Chapter 344: Chapter 341: A Blaze of Activity

The Mage Tower’s basement was completely overhauled. The Magic Array Disc below was reprogrammed and embedded into a metal sphere that would act as the client unit.

Just as Kou Bo could remotely manage his avatars, Rorschach could take the main unit back to Lansite, with the two cores maintaining their link through Magic.

"Ahem." Bart coughed, seeing that Rorschach and Andre had finally finished tinkering after bustling about.

"Sore throat?" Rorschach asked, concerned for his client and friend.

Bart pointed at his Tower Spirit. "No, I just want to try waking it up. What should I call it? Since it’s a piece of your Soul, how about Rorschach Two?"

"Stop right there. You can name it, but not that! Besides, you probably can’t communicate with it directly using language right now. I told you about this before... Andre, you explain."

"Currently, it can only input and output signals that a machine can understand. The sphere designed by Teacher Rorschach can only translate Magic Pulses. After the recent adjustments, the tower’s entire Defense Spell system can operate autonomously. But if you want it to understand what you say and speak on its own, it will require more computing power to analyze sound waves and connect to the Magic Arrays for the Communication Skill and Illusionary Sound Technique..."

At first, Bart had thought the "Basic Array" inside the sphere would include the Communication Skill, but he didn’t expect it to need hardware support. "So, am I to understand that this mute Tower Spirit has just taken over all of Andre’s work?"

Bart was shocked and a little annoyed to realize he’d spent several dozen times an apprentice’s stipend just to replace the work of a single apprentice.

’Experience from two lifetimes had proven to Rorschach that the biggest obstacle to automation was that labor was too cheap, and human life was even cheaper.’

"Don’t worry," Rorschach said, dangling another carrot to get Bart to spend more money. "The Tower of Stars once purchased two computing machines specifically for analyzing waves. If we can acquire and slightly modify them, we can give the Tower Spirit the ability to receive and produce sound. As a bonus, it could also be used to control some Shaping Spells."

’Sir, you’ve purchased the Tower Spirit Lite. The voice assistant is an extra charge! Don’t worry about it being standard elsewhere; our voice interaction module is an optional add-on. The only question is, are you going to pay up?’

Since no one else sold them, Bart of course had to pay up. He sighed toward the heavens. "Just tell me what the damn machine is called. I’ll have the merchant guild procure it now."

Rorschach patted his shoulder comfortingly. "Buy one for me, too. I’ll pay you back when it arrives."

"..." Bart wanted to throw this sly merchant out of the tower.

...

RUMBLE RUMBLE! 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

A giant Demonic Puppet pushed over a massive, decades-old tree, then ripped its entire root system from the soil.

Its eyes glowed red. Though made of just stone and earth, its strength was immense. These terrifying Demonic Puppets moved in groups, each one standing between six and ten meters tall.

These Demonic Puppets had appeared overnight on the far outskirts of Lansite. The residential areas were fine, but the Fanta beverage factory, also on the outskirts by the river, could feel the commotion they were making—it was enough to shake the very earth.

At first, people were terrified, but then they received a notice: these earth-made Demonic Puppets were just construction workers, and everyone should remain calm.

Oh, well that was fine then. The factory employees and everyone in the city knew that Fanta’s behind-the-scenes owner was a Mage, and one with very close ties to the Prince Consort.

The Demonic Puppets were not only loud but also highly efficient. In just one day and night, a new clearing appeared on the outskirts of Lansite, along with a very flat and wide road. The food factory employees and the residents of Lansite, who had quickly accepted these oversized "construction workers," now had a new recreational activity: watching the big guys at work.

They would carry food baskets and picnic blankets, walk down the newly cleared road to the construction site, and then climb a nearby hill that had been cleared of trees to watch the earth-made Demonic Puppets work. The wealthy would sip drinks and eat white bread with sausage, while the less fortunate could make do, savoring a cup of light beer as they watched.

It was just like the "guy magnets" of Rorschach’s previous life, where men would stop to watch excavators and cranes. The residents of the small city, who lacked other forms of entertainment, found that these big guys worked with incredible energy, and watching them was just as exciting.

It was only when they looked down from the hill that they noticed a metal rod embedded in the head of every Demonic Puppet. It was an "Antenna" set up by Rorschach, and it was, of course, connected to the intelligence core.

"Hey, it’s lifting that log so easily." "Whoa, look at that huge sheet of metal! It lifted it in one go!"

Then everyone started to daydream: "If only a big guy like that could build my house..." "If only it could come and plow my fields..."

In contrast to the public’s delight, the other extreme in body type on the construction crew—Jansen’s team of leather-clad dwarves—was currently quite frustrated.

They had arrived in high spirits, as their last collaboration building Bart’s Mage Tower had been a pleasant one; both Mages were the type to pay promptly and without fuss. But now, they were discovering that they didn’t seem to have much of a role to play.

For instance, two dwarves were now staring blankly at a blueprint fresh from Rorschach:

"Can you make heads or tails of this blueprint?"

"Nope... Should we ask the boss?"

"He definitely won’t understand it either. We’ll have to ask Uncle Rorschach."

"We already asked him yesterday. I’m too embarrassed. You go ask, you go ask..."

Then they suddenly felt the sky darken. A Demonic Puppet had bent down and was also looking at the blueprint in their hands, its two eyes of fired glass flickering red a few times.

"You can understand this?" one of the dwarves shouted up at it, annoyed that it was blocking the light.

But the Demonic Puppet had no ears or mouth. It just paused for a moment, then went back to work according to the blueprint.

"It’s over. I think it actually understood it... Are we dumber than these big oafs?" The dwarf began to question his life.

And so, the dwarves could only take on the jobs of unskilled laborers—mixing materials, tightening screws... and pouring concrete.

In the temporary project office—the top floor of the nearby food factory’s R&D building—Rorschach was monitoring the entire construction site through multiple Crystal Balls. The view from every Demonic Puppet’s eyes was visible there.

’Is it the off-season for farming or something? More and more residents are gathering to watch... They’re acting like they’re the clients. Should I hand out white hard hats?’ He wasn’t serious about the color, but Rorschach really was planning to prepare more rattan safety helmets. Otherwise, who would be responsible if an accident happened and someone got hurt?

’Enough watching... back to the drawings...’ He threw himself back into the tedious work. Because time was tight, he had no choice but to commit the cardinal sin of engineering: designing and building at the same time. In any case, the cost of trial and error was acceptable.

With the support of the large metal sphere by his side, the main unit that possessed Rorschach’s memories could naturally handle things like material and energy balance calculations. As for anything it couldn’t calculate, he would just have to rely on Magic as a backstop. For example, for the pipes meant to carry concentrated sulfuric acid, Rorschach considered using a Magic Array to reinforce them for the time being.

’In his past life, it was ’blame the materials for a bad design.’ Now, it’s ’rely on Magic for bad materials.’’

Sigh... He grabbed a handful of his hair and started drawing again. The drafting table had been modified; the pen was attached to two connecting rods, allowing the intelligence core to mechanically obtain the coordinates of the pen tip relative to the paper. This way, the core could read the information from Rorschach’s drawings without a visual system.

So the dwarves’ existential crisis was misplaced. It wasn’t that the Demonic Puppets were smarter, but that the main unit controlling them already had the blueprints recorded, and the Soul within it could fully understand them.

Rorschach downed a concentrated Energy Potion in one gulp and pumped some Magic Power into his body. The surging adrenaline swept away his fatigue. In his soundproof office, he couldn’t help but roar, "Work through the light rain, work through the downpour! Work like mad in the sun, work by lamplight in the dark! WORK! WORK! WORK!"

At this moment, he was not alone in his struggle in this Otherworld. What was surging through him wasn’t adrenaline, but the blood and tears of the "infrastructure maniacs" from his past life!

Night fell, and the crowd of onlookers at the edge of the construction site had long since gone home, mostly dispersed. But the Demonic Puppets showed no signs of stopping. The site was still a hive of bustling activity.

"Boss, these big fellas aren’t stopping. Does that mean we have to keep working, too? Should we light some lamps first?" a dwarf asked the foreman, pointing at an earth-made Demonic Puppet.

"Idiot, they’re not people! They can’t get tired!" Jansen snapped, rapping the laborer on his safety helmet. "You still want to ’work, work, work’? Have you worked yourself stupid?!"