Three months later, I again smeared the construct with honey and connected its body together. The gravity formation was ready, I'll deal with the rest of the modifications later. This process only took so long because it was the first time I created such a formation through trials and errors.

By activating the gravity formation, my two-ton construct instantly began to weigh no more than 400 kilograms. At the same moment, I performed the Sonic Burst at the angle I needed with just a thought, the stabilization runes evenly distributed the force of the blast to the entire body, and I flew into the air with great speed tearing the airspace in front of me.

Although the gravity formation only worked for half a second, it was enough to give my construct a huge acceleration force. Although the return of the weight to two tons slowed down the acceleration, at the same time, this weight made it possible to get through wind resistance much more effectively. Thus, the efficiency of this jump remained quite satisfactory. I flew at great speed, watching the trees below me getting smaller.

Due to the weight, I soon began to be pulled more and more towards the ground, and as a result I sank to the ground at great speed. Before landing, I activated the gravity formation for a moment again and performed another Sonic Burst. All the inertia of the descent was instantly extinguished and I landed almost steadily.

In one such jump, I could overcome about 500 meters in seconds. Any Mage would envy such speed. I still had a hard time imagining the speed that True Magicians were capable of, but Stephanie would only have to eat dust if she tried to catch up with me now. Kyle's silver wolf was not worth mentioning.

If I tried to do this in a mortal body, even as a True Knight, my body would turn into bloody paste. However, I obviously didn't have any internal organs now, so I could withstand the pressure of any force. There were no problems with the golem either. At least its damage was sustainable. And I still had room for improvement in all aspects.

Entering Mengel's sphere again, I took out the composite wings for the golem from the box, after which I returned with them back to the construct and installed them on my golem.

Repeating the procedure with the jump, I again began to quickly gain height, but this time I used the wings to slow down the descent. Unfortunately, I didn't have the opportunity to test with the wings before. The descent rate remained too high, the wings had to be redesigned several times until I found the right balance.

Although I still couldn't stay in the air for too long due to my excessive weight, after each jump I managed to fly several kilometers before landing, and the flight speed was much higher than what I was capable of as an acolyte. Theoretically, I could stay in the air constantly regularly using sonic blasts, although my mental energy was not infinite so I preferred to glide most of the time.

At first I decided to return to the settlement of Tarrister, of course, I was not going to enter the settlement itself. I just decided that since now there is an opportunity, it is better to take the rest of the boxes of gold that I buried not too far from the settlement immediately upon arrival on the Orion Continent. Who knows when I can return.

Having hidden the boxes in subspace, I finally moved towards the restricted area, namely the Sea of ​​Decay. This zone was the largest of the nearby anomalous zones, and no one knew how far it extended.

There I was going to improve my skills, modify the construct and its weapons. It is possible to create a basic golem and so on. In general, increase my combat capability as much as possible with my current resources over the next three years, and maybe more.

I would like to stay in the Tarrister settlement and use my people and not only people for my ideas, but this is too risky in the current situation. Who knows what these rank 2 Mages from the central part of the Southern Continent have in mind. Maybe they don't care about Melrose's research, or maybe they'll look for me with any means necessary. Better to be safe than sorry.

Focusing on the map, I tried to stay away from all organizations and settlements. However, I did not find invisibility spells. My golem at 2.5 meters and even with wings was quite noticeable. Although I used a low frequency sound inaudible to the human ear when using the Sound Burst, nevertheless, sometimes onlookers noticed me and stared at the flying golem in bewilderment.

Every day I took breaks for half an hour to meditate and restore my mental energy to a peak, after which I set off again.

One day, I did encounter another True Mage. Luckily he was on a land animal, so there was nothing he could do but stare at me with a puzzled look.

Finally I reached the jungle not too far from the place where I hunted earlier as an acolyte. A week later, I reached a huge cliff. A hundred meters below the cliff, a light layer of purple fog began to cover everything in sight like an endless sea. However, this does not mean that it is safe to fly over the fog, just that the fog concentration was lower at the top and denser at the bottom.

Drawing my sword, I jumped off the cliff, however, I didn't want to go down at too high a speed, such a fall would be too hard to stop if something went wrong. I used my sword to regularly slow down the falling speed, gradually descending into the purple Sea of ​​Decay along the edge of the cliff.

Many Mages tried to discover what was at the bottom of the purple abyss by sending inside various types of golems and inanimate creatures. Trying to use various vision replacement and intelligence spells. However, this abyss was too wide. Even if some of the golems managed to return, they did not find anything useful.

Of course, not much has been written about this anomalous zone. But this does not mean that there was no information at all. Even if one of the Mages found out something, in most cases they would just keep the information for themselves. In extreme cases, they exchanged it for something else. There was barely any common database for everyone to us. Each piece of information was considered by Mages as something of value.

I descended for a relatively long time, apparently the descent was at least a kilometer long. All this time, the fog thickened, so that visibility at the bottom was only about ten meters. However, during all this time, I did not feel a single drop of discomfort, making sure that it was safe for a construct like me.

At first, there were only rock formations of various shapes protruding from the ground around, with rare exceptions. The ground was covered with a purple smog that spread out from every step of my two-ton carcass. Despite the poor visibility, I could feel the vibrations of everything around me within a radius of about a hundred meters.

On the way, the image of a small scorpion appeared in my mind. At first, I thought that living organisms did appear that adapted to the local anomaly, but I soon realized that it was a miniature golem. Feeling me, he seemed to be buried somewhere in the ground.

Although sound vibrations propagated under the ground as well as in the air, and I could catch this wonder, I decided to ignore it for now and move on. Maybe they're all over the place. Of course, it turned out later that this was not the case.

After walking in this way for about a dozen kilometers, the environment finally changed. Now there were some kind of poisonous swamps around. Due to the fact that the fog covered the sky, the rays of the sun did not come here, it was rather dark. Most of the area was covered with water. Various kinds of roots, creepers and trees of bizarre shapes and types grew from the water. This time, the vegetation was definitely not made of stone. With difficulty cutting off a piece of wood, I looked at its core. Although the tree looked more dead than alive, it was surprisingly strong.

Creepers of neighboring trees seemed to come to life and wrapped around my golem from all sides, trying to drag it under water. Obeying inertia, I dived into the water and looked at the thick trunk of an ugly tree. The bark of the tree seemed to move as I approached and formed a large mouth with dark teeth.

After cutting off the vines with my sonic sword, I approached that mouth and began cutting off its teeth one by one. The tree was alarmed trying to stop me, but the forces were unequal. Then I began to open the tree itself and found in its hollow a small seed of the wood element.

Soon I was looking at those strange wooden teeth shining with a dark light and the element seed. In fact, both were considered magical materials of the wood element. As for the teeth, I wasn't sure, but the seed or elemental heart was quite valuable and could be worth dozens of magic crystals.

This tree was a kind of elemental. Elementals were the only kind of magical creatures that formed something like an elemental seed inside their body. They were usually non-sentient or semi-sentient, however, as an acolyte on the way to the academy, I heard that a sentient water elemental would be up for sale at an auction nearby. It's just that for them, gaining intelligence usually takes too much time or the right circumstances are needed.

Along the way, I occasionally encountered small venomous mammals of various species that apparently managed to adapt to the fog. If I met enough interesting material or an insect, then I threw them into my subspace. Rock, like me, did not care about this poisonous fog, and there was nothing else alive and valuable enough in the subspace. True, mammals often simply died without purple fog, so I soon lost interest in them.

After a certain amount of time, I went to the real sea. From the outside, there was nothing unusual about it, only the same layer of mist swirled over it. However, I didn't want to risk going into the sea, so I just walked parallel to the shore. My feet got stuck in the swamp up to my knees, and sometimes even deeper, so sometimes I had to use the Sonic Blast.

Once a white eagle flew in the sky, having heard the noise from the consequences of a sonic explosion, it turned off its course and landed next to me on a tree, looking at me with interest. I also appreciated the eagle. It was not large, about half a meter in length. It was clearly a golem made of some quality materials and looked extremely natural. I didn't feel any mental energy in him. However, it is clear that in front of me was a living golem.

- Are you a golem? - I tried to speak.

The white eagle trembled, then its eyes watered, its beak opened, its wings spread apart, and it screamed wildly. His high-pitched laugh was a little unpleasant to hear, even for me. The eagle himself laughed so hard that he just fell off the branch and began to wallow in the mud, rolling back and forth, continuing to laugh.

- Khee Khee Golem! Khee Khee Golem!

So he continued to laugh for a while while I watched him in confusion. Finally, the already not very white eagle calmed down and flew up and sat on my shoulder.

- Brother, you're good. Do you want to do some stand up at the gathering? We love guys with humor. What do you say? - asked the eagle.

- What's so funny about the word golem? - I clarified.

The eagle again went into a vile scream laughing, and then asked.

- Have you seen anyone other than golems around? Well, apart from all the filthy vegetation and small insects? There may still be any undead, but this is rare, they rot over time. There's no one here but golems mate, that's why it's funny. Are you golem? Khee Khee. Khee Khee. - The eagle laughed again.

Well, I assumed that if it was really only golems, then such a question might look funny, but this eagle laughed as if he had never heard anything funnier in his life. He clearly has a headache.

- Wait a minute! I know! You are not a golem! You are a secret agent! You are a secret agent! You are a secret agent!

The eagle started trying to open my helmet, shouting the same thing. I took it in my hand and it hung helplessly in my palm but kept screaming.

- Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! - I yelled and my voice echoed around.

Finally the eagle shut up and froze. I learned to restrain my mental energy a long time ago, so for now I decided not to use it, limiting myself to only a small sound vibration.

- Sorry friend, that was rude of me. Sometimes you just want to believe, you know? Well, we have been living here for hundreds and thousands of years, and there is no one here except golems. So I was hoping you were an undercover spy or something. Just an innocent dream, you know? No offense buddy. - the eagle spoke again.

I put it back on my shoulder.

- Okay whatever. Do you have some kind of settlement? Take me to your meeting, maybe I can make someone laugh. And what is your name anyway?

The eagle pointed the way and I slowly walked forward. Along the way, the eagle continued to chat, telling all about the local population. I soon realized that the local intelligent contingent was harmless enough. The danger was represented by some semi-sentient golems, elementals and undead whose behavior was difficult to predict, but they were not often encountered. So far, there was no reason to believe what this eccentric eagle was saying. Nevertheless, I continued to try to squeeze out more information from the chatty interlocutor.

The eagle's name was Chibi. Taking the eagle in my hand, I flew into the air and spread my wings, after which I released the eagle to my back. He grabbed the claws of the ledges on my helmet and spread his wings and began to shout excitedly.

- I'm flying!

What a weirdo. Like he was not flying before he met me.

Anyway little by little I began to get used to his chatter. By itself, the golem was quite harmless, just looking for some new entertainment all the time, trying to dispel boredom. Apparently, other local residents had similar symptoms.

At first, I was worried when Chibi told me that over time, some of the local golems became sentient in the purple mist. What if my construct will suddenly come to life and throw me out of the cockpit. However, it would seem that tens or even hundreds of years would have to pass before the golem was able to form a mind in this strange anomalous zone.

I checked my soul crystal and made sure the purple mist had no contact with it.

It's a pity that these golems were not very suitable to become my weapons. In fact, each of them developed a unique personality. This cannot guarantee fidelity and obedience. Only a living golem created by me personally could be completely trustworthy.

Nevertheless, it will not be superfluous to look at the locals. Even if I create a golem myself, which will not be easy, at first its intelligence will be negligible. This can be compared to the creation of an advanced artificial intelligence that will gradually develop with my help. But for the foreseeable future, such a golem would not qualify as a magical being, rather just a puppet.

Although Chibi didn't show any signs of having magical powers either, I at least didn't rule out the possibility that he could develop it.

Apparently the golems that the Mages sent here from outside either didn't go far enough or were killed by local creatures like that tree. Well, or they were here for so long that they acquired something like a full-fledged self-consciousness and, naturally, they did not want to return to the Magician.

In any case, this place was just perfect for Rock and me so far.