In the dim, filthy sewer, an evil lich interrogated an ugly, twisted hag for information about ascending to godhood.
No matter how one looked at it, the scene resembled the prelude to an evil archvillain hatching a sinister scheme.
In truth, however, Anbaixiu had not managed to pry anything useful from the hag's mouth.
The hag had merely heard a prophecy from other hags.
"The blasphemous experiment ultimately succeeded after all, only to be hidden away in the sewers of the City of Alchemy. It is a treasure that materializes divine power; anyone who obtains it can become a true god."
The hag spoke with utter gravity, but having heard it, Anbaixiu only felt that mortals were truly far too foolish.
If the City of Alchemy had genuinely produced a treasure capable of granting godhood, would they have waited until now? And hidden it in the sewers, no less?
If they had simply given it to that enigmatic Lord Speaker, wouldn't the City of Alchemy have resolved its economic crisis right then and there? Would they need to struggle as hard as they were now?
Besides, becoming a god was hardly so simple—it was nothing more than the delusion of mortals.
If one were to ask who on this continent stood closest to the gods, it would inevitably be legends.
So-called legends were simply powerful individuals who had transcended the mortal realm yet had not ascended to godhood. Hence, legends were also known as demigods; each had already grasped a vestige of divine power, allowing them to disregard mortal rules to a certain degree.
The legendary boon Anbaixiu possessed was the ability to break rules by directly fashioning blank souls—a power over rules that only deities could wield.
Yet even for a legend, the distance to true divinity remained vast.
This sort of thing was somewhat like a civil service post: one position per seat. It was not something you could claim just by being capable.
Generally speaking, there were only two possibilities for a mortal to become a god.
The first was sheer luck: gaining the favor of that Primordial Creator. This God above Gods could designate any living being a deity, or even bestow a godhead upon an inanimate object. There were no prerequisites and no side effects; so long as He nodded in assent, one would ascend to the heavens in a single leap.
It was just that Anbaixiu had never heard of anyone actually being such a lucky bastard.
The second path was naturally to become a legend first, which was equivalent to passing the initial written exam for godhood, after which one simply had to wait patiently. With good fortune, a deity might be willing to help you become a new god—for instance, by sacrificing themselves and relinquishing their godhead to you.
Indeed, under ordinary circumstances, these were the only two paths to godhood.
Without the old guard stepping down, a new god could not take their place.
Otherwise, with several hundred legends roaming this continent, wouldn't they have all ascended to the divine throne long ago?
Naturally, there was also the most outrageous possibility spoken of in legend: forging a new path oneself, carving out an extra seat among the pantheon where positions were strictly one-to-one.
Rumor had it that the God of Alchemy was a true new god who had forged a novel godhead and obtained the acknowledgment of the Primordial Creator God, who permitted him to become a new deity.
See the catch? Even if you were extraordinary enough to blaze a trail of your own, you still needed the Primordial God to nod before you could achieve divinity.
If that Being refused to nod, no matter how formidable you were, you remained nothing more than a legend.
Mortals harbored so many unrealistic fantasies about gods that they actually believed rumors claiming one could ascend just by grabbing some treasure.
Yet upon deeper reflection, Anbaixiu felt something was not quite right.
It was one thing for the druids of small clans or creatures like hags to be ignorant, but the Ryan Empire possessed plenty of legends; they would not fall for such rumors so easily. Yet paladins of the Ryan Empire had indeed appeared in the City of Alchemy and were preparing to explore the sewers. There definitely had to be something in this wretched place.
Seeing Anbaixiu lapse into silence, the hag assumed he was also after the prophesied treasure. She hurried to say, "There are still many details to the prophecy! Like the time, the location, and many portents! Swear in the name of the gods that if you spare me, I'll tell you every last one of those details!"
Hearing this, Anbaixiu said coldly, "Prophecy? Prophecy is bullshit."
The hag stared at Anbaixiu in shock, unable to fathom how he could utter such words. He was a wizard of the School of Divination! If Anbaixiu did not even believe in the power of prophecy, how was that any different from desecrating the deity he worshipped?
Anbaixiu truly did not believe in prophecy. More accurately, he had abandoned the path of the School of Divination.
The reason was simple: his soul was not so noble, and he could not unite knowledge with action.
Once you mastered the power of divination, you had to believe everything the prophecy revealed. You could not hail it as divine will when it favored you, yet proclaim your fate was in your own hands the moment an unfavorable prophecy arose.
The laws of the world would never indulge someone with such double standards.
And if one could not fully accept fate's decree, learning of impending misfortune would only drive a person to anxious restlessness and constant dread. They would exhaust every means to avert that dire future, ultimately speeding toward their demise through their own desperate meddling.
The terror of death paled before the terror of waiting for death to arrive; such torment could drive anyone mad.
Anbaixiu had never possessed the temperament to accept fate with equanimity; otherwise, he would not have stubbornly pursued immortality. Perhaps because of this very hypocrisy in his heart, when he advanced to become a legend, the legendary boon he received had nothing whatsoever to do with the School of Divination.
It was precisely for this reason that Anbaixiu finally accepted his own weakness and resolved to take another path.
Aside from bringing financial strain, turning into a lich was partly tied to this choice. Still, it had been centuries of hard work, so the power of the School of Divination had not vanished entirely; it merely remained frozen forever at the cusp of advancing to legendary status, incapable of progressing any further.
This was also the main reason Anbaixiu had ended up as a counterfeit legend. Having personally cast aside his greatest specialty, catching up to stand on the same starting line as other legends required an enormous amount of time.
Yet there was no need to explain these details to a hag. Anbaixiu merely raised his hand slowly, a skinning knife slipping between his fingers, and said to her, "It seems your usefulness ends here."
"No, wait!"
At the sight of the skinning knife in Anbaixiu's hand, the hag turned pale with terror and frantically begged for mercy.
Caring nothing for what she had to say, Anbaixiu brought his blade down cleanly, slicing off the hag's scalp, which bore only a few sparse hairs.
Foul, reeking blood splattered outward. The skin atop the hag's head was completely flayed away, exposing her pale cranium.
Meanwhile, the hag scalp in Anbaixiu's hand throbbed continuously as if it were alive, its dense patterns squirming like countless maggots.
A truly repulsive thing, yet it was the most valuable item on a hag's body.
When flayed alive from a hag, the scalp would concentrate the vast majority of her power. With just a few ingredients, one could brew an alchemical potion that permanently increased an attribute. Perhaps it would bolster strength, enhance intelligence, or grant agility—it all depended on which supplementary ingredients were added.
Although such potions only worked on those below legendary status, they were still enough to fetch tens of thousands of gold coins. With the prices of all sorts of materials skyrocketing in the City of Alchemy, Anbaixiu was confident he could sell this potion for forty to fifty thousand gold coins.
Back when the hag had offered only twenty thousand gold coins, Anbaixiu had already sentenced her to death. Unless she could offer more than the value of her own scalp, how could he ever agree to spare her?
Having had her scalp stripped away, the hag collapsed limp onto the ground, stripped of all her strength. Now more fragile than an ordinary mortal, she did not even need Anbaixiu to finish her off; the toxic stench saturating the air quickly invaded her body, sending her into fatal convulsions.
Deprived of the protection of magical power, the sewer environment was deadly.
Anbaixiu cautiously extracted the hag's soul, turned her corpse into a skeletal puppet while he was at it, and walked off toward another direction in the sewer.
Although this outing had yielded a bountiful harvest, Anbaixiu had not forgotten his true objective.
He had come to catch slimes; he only hoped there were no mistakes in the location Naomi had marked out.
Chapter 31