The massive stone doors groaned to a stop, revealing a dark void in the temple’s ancient face. Jonah froze at the threshold, his heart pounding like a war drum in his chest.

“Jonah, what’s happening?” Seraph’s voice, sharp and urgent, crackled over his comms unit. “What did it say to you?”

“It said… it said I could enter,” Jonah replied, his voice barely a whisper. “But only me.”

He took a step forward, half-expecting the Golem to grab him. It remained motionless, a silent sentinel. As Jonah crossed the threshold, the world behind him vanished. With another deep, shuddering groan, the stone doors slid shut, plunging him into absolute darkness and a sudden, profound silence.

“Jonah! Report! Are you there?” Seraph’s voice was tinny and laced with panic in his ear.

“I’m in,” he said, his own voice sounding small in the vast, dark space. “The doors sealed behind me. I’m alone.”

“Stay put. We’ll find a way to–”

“No,” Jonah interrupted, a strange calm settling over him. “This is… this is my path. I’m okay. I’ll keep the comms open.”

There was a moment of static-filled silence. “Understood,” Seraph finally replied, her voice tight with reluctance. “Be careful. And report everything.”

Jonah took a shaky breath. He couldn’t see a thing. The air was thick with the smell of dust and cold, old metal. He reached for the light charm Vanessa had given him. He crushed the smooth, flat stone in his hand.

A sphere of warm, gentle daylight bloomed into existence, pushing back the oppressive darkness.

And Jonah gasped.

He was standing in a chamber so vast it felt like the inside of a cathedral. But this was no place of worship. It was a factory. A Golem factory.

Stretching out before him were dormant assembly lines, lined with hulking, multi-jointed robotic arms frozen in mid-motion. Huge, arching gantries disappeared into the gloom above. Along the walls were containment fields, shimmering faintly, that held inert mechanical parts – legs, torsos, and heads of Golems in various states of completion.

Dust lay thick on everything. But the air itself… it hummed. Not with electricity, but with a powerful, residual magic. The sheer scale of the creation energy that had once flowed through this place was overwhelming. It was like his Beast Space, but a thousand times larger, built of metal and stone instead of thought and spirit.

He needed to navigate this place. Shard’s sonar was his best bet. He summoned his Echo-Shell Guardian, who appeared with a quiet thud, its crystalline shell reflecting the light of Jonah’s charm.

‘Shard, find me the heart of this place. The control room’, Jonah projected.

Shard’s antennae twitched, and it sent out its silent pulse. The returning vibrations were… strange. They resonated with the ancient technology in a way Jonah had never felt before, creating a clear map in his mind. The sonar didn’t just show him walls and obstacles; it revealed the faint, dormant power lines that ran through the floors and ceilings, like the veins of a sleeping giant. One of those lines led directly to a chamber in the center of the facility.

“I’m heading for a control room,” he reported into his comms. “There’s a clear path.”

He followed the mental map, walking past silent, skeletal machines that looked like metallic dinosaurs. It was a lonely, eerie journey. He was a boy of flesh and blood walking through a graveyard of steel.

He finally reached a set of smaller, burnished metal doors that slid open with a soft hiss as he approached. The control room.

It was a circular chamber, its walls covered in dark, unlit screens and complex consoles. In the very center of the room sat a high-backed chair, like a captain’s seat on the bridge of a starship.

And in the chair was a skeleton.

It was slumped forward, its bony fingers still resting on the console before it. The figure wore the tattered, dust-covered remains of what might have been a lab coat. This was him. The Creator of this place. The Artificer.

Jonah approached cautiously. The Artificer must have died here, at his post, ages ago. On the console, directly under the skeleton’s hand, lay a single object, still glowing with a soft, internal light.

It wasn’t a gem or a sphere. It was a crystal, about the size of Jonah’s palm, shaped like a perfectly formed shard of ice. A data crystal.

With a deep breath, Jonah gently moved the skeletal hand aside. The bones crumbled to dust at his touch. He placed his own hand on the glowing crystal.

He braced himself for an essence, for the psychic backlash of a soul. But what flowed into him was something else entirely.

It was pure information.

There were no feelings, no memories, no rage. It was like downloading a book directly into his brain. He saw diagrams of Golem power cores, complex equations describing rune-based programming, and intricate theories on how to imbue inanimate objects with a semblance of life.

It was the Artificer’s final research notes. His life’s work.

And as the information flooded his mind, a profound realization dawned on Jonah. This ancient, technological magic… it wasn’t so different from his own.

The principles were the same.

The Artificer used a Power Core as a foundation. Jonah used a Genesis Core.

The Artificer used mana and runes as an energy source. Jonah used the essences of defeated beasts.

The Artificer used a blueprint, a design. Jonah used his will, his instinct.

The medium was different – stone and metal versus flesh and bone – but the art was the same. The art of creation.

He wasn’t a biological anomaly. He wasn’t a freak of nature or a random mutation.

He was a Beast Weaver. Part of a tradition of Creators that stretched back into the forgotten mists of history. He had found a kindred spirit, a long-lost ancestor of his craft. His understanding of his own power deepened in an instant, connecting him not just to the creatures of his world, but to its deep, magical history.

A wave of awe and gratitude washed over him. He looked at the pile of dust that was once the Artificer.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

The last of the data flowed from the crystal, and it went dark, its power finally spent.

And at that exact moment, the control room was plunged into a new light. Red, flashing, and urgent.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep