The House Argent workshop—formerly a derelict armoury and currently a designated fire hazard—smelled of ozone, hot oil, and the distinct, metallic tang of stress.
We had used the Jester's Laundry profits to upgrade the facility significantly, dragging in mana-lathes, inscription tables, and a blast-furnace that probably violated several building codes. But Grace had a unique talent for turning a high-end laboratory into a chaotic nest of scrap. Gears hung from the ceiling on fishing line like industrial wind chimes. Half-dissected clockwork beetles littered the floor, crunching underfoot if you weren't careful. It was a cave of wonders, assuming you wondered how long it would be until something exploded.
In the centre of this mechanical hurricane sat the architect of the chaos.
The problem with geniuses is that they generally don't know when to sleep. The problem with desperate geniuses is that they don't know when to stop holding a high-explosive mana crystal with trembling fingers.
Grace looked like she had gone ten rounds with a caffeine elemental. Her hair was a static-charged bird's nest, her goggles were foggy, and she was staring at a blueprint as if she could intimidate the ink into changing its shape.
"It's impossible," she muttered, her voice cracking. "The tolerance is too low. I need to inscribe a tertiary stabilising rune on the interior curve of a differential gear. The gear is the size of my pinky nail."
She dropped the stylus on the workbench. It rolled off and hit the floor with a mocking ting.
"I can't do it, Murphy. My hands... they aren't steady enough. House Voss uses diamond-tipped golems for this level of micro-inscription. Our tools are just not advanced enough."
I picked up the tiny steel blank. It was small. Distressingly small.
'She is right,' Ronan noted, projecting a schematic of the gear into my mind's eye. 'To etch a functional strengthening rune on that curve requires the stability of a statue. Her pulse alone would ruin the line.'
"Or," I said, spinning the tiny gear in my fingers, "it requires a void."
Grace rubbed her temples. "Murphy, I don't have time for riddles. I need focus and a miracle."
"I have both. And I also have a tuxedo."
I focused. A Clone popped into existence on the workbench next to Grace's elbow.
It was the Toddler Variant—compact, low-mass, and currently wearing a tiny tuxedo because I felt the occasion demanded formality. He stood about three feet tall, holding a deflated beach ball while standing next to a large inflated one. He quickly put the deflated one in our shared inventory and gave a thumbs up.
Grace stared at him through bleary eyes. "Why is he dressed for a gala?"
"Professionalism! The little guy must look good for his first day at the office."
I handed the tiny steel parts to him, which he simply pocketed, along with a standard diamond-tipped stylus.
He tapped the plastic surface. It didn't bounce; it rippled, the red-and-white stripes dissolving into a swirling invisible haze. He didn't jump; he simply leaned forward and stepped into the ball, vanishing like a magic trick gone right.
Thump.
I staggered back, grabbing the edge of the table to keep from hitting the floor.
The drain was immediate and nasty. It felt like donating a pint of blood in a single second. My vision greyed at the edges, and a cold sweat prickled on my forehead. It didn't matter that he had used the "Beach Ball Door" instead of my chest; the cost of passing a Living Spark across the threshold was always a tax on the original's body.
"You okay?" Grace asked, waking up slightly at my sudden lack of balance.
"Fine," I wheezed, straightening up and waiting for the room to stop spinning. "Just... doing that a few times today has taken its toll. The landlord charges a steep deposit for new tenants, regardless of which door they use."
Grace looked at the empty spot where the beach ball had vanished. "Where did he go?"
"The void," I said, catching my breath. "Inside, there is no wind. There is no vibration. And most importantly, the clone has total telekinetic control."
Grace stared at the beach ball. She looked at me. She looked at the pile of failed prototypes on the floor.
"I hate you," she said, but the tension in her shoulders was finally dropping. "I hate you so much."
"I get that a lot," I said. "Kaff?"
The world flipped inside out.
The disorientation of stepping through a plastic beach ball faded instantly, replaced by the sterile, infinite silence of the White Void.
I landed on the white marble floor, the only feature in a world of blinding purity. The Indigo Sky churned above, a storm of raw power that never touched the ground.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the gear parts and the stylus.
I didn't need a desk. I didn't need a clamp.
In this space, my will was physics. The tiny gear froze in mid-air, suspended in a grip of absolute certainty. It stopped spinning. It stopped vibrating. It became a fixed point in the universe.
To the Original outside, this was a microscopic piece of fiddly metal and a headache. To me? It was a canvas the size of a billboard.
I took the stylus out and began to work.
I didn't squint. I didn't need a lens. I just commanded the space to show me the truth of the object.
Instantly, my perception shifted. The gear didn't physically grow, but to my senses, it was suddenly the size of a millstone. I could see the jagged cliffs of the steel grain. I could see the valleys where Grace's file had roughened the surface. I knew this object better than the smith who forged it.
I floated the diamond stylus forward. I didn't hold it; I steered it. Telekinesis doesn't tremble. It doesn't have a pulse. I drove the diamond tip into the curved valley of the steel, carving the rune with a cold, absolute precision that biological hands could never replicate. The diamond ploughed through the metal grain like a ship breaking through ice, curling up perfect, microscopic shavings of steel.
This attempt would have been impossible a few weeks ago. Even with this level of microscopic control, there simply wasn't enough surface area to inscribe a standard rune. It was only possible because we had learned to strip the 'bloatware'—the prayers and flourishes—leaving just the raw, executable code small enough to fit.
The engraving was done. Now for the hard part: The axle.
It was a steel rod, thin as a hair to the outside world but a massive pillar to me. In the real world, fusing this to the gear would require heat, and heat would warp the delicate rune I'd just carved. I needed a bond that was absolute but cold.
A random memory surfaced from the depths of the trauma archive about cold welding. I had heard it somewhere on a playground, or was it a teacher? I don't remember exactly what he said, but it had something to do with having two flat pieces of metal fusing if they touched in space. I later learned it was called 'Cold Welding'.
I hovered the axle over the gear hole. I tried to remember why that happened. It wasn't the zero gravity; gravity doesn't stop atoms from fusing. It had something to do with the vacuum of space.
I was pretty sure it had something to do with the oxide layer—a microscopic skin of rust formed by oxygen that acts like a barrier. Which meant that metal never actually touches metal; it touches the rust.
"Let's test the theory," I whispered to the silence.
I used the Inventory's Sorting mechanic—the same one I used to clean mud off my boots or separate gold dust from river sand.
It was a conceptual surgery. I stripped the invisible layer of corruption from both the gear's socket and the axle's tip. To my mind's eye, the steel suddenly looked "naked." Raw.
'Remove the air.'
I used my telekinetic grip to push the atmosphere away from the joint, creating a localised vacuum around the two parts.
Then, the Press.
I slammed the axle into the gear.
There was no heat. There was no spark. Without the oxide barrier or air gaps to tell the atoms they were separate objects; they simply got confused. The electrons wandered across the gap, panicked, and decided they had always been one piece of metal.
Snap.
The seam vanished. The gear and the axle weren't glued; they were one monolithic object.
Cold Welding. Fusion without a single degree of thermal stress.
It was perfect. And as I inspected the seamless joint, a terrifying realisation hit me: If I could do this, I wasn't limited to steel.
I could fuse Tungsten edges onto flexible steel cores. I could embed delicate crystals inside solid armour plates with no entry seams. I could build ship-in-a-bottle mechanisms that were physically impossible to assemble by hand.
I could break the crafting system in half.
I quickly inflated the second ball and floated the finished component through a portal on its surface. "Order up!"
After regaining my stamina—which took a solid hour and a lot of complaining—we got back to work. We didn't have time to waste moving furniture; the expedition was looming, and Grace was running on fumes and pure spite.
The next four hours were a blur of efficiency.
Grace fell into a rhythm. She would assemble the chassis in the real world, calling out dimensions and rune requirements. I would grab the delicate aerospace-grade components, hand them to a tuxedo-wearing toddler clone, and watch him dive into a beach ball portal. Seconds later, he'd pop back out, holding a part that had been Cold Welded to perfection in the zero-gravity vacuum of the Void.
It was an assembly line that violated several laws of physics, but it worked.
Ronan was taking a break from engineering. He had a clone sitting inside the Void, "sipping" the Emperor's pure mana to boost our cultivation while I did the manual labour outside. He tried to explain the mechanics of "dual-processing mana pathways," but my mind cut out after the word "meta-physical."
Meanwhile, the Spider began to take shape on the scarred stone workbench.
It wasn't the clunky, steam-puffing monstrosity the Academy usually produced. It was sleek. The legs were articulated with multi-jointed pistons, moving with the silent grace of a predator. The chassis was a flattened sphere of polished steel, packed with the hyper-dense gears we'd fabricated.
"Final step," Grace said, her voice tight. "Core Synchronisation. I need to wake it up."
She picked up the Mana Core—a vibrant Green crystal—and slotted it into the Spider's thoracic cavity.
She raised her hand, her fingers glowing with blue mana. She began to weave the activation sequence.
"Careful," I warned, the Danger Sense giving a low, ominous thrum in the back of my skull. "That's a lot of juice for a small engine."
"It needs the boost to start up the gyros," she muttered, sweat dripping down her nose. "Just... one... more... push."
She flared her mana.
The core didn't hum. It screamed.
A high-pitched whine tore through the workshop. The green light turned blinding white. The Spider began to vibrate so hard it blurred against the stone table.
"It's looping!" Grace shouted, stumbling back. "The intake rune is pulling too much! It's going to breach!"
Grace froze. She knew the blast radius. We were dead.
I didn't freeze. I didn't have the luxury of panic.
"Nope," I said.
I lunged forward. I didn't try to diffuse the rune. I didn't try to shield us.
I slammed my hand onto the screaming chassis, mentally gripping the overloading core.
Store.
The crystal vanished from the robot an instant before detonation.
Inside my mind, I felt the item in the Inventory.
Without my mental permission for time to flow, the explosion hit the stasis lock and froze. Somewhere in the white void, a beautiful, terrifying flower of white fire was now hanging suspended in mid-air, forever caught in the microsecond of detonation.
"Safe," I said, exhaling sharply. "Though I'm not taking it out anytime soon."
The workshop was silent, save for the ticking of the cooling Spider chassis.
Grace was pressed against a tool rack, hyperventilating. She looked at the empty socket in the robot, then back at me.
"You..." she wheezed. "You're incredible."
For some reason, that made me uncomfortable. Was I incredible? Or just very, very used to things blowing up?
"Let's count that as a sign to take a break," I deflected, leaning against the workbench to hide the tremor in my hands. "Do we have any sandwiches left?"
I raised my hand, and a slightly squashed ham sandwich appeared from thin air.
"Here," I said, tossing it to her. "Emergency rations. It's been in stasis for a week, so technically it's fresher than the air in here."
We sat on the cold stone floor of the workshop, leaning against the heavy workbench. Grace took a bite, chewed slowly, and then let out a long, shuddering breath. The adrenaline crash had finally hit her.
We ate in silence for a few minutes, the only sound the low hum of the furnace in the corner. It truly felt like a campfire at the end of the world.
"Why the spider?" I asked, gesturing to the metal contraption. "I mean, I appreciate the nightmare fuel, but most people build Golems that look like knights or dogs. Why eight legs?"
Grace swallowed. She traced the rim of her goggles with a grease-stained finger.
"Stability," she said quietly. "Bipeds fall over. If you land a hit on a knight's knee, it's useless. A spider can lose two legs and still carry a wounded soldier out of the kill zone."
She looked at the machine with a softness that was entirely at odds with the lethal metal.
"My birth mother died in the Border Skirmishes," she said. "She bled out in the mud because no one could reach her. The terrain was too rough for the carts."
"I want to automate the front line," Grace continued, her voice gaining a fierce edge. "I want to build an army that doesn't bleed. A legion of these things swarms the walls and the trenches, dragging people home. The expedition is the first chance to prove it works in the field."
"A noble goal," I said, saluting her with my sandwich crust. "Though Empires usually prefer cheaper meat to expensive metal."
"Then I'll make them cheap," she countered stubbornly.
She turned to me, her eyes searching my face. "What about you, Murphy? You have a King's name and two of the most unique Arts I have ever heard of. Who are you, really?"
I froze mid-chew.
"I'm just the guy holding a sandwich," I deflected.
"Bullshit," Grace said, though she smiled slightly. "You act like... like you've seen it all before. Even when we were dying on top of the Ziggurat, it didn't faze you. Not for a second. There's an old soul behind those eyes. The other girls in the dorm talk about it, you know."
"Talk about what?"
"You," she said, rolling her eyes. "Vespera thinks you're a tragic mystery. Her crush is so obvious that it makes me cringe. Pippa thinks you're this 'misunderstood protector.' Even the Vermilion girls stare at you in the Hall."
I choked on my ham. "Me? I'm the Academy Coward, remember?"
"That's the point," Grace said, leaning in slightly. "You don't care what they think. That drives them crazy. It makes you seem... older. Dangerous." She paused, her voice dropping a decibel. "Is there... anyone? Someone from home? Or here?"
I looked at her. She was brilliant, fierce, and currently covered in soot. She was also, technically, a child compared to the thousand-year-old man currently inhabiting this body.
"I don't really get it," I admitted, leaning my head back against the bench. "Romance. The drama. From my experience, it's all doomed to end with two people hating each other. Besides, I might look sixteen, Grace. But inside? I feel like I've been tired since the bedrock was soft."
I let out a long, rattling exhalation.
"When I look at people, I don't see peers. I see tourists. They stand in the middle of a palace, safe and warm with full bellies, screaming that their lives are over because the tea is cold. They walk around with this absolute, unshakable confidence that they understand how the world works, when they haven't even looked out the window."
Grace pulled back, a flash of disappointment crossing her face before she hid it behind her mask of cynicism.
"Right," she muttered, picking at a loose thread on her trousers. "Old soul. Got it. Well, lucky for us, I prefer machines. They don't give cryptic answers."
An awkward silence descended, thick enough to cut with a welding torch. I realised I might have killed the mood a little too effectively.
"Why do you do it, Grace?" I asked, breaking the quiet. "The stress. The panic. The caffeine poisoning. Is the grade that important?"
She stopped picking at the thread and looked at the crate of failed parts.
"It's not about the grade," she said quietly. "It's about leverage. House Voss... they own everything. My tools, my funding, my future. They look at me, and they see a breeding mare with a high IQ."
Her hands clenched into fists.
"I'm not doing this for a pat on the head, Murphy. I'm doing this to become undeniable. I want to build something so complex, so valuable, that they need me. I want to force them to treat me like a partner, not an asset. That is my goal. Freedom."
She looked up at me, her eyes burning with a desperate intensity. "What about you? You float through this place like nothing matters. What do you want?"
I looked around the workshop. I looked at the Spider, the chaotic mess of gears, and the faint blue glow of the mana lamps.
"Honestly?" I said, a small, genuine smile touching my face. "I'm having the time of my life."
Grace blinked. "You were almost expelled last week."
"I know. And the food is hot, the bed is soft, and I have friends who haven't tried to stab me yet. For the first time in... well, ever... I'm actually just living. I'm enjoying the ride."
"Surely that's not all," she pressed. "You must have a reason. A goal of some kind?"
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, my expression hardening just a fraction.
"I do have a goal. A simple one."
"World domination?" she teased, though she looked unsure.
"I need to find someone," I corrected. "Someone responsible for a lot of pain."
"And when you find them?"
"I'm going to kill them," I said, my tone as casual as if I were discussing the weather.
Another silence descended. This one was heavier.
"So," I said, clapping my hands together to banish the tension. "How's the laundry business going?"
Grace blinked, adjusting to the sudden pivot. "The delivery company doubled their pricing when they realised what we were making. I'm considering renting a shop in the Upper District, but we will need a massive deposit to convince anyone we are legitimate. The new overhead is going to kill the margins."
"What if we just bring the laundry to them?"
Grace leaned in, her mechanic's brain engaging. "We already do free delivery."
"Not delivery," I corrected. "A Mobile Cleaning Machine. We construct an elaborate-looking wagon with a hole at the top and a hole at the bottom. It doesn't actually do anything. And inside... we simply put a beach ball."
I grabbed some charcoal and started illustrating my idea on a piece of scrap parchment.
"We park outside the Inns, bathhouses, or the dorms. We take the laundry bags and throw them in the hole on top of the machine. The laundry ends up in the Inventory, where a few clones are waiting. They instantly clean and fold the laundry using the mana-water, and a few minutes later, it comes out the other hole."
Grace's eyes widened. "Zero rent. Direct access to the client. And if anyone wants to make trouble..."
"I make the wagon disappear into my inventory," I finished. "It's a ghost business. No address to raid."
"Well then," she said, standing up and dusting off her trousers. "We'd better finish this spider so we can get to the dump."
"Dump?"
"Yeah," she grinned, "That's where all my parts come from. And if we're going to build a ghost wagon, we're going to need a lot more scrap."
There was no sunrise in the Void. Just the eternal, churning indigo sky and the frozen white fire of the stasis-locked explosion hanging above us like an avant-garde chandelier.
To keep us sane, I'd tried to make the white hellscape homely. I'd conjured a thick, red Persian rug to cover the cold marble floor. Two overstuffed leather armchairs sat next to the workbench, and in the corner, a brass gramophone was currently scratching out the opening chords of Toto Africa as we worked.
It felt less like a magical workshop and more like a wizard's lounge in the 1970s.
"Moment of truth," Grace whispered.
She tapped the activation rune on the Spider's chassis.
I sank deeper into my leather armchair, bracing myself for the grinding of gears. I expected the screech of metal on metal, the clanking of pistons, or at least the heavy thud-thud-thud of a mechanical beast learning to walk.
Instead, there was silence.
The Spider stood up. It didn't jerk; it flowed. The eight legs extended in a ripple of polished steel, lifting the chassis off the workbench with the grace of a dancer. It skittered sideways, climbed down the leg of the table, and settled on the Persian rug without making a sound louder than a breath.
It was terrifying.
"Forward," Grace said clearly, her voice echoing slightly in the vastness.
The Spider surged forward three feet and froze.
"Left," she commanded. It turned left. "Hold." It stopped dead.
"It works," Grace breathed, her eyes wide behind her goggles. "It actually works."
Grace looked at the machine—her masterpiece. Then she looked around at the impossible room we were in. The manic energy of the night began to drain out of her, replaced by the crushing weight of reality.
"It's a masterwork," I admitted, collapsing back into the leather chair. "But we have a problem."
"Problem?" She spun around. "The gyros?"
"The production rate," I said, gesturing to the complex machinery. "It took us six hours to build one. If we want a squad before the expedition, we can't do it sequentially. We need to parallel process."
Grace rubbed her eyes. "I don't speak 'Ancient Strategy', Murphy. What does that mean?"
"It means we stop being artisans," I said, sitting up. "And we start being a factory."
I focused.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Three Toddler-Clones appeared on the Persian rug. They were all wearing the tiny tuxedos—because standards must be maintained—and they looked at me with identical expressions of bored competence.
"Station One," I pointed to the first clone. "Chassis alignment and oxide stripping."
"Station Two," I pointed to the second. "Leg articulation and Cold Welding."
"Station Three," I pointed to the third. "Rune inscription and final assembly."
I looked at Grace. "You are Quality Control. You verify the cores. I am the facilitator. I sit back and watch the magic happen. We don't build one spider at a time. We build the legs, the bodies, and the gears all at once, and then we snap them together like a kit."
Grace looked at the tiny staff. She looked at the efficiency of the setup. A slow, dangerous grin spread across her face.
"My father would be proud," she murmured.
"Who?"
"Never mind. Let's work."
The next hour was a symphony of efficiency. The clones moved with telekinetic precision. There was no talking, just the soft whoosh of air being displaced and the snap of cold welds fusing metal.
We finished the second spider in forty minutes.
We finished the third in thirty.
We were halfway through the fourth when the rhythm broke.
"Station One, report," I barked as the first clone stopped moving.
The Toddler held up an empty hand and shrugged. He pointed to the pile of scrap metal we had brought in.
It was gone.
The heap of high-grade star-steel, the copper cabling, the mana-conducive crystal shards—all that remained was a bit of twisted rebar and some useless brass filings.
"We're dry," I announced, the momentum crashing into a wall.
Grace scrambled over to the pile, kicking through the dust. "No, no, no! We were just getting the timing down! We need the plating for the chassis. I can't build the legs out of brass; they'll buckle under the torque."
She looked at the three finished spiders and the half-built corpse of the fourth.
"Three," she whispered, frustrated. "Three and a half. It's not enough Murphy."
Grace slumped against the workbench, the exhaustion finally catching up to her now that the adrenaline of production had stalled.
"Looks like we are going to need to visit the Voss dump sooner rather than later."
"The Voss Dump?" I repeated"
"Yeah," she yawned, sliding down to sit on the rug. "Literal tons of high-grade alloy... just sitting there... rusting..."
She swayed, her eyelids fluttering shut. The crash hit her like a hammer, and she tipped sideways.
I moved just in time to catch her, shifting so her head landed heavily on the arm of the leather chair instead of the floor.
I sighed, grabbing a spare blanket from the pile of bedding I kept in here and draping it over her.
I sat there in the silence of the Void, the Eagles playing softly on the gramophone, a sixteen-year-old girl passed out on the furniture, and three silent, mechanical spiders watching me from the rug.
We had the assembly line. We had the workers. We just needed the raw materials.
"Get some rest, Grace," I whispered to the empty world, looking at the half-finished spider. "Tomorrow night, we go shopping."