Strife between deities was exceedingly brutal; the God of Alchemy himself had nearly been hunted down and slain by Lolth the Spider Queen.
If Anbaixiu had not helped him restore a measure of divine power in the nick of time, the God of Alchemy would not even have been able to repel her.
And if Lolth had not needed to stay wary of her own far-from-virtuous allies, the God of Alchemy would have had no choice but to keep fleeing for his life.
Therefore, the God of Alchemy was deeply unwilling to see Anbaixiu ascend to godhood in such a manner.
Merging with an ill-fitting divine portfolio would leave one as a lesser deity forever—the kind that mortals routinely managed to slay in legends. The God of Alchemy had given up on assimilating those portfolios partly because they were fundamentally unsuitable for him.
Portfolios like Corruption, Darkness, and Spiders might warp alchemy into a craft that existed solely to harm others. If that happened, the God of Alchemy would never regain his former power.
Things made to harm could never match the widespread appeal of daily necessities.
The only one with any real utility was the Drow Race portfolio. By merging with it, he could become the chief deity of all drow elves, recovering his power much faster without any major side effects—at most, alchemy would simply become more common among the drow.
Yet doing so would turn the God of Alchemy from a conceptual deity into a faith deity. While neither was inherently superior to the other, it would leave him bound to the influence of his worshippers, which went against the path he sought for himself.
Moreover, this was the most valuable among the four portfolios.
If Anbaixiu integrated the Drow Race portfolio, he might even be able to negotiate with Lolth the Spider Queen and serve as her subordinate deity or something similar. With a patron behind him, his path as a deity would be far smoother.
This student of his had an awful penchant for walking on the knife's edge; as a teacher, he naturally had to look out for him and lay down several escape routes.
"Let's see what this lad is up to."
The God of Alchemy tapped the table, and a massive crystal mirror rose before him.
Though smooth to the eye, within it lay hundreds of millions of patterns imperceptible to mortal sight, brimming with immense divine power.
This was an artifact forged by the God of Alchemy himself—the pinnacle of the alchemical craft, a feat of technology far beyond mortal comprehension.
Whatever crossed his mind, the mirror would project an image to match.
It was thanks to this artifact that the God of Alchemy had detected Lolth's impending attack in advance.
Soon, Anbaixiu's face appeared in the mirror, along with a dingy alleyway where a mob of furious adventurers had surrounded him.
The God of Alchemy felt a pang of weariness. This brat truly stirred up trouble every waking moment.
Night had fallen over Sweetdew City in the desert, and the frigid wind blew cold enough to freeze water droplets into frost.
The moment Anbaixiu stepped out of the tavern, a gang of adventurers cornered him in an alley nearby.
Anbaixiu sighed. "Why is every tavern surrounded by alleys so convenient for ambushing people?"
Whether in the City of Alchemy or Sweetdew City, the layout was always identical. It was as if these adventurer taverns could never bear the light of day, cradled in a web of alleyways so that anyone leaving had no choice but to pass through such dark corners.
"It's this bastard!"
The orc ranger, his face swathed in bandages, pointed at Anbaixiu, his voice as pathetic as a wail.
That earlier mob-beating had broken several of the orc ranger's bones. Worse still, their captain was too stingy to spare even a single healing potion on him.
The reason was that after the duo got thrashed, their adventuring company had to pay a huge sum in damages to the tavern.
The tavern had dared to demand three hundred gold coins for a single rickety table, and even the broken bottles used to pummel them were billed at one gold coin apiece.
The price was utterly insane—those bottles hadn't been worth a single gold coin even when full of booze! The tavern's excuse for the markup was that since people had drunk from them, some might have been future legends, giving them great commemorative value and justifying the cost.
The final figure on the bill was enough to make the adventuring company vomit blood.
Suddenly saddled with such a mountain of debt, the company captain had wanted to slaughter the two on the spot. But the tavern didn't care about their internal squabbles; if they wanted to keep operating in Sweetdew City, they had to pay up.
Unable to swallow this indignity, they naturally had to seek out Anbaixiu for revenge.
Perhaps they could even squeeze some compensation out of this alchemist to soften their losses; alchemists were usually loaded.
After waiting until the chilling, windy night, they had finally trapped him in the alley.
"Brat, hand over everything valuable you have, then cut off one of your own arms, and we might consider sparing your life."
The speaker was a tall tiefling clad in heavy black armor. Even his head was completely encased, and the strange engravings across the metal made him look sinister and terrifying.
"A Hellrider? A tiefling Hellrider... Don't tell me that armor is a family heirloom?"
Anbaixiu looked genuinely astonished. Hellriders on their own were nothing extraordinary, but paired with being a tiefling, the combination was truly unusual.
Once, there was a noble angel named Zariel. Despising her peers' weakness toward the infernal powers, she had raised an army on her own initiative and charged into the Hells, intent on exterminating all the archdevils.
Zariel was indeed incomparably mighty and had briefly achieved staggering victories. Unfortunately, not all the warriors who followed her shared an angel's unyielding resolve.
A portion of them were terrified out of their wits by the horrors of Hell and chose to desert.
Zariel had left a fallback for the crusade: a powerful portal connecting Hell to the mortal realm, large enough for angels to pass through.
Yet to conceal their treachery, these deserters not only slipped through the portal back to the mortal realm, but destroyed the portal behind them.
Trapped forever and cut off from the mortal world, Angel Zariel was overwhelmed by endless hordes of devils and ultimately captured.
Brought low by betrayal, Zariel ultimately failed to withstand Hell's corruption. Renouncing her former grace, she fell and became a devil. This newly minted archdevil became the ruler of the first layer of Hell, harboring an eternal grudge against the knights who had betrayed her.
And among those Hellriders, a great many were tieflings.
Tieflings, already bearing fiendish blood, possessed high resistance to infernal environments and should have been Zariel's greatest asset. Who could have imagined that the tieflings would flee the fastest? Perhaps the baseness in their blood had been awakened by Hell's atmosphere.
In any case, that was all ancient history.
Yet due to Zariel's fall, the truth of those Hellriders' betrayal had become murky. Some believed Zariel's corruption had forced the knights to retreat, while others knew that the knights' betrayal was what drove her to fall.
Anbaixiu knew the truth because he had once known a Hellrider who had lived for ages. His body had fully transformed into a devil's, yet he had tormented himself with guilt over that ancient betrayal for centuries before finally finding release with Anbaixiu's help.
Before his death, he had confessed his sins before Anbaixiu. To ensure his soul would never fall into Hell, he had even asked Anbaixiu to obliterate it completely. It was for this very purpose that Anbaixiu had dabbled in necromancy for the first time, spending five full days to shred the soul to pieces—a process that was far from pleasant.
Yet the Hellrider endured that excruciating torment akin to being sliced to ribbons, finally perishing at Anbaixiu's hands.
At the time, Anbaixiu had remarked that if this Hellrider had displayed such unyielding willpower while following Zariel, he would never have spent his entire life drowning in guilt.
The fellow standing before him wearing Hellrider armor evidently subscribed to the alternative narrative.
The tiefling captain had not expected Anbaixiu to recognize the origins of his armor. With a swagger of pride, he declared, "This is a badge of honor from my ancestor's crusade into Hell! Seeing that you have some worldly knowledge, we'll waive the arm, but you're still leaving here with at least one broken leg."
Anbaixiu rolled his eyes. The tiefling had clearly been fed a load of nonsense by his ancestors.
Still, that hardly mattered. Anbaixiu had little interest in the feud between an archdevil and her traitors.
Calmly, Anbaixiu addressed the tiefling, "Captain, did you just say you were going to break my leg and take everything valuable I own?"
"What, you think you still stand a chance?"
Blades slid from their sheaths, arrows were notched and aimed, and magical light coalesced atop staves.
This was an experienced adventuring company. Even when confronting a solitary alchemist, they showed no carelessness; the moment he made any suspicious move, they would strike like thunder.
Anbaixiu raised both hands and said, "Then allow me to open my magical storage space to retrieve the goods."
"I'd advise you not to pull any foolish tricks. Right now, you get to live, but if you anger us, no one will give a damn if we slaughter you," the tiefling captain threatened.
"Rest assured, I promise not to make any sudden moves." Anbaixiu opened his personal pocket space. Just as the spatial rift tore open, he added, "Though they might not be as cooperative."
Before the adventurers could react, over a dozen drones zipped out from the spatial rift, loosing a dense volley of flying darts with sharp whistling hisses.
Cries of agony erupted one after another, and adventurers without armor collapsed across the ground in heaps.
Anbaixiu knew the darts lacked raw killing power, so every one of them was coated in potent paralytic poison. None of these adventurers were elves immune to such effects, so down they went the moment they were struck.
The only ones still standing were the heavily armored tiefling captain and a lucky wizard whose companion had blocked the initial wave of darts.
Yet the moment his shield of meat tumbled over, he caught a dart of his own.
The Shield spell failed him completely due to his shoddy spellcasting. The dart not only punched right through the magical barrier but planted itself square in his groin.
In the end, only the tiefling Hellrider remained on his feet.
Though shocked by his companions' sudden collapse, realizing the darts could not pierce his plate armor emboldened the captain. He raised his longsword toward Anbaixiu.
"Deceitful human! I've changed my mind. I'm chopping off all four of your limbs, then shoving this scrap-metal junk down your throat!"
Flames erupted along the blade as he swung to cut Anbaixiu down.
Yet the spatial rift had not closed. Two massive black shadows shot out, slamming the Hellrider straight into the dirt.
They were black gargoyles, each larger than a tiger—the very ones Heji Stone had gifted him long ago.
He hadn't had occasion to use them before, and unleashing them against a second-rate Hellrider was honestly severe overkill.
The obsidian gargoyles pinned the tiefling's limbs, pressing him firmly to the earth no matter how wildly he struggled.
Anbaixiu strolled over to the tiefling's side and said, "See? I'm a man of my word. I didn't make a single sudden move. Now, let's return to our earlier discussion regarding valuables... That Hellrider armor of yours looks quite fine. Ought to fetch a pretty penny, don't you think?"
Chapter 281