Chapter 30

  Ethan drifted inside the core interface, watching through half a dozen sensory feeds at once. The third floor was running smoothly. Traps reset on time, constructs followed their patrol paths, and the new ventilation system kept everything just smoky enough to be eerie without choking visibility.

  He still didn’t have a body. Not really. But with the way his dungeon systems were set up now, it didn’t matter. He could be anywhere inside, see anything, speak through any golem if he wanted.

  Even so, the instincts were back. The human parts of him.

  Sometimes he caught himself flinching at loud noises, even though there was no body to flinch with. Or getting annoyed at a squeaky gear that no one else would notice. Or remembering his name, his real one, like it mattered again.

  He didn't like that.

  Not because he hated being human, but because those instincts made everything harder. Made it harder to ignore fear. Harder to act like a perfect machine.

  The Strategist didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t unless he gave it a direct order.

  That was fine. Ethan needed space to think.

  His new Observer powers were… simple. Not flashy. Not dramatic.

  But powerful.

  He could read the status of almost anyone now. Anyone not protected by something stronger than him. That meant most people in this part of the world. Even Corwin and his crew.

  He could change those statuses, too. Adjust stat growth. Shift resistances. Flag them for surveillance. Not create power from nowhere—but bend what was already there.

  And then there were the extra tools.

  Portals. System windows that let him pull someone into conversation—forcefully, if needed. Messaging. Tracking. Minor mind reading, though that only worked if they weren’t shielded by some kind of mental defense or divine blessing. The system wouldn’t let him touch people marked by higher authority.

  Still, it was enough.

  His mob limit was basically irrelevant now. With the upgraded Engineer Golems, he could spawn and maintain as many constructs as he wanted. They built. They repaired. They even handled some of the code-level commands for the older models.

  The old problem of “too many mouths, not enough mana” was gone. Replaced by steady expansion.

  And the Silence hadn’t placed any restrictions on that. If anything, it felt like encouragement.

  Ethan checked the dungeon’s state again. Mana flow was balanced. Resources from offerings were stockpiled in the forges. Faith levels were high enough to keep his cloaking intact.

  All good.

  He opened the Observer tools one more time, scrolling through what he had access to. A floating window showed system processes and tags.

  His name now had a mark next to it:

  [Authority Level: Observer - Low Tier (Sealed)]

  He had one emergency override. A single-use upgrade to temporary pinnacle-level access. He wasn’t touching that unless something really bad happened.

  And it might.

  Because just as he closed the interface, something pinged his awareness.

  It wasn’t a full alert. Just a tiny trace. A nudge.

  Someone, somewhere, had flagged a soft anomaly in the logs.

  ____

  Leo noticed it first.

  A flicker. A missing tag that shouldn’t be missing. A record that was there, but not really there. Most low-tier Observers wouldn’t have even spotted it. The system buried these things deep, buried them under layers of authority checks and backlogged incident reports. But Leo was stubborn.

  Always had been.

  He sat hunched at a viewing desk inside one of the system’s smaller satellite archives, surrounded by thousands of shifting information cubes and faded threads of discarded data. No one ever came here. It was a place for washouts and the nearly-forgotten. Perfect for someone like him.

  Leo had always been a bit of a footnote.

  Born the son of a Gryfon matriarch and a Celestial Lion spiritwalker, his bloodline was ridiculous by most standards. His body shimmered with celestial feathers and stormy mane-fragments even in his system-projected form. He should have risen fast. Should’ve been a prodigy. Should’ve walked into the middle-tier Observer circles by now.

  But he wasn’t.

  Because Leo didn’t play the games.

  He didn’t curry favor. Didn’t suck up to the high-tier Observers. His only mentor had been one of the few who genuinely taught for the sake of teaching—a quiet old entity called Mastery—who’d died in a system purge that Leo still didn’t understand.

  Now he was just… here.

  Sorting backlogged anomalies. Flagging potential issues. Reading between the lines of what the system pretended was stable.

  Which was why, when he saw the anomaly tagged “[Obscured – Priority Seal: Pinnacle+++],” he didn’t immediately dismiss it.

  He stared at it for a long time.

  Pinnacle tags weren’t supposed to exist at his access level let alone something this. They were way above his pay grade. Top-tier High Observers or Pinnacle Observers might’ve seen them once or twice. Ascended units? Maybe. But someone like Leo?

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  No shot.

  Except… it was there.

  Just a flicker. A user ID wrapped in blank data. Energy usage that didn’t match the logs. Mana shifts that were too clean. Too perfect. Like someone was rewriting reality just fast enough to stay hidden.

  He leaned back in his chair, clawed fingers twitching. His system display flickered around him, the faint blue light of cascading permissions outlining his face. A long sigh escaped his lips.

  “Well, crap.”

  He tapped a few keys, pulled up the meta-thread. No details. Just location coordinates buried under a pile of redacted lines.

  “Redroot sector,” he muttered, brow furrowing. “Dead zone. No active observers posted. Just... a dungeon anomaly report from a half-suspended scout.”

  He clicked deeper.

  No logs on the dungeon core. No tier readouts. Just a vague “mechanical interference anomaly” flagged two months ago.

  Leo's ears twitched. His tail swished.

  “Alright. Who the hell are you?”

  He didn’t plan to report it. Not yet. He knew what happened to people who stumbled into things above their clearance level. Most of them vanished. The lucky ones got reassigned to cleaning corrupted data from divine war logs.

  Leo wasn’t stupid.

  But he was curious.

  And curiosity, as his father once said, was the only honest sin worth dying for.

  He copied the anomaly thread into a sealed memory pocket, encrypted it under three redundant tags, and locked it behind his old mentor’s private encryption method—one no one used anymore.

  Then he leaned forward and whispered to the system.

  “Let’s see what you’re hiding down there.”

  ____

  Back in the dungeon, Ethan felt a strange ripple—like a cold wind brushing past the back of his awareness.

  He froze. Checked the core. No intrusions. No scans.

  Just… pressure. A gentle one.

  Like someone knocking politely on a wall they weren’t supposed to know was there.

  The Strategist chimed in.

  “Unidentified Observer has noticed the cloaking seal. They lack the authority to pierce it. However, further attention is likely.”

  Ethan narrowed his focus. “Should I be worried?”

  “Not yet.”

  He watched the third floor again. A set of Mirage Golems triggered their light-burst decoys just as a group of high Gold adventurers crossed the central hall. Perfect timing. Just disorienting enough to throw off their rhythm.

  Not lethal.

  Not yet.

  But effective.

  And then his thoughts circled back.

  Who was watching?

  Who had even noticed?

  He opened his emergency override—just looked at it. Didn’t activate it. Just stared at the glowing system marker labeled:

  [Temporary Pinnacle Override: 1 Use Remaining]

  Then he shut it.

  Not yet.

  But soon, maybe.

  ____

  Ethan had built a lot of constructs.

  Clumsy ones. Brutal ones. Elegant ones. Some designed to kill, others to trick, a few just to see if he could. But this time was different.

  This one wasn’t for defense.

  It wasn’t for the dungeon.

  It was for him.

  He didn’t say it out loud. Not even to the Strategist.

  It started the same way any other construct did—with a design sketch in his mind’s interface. He kept it simple at first: humanoid frame, good balance, reinforced joints. But the more he worked, the more pieces changed. Improved.

  Better.

  He remembered everything that had gone wrong before. How the Combat Striders sometimes jittered on tight turns. How the Sentinels lacked fine control for delicate tasks. How even the Mirage Golems struggled to maintain their illusion fields under sustained pressure.

  None of that would happen here.

  He tore through the vaults of raw material he’d gathered from Guild shipments and worshipper offerings. He used titanium-laced orichalcum for the inner plating—tough enough to shrug off enchanted blades. He layered flexible mana-fiber muscles beneath the surface, tuned precisely with the latest mana-pathing techniques he’d unlocked at Tier 7. Joints were crafted from phase-tempered alloys that adapted under stress.

  The face… he almost gave it a human one.

  Almost.

  Instead, he shaped something close. Smooth, expressive. Familiar enough to comfort, alien enough to keep others guessing. No mouth. Just a simple voice-slot, tucked neatly beneath a reinforced crest of enchanted glass.

  He built it in stages. Alone. One Engineer Golem helped, but Ethan did most of the work himself—manually adjusting every circuit, layering enchantments, fusing soul-threaded mana paths to ensure it could channel and store more than any previous model.

  When it came time to install a power source, he didn’t hesitate.

  He used everything.

  A refined dungeon battery, stacked with dense tribute-converted mana. A pocket soul-fragment he’d secretly grown, carefully shielded from outside detection. Even a single divine spark—just a trace—left behind in a blessed dagger one of the priests had left at his shrine.

  He ground it down. Mixed it in.

  And then, just as he was setting the final plate in place, the system did something strange.

  A flicker. A warning.

  Blueprint Invalidated.

  Reason: Classified – High-Interference Protocol Active.

  Outcome: Construct Design Purged. Prototype Ineligible for Reproduction.

  Exception: Core Integration Possible. Approved by Silence.

  Ethan stared at the message for a long time.

  It didn’t make sense. He’d followed the rules. Used his own parts. Nothing stolen. Nothing corrupted.

  But then he saw the bottom line.

  Core Integration Possible.

  That stopped him cold.

  He had never considered that. Not seriously. Dungeon cores were stable when buried. Safe when surrounded by stone and wards and layers of protection. Moving one was… unheard of.

  But not forbidden.

  And now?

  Now the system was telling him it was allowed.

  The Silence had said nothing. No cryptic warnings. No permissions denied.

  Just a quiet green light blinking in the corner of his screen.

  So Ethan made the choice.

  He reached deep into his heart chamber and pulled his core free.

  It didn’t hurt. Not exactly. But it felt wrong in a way he couldn’t explain. Like stepping off a ledge with no idea what waited at the bottom.

  The construct stood silent, its chest compartment open, glowing faintly.

  Ethan hovered over it for a long moment.

  Then he lowered the core inside.

  It clicked into place.

  And the world shifted.

  The sensory feeds went wild. All of them. Every part of the dungeon screamed for attention—then dimmed. Stabilized. Re-routed. The construct’s eyes lit with gold-blue light. Its limbs twitched. Its fingers curled slowly, flexing like they had always known how to move.

  And then, one step.

  Another.

  And then he stood still—stood, for the first time in what felt like a hundred years.

  The construct raised its hands. Turned them palm-up. Looked around.

  And smiled.

  Because this wasn’t just a golem.

  It wasn’t a guardian. Or a fake.

  It was him.

  Ethan had built himself a body.

  And no one—no one—knew it yet..

  The dungeon still ran on its own. His core was still protected. His presence still cloaked under divine silence.

  But now?

  Now he could walk.

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