golems were the most basic and coincided with the typical image one had when thinking of a golem from video games.

He had chosen these because they had the smallest cost to maintain their body after formation. That was right, there were other variations, but unlike these earth element golems, they needed mana to maintain their form.

However, seeing the mountains being naturally cold and getting colder in winter, it was perfect to test snow and ice golems, the variations of earth and stone from the water element.

Seth didn't just wish to gain more proficiency for <Golem Artisan>. Understanding and comparing the different spell arrays was another step forward.

His ultimate goal was to identify the parts of the spell array that allowed the souls to generate and bind to a golem body. If he succeeded, he might even be able to enable a normal soul to generate a body of flesh and blood around a vessel, as Al did.

And if that didn't work, he would just have to keep raising <Golem Artisan> until it did work.