< Xeir’s POV >

  Have you ever tried training an AI from scratch using the measly data you have without buying, or in many cases, stealing data from the internet? You have to constantly feed it the data you want its neural network to recognize and act on it. It could take a very long time for it to work a single specific order correctly.

  Well, back in my original world, we don’t have such a thing as AI or anything and the internet is pretty new to us. I still remember having a colored pyboy is the biggest thing there before getting roped up into the military career even when I’m both underage and not a male. Well… I wasn’t lying to them about my gender when they conscripted me, they just assumed I was some orphaned boy and picked me off the road, shoved a gun at me, and pushed me to war. That means I’m handsome enough, hehe.

  … Anyway, that’s not important. I know about AIs because I reincarnated into many worlds with artificial intelligence. Some look like it came out from a sci-fi movie, some a tech dystopian, some even have a weird combination of steam and innovation, and some went full-on technomancy with magic. Therefore, I’ve many chances to train some AIs to full functionality.

  What I want to tell you is… this rocky humanoid va golem… ugh, what a mouthful name, I’ll just call it a nurse since we’re talking about suturing a pnet here. I’m the doctor controlling this operation, so my helpers are nurses!

  What I want to tell you is that this nurse golem acts exactly like AGI, or artificial general intelligence. It has some basic functionality like listening to basic commands like walk here, run here, dig here, etc. However, it’s… very bad at it at first. It often disregards any environment and even destroys the giant needles I made for it to use just because it has no idea what the needle is and instead walks over them.

  I fix that by directly assuming command of the nurse and think very loudly what is what and what to avoid. Gradually, the nurse is learning and stopped being an idiot. So, about 2 weeks according to the Earth’s time, the nurse can fwlessly pick the needle and throw it to the other side of the tectonic pte like how I did with my gigantic hand!

  I made a few more nurse golems and copied the AI model from the first golem over them, making them as good as the first.

  However, while the nurses can throw needles well, I still face the problem of how slow my needle creation is… So I made a needle factory!

  By making a mold using the already-finished needle I made, I ordered the nurses to use a bck stone bucket to fill it with va, then pour it into the mold. After it was cooling down a bit, I ordered them to break the mold and… uh… what is the needle so brittle?

  The first batch of factory-made needles are… very unsatisfactory. There are many bubbles and holes inside and once the nurse golem throws them, it breaks upon impact, unlike the needles I personally made myself.

  As someone who used to be a bcksmith as well… wow, I forgot how to be a bcksmith, so I have to search my backup memories in text… Uhhh… no, those are molten irons, not va. Geologist information? Oh, found it.

  Apparently, because I never researched my backup information before in this incarnation, I mistook a lot about how va worked. So, those bck rocks I keep making are not exactly a rock but rather, gss. To be exact, obsidians.

  Generally, obsidians are created when va with high silica content is cooled rapidly. And I mean, very rapidly, like an immediate contact with water or being cooled in the air. Fast enough that crystals don’t have time to form and create other igneous rocks.

  Additionally, while obsidians are brittle, they are sharp, very sharp. But what I need is not sharpness. I just need it to be strong enough that throwing it won’t break it.

  Then, how come the needles I made myself are different from the mold? Is it because I made them with psychic energy? Then how could my humanoid form break so easi…ly…

  … Oh right, my humanoid form isn’t even forming into a solid object yet and it’s still a liquid va.

  … Anyway, to test this theory, I ordered the nurses to make a new needle and I made a needle by myself. From the outside, the two needles look identical with bck-ish rock texture. However, when I brush it off a bit, what is revealed under both of them is a solid and reflective bck gss-like material.

  That confirmed that both of them are obsidians…

  I ordered a nurse golem to throw the needle I made and voi! It held up and pierced the other side perfectly. However, when I ordered it to throw the one the nurses made, the needle broke into pieces.

  From closer inspection, the needle I made is obviously covered by psychic energy since that was the principle for reinforcing and suturing the ptes in the first pce. However, the needle the nurses made are not covered in any energy. Rather, it’s just a big obsidian with va attached to its end…

  Oh wait, the va thread snapped right away as well.

  Uh… ok, I think I was looking at the problem with the wrong approach.

  The problem for it to break easily is not because of material, it was because the needles made in the factory are not considered a part of me and were cut off from the domain. The differences are only that I didn’t directly control the va being scooped into the bucket and the ones I personally made are made with my will.

  Does that mean… My factory pn was destroyed before it even had a roof!?

  No… I just need to teach the nurses how to use psychic energy to make their own needles! Since using psychic energy is almost instinctive to me, it has to be instinctive to my species and to that extent, my drones as well even when I have no idea how to do that exactly.

  Once I updated the nurse model from the new training, they began to use psychic energy to create the needles! I checked and I can feel the connection to these needles so they are definitely considered a part of my domain now. When I ordered them to throw the needles, they pierced the ground exactly like how I did it myself now!

  Finally, automation!

  My mood was better and I feel happy now that I have helpers, so I decided to repair the broken threads. Additionally, I ordered some of the nurses to throw the needles to the sides of the tectonic ptes as well before I control the va from my side to reinforce it by making more va thread to tie between threads connected to the needles.

  I intentionally keep the heat of the thread longer by consciously thinking about it, intending to make it stronger by at least turning them into basalts instead of obsidian. Not only that, since my domain slowly assimites the other ptes, I can heat the rocks on the other side up to thousands of degrees and basically melt them with the needles, creating more thread like a root of a tree.

  … It’s getting tiring again, so I also teach the nurses how to do it…

  In the end, I created about 10,000 nurse golems spreading across the tectonic ptes. The number sounds ridiculous but on the scale of a tectonic pte… They are extremely inadequate. I can create more, sure, but when I make more than 10,000, the automation of the new golems are… how do I describe it, wonky? They tried to create the needles but instead of a needle, what appeared was just a lump of va without any precision at all. If I create even more, I just get a headache again…

  Is there a popution limit somehow? Do I need to wait for my domain to grow before I can make more golems comfortably? Since I have no idea how to measure my assimition rate right now and I’m pretty tired… should I just order the golems to duplicate when I feel comfortable?

  … Ugh… I think I used too much of my brain in the past month. I’ll go to sleep. Wake me up when you guys finish suturing a pte or something…

  .

  .

  .

  < Narration >

  A gigantic humanoid shaped creature made purely out of the fiery molten mantle of a pnet, or va, was seen diligently conjuring a lump of va from ground to shape it into a long and sharp object. Among many simir creatures doing simir things, it was the first to ever roam on the face of this unnamed pnet.

  Its height, using a measurement of humans from Earth, stood at roughly 500 meters, comparable to few of the tallest buildings ever built in the modern days. Its skin, composed entirely of va, is being held by a sheer force of mental energy from beyond the void. However, while that may be true for a few couple minutes after its birth, it is not so once time moves forward.

  Clear signs of cooling down are seen. Molten va, being rapidly losing its temperature, turned into bck reflective material known as obsidians. While parts which required reflexibility for movement are still partially in liquid form, that too began to join the solid parts because it stopped pulling materials out of the sea of va beneath, effectively turning its entire body into gss.

  While normally brittle, the obsidian titan defied common senses. Due to how it is being controlled directly by what was dubbed as psychic energy and is being connected as a part of the hive mind with psychic energy defying all logics, the former brittle materials turned into a formidable gss that can withstand many times over the forces required to break them.

  Not only that, the psychic energy also held up the shapes of the obsidian titan together, allowing it to act as usual without colpsing back into the sea of va. And is also the reason why such a gigantic construct would not be sunken into the mantle right after the queen decided to part away with the hold on the psychic energy used for its creation.

  It can remember vividly how it was created. The queen, the entity commanding the entire hive mind, conjured its shape out of the sea of va. Whether or not it was accidental or intentional, the queen cut the control of the chuck of psychic energy holding the shape together off and desired its independent control.

  When it first realizes it has become a being connected to the hive mind, it understands that the will of the queen is prioritized over its will and it will loyally do whatever command she would give. It can sense the thoughts and emotions of the queen and will act according to it if she so desires. However, because of its simple and immature mind at its creature, when the queen ordered it to walk forward, it diligently walked forward without dey, accidentally stepping on the queen’s humanoid body in the process even if she is only about five times smaller than it is. Yet, it continues forward.

  It was much ter that the queen had assumed control of its body and showed how to do things properly. After many examples, it can now follow simple commands given by the queen almost fwlessly. As of now, it can conjure the psychically enhanced obsidian spears, or needles as the queen calls, effortlessly.

  The obsidian spear is even taller than the obsidian titan itself, reaching almost 800 meters in length. When conjured, it would get materials from the queen’s domain by injecting its own psychic energy into the sea of va, scoop some va up, and use its own energy to mold the va into a solid spear.

  Its order from the queen is to attach a string of psychically active va from her domain to the spear and throw it to the other side of the chasm, outside of the queen’s domain, to assimite and spread her domain over.

  As it is also considered a part of the queen’s vast mind, she can control the spears on the other side like her own limbs.

  At first, the queen expressed her emotion of joy once she successfully taught it to do the job and duplicated all of its experience to other obsidian titans, and she created its kin more and more in a grand operation of repairing the pnet. However, as time goes on, she realized that there is a limit to how many she can create.

  While ten of thousands 500 meters titans are ridiculously overkill in normal situations, spreading them over an entire tectonic pte rger than a continent in order to prevent the destruction of a pnet is as the queen thought: not fast enough.

  It would take years using the current method for the operation to succeed. The queen doesn’t know how long the pnet can hold, but she also can’t do anything else. Rather… She was so focused on brute-forcing to notice that in her own empire interface, there is a section regarding technological research waiting for her to actually start an empire.

  Still, a technology that can repair a doomed pnet is far down the line, so her current solution is, in fact, the most viable solution avaible for her. Once the queen accepted that there is nothing she can do now, she decided to sleep and left the titans to continue working.

  The obsidian titans obeyed, and diligently threw spears after spears to the other side. Not knowing of the words tiring, they continue forward the queen’s goal.

  It was then that the first obsidian titan remembered the st thought of the queen, that she wanted more of them, but that is impossible. However, ever since it came into being, its psychic energy also grew separately from the queen, albeit at a much slower rate.

  It decided to imitate the queen, creating helpers that are much smaller yet many more numerous. The other obsidian titans, being in the same hive network, learned how to do it and imitated the method.

  It decided to not wake the queen up to report as per her command to wake her up only when at least a tectonic pte was successfully assimited.

  Once the queen wakes up, she would be in for a surprise.

  Luphrasia