Grinning to myself, I watched as a statue made from enchanted stone moved slowly but quite smoothly through a series of movements, emulating some of the training I had been given what felt like ages ago by Mrs. Wu. It wasn't anything tremendously complicated but given that the figure was nothing but stone, with a bit of crystal to improve magical transmission and reception, it was quite the feat. Good enough, even to be considered worthwhile to use in combat, at least if I managed to reduce the time I needed to create such a statue by a few orders of magnitude; otherwise, I would have to store them in my magical bag and pull out when needed, which might work. But, at least for now, conjuring and enchanting one of them in the heat of the moment was utterly impossible.

This one, for example, shaped like a fairly generic humanoid figure without any real facial features, had taken me some thirty minutes to conjure before I had needed multiple sessions, altogether some thirty hours, to enchant it so it would move. The entire process required a tremendous amount of Astral Power, plus some of my vitality used for both Blood and Death Magic. It was, quite frankly, one of the hardest pieces of magic I had ever used, but coming up with it had been so incredibly worthwhile, even if it had taken time I had originally planned to use otherwise.

If not for this particular project, we would have left this area almost a month ago, travelling north again. Though, in hindsight, I was quite happy that we hadn't left as soon as the ground was somewhat free of snow and mostly dried out, simply because it had only been somewhat dry and sunny for a few days before winter decided to return around the beginning of April, bringing with it a wonderful mixture of snow, rain and enough hail to make a Nazi parade happy. After all, calling for hail was practically their unique selling point. Well, calling for hail and rampant bigotry and racism, maybe there was some strange connection between shitty weather and shitty people.

While I was confident that we could have weathered that particular nastiness, there was no doubt in my mind that it would have been incredibly uncomfortable. Instead, we stuck around in my comfortable tower, content to watch the wind uproot a tree or two in the forest around it, and the sheer amount of water coming from above had the creeks and brooks abandon their beds and spread all over the countryside. It was quite dramatic, really, though compared to the flooding we had witnessed in places as the snow further up in the mountains had thawed, it was fairly limited.

Either way, with my project to analyse an Undead or five while trying to figure out what made them tick, I could easily occupy my time, and Lia had more than enough time to dither back and forth, never coming to a conclusion. If it wasn't such a serious topic, I might have suggested that she could use some form of randomisation, like a set of dice, and decide like that, but I kept that particular joke to myself. Even if leaving things up to chance was a legitimate means of decision. Or would it leave things up to fate if there was such a thing?

Before the change, I would have immediately said there was no fate, but then, I would have said the same thing about magic. So, with an absurdly improbable thing as the system existing and interpreting the entire world in numbers, who was to say there was no way to use those numbers in some way to predict the future? And who was to say that there was no automatic process already doing so while possibly nudging things to create a desired outcome, though I had no clue what that outcome might be? It was a thought both interesting and incredibly scary, so I soon discarded the line of reasoning as unprovable and focused on other things. Like the statue I had planned and the enchantments I was pondering.

"Lia, my dear, would you like to test my newest creation?" I asked my daughter, who had been working on her own physical training, something we all had neglected somewhat during our time at the tower. Compared to our time travelling, the tower was a lot more suited to mental pursuits, allowing us to indulge a lot more than we could on the road, so a few things had fallen by the wayside. Not enough to hinder any of us, let alone ruin our physiques, but enough to dull some of the edge we usually had.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Sure, what did you make?" she asked, looking at me with curiosity in her eyes.

Showing her to the room in which I had set up the enchanted statue, I gestured that she should enter the ring drawn around it while I was watching, hoping that things would work. The statue should, hopefully, recognise anyone stepping into the ring as an enemy and use the skills I had projected into its construction to attack them.

Sadly, when I tried stepping into the ring, the statue didn't recognise me, possibly because its animating force was my own magic, preventing it from attacking me. Or maybe I had messed up that part of the enchantments, thus my experiment with Lia.

Lia simply nodded, stepping across the line of crystal, and the statue started to move in response. Its initial attack was a little stiff, lacking the fluidity I would have hoped to see, and things didn't get much better from there. While the movements worked, it was quite obvious that the statue was a mere mimicry of life, lacking the spark of creativity that turned a mechanical routine into something worthwhile.

To challenge someone like Lia, the statue would need a whole lot more power, something I wouldn't be able to impart continuously, not if I wanted it to draw power from the formations I had set up within the tower. Still, from the way Lia was moving and adapting, I could see the statue working as an initial training aid, allowing someone to reach the level of a novice in relatively short order.

If I wanted the statue to be able to actually teach and not just provide an example, I would have to improve the enchantments I was currently using by a lot, especially when it came to adaptability, something the statue currently lacked entirely. It was merely able to recognise a foe and attack using the patterns I had imparted into the spells animating the stone. It could also react to a somewhat wide variety of physical attacks and block them, but, as I could see from the way Lia was readily toying with it, even that was incredibly limited. For now, it was merely a very advanced training dummy, not something able to teach people outright.

Given the amount of work I had needed to get even this far, I doubted I would be able to create a satisfying version of this in the time I was willing to spend in the area, so a different solution was needed. Luckily, I already had a fairly good idea what I might be able to do, namely to set up an area similar to the shrine downstairs, only with writing regarding martial arts. There, I could add a few of these training dummies; that way, people should be able to train and get used to the things depicted on the walls, hopefully allowing them to understand the basics of the styles depicted and make them their own, thus carrying the name of Sigmir, and my own name for that matter, forward into this world.

"It needs some work," Lia stated after stepping back out of the circle. She had been able to easily overcome the statue and only stepped back when it became obvious that the only way to stop it was to destroy it, something she luckily didn't do. Not because she was unable to, even if the statue was made from stone, Lia was more than able to destroy the material, to say nothing of her ability to erase the somewhat delicate runes carved on and into the material.

"If I wanted to use it for combat or to protect the tower, yes, it would need a lot of work," I readily agreed with a nod, "But that's not its purpose; it's supposed to serve as a training aid, helping those without a magical inclination to find their path forward. I doubt what I have in mind will be as useful as the various writings and teachings we have prepared below, but it might help close the distance."

Now it was Lia's turn to look somewhat pensive before she nodded, acknowledging the use of it before she spoke.

"Then you might want to start with something even simpler, just to make sure people have the basic motions down. If you start them at that level, I have a feeling there would be a lot of failing and flailing."

With a nod, I accepted her point and began to make a lesson plan. Multiple statues would be engaged in sequence and the writing accompanying those statues would hopefully give people a good chance to follow the martial path if they lacked the intelligence for the arcane path. If doing so happened to keep people from heading down the divine path, well, that would be a true tragedy.

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