Chapter 394 - 383: The Price
Chapter 394: Chapter 383: The Price
Allen’s voice was devoid of emotion, like he was reading the risk disclosure from a technical manual.
"First, you will permanently lose your potential to advance as a Wizard."
"A Golem’s body has no Sea of Spirit, so it cannot inscribe Will Runes. Your power ceiling will be locked to the performance limits of the body I create for you."
"In other words—"
He paused for half a second.
"Your career as a Wizard is over."
Ryan didn’t speak.
Twenty-seven years. He had walked the path of a Wizard for twenty-seven years.
Starting as the lowliest apprentice, he had relied on his less-than-outstanding talent and a desperate, tenacious attitude to claw his way up to a First-level Wizard, step by step.
The fruits of his struggle were gone, just like that.
Then, a question came through Ryan’s spiritual resonance: "Boss, can I ask what the Golem’s upper limit is?"
"With current technology, the level of a First-level Wizard," Allen replied. "In the future, if my technology improves, I can replace it with a stronger body for you. But that will depend on me, not you."
The weight of those words was immense.
It shifted Ryan’s fate from being self-determined to being decided by another.
"Second, you will be subservient to me."
Allen didn’t sugarcoat this point. In fact, he used an even colder phrasing.
"The Puppet’s core is an Incantation Hub that I manufactured. The maintenance of the soul vessel and power source will also be completely dependent on my technology. Essentially, you will no longer be an independent life form, but rather a—"
He paused, as if searching for the right word.
"—a being that requires periodic maintenance."
Throughout the entire process, the light of Ryan’s soul trembled faintly. Unwillingness, anger, and all sorts of emotions churned within it, only to be brutally suppressed.
He didn’t interrupt Allen.
"Third."
Allen’s gaze remained fixed on the container, his speaking pace unchanged. "Soul migration technology. I have mastered the complete theoretical framework and operational procedures. But I’ve never performed it. You would be the first."
The weight of that statement needed no explanation.
Being the first meant there were no successful precedents to refer to, and it also meant that all possible accidents were unknown.
"What are the consequences of failure?" Ryan asked.
"Soul disintegration," Allen said. "The irreversible kind."
The light in the container dimmed for a moment. It was more obvious this time.
Ryan was silent for a few seconds.
"And the success rate?"
"My personal assessment is seventy percent."
"Seventy percent," Ryan repeated the number.
Finally, he asked Allen a question: "Do I have time to think about it?"
Allen’s reply was brief, yet it carried more pressure than the previous three points combined.
"Your soul’s ’shelf life,’ calculated at the most recent rate of decay, is fifty-one days. If you refuse, I won’t force you. However, after three days, the minimum activity level required for soul migration will be gone, and this option will be permanently closed."
He left the final decision to Ryan.
He could provide the solution, but he couldn’t make the choice for another.
This was the line Allen Wesren drew for himself, between "absolute rationality" and "remnant humanity."
The luminous mist in the container grew completely still.
Then, Ryan’s voice rang out again, tinged with the rough and tenacious logic cultivated by a low-level Wizard Apprentice struggling through the mud.
"In my life... I’ve never had much of a choice."
"When I was an apprentice, my mentor sent me to the most dangerous mines to gather materials. My payment was whatever scraps he left over. Did I go? I had to. If I didn’t, I’d be kicked out."
"In New West, to get a bigger bonus, I took Griffin to gnaw on the hardest bones. Did I go? Had to go then, too. If I didn’t, my sister would have no resources for her cultivation."
"Now, you’re telling me I can ’live,’ but with conditions."
His voice took on a hint of self-mockery.
"Conditions? Then fucking so be it."
His voice suddenly grew soft, as soft as a sigh.
"At least... you asked me."
"The bastard who killed me never did."
Allen said nothing.
He just stood there, watching the faint candlelight in the container that stubbornly burned in the darkness.
Ryan’s voice stabilized again, carrying a tone that had been polished by extreme suffering, making it terrifyingly calm.
"That letter... the one I wrote to Ella, is it still here?"
"It is."
"Can you help me send it?"
"I can."
"In the letter, I said I would take her to see the auroras of the Frost Wind Plane."
Another stretch of silence.
"If I become that... that thing... can I still take her?"
Allen replied, "From a physical standpoint, yes. As my first test subject, I will guarantee that you will be a Puppet with free will."
"Heh."
Ryan let out a soft laugh. The sound became extremely distorted and ethereal through the spiritual resonance, as if it had come from another world.
"That’s enough."
"I accept, Boss."
Allen nodded slightly and prepared to adjust the container’s Rune Array, intending to put Ryan back into deep hibernation to slow his soul’s decay as much as possible.
In the final moment before the light in the container faded completely, one last sentence came through Ryan’s spiritual resonance.
"But... Boss."
"Could you... not make it look too ugly?"
"My sister... she gets scared easily."
The light extinguished completely.
...
「Three days later.」
Cybertron Workshop, inside the newly completed Precision Component Development Laboratory.
On the mounting bracket before Allen, a two-meter-tall humanoid skeleton slowly rotated within an anti-gravity field.
[Puppet Zero].
This was its skeleton. Its main frame was constructed from a Secret Silver Tungsten Steel alloy, its design referencing the classic structures from the *General Principles of Advanced Puppet Design* and optimized with Allen’s own understanding of force conduction in large Golems.
The curvature of every bone and the interlocking precision of every joint far surpassed those of natural life, brimming with a sense of aesthetic design.
Once the skeleton was assembled, it was time to install the power system.
From a nearby thermostatic storage container, Allen retrieved the V1.0 high-density Magic Power storage module he had personally crafted.
The palm-sized, deep-blue crystal resembled a meticulously cut heart.
He carefully embedded it into the core position of the skeleton’s chest cavity. The micro-Runes at the interface lit up instantly, completing the seamless connection.
As the energy conduits were connected, faint blue Magic Power flowed along the conductive pathways on the inner walls of the skeleton, as if infusing the steel skeleton with its first blood.
"Power system connection is nominal," Jarvis’s voice sounded in his mind.
Next came the sensory detection system and the weapons integration system.
These two technologies were relatively mature, so Allen simply downscaled and transplanted them from the design plans for the Freedom Gundam and the Cyclops.
The visual module used a crystalline lens that could switch between three focal lengths, while the auditory module was a vibration sensor array capable of capturing infrasound and ultrasound.
Everything proceeded in an orderly manner.
Until the final step, the core of the intelligent control system—the "Incantation Hub"—still had some problems that needed to be solved.
The Incantation Hub for Gabriel was designed for a twenty-four-meter-tall colossus. Its core Rune Matrix disc was the size of a washbasin, with a complex and precise structure.
However, the Puppet before him, in its pursuit of a realistic appearance, had a head roughly the same size as a normal human’s.
Shoving a washbasin into a head was going to require some serious modifications.