Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4: Ecosystem

'Madam Kresha is expecting me to be at the designated space when she returns. I just have to be there when she arrives for me.'

His sound logic and lack of a guiltable conscience resulted in him following three identical looking golems as they travelled down ramp ways and more halls cut into slopes that led further underground.

The golems were humanoid in shape, but moved on very wide tires attached at what would be a person's waist. Each one had three arms; one on each shoulder and third protruding from their backs that was twice as thick.

Eventually the stone beneath them started to lose its flat plane and transformed into fragments of upturned rocks and broken gravel. The golem's large tires were clearly designed to handle the uneven terrain, as they didn't slow down in the slightest.

Arkyn kept following as they started clattering loudly to their destination. They took another hour to travel through to the very end of the tunnel.

Surprisingly, there was already another golem there. This one was simply a bucket with treads that carried a dozen, identical looking pickaxes inside. As soon as they arrived, they each grabbed one with their third arm and lined up along the end of the tunnel.

They braced themselves using the two smaller arms and hacked away at the uneven wall.

Arkyn was so enthralled with how they were designed in such a specific way to operate, he was nearly run over by another golem approaching from behind.

This one was a tall cube with a basin indent at the top; it was grabbing all the loose gravel behind the golems with a series of small shovels that poured it into an opening in its basin. After a couple minutes of scooping, it shook back and forth rapidly.

The vibrations caused particles of dust to shoot out the top before turning around with its haul. It didn't seem like the miners were going to do much else, so Arkyn followed the cube to wherever it was going next.

The cube didn't go up or down any levels, but it took a long time travelling along the length of many corridors. Arkyn felt the stagnant air grow hotter as they moved, but that still didn't brace him for the surge of four hundred furnaces worth of heat coming from the open area before him.

Half the floor was naturally forming pools of molten lava, bubbling and fizzing with large crucibles of metals suspended above them. The tanks seemed to be simple rock carved into huge cylinders, but Arkyn saw with his full form that they had runes written along the sides, almost draining the heat out of the air to power and reinforce the structural integrity.

The cube travelled between the tall rock tanks, occasionally stopping to let golems with brand new tools and parts in hand pass. The ceilings weren't carved very high, but the radius of the area was so large, Arkyn couldn't even see the other side from where they were positioned.

Eventually they arrived at about the center space, where he felt a constant air flow blowing from piping holes cut in the ceiling above. When looking up to them, he noticed a strange series of rails on the ceiling as well.

He didn't get a chance to ponder them for long, as the cube golem stopped rolling and opened up without warning.

It split open vertically, revealing an expanding tray that was holding what looked like pans stacked on top of one another. They were actually different sieves that had smaller openings the further down they were in the stack. All the shaking it had done in the mining tunnel had divided out the rocks so they were sorted separately based on size.

Arkyn barely had a moment to inspect them before something riding the ceiling rails flew by, snatching the filled sieves and replacing them with empty ones. It had blurred by and had such an extensively complex collection of mana pathways, that he couldn't even begin to describe it visually.

The cube golem went back the way they came, but Arkyn followed the ceiling one this time. He barely caught a glimpse before it disappeared around the corner of a crucible.

He wanted to know what it was doing with all the debris in the sieves. Even though he lost sight of it, the simple solution was just to follow the railing to wherever it went.

It ended a few hundred yards from the center space, where a circular line was drawn into the ground by a repeating line of runes. As soon as he stepped foot inside the circle, he felt the heat wasn't nearly as intense as before.

'The heat must be damaging to the golems working at this location, I cannot imagine a reason to only expel heat from this certain spot.' Arkyn thought as he finally found the golem who sped past him.

The closest thing he could compare it to was an upside down orchid.

It clung from the ceiling with a long spine of jointed parts that fidgeted constantly to make adjustments. Every other joint had thin arms that bloomed out to hold various little items, including the sieves.

At the bottom of the spine was an orb of metal with grey crystals facing every angle, looking like the central bud of a flower crossed with an insect's eye.

It spun its eyes onto each sieve to identify their sizes and were handed off to golems bolted into the floors. They were just mechanical arms cut off at the shoulder, the most significant part was they had similar grey crystals embedding in the palms to stare at the materials within the sieves, looking for flecks of metal and other items of interest.

The dainter hands received the tinier portions of collected rocks as they went up in scale alongside the wall until the largest ones were searching at pieces bigger than fingernails. Whenever they found something of significance, they tossed the piece into large bowls of assorted materials.

Before Arkyn had a chance to inspect the different colored rocks and ores, another little bucket with treads from the tunnels came into view. It was holding several pickaxes that were clearly broken from excessive use. Once it was close enough, the spidery-ceiling golem plucked them out of the bin. It analysed them for a moment before riding the rail system to a certain vat that was still in Arkyn's sight.

Without any delay, it tossed the broken shards inside to remelt with all the rest. On its way back, it picked up more from golems that were casting tools out of moulds carved into the walls.

They carried molten metal in smaller crucible pails, where they immediately started cooling inside the array. It took them only a few seconds to pour the metal and let it return to a solid state, they grabbed the freshly made tools and handed them to the ceiling golem as soon as it approached.

When the bucket with treads received its replacements, it went back to give its miners the necessary tools to continue. It didn't take long for Arkyn to realise the system Kresha made underneath the mountain was a self-sustaining and self-expanding factory of golems.

The massive underground structures and specialised golems were made possible because she thought out every process of keeping themselves in constant operation.

A feeling of heat rose in Arkyn's chest; it felt similar to the jolt he felt while walking out of the alcove for the first time.

Thinking back to it, he could associate the sensation with the word, 'fear.' This time, he instantly knew what it was. It was the sensation of pride.

Pride in a creator who formed a whole world with her own hands.