You know, I barely recognize this place clean.

  “Har har har” Lindle replied unamused, dropping his pack with a soft thump on the table.

  The homunculus eyed it.

  You… didn’t bring it all back, did you?

  “No. I buried it all in the woods before training with Madam Holly.” He opened the top and pulled out a rounded object wrapped in a thick woolen sheet. “She finally let me take this afterward.”

  The homunculus leaned forward in excitement as Lindle undid the covering, a warm white glow filling the room as he did, finally revealing a white, lumpy-looking rock covered in small indents. Aside from the glow, the Moonstone didn’t look very impressive, but it was probably the single most valuable thing Lindle had ever held in his hands.

  When Lindle had spoken of his plans to build Nothing’s complete body, they had settled on a list of different Ethos aspects necessary to bring their shared vision to life, and they had shared that list with everyone to keep an eye out for anything that might fit. As far as Lindle and Nothing were concerned, they had all gone above and beyond.

  Humphrey had gone on a multiday hunt to track and trap a Cackling Tundra Paw. Despite the name, they were some of the stealthiest monsters in the Glacial Reach for their tier, and the tier above them. They were extremely deadly and their fur was highly prized. Without any prior warning, Humphrey had walked into his workshop, exhausted, but with a grin and a level higher before tossing a pelt to Lindle. His combination of stealth artifacts had allowed him to follow the beast to its den and set a trap.

  Thalia, feeling competitive after that display, had gone into the inner grove and gotten permission from the True Grove and elder druids to grow some more… volatile plants and fungus. A week or two later, she had emerged with a very concerning… thing, growing out of a pot. Thalia had told him it was called a Cyclic Saprosprout while she idly batted the petals reaching towards her away. Lindle couldn’t tell if it was a mushroom with a flower growing around it or a flower with a mushroom growing inside it. Apparently, according to Thalia, it was technically both, as they were a pair that grew symbiotically on each other, and it excelled at taking in energy from moonlight, meat (decaying or not), miasma, and possibly other exotic energy sources, depending on where it was raised.

  The way his friends had gone about securing two extremely valuable sources of Ethos had left Lindle a bit intimidated, but also with a much more open gold budget. Some things simply couldn’t be found in the Glacial Reach, but that’s what merchants were for. Every few days Lindle scanned various stalls in the market, trying to find anything that held the right aspects. While he was sure that they could have sourced things with the right blends of earth Ethos, the issue had been the lack of demand the people of Glacerhine had for it. Many of the crafters in the village had classes suited for using materials such as animal and monster parts, wood, and even construction using ice, but metal smiths and alchemists such as Lindle’s mom were an extreme rarity. Even then, the village didn’t have a big crafter percentage anyway, so processed goods were by far the most common items on sale.

  Lindle had looked over the occasional ore and minerals that passed by through the market when one day his eye had been caught by a round gemstone embedded in a chunk of wet-looking stone. He recognized it as the core of an elemental of some sort, but it wasn’t surrounded by ice like usual. Apparently, this core’s elemental had been slain in the Crying Tundra, which was full of the much rarer mud and earth elementals.

  The merchant had sensed his interest and tossed out an outrageous sum of over 100 gold. Lindle had simply crossed his arms and frowned, using the unimpressed expression he had gotten extremely used to wearing since he met Madam Holly. Some back-and-forth haggling afterward had allowed Lindle to lower the price to a much more reasonable 40 gold, considering even most monster crafters would struggle to find a reason to buy an elemental core. It was a hefty chunk of his gold savings, but he was happy to pay it.

  Adding those three up, Lindle would be able to handle just one more major Ethos source for the project, but finding that final source would have been the most difficult of all. That is, it would have been if Madam Holly hadn’t casually shown him the Moonstone she had ‘lying around’ her house after one of their training sessions. She had promised Lindle he could use it for Nothing’s body, but she would hold onto it until it was time, considering Moonstone’s were extremely attention-grabbing. The heat, glow, and invigorating feeling it gave off wouldn’t be contained to his workshop for long, no matter how much he covered it up.

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  Now that he had unwrapped it, the neighbors would probably notice it in a matter of minutes unless he extracted its Ethos, which meant it was go time.

  He took out the Cackling Tundra Paw pelt and Earth Elemental core from their hiding spaces. The Cyclic Saphrosprout however was with his mom, since she had much more experience handling dangerous plants than him. He had asked her to retrieve it once he had gotten home, and as if on cue, she entered his workshop holding its pot.

  She placed it on the table next to the others, all four magically rich objects in a row were almost overwhelming to his Ethos sense, but only almost.

  “Finally time. You ready?”She asked him lightly.

  He nodded. “Yep.”

  Her eyes watched his expression before she smiled. “Good. It’s not the same as making a Masterwork, but this is close enough that I know you mean that.”

  She rifled through her pockets. “I’m happy that this won’t be strictly necessary, but every bit helps.” His mom took out a glowing blue potion bottle and handed it to him. “It took a lot of variations on the recipe of different kinds of mental buff and meditation potions, but I finally figured out the trick to making something that should be useful for this.”

  Lindle looked at it confused before it dawned on him. “Wait… this potion… is a buff for my crafting Skill?”

  She grinned proudly. “System assessment Skill certified. Maximum boosts for your level to all your mental stats, and a direct upgrade to the target's ability to ‘comprehend, visualize, and manipulate underlying essences behind reality.’” She quoted. "I wasn’t sure I had succeeded after testing it myself. It reminded me a little of some other types of potions I had made in my youth, but then I remembered that was what your sensory feat described Ethos as.”

  Lindle pulled up his status to quickly check, and sure enough, there it was.

  -Ethos Attuned (Feat)

  You have attuned to the underlying essence behind reality. You can now sense Ethos present in the world.

  “Mom, this is amazing. I didn’t imagine something like this was possible.” He examined the potion in awe, watching it swirl inside its bottle.

  “I’ll give you the recipe later, though it’s quite a bit above of your ability to make. Pretty rare ingredients too, so I won’t be able to make too many of them.”

  “I don’t know what to say… Thank you.”

  “It was my pleasure. Really, it was a lot of fun having a reason to put together serious experiments again.” She laughed.

  His mom turned to Nothing as they shifted, and she kneeled in front of the fireplace. “I put a bit of a Dexterity boost in there too, we don’t want you coming out all misshapen, do we?” She held out her hand, Nothing reaching their head out of the flames to push against one of her fingers affectionately. “I hope to have a conversation out loud with you soon.”

  Tell her I appreciate it, and I hope to as well.

  Lindle did so, and his mom smiled before standing. “Well, I won’t keep you two any longer. I’ll have something ready for you when you’re done. Have fun!”

  She exited his workshop with a wave.

  Lindle looked down to Nothing and shrugged before reaching down his hand, casting [Produce Ember] to light a fire in his palm. Nothing hopped out of the flames and let Lindle carry them to the table.

  He arrayed the four objects in a circle and placed the unfinished homunculus down in the center of them. Lindle took his seat in front of him and ran down his mental checklist one more time, going over every instruction Nothing had drilled into him that they would need to do.

  Those instructions were very important, since for the first time, Lindle wouldn’t be the only one molding the Ethos, Nothing would be too, and if they moved out of sync with each other, everything would be ruined.

  Lindle was only a level 10 Artificer after all, he didn’t have the Skills required to make a homunculus from scratch. That was only possible for a class above his tier. Nothing’s current body was a complex self-aware mass of Ethos that held true intelligence and was capable of true life, Lindle was nowhere close to being able to create something like that. With [Artifice Crafting] active, however, Lindle would certainly be able to mess them up, and he would have no idea how to put them back together.

  What he was capable of doing, however, was constructing the shell that Nothing would inhabit. The tail-end of a highly intense and masterfully designed crafting project that required nothing but the fundamentals.

  The various aspects that would go into it wouldn’t actually matter very much to Nothing’s unique abilities as a homunculus and intended role as a crafting companion, aside from a necessary minimum of energy. Those bits were all already inside of Nothing, and the homunculus would be responsible for molding them to completion so that they could be a true bonded companion to Lindle, already having long been taught how by their original creator. That wasn’t to say Nothing’s body wouldn’t provide its own set of abilities, and Lindle intended to make them as useful and well-suited to Nothing’s tastes as possible. It was equally important that Nothing would be able to form a true sense of identity with their body after all.

  It would essentially be as if Lindle was designing Nothing’s body and Bloodline traits while Nothing was designing their Class, each for the sake of the other. As they went along, together they would connect the two halves, step by step, bit by bit, into a single whole.

  Lindle looked down at his friend. “Are you ready?” He felt nothing but confident eagerness back over their bond.

  I’ve waited long enough. Let’s do this.

  Lindle cracked his knuckles, downed his mom’s potion, and activated his Skill.