Chương 36: The Script of Clay

The damp limestone walls of the fault line dripped with a slow, rhythmic tap-tap-tap that echoed into the pitch blackness. Ethan sat on the unpaved cave floor, his bare legs caked in a thick, drying layer of deep red ochre. He did not open his logout interface to check his real-world countdown. The seven-day Chinatown safety anchor was secure, but his stingy soul refused to waste a single server minute.

Manual mining limits the extraction velocity, Ethan calculated, his eyes tracking the data cells blinking inside his visor. Hoisting forty-kilogram bags of silt drains my stamina bar by twelve percent per hour. If I keep executing the manual loops myself, the time-loss overhead will eat my profit margins before the next moon phase clears. He needed to automate. He needed an industrial infrastructure that didn't demand a single copper grain of wages, maintenance, or food overhead.

How did the engine bridge the gap between inanimate terrain and an active, autonomous asset? His thoughts raced through standard gaming command lines— Summon, Animate, Construct —but every logic module rejected them. The server didn't run on modern English shorthand. Ethan's eyes narrowed as his gaze drifted downward, tracking the system tags still floating over the crimson mud vein: אֲדָמָה (Adama / Soil).

He stared at the unvocalised letters until his photographic memory forcefully dragged up the linguistic directory mapping he had audited during his iron-blood transfusion. It has been staring at me the entire time, Ethan's inner voice clicked with a sudden, breathless intensity. The directory core isn't hidden. It's built right into the name of the earth itself. The word אֲדָמָה (Adama) was an exact, literal compound extension.

If you stripped away the final feminine singular suffix, the remaining three-letter root formed the absolute baseline directory for human flesh within the server's core registry: אָדָם (Adam). The server computes human flesh and red dirt under the exact same root registry, Ethan reasoned, his heart hammering against his ribs as his fingers tightened around his infinite-durability, oxidised bronze trowel. To animate an asset for free, I must bridge the gap between environment and entity using the soil's own name.

With the math locked in, his hands began to operate with a cold, mechanical predictability. For three continuous hours, his Level 15 Strength and Constitution metrics—heavily backed by his Primordial multipliers—allowed his body to lift massive, unrefined weights without a point of strain. He used his bronze trowel to gouge thick, heavy chunks of high-purity iron oxide silt straight from the wet bedrock vein, dumping over three hundred kilograms of the iron-heavy crimson mud into the center of the hollow.

Guided by his Structural Analysis passive's 300% multiplier, his hands became a blurred, clinical machine. The unshaped mud rapidly took on a looming, blocky, human-like geometry. A two-metre-tall homunculus rose from the cave floor. Its chest was a wide, solid vault of unbaked terracotta; its limbs were thick, tree-trunk pillars of dense, iron-rich ochre mud designed solely for heavy load capacity. It had no decorative mouth, no sculpted hair, and no clothing modules.

It was a raw, primitive monument of pure alluvial mass. Ethan stepped onto a limestone boulder to align his chest with the creature's blank, mud-smeared face. He pulled up his Grade 2 Semitic Syntax Layout, driving the sharp, green-patina edge of his trowel directly into the damp clay of the homunculus's forehead. He carved the three characters of the flesh directory: אָ-דָ-ם. Adam. Man.

The moment the characters settled, Ethan reached into his verified library, his eyes locking onto the contractual stability root he had successfully used to freeze his water canteens: א-מ-נ (A-M-N). If Adam provides the physical blueprint, Ethan calculated, then capping the syntax matrix with the Aman script will force the engine to process the massive shape under an automated, trustworthy lease parameter. He channeled a massive thirty-unit pulse of his mana bar straight into the dual inscription.

The letters glowed green, but the giant mud torso savage-shuddered, its heavy shoulders shifting two millimetres to the left as the system processed the structural scaling. The low-tier Aman contract script lacked the structural density to anchor three hundred kilograms of earth against the environment file. The internal lines sheared violently, the heavy clay limbs groaning as the code failed. [System Prompt: Animation Script Unstable] Error: Target Entity lacks a validated Existential Reality Parameter.

Maintenance Overhead Projected: 45 Mana Units per second required to maintain physical form. Status: Critical Structural Bleedout Active. A terrifying, localized gravity spike hit the center of the cave. Ethan's visor flashed a violent, blinding amber as the haptic feedback loop in his reconditioned 2035 visor glitched, sending a raw, agonizing thermal shock directly through the skin of his forearms. Forty-five units a second!

Ethan gasped, his virtual throat constricting as his master mana pool plummeted like a stone through water. His blue resource bar didn't just tick down; it evaporated. The high-pressure logic loop was violently dragging the raw life-force straight out of his character's cells, trying to feed the insatiable structural appetite of three hundred kilograms of sliding mud.

"Cancel!" Ethan roared, his voice cracking against the limestone ceiling as he violently yanked his hands away from the clay face.

"Cancel query! Release root!" The system severed the connection with a dull, heavy pop that sent a physical kinetic recoil through his bare heels. Ethan skidded backward into the gravel, his chest heaving under his sweat-soaked burlap apron as his breath came in short, ragged wheezes. His mana bar sat hollowed out at a miserable four percent. The giant terracotta homunculus didn't just stop moving; it decomposed.

Without his personal energy holding the syntax structure together, the clay limbs went completely slack. The massive torso slumped violently against the bedrock wall, the features melting down into an unshaped, worthless mound of red sludge that buried his feet in cold slime. Ethan stared at the slick, red ruin of his three hours of back-breaking manual labor, his knuckles white as his fingers shook against the cold grip of his bronze trowel. The phantom heat of the haptic glitch still stung his forearms.

His photographic memory was entirely fixed on the flashing red Reality Error block that had almost burned out his capsule's core buffer. It was an absolute failure. The Adam folder gave it the biological blueprint, but it carried zero permanence. It was a parasitic drain—a structural black hole that would bleed his personal assets dry long before it could mine a single grain of copper slag.

Ethan let out a sharp, ragged breath, slamming the flat of his trowel against the limestone wall in raw, unvarnished frustration. The echo bounced uselessly through the pitch-black tunnels. He wiped a streak of greasy red mud from his forehead, his jaw clenching as he forced himself back down onto the unpaved stone. The machine had beat him this time. The math was broken, his resource pool was dry, and he was back in the dirt, left with nothing but an incomplete code string and a pile of melted water.