Dungeon’s Path
Getting Clay – Chapter 301

The idea of having kobolds making golems really tickled Doyle’s fancy. They might even end up being better than him at it, given enough time. After all, except for his one skill, the kobolds would have everything he has.

In fact, just buying the kobolds a carving skill would already give them something over him. Though depending on how golems work out, Doyle is definitely down for getting such a skill for himself as well. Carving a golem body might be the easiest method of improving the pattern of one of his monsters.

All the other monsters require him to do all kinds of hands off things. A golem, in theory, just requires him to carve a better body. Though that raises the question of whether it actually needs to be carved or if he can spawn in a perfectly shaped body.

A good question, except that and every other question about golems would have to wait until he actually made one. Though there was one question, he had no doubt on what the answer would be. Could he make a golem? Doyle was one hundred percent certain he could.

After all, at the most basic level a golem is simply inanimate material given life and Dungeons do that all the time. All Doyle would need to do is figure out the best way for him, not a way. On top of that, he can always go and ask Ally if he gets stuck.

And so Doyle turns to his first problem to overcome. The lack of clay. Yes, he could go for a stone golem, but clay golems had always amused him more. Both the wet and the baked versions.

Good thing that getting clay wasn’t actually all that hard. The secret is that soil is in fact made of three different sizes of particles. They are from biggest to smallest sand, silt, and clay. With the ratios between those determining the texture and what not, the soil takes on.

Of course, you will have areas of just sand, just silt, or just clay. Plus, while that is the size of the particles, those soil particles are made of minerals, organic matter, living organisms, gas, and water. Which is why you can have so many different colors of clay despite all being clay. A place with more iron content will result in red clay. If instead the clay lacks impurities, it will end up being white from alumina and quartz.

Now, Doyle hadn’t actually gone out and harvested clay as a human, but he ended up going on a deep dive on it at one point. Sure, he mostly remembered interesting if useless at the moment facts, but one thing he remembered was going to give him clay. Because in theory, you can extract clay from almost any soil and he had the pattern for dungeon soil.

As for how you get clay from soil? Of course, if you were to do it outside you would look for signs of clay heavy soil. Stuff like it cracking when it dries. Doyle doesn’t have that option though as all he has is dungeon soil.

That likely meant a very small harvest of the stuff, which thankfully doesn’t matter. So how do you do it? Well, clay is the smallest particle so all you have to do is mix your dirt in water and let it settle. The clay will stay suspended the longest and so end up on the top.

Of course, there are multiple ways to do this depending on how much clay is in the soil. Enough clay and you can literally just dig a wide depression in the ground, fill it with water, mix everything up, and let it set. Doyle didn’t have that luck and so would need to go for a more work intensive method.

Instead of just letting it settle naturally, forming a layer of clay. Doyle would mix dirt and water in a big bowl, let it settle a little, and then pour the still muddy water into a new container. This leaves the sand and silt behind in the original bucket. Also, while it doesn’t matter to Doyle, it helps if you use a strainer of some sort to remove things like sticks and whatnot that will be mixed into natural soil.

Once Doyle has collected a decent amount of clay water, he cheats. Normally you would want something like an old shirt or a porous clay vessel to strain or drain the water from the clay. Otherwise, it would take way too long for the clay to dry out enough for use. Doyle just removes the water from existence, bit by bit, until he has a proper heap of clay.

The clay was abnormally smooth, likely because of being from dungeon soil instead of a more natural sample. Not that Doyle minded. All that mattered was what happens when he deconstructs it.

{Clay pattern acquired at lv13}

Upon seeing the level, Doyle was suitably impressed. After all, his soil level was only 6. Though thinking about the levels of his various materials, he shudders at the work which is ahead of him.

Doyle, after listening to people in the town and Ally, had pieces together what was missing. The intent. So far, he had been treating things as if they were pre-system materials. Except that wouldn’t work.

At this point, there was enough supernatural power around that even a baby would likely only suffer an upset stomach from a pre-system, non-magical poison. Even acids and heavy metals without magic wouldn’t do much.

It was actually kind of funny the reactions this had caused in town. After all, pre-system alcohol was a poison, just one we happened to enjoy. So now all those hundred-year-old vintages? The expensive top shelf bottles?

Well, they better taste good because they certainly aren’t going to get you drunk. Upon discovering this, Ace made sure to offload every single bottle of the stuff they could find as quickly as possible. Ended up making a tidy profit as people happily bought them with system coins.

Though even if they had remained alcoholic, they still wouldn’t have held their value going by what Ally had to say on the topic. At this point, poison was all about magic and intent. In turn, this means that at the high end, alcohol is no longer a poison.

After all, why would you put poison intent into something you intend to drink? Instead, the intent to get you drunk is all that remains and without any maliciousness. Not only did it mean you wouldn’t die from poisoning if you drank too much, but it had two very handy benefits.

The first was that you could sober up by will alone. In fact, even if you didn’t, since it wasn’t a poison, you don’t get hungover. On top of that, since it isn’t poison, high-level people can still get drunk on the good stuff, even if they have a high resistance to poison. Now, to make alcohol that only contains alcohol intent without the poison requires you to go beyond masterwork.

After all, it isn’t like magic has removed the fact that alcohol can be seen as a poison. A masterwork brew will still be “natural” alcohol and thus contain at least a hint of poison intent. So a brewer has to go beyond masterwork with a poison free batch being literally magical instead of just containing magic.

Suffice it to say, the town isn’t going to see much of that any time soon. However, it pointed the way forward for Doyle. He had nearly perfect sugar, but it was still only sugar. To advance it even more was going to require aligning the intent within it and stepping into the metaphysical.

Though he also admits that none of his products would count as a crafted masterwork yet. So there was still room to grow before he had to step into that realm. However, Doyle could also see how even at this point, such a thing would be useful. His only question being at what level was masterwork?

Did every item have their own level of mastery? Was it entirely based on skill level or could you be nearly unskilled and still make one with a high enough level pattern? Did some patterns level up quicker because they were easier to master?

It was all a frustrating mess that Doyle suspected had a ton of caveats attached to it. Even Ally wasn’t entirely sure as crafting wasn’t ever something she learned about. After all, it isn’t like a dungeon in normal circumstances would want or need to know how to actually craft things. Instead, they just make things whole cloth off of whatever they’ve managed to deconstruct.

Doyle sighs to himself and puts those thoughts to the side. Right now he has the clay and so can attempt his first golem. Which failed. To be fair, Doyle had gone for the least work possible and so tried to just pump an un-formed lump of clay full of power.

From such simple beginnings, he quickly advanced in complexity. Whether it was shaping the clay into ever more realistic animal and human shapes, changing up what he infused it with, or adding extra ingredients. Doyle tried it all. Even better, some of it worked!

The problem wasn’t making a shambling mound of clay in whatever shape he wanted. Rather, it was to simplify things down to the most basic actions needed. So after creating complex monstrosities, Doyle slowly worked backwards.

First was the shape. There was no reason a golem needed to look like an actual human or animal. So details were removed or simplified until Doyle could no longer animate the clay. The result of this was actually quite close to just a lump of clay, but it required some form.

And not just a form, but it needs to be sculpted. You can’t just have a lump of clay and try to animate a man shaped piece of it. The clay has to be formed into a shape.

Now, that shape can be as simple as a lump of clay with a bit dragged out to make a tail of sorts. However, if you just slapped a clay ball on a surface and it happened to make a similar shape, that didn’t count unless there was intent behind it. Kind of annoying, but Doyle figures it will be all smoothed out when he deconstructs one and gets an actual pattern for it.

So now, with the shaping requirements figured out, Doyle turns to the powering of the golem. At the top end, he had basically made veins of monster stone spread through the clay mass. Then the actual power came from a number of world energy gathering arrays. They had been carved onto small clay plates and inserted into areas connected to power use. Stuff like in the heart, where the heart would be, and in the gut.

Real overkill as he had managed to animate the clay with much less, but Doyle had wanted to test how deep he could on the matter. In the end, such complexity ended up making a weaker golem. While the monster stone became flexible through magic, any break in it would dump out all the golem’s power.

In the end, you technically didn’t even need to add anything to the clay. Rather, you just need to pick some of it to be in charge and to hold power. Doyle figured this step would actually be a lot easier with a solid material as it would be able to shift around.

So while the method using the least outside materials was to use the existing clay, that wasn’t actually the simplest. Rather, the method which was easiest to implement was to take part of the clay and fire it. That smaller lump of clay is then reintroduced to the rest of the clay and used as the golem’s battery and control.

However, the important part with that was that you used clay from the lump you are making the golem out of. The inherent connection makes the powering process a lot easier. If you tried to use clay that wasn’t originally a part of the golems mass? You might as well use one of the mystic energy storage options like the previously mentioned monster stone. Though Doyle did figure out one other slightly more complex method that was worth using.

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