Chapter 327: You
It was five days later when Arwin finished his first Core. It was one of the most simultaneously difficult and straightforward projects he’d ever worked on. The constraints on it were so general, so indeterminate, that he had no idea what would work or what wouldn’t.
All he knew was that he needed a heart for his Soul Guardians. A source that was more than just power. It had to be an artificial soul.
He knew how to make an item with a soul. He’d made one for Reya. The only difference was that he had to make one for a suit of armor instead. In theory, it shouldn’t have been too different.
Things were more than a bit harder in practice. The core was meant to be part of a larger being. It was simultaneously a piece of the guardian and also its own item. Arwin couldn’t just stick one of his own hairs into it, but he couldn’t just modify the suit of armor made from the Ivory Executioner Armor and add the core in.
The armor had to serve the role that Reya did, providing him with energy and giving him a way to make the item its own item.
Figuring out how to do that took Arwin three of the four days. He spent practically every waking moment he had in the Infernal Armory, emerging only to get food for it and himself and to sleep.
He spoke with everyone in the Menagerie to see if they had advice. Wallace swung by at one point and lent him a few pointers on working with more intelligent items, but in the end, the solution turned out to be far simpler than Arwin had thought.
Every step he’d tried had been one where he tried to replace the source of power that Reya had provided for her item. After all, he’d been convinced that no piece of metal could ever actually provide magic.
That was his job. Metal was nothing but that. Metal.