Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3: Curiosity

After several staircases and over a dozen sharp turns through corridors, Kresha nearly ripped the handles off a set of double oak doors. She flung herself through, letting them swing shut with Arkyn stopping at the entrance, awaiting her next line of information.

A few minutes passed before he figured she might be waiting for him to step through the doors. Once he did enter, he found that this room was the smallest one he'd seen so far, filled to the brim with wooden shelves holding a variety of vials and glassware.

In the big glass jugs, brown, spongy spheres were rhythmically expanding and contracting like they were breathing. The fluid inside slightly stirred as they moved, swishing up the swampy dirt in the bottom.

Most of the smaller vials were filled with a purplish-red liquid, somewhat opaque in the light. Kresha was pouring back vial after vial of the stuff down her throat while sitting cross legged on the floor. She shot her tongue down the tubes just to swallow it faster.

Behind her was a much larger sphere of brown sponge, nearly half the size of Kresha with a darker surface colour. Running all along its strange skin were bright red veins, pulsating randomly while it kept a steady breathing pattern.

Kresha saw him enter from her peripherals, but didn't acknowledge him. Instead she took what looked like a spile that drained syrup out of trees. It was much larger than the kind that sat inside the trunk of a maple, having a near foot-long needle she jammed into the center of the big sphere with no hesitation. Not once slowing down from her consumption of the vials.

There was no reaction from the breathing sphere either, only more of the substance emerged from the hollow end of the spile. Kresha reached over and found an empty metal pocket flask from a pile on the shelf, leaving it to catch the purplish-red liquid as it poured out with the density of lukewarm honey.

Arkyn watched and waited as she refilled multiple flasks, only watching until she finally seemed to stabilise herself and finish bottling the odd substance.

"We will pick back up on this tomorrow. I am tired and I've fallen quite behind on my doses this week. Go back to the Golem Cavern and sit in your room until I come for you, that is all."

Arkyn nodded and walked back to sit on his stone bench alone, listening to the echoes of all the other golems moving about. After a few minutes, he decided to make use of the time spent waiting to explore the various things about the room and himself.

He looked down at his human form, touching his fingers to the artificial skin. Everything about it felt human, but his mind knew it was only a physically structured illusion to let his sensory functions transition to what he was seeing visually.

He felt the energy circulating in the four large orbs in his chest like tiny shocks of electricity, humming inside. Arkyn tried to understand the sensations without internally viewing the pathways they flowed through.

By using the same method of focusing the energies to different spots, he did the opposite. He tried to block the paths from their original circulation, suppressing until one by one, his senses faded.

The sounds of grinding metal, the taste of dust and rock in the air, the cold feeling of the stone, all of it turned to nothing and left him in silent meditation. Eventually his sight turned to nothing but pitch black.

He practised this several times to confirm the process was consistent to use whenever needed, then he moved onto his true body. His perception of light changed to energy outputs once again.

This time he could see so much more on the walls and ceiling of the alcove.

The runes at first looked to be engraved at random or just inconsistent to his naked eye, but in reality, the walls were showing the same type of mana pathways as his body. Only these were more spread out, and when the thin tendrils touched the unseen symbols, he could see their behaviour and colours changed slightly.

A jagged path would curve, after passing through circular shaped rune, another's colour would go from yellow to orange when rotating into a half triangle, letters would blink on and off randomly like twinkling stars. It was all a maze of purposely placed programs, designed to help him wake up for the very last time.

Seeing the varying colours reminded him about how the red, green, blue, and yellow paths in his own body were equally but randomly spilling from the radiating source. Arkyn tried to pull them apart one at a time by focusing the energy of his head to guide and almost lasso them based on colours.

Instead of pushing all the energy into the runes under his skin, he tried manipulating the runoff energy of red to condense at his right hand.

It pooled quickly, starting to build up a pressure in the metal when more of the same type of mana was gathered. After a short period of time, the pressure increased to a point that he could no longer fully contain it.

Ruptures appeared in his perfectly shaped sphere he was trying to make, the cracks spilled outward until the red started leaking from his metal palm.

It became gaseous at the exposure to air, erupting in a small flume of dense mist. When switching back to his human form, he could see it was emanating a heat haze. The spots that leaked the red energy were glowing orange like he had magma running under the cracks in his skin.

Once he stopped focusing on dividing out the fire magic, the cracks closed back up as if it hadn't ever happened. His arm was still warm from the excess energy, but it didn't linger for long.

He repeated the process with the blue, yellow, and green hues of mana and discovered something interesting.

The blue had the opposite effect, freezing the moisture condensing against his metal skin. Meanwhile the other two didn't have any kind of effect at all. The yellow felt too ethereal to contain in one specific segment of his body and the green seemed too inflexible to keep any modified shapes.

Any attempt to reshape them would only disrupt for a few seconds and then set back into place as soon as he stopped pushing

After a few hours, Arkyn noticed his ability to shift around the energy paths was deteriorating. His little lassos of mana were weakened. They could no longer grip the little rivers to change them or concentrate under his control. Instead they kept snapping at the slightest resistance.

It seemed there was a limit to how much his crystallized brain could produce and manipulate the other energies before needing some form of cooldown. The same could be said about the generated energies themselves.

The radiating light from the cores in his chest were much weaker, before it was bright and filling up every inch of the confined space that was his body, but now they were very thin and significantly dimmer.

Having been left with no other source of experimentation or information gathering, he stood up from his bench and peered out to the hallway. He watched golems of different sizes and shapes pass by, trying to analyse the way their runes interacted with the small spheres of multicoloured light that rested somewhere inside their bodies as well.

Curious to how a particular golem operated with its strange appearance, Arkyn began to follow a group of three out of the space and down to the lower floors.