Chapter : 1401

The days turned into a routine. A wonderful, secluded routine. Lloyd would wake up, dodge his family at breakfast, and run to the manufactory. Mina would arrive shortly after, carrying new books from the Siddik library. They would lock the door and enter their own world.

The manufactory became their fortress. The workers got used to seeing Lady Mina. They started calling her "The Professor's Brain," which Lloyd pretended to be offended by, but secretly agreed with.

One rainy afternoon, they were working on the interface between the Heart and the Lilith Stones. It was tricky. The Heart was old magic; the Stones were new tech. It was like trying to connect a steam engine to a computer.

"The frequency is off," Lloyd muttered, adjusting a caliper. "The Lilith Stones vibrate too fast. The Heart is slow. Deep. Tectonic."

"It is a language barrier," Mina suggested. She was sitting on a stool, her dress covered in a protective apron. "The Heart speaks in concepts. 'Protect'. 'Defend'. 'Endure'. The Lilith Stones speak in commands. 'Move left'. 'Stop'. 'Go'."

"So we need a translator," Lloyd said. "A buffer."

"Or a filter," Mina said. She stood up and walked to the chalkboard. She drew a symbol. It looked like a series of interlocking triangles. "This is the Crest of Anubis. It represents the harmonization of disparate elements. If we etch this onto the connecting plate... maybe it will smooth out the signal."

Lloyd looked at the drawing. He activated his [All-Seeing Eye] for a second, visualizing the energy flow.

"If we carve that into silver," Lloyd said, his mind racing, "it acts as a resistor. It slows down the Lilith signal just enough for the Heart to understand it."

"Exactly," Mina said.

"You're a genius," Lloyd said. "Have I told you that today?"

"Only twice," Mina said. "You are slacking."

Lloyd laughed. He grabbed a piece of silver plate and his engraving tools. "Alright. Let's try it. Hand me the chisel."

They worked side by side. Their shoulders brushed. Their hands touched as they passed tools back and forth. In the beginning, these touches would have been electric, terrifying. Now, they were comfortable. Familiar.

It was a dangerous comfort. Lloyd knew that. He knew that every hour they spent together, the bond grew stronger. He knew he was playing with fire. But he couldn't stop. He didn't want to stop.

"Hold this steady," Lloyd said, positioning the chisel.

Mina placed her hands on the silver plate. "Steady as a rock."

Lloyd began to tap the chisel with a small hammer. Tink. Tink. Tink. The silver curled away, forming the lines of the crest.

"Lloyd," Mina said softly, over the sound of the tapping.

"Yeah?"

"What happens when we finish?" she asked. "When the suit is done? When the war is over?"

Lloyd stopped tapping. He didn't look up. "That's a lot of 'whens', Mina. The war might take years."

"But eventually," Mina pressed. "Eventually, the puzzle will be solved. And we won't have an excuse to be in here anymore."

Lloyd looked at her then. Her eyes were searching his face, looking for an answer he didn't have.

"I don't know," Lloyd admitted. "I try not to think about the 'after'. I focus on the 'now'. The 'now' has giant robots. The 'after' has... lawyers."

Mina smiled sadly. "Lawyers. And wives. And envoys."

"The Terrible Three," Lloyd joked weakly.

He put down the hammer. "Listen, Mina. I can't promise you a simple future. My life is a knot that even Alexander the Great couldn't cut. But I can promise you this: I'm not going to just let this go. What we have here... this partnership... it works. It matters. I'm not going to let politics destroy the best team in the kingdom."

"The best team," Mina repeated. She liked the sound of that.

"Yes," Lloyd said. "We are the Ferrum-Siddik Alliance. We are unstoppable. We solve unsolveable problems. Finding a way for us to... exist... that's just another problem. A really hard engineering problem."

"Engineering the heart," Mina murmured. "That sounds harder than engineering a golem."

"Maybe," Lloyd said. "But I have the smartest consultant in the world helping me."

They shared a look. It was a look full of unspoken words, full of longing and resignation and hope.

Then, the door to the workshop banged open.

Borin, the explosives expert, burst in. His face was covered in soot. His hair was standing on end.

"Master Lloyd!" Borin shouted. "The new fuel mixture! It works! It works too well!"

Behind him, a small mushroom cloud of purple smoke puffed out of the alchemy lab.

"Fire in the hole!" Borin yelled happily.

Lloyd sighed. The moment was broken. Reality had crashed back in.

Chapter : 1402

"Duty calls," Lloyd said to Mina. "Stay here. Don't touch the silver. I have to go put out a fire. Again."

"Go," Mina said, hiding a smile. "Save the laboratory, brave hero."

Lloyd grabbed a fire extinguisher (another invention of his) and ran towards the smoke.

"Borin!" Lloyd yelled. "If you blew up the coffee machine, you are fired!"

Mina watched him run. She leaned back against the table, listening to the chaotic sounds of Lloyd shouting orders and Borin apologizing maniacally.

She felt a warmth in her chest. It wasn't the thrill of discovery. It wasn't the satisfaction of research. It was something simpler.

She was happy.

Here, in this noisy, dangerous, messy room, she was happy. And she knew, with absolute certainty, that she would fight anyone—even her own sister, even a princess—to keep this feeling.

She looked down at the silver plate. The crest of harmonization.

"We will figure it out," she whispered to the metal. "We will harmonize the disparate elements. Me and him. We will make it work."

She picked up the chisel. She wasn't an engineer, but she was a quick learner. And she wasn't going to wait for Lloyd to do all the work.

Tink. Tink. Tink.

The sound of her work joined the symphony of the manufactory. The Scholar had joined the Alliance for good.

The workshop was silent, save for the low, rhythmic hum coming from the table. It was a sound like a giant cat purring inside a cave.

Lloyd stood on one side of the Golem Heart. Mina stood on the other. Between them, the ancient artifact was glowing. Not the faint, dying light it had when they found it, but a steady, pulsing amber rhythm.

"It's stable," Lloyd whispered, afraid to break the spell. "We did it. The silver interface plate is working. The Lilith Stones are talking to the Heart, and the Heart isn't screaming back."

"The harmonization crest," Mina said, her voice filled with awe. "It acted as a linguistic bridge. It translated the binary logic of the modern stones into the conceptual flow of the ancient core."

"Okay," Lloyd said, cracking his knuckles. "Phase Two. Let's see what's actually going on inside that rock. I'm going in."

"Be careful," Mina warned. "Do not get lost in the data stream."

"I have a tether," Lloyd said, tapping his temple. "My sparkling personality."

He placed both hands on the Heart. He took a deep breath and activated his [All-Seeing Eye]. But this time, he pushed it further. He didn't just want to see the physical structure; he wanted to see the energy. He wanted to see the code.

Zoom.

The world dissolved. The workshop vanished. Lloyd was floating in a universe of golden light.

It was breathtaking. The interior of the Golem Heart wasn't just rock; it was a galaxy of mana pathways. It looked like a three-dimensional spiderweb made of lightning. Millions of tiny channels intersected, creating nodes of power that pulsed with information.

"It's... beautiful," Lloyd murmured in the real world.

"What do you see?" Mina asked, her pen poised over her notebook.

"It's not a circuit board," Lloyd said, his eyes moving rapidly behind his closed lids. "It's a biological map. It looks like... a nervous system. Anubis didn't build a computer; he built a stone brain. There are synapses. There are memory centers."

He pushed his vision deeper, zooming in on the core where the "soul" of Anubis's daughter had once resided. It was empty now, a hollow space waiting to be filled. But around it, the architecture was intact.

"The energy flows," Lloyd narrated. "They aren't linear. They loop. It's a feedback system. That's how it learns. It takes input—say, 'enemy attacking'—and it runs it through a filter of past experiences. 'Last time enemy attacked, punching worked. Therefore, punch again.'"

"Heuristic learning," Mina noted, writing furiously. "It mimics intuition."

"Exactly," Lloyd said. "But here is the crazy part. The power source. The connection points for the Aethel-Quartz."

He focused on the base of the sphere. He saw the input ports. In Wilfred’s machine, these had been brute-forced, jagged holes drilled into the casing. But looking at the original design, Lloyd saw something elegant.

"It's a hybrid system," Lloyd realized with a jolt. "Mina, check the text on page 40. The section about 'The Breath of the Earth'."

He heard pages rustling.

"Here," Mina read. "'The Breath is not singular. It is the marriage of the Sky and the Soil. The Quartz sings the song, but the Iron holds the note.'"