Bone Golem

"You'll understand later." Now that I was done with worship for the moment, fixing myself became my priority. How to make it a reality? I could fix my core circuit. I could easily supplement my will-core circuit with the ideas behind my Creator's will-core circuit, removing the issues and making it much better in the process, but that left me destroyed and some other will-core utilizing my improved will-core circuit. Allowing anything other than myself to benefit from my effort was unacceptable.

"Mr. Bone Golem, can Glrt be a shaman Glrt now?" it had jumped off of my earth-skull and approached the face. "Mr. Bone Golem has a face. Glrt didn't know. Mr. Bone Golem's eyes are empty, did you know?" it placed its hands into my earth-skull's eye sockets and giggled. The attention span, though. Barely a moment had passed for the thing before it ran around my earth-skull again. The more I looked at its will, the more confused I was. The power of the will was greater than my Creator. The will cloud was very dense, proving that it had reaction speed far surpassing my Creator. Still far slower than my own, but every moment my Creator experienced would have been four for this creature. Yet...this creature had such a flimsy and weak intent that it was often gone before being realized. I couldn't imagine this creature doing anything for an extended period of time or for a greater goal than what it felt in the moment.

I put it out of my mind. "You'll be a shaman once you understand what worship is and successfully worship me. Try figuring it out." Given the weakness of its intent, it would never understand worship. It would try, for a moment, and give up long before it ever reached a conclusion. I turned my attention to the bodies, delving into them once again to see if they were still unstable. Surprisingly, they were stable now. I learned two patterns and both held steady long enough for me to develop a rune from them.

Glrt continued making noise after giving up figuring out what worship was, but I was too focused on clearing the flesh from the bodies so I could learn bone runes to care. Both Glrt and the larger one were too weak to do any damage to my earth-skull, so I was safe. Given the flimsy intent, I wasn't about to trust Glrt's loyalty.

The bodies were largely the same, but I found that the former shaman had runes specific to it that didn't work on the other bodies. All the runes that worked on the others worked on it, but the shaman had a few more.

The bodies were all much more complicated than the plants I'd interacted with before as well. Not only did they have runes for the body as a whole, but there were runes for parts of the bodies as well. Circuit construction was also much more difficult than anything I'd tried before. Specifically, circuits to interact with parts of the bodies without affecting others. The earth and air were homogenous entities, so spreading circuits was as easy as spreading will into their space. Plants were smaller, but the paltry will contained within bound the entirety of the structure together. Those circuits were stable so long as the will of the plant was stable. The bodies, on the other hand, had parts that fit different runes, but the parts weren't consistent with the rest of the body. Some of the parts were absolutely tiny, proving an issue to even my own perfect will to fit a circuit within such a small space. As time passed and the intent patterns I developed moved the pieces, they mixed together into a mess. That was the worst part. Even those pieces that had been large enough to fit a circuit in were now contaminated with the small bits, requiring all of them to be as small as the smallest bits that mixed in with the rest. It would be so much easier if there was a singular will that unified the bodies.

Was that an answer? My creativity was lacking if I hadn't thought of that before. I was a will construct, why couldn't I make will constructs? They didn't even need to be will constructs, material constructs could work as well. I would have to be much more competent in my control of them than my Creator had been with me, but in principle it should work.

I started building circuits around the bodies, simple ones. There were principles I could underlay into my constructs despite having different base composition to myself. The will-centered circuits should work the same, the problem was building them in such a mess of meat and viscera. I also decided to alter their composition in relation to the core. My core rune was will, whereas I planned to build my new constructs with the core runes being specific pieces so I could remove them from the bones. I could build the circuits into their bodies to give them will-cores to make them useful to me afterwards. My will-core didn't help me control my body, despite being much more powerful than anything I'd give them, so I didn't see the need to give them one at the start.

The first construct circuit I built was for a blood-based construct. Glrt was now sitting near one of the bodies, watching the corpse twitch and shudder as I experimented to find the correct rune, so I had to tell it to move before activating it. I wasn't sure if Glrt would be destroyed by the circuit, but I was sure it would find some way to alter the parameters. Maybe Glrt would become the will-core of the construct, which would make Glrt much more powerful than she currently was. Assuming the construct had the ability to freely manipulate its parts. That was the biggest part that still worried me.

The circuit activated and I felt the mana within the circuit gathering will. No more than plants, but it was gathering will and binding it to all that which was the same as a single construct. Without intent, it did nothing. The will was successfully bound to the blood, but it was inert. Well, I could help it with that. Unlike a being with a will-core, a being of pure will had no issues accepting intent from foreign wills. I spread intent into the unifying will to draw it together into a mass and provided mana to make it happen and watched. Hopefully, it wouldn't need my help to separate itself from the rest, as I still wasn't sure how to make that happen apart from this.

The blood construct seemed to have an innate ability to move its parts. Perhaps it was due to the core rune being different, but I still couldn't help a bit of jealousy at how easily this being was manipulating itself. There was no strenuous process of discovery or effort put in to learning. The blood simply seeped out of the bodies as if it was supposed to do so and had the capability all along. Such a smug construct, easily doing what was impossible for myself, despite my being superior. It made me feel much better when I realized that without my control and mana infusion, the will would dissipate and scatter. That, at least, wasn't a problem I would ever have. Perhaps that was it, I was a will construct. Of course I could amalgamate and control my will. It was a blood construct. Of course it could amalgamate and control its blood.

It took a long time for the blood construct to gather itself from within all the bodies. So much mana was wasted it felt like a crime, but it was fine so long as the end result was what I wanted. I started building a set of circuits within the construct so that it would gather its own mana and maintain cohesion without my input so I could start removing other viscera. I didn't build a mana-core circuit for it because I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it after I learned everything I needed to from these bodies.

Blood was chosen as the first because removing it had the lowest likelihood of damaging the bones. Everything else was directly or indirectly bound to the bones themselves. I could tear the bodies into smaller pieces, which would reduce the damage done, but I would probably break the bones as much as the rest of the viscera removing itself from the bones would.

Before I could address that problem, however, Glrt was becoming much more noisy. Its intent was staining the surrounding mana as it screeched and moved restlessly. "Mr. Bone Golem, it's trying to kill me! Stop it, Mr. Blood! Glrt doesn't taste good!" Ah. The blood construct was still being driven by my intent to coalesce the blood into a single construct. I consumed its intent for cohesion for the moment. I could address that problem more when I finished with the bones and no longer needed the earth-skull. "Thank you, Mr. Bone Golem. Glrt was about to die. Mr. Bone Golem saved Glrt!"