Reason told Anbaixiu that the City of Alchemy would never sell him the real thing for five hundred gold coins, yet he could not resist seeing just how convincing the fake was.
The young saleswoman looked around conspiratorially before slipping a small vial of silvery solution into Anbaixiu's hand.
It felt dense and heavy; in terms of weight, there was barely any difference.
Yet the moment Anbaixiu took a closer look, disappointment washed over his face.
"Your mercury has separated into layers. Wait, no—this is literally just ordinary mercury, isn't it?"
Anbaixiu might not specialize in alchemy, but he was no amateur. A single glance was enough to tell what it was.
A tiny dash of genuine Living Mercury Solution diluted with common mercury. To the untrained eye, it looked no different, but an expert could spot the distinct hue separation caused by the two being insoluble together.
Living mercury could dissolve almost any metal and be conveniently precipitated back out, but it could not dissolve true mercury.
For five hundred gold coins, this counterfeiting was laughably shoddy.
The salesgirl said sheepishly, "I knew you were an expert. Don't worry, this was just a sample. Only when a true connoisseur sees we're on the same page can we really talk business."
With that, she swiftly swapped it for another vial.
This new vial of living mercury genuinely made Anbaixiu marvel.
Outwardly, there was not a single flaw. Telling whether it was authentic or counterfeit would likely require unsealing it for a chemical test.
"Two completely different tiers of craftsmanship, and both cost five hundred gold coins?" Anbaixiu asked.
"Of course not! That earlier bottle was five hundred; this one is at least three thousand."
Just as Anbaixiu was about to ask to test the goods, inspiration struck. He praised, "This isn't living mercury at all—it's a solution of dead mercury corpses! No wonder you can't tell from the outside. Clever, very clever."
The salesgirl's eyes went wide with shock. Lowering her voice, she hissed, "Don't be so loud! Are you buying or not?"
She was panicking. She had only wanted to push some merchandise for an extra commission; who could have imagined that an alchemist who looked so young could deduce the underlying trick at a glance? This was a counterfeit processed by the Alchemists' Council itself, touted as utterly undetectable.
Yet this young fellow had figured out the mechanism after a single glance, without even unstopping the vial to test it?
How was that possible? She had probably run into one of those eccentric old monsters playing the pig to eat the tiger. Why was an old coot hundreds of years old playing the innocent youth?!
Seeing her expression, Anbaixiu knew his guess was spot-on. Once laid bare, the trick was actually quite simple.
Living mercury was originally a failed product of the City of Alchemy. They had intended to create a new type of slime, only to end up with a mercury slime in a "vegetative state."
It was alive, but devoid of any consciousness. It could not even move, retaining only an instinct to devour metal.
Had it not been for the fairly decent utility of that metal-devouring instinct, it would have been discarded as scrap.
Yet a "vegetative" slime was still a living creature, and living creatures eventually died.
A dead mercury slime did not rot. It looked identical to when it was alive—so much so that even the alchemists of the City of Alchemy could not tell the living from the dead. The only way to differentiate was to toss in a piece of metal.
A living mercury slime would devour it; a dead one lacked that ability.
Some genius had come up with the scheme to slice off a sliver of living mercury slime and blend it into the corpses of dead ones, producing this half-dead, half-alive state.
It still devoured metal, but its efficiency was severely reduced.
A layman would hardly be able to tell whether the living mercury's quality had deteriorated or if it had simply been "weakened" during transport; they might even assume a few days of nourishment would nurse it back to health.
As for the cruder forgery from earlier, it was probably a defective imitation concocted by low-level workers who had seen the council's method and tried their own hand at it. For all he knew, this very salesgirl had brewed it herself to pocket a little extra on the side.
Only when she realized she could not fool an expert like Anbaixiu did she bring out the high-end counterfeit.
The City of Alchemy knew that the genuine article was too expensive to sell. Without funds for upkeep, the living mercury would continually perish, bleeding money day after day. That was what drove them to concoct such an underhanded scheme.
Anbaixiu suspected plenty of suckers had already paid full price for these high-end fakes. It was a clever method, but profoundly dirty.
As expected of the City of Alchemy. It had held the title of the continent's wealthiest city for years on end, yet it had never once appeared on any moral ranking.
Anbaixiu had originally planned to decline.
He intended to do business with his friend from the Elegy Poetry Society.
He was strapped for cash, but money earned through fraud would inevitably cost him far more in the end. That brother, the Headless Horseman, was married into a family of bone dragons. If his dragon wife caught wind that his secret stash had gone awry, that brother certainly would not cover for Anbaixiu.
When that time came, Anbaixiu would face the combined wrath of a Legendary bone dragon and a Legendary Headless Horseman.
After a marital beatdown like that, even a counterfeit Legendary like Anbaixiu would have his phylactery smashed to pieces. It was a surefire loss.
Yet just as he was handing the vial back, a question struck him.
Did a dead mercury slime count as a corpse?
Anbaixiu only dabbled in alchemy, but when it came to necromancy, he was a true master.
He had half a mind to ask if the Alchemists' Association had ever tried casting necromancy on dead mercury slimes, but swallowed the words before they could leave his mouth.
The thought was merely a sudden epiphany. Perhaps the association had a blind spot and had never even considered it? Speaking up would only tip them off.
If it worked, he would be handing the Alchemists' Association a golden opportunity to turn their fortunes around for free, and those capitalists would never pay him a copper in royalties.
With that in mind, Anbaixiu turned to the salesgirl and said, "Three thousand gold coins is too steep. Can't you come down a bit?"
"The price is clearly marked. No bargaining."
"The clearly marked price is for the real thing! Yours is a fake!"
"I really can't go any lower."
"Then throw in two vials of that cheap stuff."
...
After some haggling, Anbaixiu spent three thousand gold coins to walk away with one high-end counterfeit, one low-end knockoff, and two pouches of enchanted seeds thrown in as a bonus.
Evidently, living mercury was truly struggling to sell.
Anbaixiu had originally planned to browse a bit more; after all, keeping living mortals in a lich's domain required far more preparations. But now his mind was entirely consumed by this vial of living mercury solution. Intuition told him that a massive business opportunity lay within.
Leaving the City of Alchemy, Anbaixiu hurried back to his castle as fast as he could, even turning into mist to slip directly through the roof.
Dispelling the Transmutation spell, Anbaixiu reverted to his sinister, ferocious lich form and headed straight for the laboratory with the two bottles of fakes.
Isabel was still diligently brewing Basilisk Oil, with a respectable number of finished products already arranged on the shelves. Thanks to Anbaixiu's earlier pointers, she had finally mastered the brewing method. With her solid foundation, the young girl had brewed ten whole bottles of Basilisk Oil with only a single failure—an impressive achievement.
Yet as Anbaixiu's eyes swept over the wasted materials, Isabel felt her heart leap into her throat.
Would this lich become furious because she had wasted those ingredients? Would he turn her into an experiment for his necromancy?
The lich's skeletal visage betrayed no emotion, looking terrifying no matter how one looked at it. Watching such a lich stride toward her in utter silence, she felt an overwhelming pressure bearing down on her, and she desperately wished for help.
Where was that boy who knew alchemy? He was an undead too, wasn't he?
Though he had only offered a few tips, he could still be considered her teacher.
*Teacher, hurry up and come save your student!*
Chapter 11