Arthur looked through all the usual places from the library to the magic item hall, but he had no luck in finding Calavia. He had the distinct feeling that she wasn’t even in the guild building at the moment. The only other two places he could think that she would be at were her home which Arthur did not know where that was, and her workplace. Arthur did recall her telling him about her work once, she said it was a small clinic called ‘healing hands’ located close to one of the slums in the southern district. The only problem with that description was there were several slums in the southern district, as with the recent attack and previous management made it a magnet for the poor.

But given that it might be important to know where she works in the future Arthur forced himself to get up and start walking back to the southern district and begin looking around the nearby slums. But that was a task easier said than done, most of the buildings in and around the slums were shabby houses or small sheds. As a result Arthur spent a lot of time looking at empty buildings while a few disabled beggars begged for money.

Arthur had to go through three different slums before he eventually found it. It stood out from the rest of the buildings due to the crowd of people standing around it. Most of those people were quite poor and from the surrounding areas, but a few better off individuals were scattered throughout the lines that formed.

Several mages stood around the building that were practically constantly casting healing spells. They fixed everything from small cuts to larger bandaged wounds, but the more dangerous wounds were quite infrequent. The city wasn’t that dangerous.

Arthur eventually spied Calavia towards the far side of the building and was tempted to walk right on up to her. But he stopped himself, she looked to be quite busy at the moment and odds were she had little time for idle chatting while she worked.

So Arthur turned back around and returned to some of the other important things he needed to deal with, such as collecting the rats from Vibia in the former headquarters of Misery’s end.

**********

For the next week Arthur steadily prepared and collected all the money he could. In addition to the bottles of alchemist embers Arthur also returned to selling a various amount of the other potions he made beforehand. Arthur also found a rather simple and effective way to kill the rats without damaging too much, all he had to do was stick them inside of his dimensional bag for a few minutes and they would suffocate and die with minimal damage. The only problem was it just felt so wrong to do it, he knew they were struggling to breath in there and that it was a torturous experience for them. So he shifted to using poison to kill them instead, it was just as effective and left the body with minimal damage without the horrible implications from the suffocation.

With all the bottles of alchemist embers and other miscellaneous potions he was brewing he easily managed to earn the ten gold coins to buy the mana stone from Osvald and a little extra.

The meeting with Osvald went quite similar to how it did the previous time, but instead of his second command leading Arthur to the warehouse he did it instead. Once they entered the warehouse they had to walk through another magically secured metallic doorway to reach the collection of them. Osvald seemingly tapped at random intervals on a grey orb situated outside the door and once he was done it opened and they walked inside.

They entered a small hallway with another metal door at the end of the hallway just a few meters down. The door the duo just passed through closed and locked with audible mechanical sounds. Once it was done the second door slowly opened and they entered through it. Inside that room were several shelves full of refined mana stones of all sorts of shapes and sizes.

Arthur was dazzled by the soft white glow they all emitted, so much so that he was quite tempted to pick one up just to hold it. “Here we are, one minor mana stone. Just as you requested.” Osvald handed Arthur a small mana stone that was mostly round. Arthur chuckled slightly, clearly the large wall of expensive and high grade mana stones was intended to give Osvald’s clients such a feeling.

“Thank you Osvald, here is your money.” Arthur counted out the ten gold coins for the mana stone and placed them in his Osvald’s hand. Once he had his money Osvald handed the mana stone to Arthur and brought him to the back door. “Is there anything else that has caught your eye in my humble warehouse? All you need to do is ask and I will happily show you.” Osvald asked just as he was about to leave Arthur and return the party.

“No, nothing right now anyways. But if I do see anything or need something I will contact you.” The two said their goodbyes and Arthur left through the back door and Osvald walked through the door back into the building.

Arthur went straight back home. Now with all the materials he could begin his experimentation.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

***********

As Arthur walked up the road towards his house he was grinning ear to ear. He now had the most important component to the production of the tiny flesh golems in his possession, now he just needed to practice and experiment with the manual he found in the journal of Brexius Sanguine Bane.

Once he was inside he blocked off the windows and doors with the solidified earth bars he kept around. They would help limit the visibility of the inside of his home and would keep most people from trying to break in. While many people didn’t like mages they were for the most part smart enough not to piss one off.

Arthur quickly placed all of the materials required on the table in his kitchen/living room and quickly retrieved the journal from his bag. He turned to the page of assembling the golem and gave it a full read just to be certain he understood what to do.

‘It says here I need a solid surface to inscribe some of the runes into as well as a few other things to keep the mana stable and properly enchant the item/golem. Can’t I just use some of the dirt from outside to make one, that way I could easily carve those runes into the surface without ruining a proper table. I could also alter the runes depending on what I am enchanting.’ Arthur exited his home through the back door and used his geomancy to collect a large amount of earth and form it into a slab. He then carried that slab into his home and placed it on the table.

‘Now for the complex and tedious part, to engrave the required rune into this slab.’ Arthur utilized his geomancy to carve out all the runes and other important bits into the slab. He started in the center where he carved out a circular trench that the physical parts of the flesh golem would sit. The trench would in theory keep any and all of the mana from leaking out and the rune surrounding it would give it power and functionality. It did take Arthur a half hour to do so, but it was well worth it.

Next Arthur picked up the rat corpses and began to assemble the physical portion of the golem. He started by cutting apart each of the five rats he would be using and separated the flesh, the blood vessels, and the bones. The hardest part was the blood vessels given how small and fragile they were compared to the rest of the body. To do this butchering Arthur had to conjure a thin knife from earth as he did not know of anyone that might sell it to him without asking questions. By the time he reached the fifth rat he was somewhat competent in removing the blood vessels with only minimal damage.

‘Now we have the worst part yet, assembly.’ Now Arthur was required to assemble the parts of the five rats into the final product. But thankfully Arthur was armed with a few restoration spells created by Brexius Sanguine Bane himself. Arthur knew they were restoration spells because he subtly asked Calavia questions regarding somewhat similar situations of what the spells did. The first spell was called Bone fusion, the spell would combine several bones of the same type from the same creature together to form a stronger and heavier one. For each of the required bones Arthur did this and by the end he was left with most of a skeleton of a rat that was one and a half times the size it normally would be with the mass of all five.

The next spell Arthur had was called Skeletal reconstruction, the spell would assemble a skeleton from provided bones. This would save the caster a lot of time when creating a flesh golem as Brexius noted in his journal, the only problem was the spell was limited to skeletons shorter than a foot in height. This made it useful for the task at hand, but for just about anything else it would be useless. But that limitation made the spell tier one allowing Arthur to cast it.

With the spell casted the skeleton slowly connected itself at the joints and was ready for the third step of the process, attaching the muscles onto the skeletal frame. This was by far the hardest part excluding the actual enchanting. Arthur needed to attach the muscles to the bone and layer them atop each other with the use of a spell and a needle with thread. The first step of this was to apply the first layer of the muscle across the whole skeleton and use the spell called stitch small muscles to connect the muscle to the bone. Then Arthur needed to layer on a second set of muscles and use the needle and thread to attach them. Then he used the stitch small muscles spell again to firmly connect the muscles.

But Arthur purposely left the head section empty to place the brain in and utilize another restoration spell called manipulate nerves. The spell allowed Arthur to manually control the nerves and connect them to the relevant muscle tissues.

By this time through the process Arthur was getting quite tired, so he decided to take a break and wash his hands from all the blood and other gross stuff he had touched all throughout the process. ‘I need to buy a pair of thin gloves so I don't actually need to wash my hands afterwards. Then I wouldn’t need to thoroughly wash my hands afterwards.’ Arthur used a nearby bucket of water that he kept to wash his hands. He took the bucket outside and conjured a small table from the nearby earth along with a simple chair. Arthur used his pyromancy to heat up the water and then began the process of washing his hands. It took him a whole ten minutes of washing until he felt they were clean enough to stop.

For another twenty minutes Arthur sat out there on that simple chair as he enjoyed the outdoors. It was starting to get a little late and the sun was beginning its slow descent below the horizon. Once his mind was clear and his mana partly replenished he returned back to his work regarding the small flesh golem.

With most of the hard stuff out of the way the only major thing that remained was inserting the blood vessels. The solution that Brexius came up with was to use the exposed area in the head to slowly shift the tiny blood vessels through and attach them from the underside. A spell created by Brexius that he called Manipulate blood vessels was used by Arthur to do exactly what the name of the spell suggested. The little blood vessels wormed their way through the open space within the flesh golem and slowly found their proper place. Once that was done Arthur finished up with most of the remaining muscle on the head, but he left a small space to slowly drip feed the artificial blood into an exposed blood vessel he left poking out just enough to be noticeable, but also enough to reattach to the other end inside to create a circulating system for it to flow.