Chapter 65 – The Golem

The flesh golem spell invented by the mage named Walkerway was a rather unconventional approach to life alchemy. Using the flesh and blood of various creatures as materials, while potentially inferior in strength to those steel golems, it granted most alchemical golems a recovery ability they lacked, and conveniently allowed for extensive modifications to life forms!

In terms of the control center, the flesh golem completely abandoned the programming of virtual souls. Instead, it employed the implantation and modification of real souls as the main control unit. Implanting such genuine souls into the flesh golem had a certain probability of retaining the characteristics of the original creature before death, and could even enable the flesh golem to acquire some innate spells possessed by the main soul.

However, the cost was—the difficulty of creating flesh golems increased significantly!

Punk stood inside the White Tower. The empty “living room” had no “superfluous” furniture. Apart from the alchemical experiment table and numerous alchemical supplies, the entire room didn’t even have a single chair. Punk, who substituted meditation for sleep, hadn’t considered trivial matters like daily living that “wasted time.” He was fully engrossed, reading this alchemy notebook word by word!

As he read, Punk’s brow furrowed. Although the creation of the flesh golem required only conventional alchemical spells, its operational difficulty made even System analysis somewhat challenging. Moreover, unlike “disposable products” like alchemical potions, golem creation demanded more meticulous steps and intricate structural adjustments, along with considerations for extreme conditions to endure in various combat scenarios. These seemingly minor details could significantly impact the final golem product.

Overall, one word—difficult, two words—very difficult, three words—really damn difficult (seems something’s off there)—such descriptions were perfectly fitting for the creation of flesh golems.

But Punk wasn’t one to be defeated by challenges. As a Formal-Level Mage with a long lifespan, he had plenty of time to study these tedious details. Moreover, with the System’s analytical assistance, many theoretical operational fine-tunings could be quickly identified and improved upon—something other Formal-Level Mages absolutely couldn’t achieve!

Action spoke louder than words. First, practice with those low-level materials!

As for where the existing low-level materials were? Punk turned around… those two white horses seemed quite suitable…

The poor two horses were tightly bound by several flexible vines. They seemed to sense the terrifying fate that awaited them, and thus, as if competing, began to scream at the top of their lungs!

“Really noisy”!

The horses’ agonized cries didn’t last long. With a Sleep Spell from Punk, they vanished without a trace.

Freed from various noises, Punk could finally focus on the experiment!

The first step was to extract the souls of the test subjects.

There were many methods to extract souls, but doing so without harming such fragile, resisting souls… that was a delicate task.As the ethereal incantations continued to resonate, the blue flowing light in Punk’s hands grew increasingly brilliant. Finally, within the dense radiance, a slender blue thread wavered and slowly emerged from the concentrated center of light, then drilled into the horse’s forehead. With a gentle tug from Punk, a sparkling blue spark was pulled out—this was the soul of a low-level creature!

For low-level beings like ordinary horses that lack intelligence, their souls cannot manifest in concrete forms, thus appearing as this most fundamental blue spark.

After sealing the horse’s soul—filled with panic and other negative emotions—into a small gemstone, Punk proceeded to handle the “corpse” left behind!

A spell called “Leather Stripping,” which was essentially an enhanced version of the Cleansing Spell, was cast. Temporarily deprived of molecular forces and friction, the horsehide smoothly and completely “slid off” the horse’s body onto the ground. The horse’s body, now stripped of its hide, revealed bright red muscles and blood vessels beneath!

Summoning a sharp ether energy blade, Punk manipulated the semi-transparent blade to dance nimbly in the air, effortlessly gutting the horse carcass. He methodically removed excess internal organs, then sliced off muscle tissues one by one, arranging them neatly while meticulously excising useless fat and lymph nodes!

With a skill that rivaled that of seasoned butchers, Punk swiftly separated the intact horse into distinct piles of muscle, fat, organs, bones, hide, soul, and other components… stuff!

Next came the tedious task of rune inscription. Punk pieced together muscles into a humanoid form, strategically implanting bones as support structures. He infused the flesh with magical energy, carved runes to enhance durability, and repeatedly used fusion alchemy spells to ensure every part of the golem connected as seamlessly as a naturally grown organism…

Finally, the main body of the golem was complete!

Looking at the fully formed golem, Punk finally understood why alchemical mages preferred to take on an apprentice or two. It wasn’t for any other reason—some steps in creating Alchemical Creations were low in difficulty but unbearably tedious. Even with a mage’s ample patience, the efficiency was simply unacceptable. Just consider Punk’s situation: to craft this golem’s main body, he had spent an entire night plus the following morning piecing together this troublesome “flesh puzzle.” It was already noon on his second day in the town!

“Sigh~~”

Puck let out a deep sigh. It seemed that when Lotalan returned to deliver payment and collect potions, he would have to ask her to help recruit an “apprentice” or two to assist with “menial tasks.” Otherwise, such inefficient work was truly hard for Punk to endure!

The remaining steps involved modifying the soul, adding absolute command protocols, and deleting unnecessary emotions and memories.

However, no creature would willingly allow their soul to be tampered with like editing a document—especially when the process involved immense pain and indescribable discomfort!So… after the horse’s intense and “unyielding” resistance, Punk managed… to break one soul, and only barely completed the transformation after severely damaging the soul of the second poor white horse. Part of this obvious failure was due to Punk’s lack of technical proficiency, but the greater cause was the violent resistance of the biological soul. This forced Punk to use more drastic measures to forcibly implant command runes, directly leading to the soul conflict spiraling out of control. The final outcome was far from satisfactory!

Faced with such results, what else could Punk do besides sigh once more? Even the creation of the lowest-level Flesh Golem was so fraught with difficulties. Punk increasingly understood why combat golems were so scarce!

At this moment, Punk vaguely recalled the mechanized mass production of his previous life. If such large-scale golem production could be achieved, wouldn’t that truly materialize an alchemical army? However, golems churned out in such quantities would likely only be cannon fodder in terms of capability. Wouldn’t it be more convenient to capture a group of low-level undead from an Undead Demiplane for control, or plunder populations from a few Lower Planes for enslavement?

This idea was quickly suppressed by Punk. These “grand and sophisticated” plans were still beyond the current Punk’s consideration!

What demanded the most attention now was… how far did the performance of this first golem he created deviate from his ideal specifications?

“Probably… not even close”!

With no expectations whatsoever, Punk carefully implanted the transformed horse’s soul into the golem’s body.

(End of Chapter)