Making the treadle took a whole half an hour purely down to a single part of the design. Not the carving of the wooden wheels, that only took fifteen minutes by hand.

It was having to make a tiny metal rod using two of his wedge nails for the sake of the thing. The pedal had to be attached to the smaller wheel with a simply wooden bar, but how exactly did it do this? Well, a tiny bronze bar was hammered into the wheel, and then the pedal’s connection was attached to the part of this bar which extended out of the wheel.

To make a long story short, he crafted all the parts and threw them together into the grid as required to make the treadle.

On its own, the part did very little, but it was no surprise that it immediately unlocked a recipe for a grindstone. Nothing too special as he’d expected something like this, although part of him wished that the cube provided other tools as well. Although, how many did he realistically need?

The grindstone was only useful since he’d noticed the worn edges on his copper knife so far, and if it continued any longer he’d essentially be grinding through things instead of cutting.

The recipe wasn’t even that tough to deal with. Two wood planks, a rod, and that treadle. With the tough part being two halves the grindstone itself carved in advance, then placed in the top and bottom of the middle column… Of course the cube just merged both halves together.

Actually, he could probably merged the two halves by merely holding them up against each other as well.

“That makes the recipes a lot less impressive... Still, does it really expect me to carve that without any experience?” It took a little while for him to come to terms with it, but as the smaller river stones couldn’t be merged together for some reason, he chalked it up to the stones clearly being of several different materials.

Eventually confirming this by holding several ‘similar’ ones together until the two round stones literally merged into a larger one.

Not entirely useful in his opinion, and he’d probably have better luck just mining a chunk of stone from the walls of the iron mine. But it did somewhat clarify how the whole merging process seemed to work, albeit barely. What might have actually helped was his inventory actually distinguishing the materials of all the stones, but he clearly couldn’t have that much functionality.

“It should be a good way to test stone carving though, for that first test at least,” he thoughtfully spoke to Sal, as usual. Carving something less intricate would be a perfect way to get started as opposed to a tiny thumb-sized piece of granite. “Well, back to real priorities.” He shook his head and finally came to realise the priority that he was realistically meant to complete quite a while back.

Taking one of the sun slivers in his possession, he placed it down only to realise he lacked any sort of mortar or pestle to easily crush such a thing. Of course, he could just try and fish out one of the bricks within the oven and crush the sliver with some merged stones…

But that sounded like a bad idea.

“Worst case scenario is that I lose one sliver? I can gather another twenty hearts tonight if I need them, what’s the worr–” As Joey’s eyes lifted off the sliver to face Sal his eyes caught sight of a standing figure not too far away and staring directly towards him.

Stare might have been a strong word to use.

A fair distance away still was a green and brown figure, one clearly wrapped in thick vines with leaves growing off it. And with some closer attention he realised it wasn’t a strange get-up, but part of its body as the vines were not merely surface level but instead weaving in and out of the brown skin…

Or rather, brown bark. That was no person or living thing, but some strange contraption like the golems but made purely of wood and vines. However, just from here he could see its slower movements, almost robotic as its legs moved rhythmically and precisely, and unlike the Forger’s golems, this thing clearly could not run.

A defining point between the two similar things.

But to him, perhaps his only chance of beating this thing. Was it something which happened to wander by, or did the number of rituals he completed finally catch up with him and allow them to begin sending a new monster?

Either way, this thing had to die as it approached. At a speed no less than his walking pace, Joey already gripped his spear and took out his knife in case it proved useful.

If this fight went poorly he knew what to do after that first death.

Mind relaxed, muscles tensed, and heart steady, the puppet entered his spear’s range… And he stabbed towards its head!

It slow movements tried to knock away the spear but drastically failed, instead allowing the spear to strike the position of its eye, from which he heard a heavy thunk, as though the trunk of a tree shook from being hit hard by an axe…

And at the position of a slightly concave position on its head to represent two eyes, he saw a thin slit in the wood representing the spear tip which penetrated it.

But the puppet still walked forward, unperturbed by that useless attack. Seeing one of its outreached arms begin to rotate and grab the spear, he immediately swung it sideways to avoid the grab before retracting. Clearly, attacking the wooden parts was a fool’s errand, which he could have guessed but tested, nonetheless.

Retreating slightly, he found it easy to out speed the slower monster, although it was several times that of a zombie. In the future he’d have to maintain caution against these things.

“What about your vines then? Are they as durable?” He hadn’t just been wandering about, analysing the puppet made the most obvious target the vines, but Joey also considered things like it’s joints or power source.

Was it something like the artificial power stone? Or more magical in nature?

Stabbing a vine isn’t that effective though, and he didn’t feel safe going up close with a knife… So that meant slashing with the spear. While he never tried the manoeuvre properly before, it was better to try now than never.

Holding the spear how he always trained with it, the first attempt to slash at the puppet went horrible, barely grazing the thing as he hit its wooden body and found himself unable to redirect the spear. It hit a vine and left a small cut, but no further damage occurred. A rather poor first attempt…

But he had endurance in spades and more than enough time as it was just the two in the plains. Slash after slash, he eventually got some cuts through the vines.

However, with every few slashes he began to noticed something.

If left for more than ten seconds or so, all damage to a vine was healed!

“In that case...” He focused on a thick vine across the puppet’s chest, heaving the spear diagonally to cut perpendicular to the thick, green plant, and finished his sentence. “I’ll cut it in one go!”

His spear tip sliced through the entire thing with ease, bisecting the vine cleanly with some strange milky fluid, almost like a sap, leaking from the ends of the upper vine. As soon as that happened, he how both ends of that vine withered immediately and turned a dry yellow, but the puppet remained active. Following like a truly unintelligible machine.

“Rather pointless. But I suppose that’s what monsters are in the end.” He smirked in some newfound confidence and slowly severed every other thick vine on the puppet’s body.

One across its back, another alone its neck, one which snaked around each leg, and finally, the two which spread out alone its arms. Several smaller vines also existed on its body, but he chose to ignore those as just destroying the big ones ought to kill the thing, and just as expected… As soon as the final arm vine was severed, withering in front of his eyes, the puppet fell down and remained still.

Its wooden body immediately began to rot, peeling and flaking until only a single item was left remaining at the core of its body…

A small orb of wood covered in small vines like sprouts, runes covering its surface like some sort of arcane implement… But just to check, he grabbed the lens of nature from nearby and looked at the thing.

Green particles swirled around the wood and vines.

“So it’s nature magic… Of course. Why should that be a surprise? I’d bet on there being a source in here too.” However, as he looked a bit more carefully, it was apparent that small bits of black particles passed through the runes and mixed in with the green, and with some closer identification he realised that the green of this magic was actually slightly darker than that of nature.

From what Diavolo mentioned, this black stuff was likely Dark magic.

Which raised an interesting point as he now wanted to try take the lens into the tower and see what colour gemstone magic gave off, perhaps anything channelling the Arcane shared a colour, or it instead showed the colour of that element which was brought out.

Or maybe gemstone magic simply received its own unique colouration!

As he held the only remnant of this puppet in his hand, the body continued to rapidly rot and eventually completely disappeared into the ground, in fact only a minute had passed since killing it, making harvesting resources from its body impossible.

“Was this a onetime thing or will they be periodically summoned.? I really need some traps… Or just some magic to kill them quickly.” It wasn’t just these new puppets too, some sort of solar magic to kill zombies faster would be so damn useful.

Especially now that his body contained those red fiery particles flowing through his blood now, partially concentrated inside his heart.

“Anywayyyy, back to grinding up this sliver. I think the tower had a mortar and pestle… And I do want to carve some stone. Sure, what better do I have to do? Not like I have to harvest the plants now that they’re grown.” He already knew that fully grown crops could be left in the ground for even weeks without worry, in which case they could be picked and cleaned as he cooked.

However, before heading straight to the tower again, he made a detour to the iron mine and carefully–

“Well that’s not good,” he said with a deep frown, standing on the rocky shore besides the thick river, its gushing flow covering the sound of his pounding heartbeat.

Because not only did a puppet stand in front of him… But so did a mangy mutt with throbbing red vessels within its black eyes. It had a thick black coat which actually appeared rather shiny, well groomed if not for the obvious patches of fur which had fallen off for some reason, and unlike any dog he’d ever seen its snout curved downwards to meet its jaw like some sort of crescent.

It could barely even be called a mutt though, with a pin-like nose right above its jaw, teeth not only jagged but extremely thick. And a hunched back like some sort of tightly caged experiment…

In less than a second he pulled out his spear and knife…

Prepared to kill another beast–

No!

Kill a new monster.