Chương 40: The Words of Death

A sharp, metallic clank of bronze hitting limestone echoed down the narrow mouth of the fault line. Ethan's posture instantly dropped into a low, motionless crouch, his Wilderness Camouflage pulling the shadows of the cave deep over his burlap kilt. He did not call Emmett back to his side. He held his breath, his thirty-seven-point Perception tracking a sudden string of flashing blue player tags descending into his remote extraction node.

A four-man scouting squad from the Pixel Rex Mercenary Corps scrambled down the loose gravel incline. They were elite, frontline Level 30 Skirmishers wearing polished bronze cuirasses and carrying heavy bronze Naue II swords drawn across their chests. They were tracking the localized data anomalies in the copper market, their visors scanning the rock face until their light beams hit Emmett's massive, slate-grey terracotta frame mid-swing.

"Hold your lines!" the squad leader shouted, his bronze sword instantly pointing at the golem's chest.

"We've got an unregistered industrial asset operating inside Sector 3! Look at those inventory counters—it's holding over three hundred kilograms of pure copper nodules!" The two skirmishers lunged forward, their heavy bronze blades forming a tight tactical perimeter around the clay giant. Above Emmett's head, the system's red target bracket flashed violently: [Target Identified: Golem Adama — Owner: Etan].

"Flag the asset for corporate seizure!" the leader barked, his face twisting with corporate greed as he opened his guild manual interface.

"The owner is that F2P crafter who broke Bochim's ledger. Under Section 7. 1 of our territorial lease, any automated craft construct operating without a primary municipal zoning permit can be legally impounded by the leaseholder! Surround it! Don't let it dump the cargo!" Ethan stepped out from the shadow of the limestone ledge, his expression completely flat, his bare feet meeting the unpaved mud road without a single trace of fear. He held his oxidised bronze trowel loosely in his right hand.

"You're stepping onto an unmapped sovereign blind spot, corporate," Ethan said, his voice entirely clinical as he walked right up to the vanguard line.

"Shut up, F2P trash!" the leader hissed, his blade twitching inches from Ethan's throat.

"Your little clay toy belongs to the Pixel Rex ledger now. We are executing an administrative impound. If you resist, we flag your character for industrial sabotage and clear your level bar back to zero." Ethan looked at the squad leader, a cold, sharp, cynical smile stretching across his soot-stained face. He looked at the golden א (Aleph) pulsing on the golem's forehead—the vital, system-enforced channel that allowed a lump of earth to pretend it possessed a standing reality.

You think this machine is just property you can clip into your corporate boxes, Ethan's inner calculus clicked, his thoughts dropping into a deep, chilling clarity. You think a creature made of clay can belong to a man or a guild. You haven't read the fundamental data laws of this server. Man is nothing but dust, and without the sovereign truth anchoring the code, the flesh file is entirely empty.

"Take the cargo then," Ethan whispered. He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't execute a combat block. He simply raised his bronze trowel, his arm moving with an aggressive, rapid velocity that caught the scouts completely off guard. The sharp, green-patina edge of the tool didn't strike the skirmishers; it slashed horizontally across Emmett's own clay forehead. With one swift, clinical swipe, Ethan's trowel cleanly smeared away the leading golden character: the א (Aleph).

The moment the Aleph was wiped from the slate-grey clay, the server's core reality engine experienced an immediate, devastating linguistic inversion. Dropping the first letter of the Emet (Truth) script left only the trailing two-consonant block: מ-ת. Met. Dead. The data integrity command vanished from the server's registry in a single frame. The foundational truth was gone.

Without that animating anchor bridging the gap between the sky code and the ground, the system violently revoked the entity's reality parameter. The stone-hard, slate-grey armour plates on the golem's body didn't just crack; they liquefied.

Emmett's two-metre-tall, eighteen-hundred-point health chassis violently dissolved with a watery slump, collapsing instantly back into a featureless, soaking mound of ordinary, wet, untaxable river dirt that splattered violently across the polished bronze boots of the corporate squad. The creature had returned to the dust from which it was formed. [System Alert: Asset Integrity De-Materialized] Linguistic Status: Met (Dead) Condition Met. Entity Status: Reverted to Environmental Mud File.

Corporate Seizure Parameter: FAILED (Target Item Weight: 0. 00 kg). The three hundred kilograms of pure copper nodules and harvested wild barley didn't drop onto the floor as salvageable loot. Because the Golem's inventory grid was hard-locked to Ethan's private Yotzer HaRishon class mirror thread, the system processed the de-materialisation by automatically compressing the raw cargo data blocks and depositing them straight into Ethan's remote, untaxed system cache.

The squad leader skidded through the red sludge, his bronze sword slicing through thin air as he looked down at his ruined, mud-soaked leather boots in a state of absolute, high-stakes shock.

"Where... where is the cargo? Where did the copper go?" Ethan slid his bronze trowel back into his burlap apron, looking down at the corporate enforcers with a cold, mocking gaze.

"I told you," Ethan said, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper as he backed into the dark subterranean fissure.

"The boss doesn't own the ground. Without the truth, you have nothing but mud." He activated his Wilderness Camouflage, his Level 32 profile vanishing completely into the pitch-black stone cavities before their tracking reticles could lock his position. He had outmanoeuvred their elite vanguard squad, secured his entire industrial harvest for zero capital loss, and the rich boys were left standing in the dark, holding nothing but dirty water.