Anbaixiu was a man who never forgot his original purpose: no matter where he went or what he busied himself with, his ultimate goal was always to turn a tidy profit.
Now that the orcs and Ryan were at each other's throats again, it would be an absolute crying shame to let such a grand spectacle pass by without raking in some gold.
The last time Ryan had clashed with the orcs, Anbaixiu had been fully occupied with sorting out Lolth the Spider Queen's divine portfolio. Dealing in divine authority had naturally taken precedence over war profiteering, causing him to miss his window of opportunity back then.
By the time he had finally freed up his hands, the orcs had already suffered a crushing defeat at Ryan's hands.
This time, the timing was immaculate. The orcs had won a round, restoring the two sides to a state of rough parity, and Anbaixiu's undead legions happened to have an eager market.
Surely the orcs wouldn't turn down an extra horde of cannon fodder to burn through Ryan's Holy Light. And if those greenskins weren't interested, Anbaixiu wouldn't mind having a friendly chat with Ryan instead—after all, the undead weren't exclusively bred to fight paladins; slaughtering orcs would undoubtedly yield even greater efficiency.
However, he needed a middleman.
After racking his brains, Anbaixiu realized he didn't know a single soul among the orcs.
To be precise, every orc he had ever known was almost certainly dead.
In the old days, his relationship with the orcs had consisted entirely of hatred. With his revenge long accomplished, he genuinely had no acquaintances left in those parts.
Still, it was hardly a crisis. Anbaixiu's network was anything but narrow.
In fact, it was vast enough that he didn't even have to hunt for a contact himself before Gustavo Fring came knocking on his door.
Through the magic mirror appeared the dark-skinned alchemist's stern, unsmiling face. Without wasting a breath, he cut straight to the chase: "I have contacts among the orcs. I want to sell your undead troops to them. They're feeling exceptionally generous right now—we can make a killing."
Anbaixiu broke into an instant grin. "Great minds think alike! I had no idea you maintained connections with the orcs."
"Back in the day, the City of Alchemy shipped goods to every kingdom except the Emerald Dream Forest. So, bottom line: can you work overtime to churn out the Simulated Souls?"
That was Gustavo Fring's primary concern.
Ever since acquiring that artifact gold coin, Gustavo Fring had run dozens of transmutation experiments.
His ultimate conclusion was that the costs Anbaixiu had quoted during their initial pitch hadn't been inflated in the slightest. That discovery had given Gustavo Fring a whole new level of respect for Anbaixiu.
The lich clearly possessed an insatiable love for money, yet once a partnership was struck, he proved remarkably honest—at least when it came to not padding expenses to swindle his partner.
That said, the artifact gold coin was an astonishing drain on resources. If he didn't recoup his investment quickly, even he would struggle to keep afloat.
"I assumed you would urge the dwarf king to place an order first," Anbaixiu noted.
Earlier, Gustavo Fring had mentioned taking the dwarven route in hopes of turning a quick profit to offset their initial overhead.
Yet there had been no news from the dwarves, and instead, he was bringing up orcish business first, which caught Anbaixiu somewhat off guard.
Gustavo Fring replied, "Deals already in the palm of your hand can wait. Deals that require fierce competition must be seized without delay, wouldn't you agree? Besides, the dwarf king needs more proof that your undead are truly effective. After all, our opponent is Ryan."
Anbaixiu nodded in agreement with the assessment.
Pitting the undead against paladins sounded absurd on paper, so it was only natural for the dwarf king to harbor doubts.
Anbaixiu asked, "Do you plan to sell the Small Fry Legion to the orcs?"
"It's one of the options, and our highest-margin product. But can undead designed for the sea function effectively on land?" Gustavo Fring voiced his concern. This was their first export batch; any malfunction would deal a catastrophic blow to their brand.
"The Small Fry Legion performs brilliantly when deployed underwater because the seawater's buoyancy suspends them perfectly in the depths. On land, however, they can only be dropped directly from the sky, which slightly diminishes their effectiveness. But rest assured, dirt-cheap cost is our greatest advantage. Furthermore, I can lend out an airship to carry out high-altitude bombardment..."
Anbaixiu had long since mapped out how his undead units would operate on dry land. Although the Small Fry Legion couldn't swim freely through the open air, they had no trouble calibrating their trajectories mid-fall. As long as they were dropped from high enough altitudes, their hit rate remained extraordinarily reliable.
The only catch was that their destructive impact might be somewhat blunted. The people of Ryan were superbly equipped, far outclassing the sea beasts who relied solely on thick hides and tough scales.
Land-dwelling humans possessed the blessing of fire, which made metal forging a simple matter.
Aquatic races, by contrast, had little choice but to rely on natural scales as armor, or at best strap a few giant seashells onto their torsos.
Consequently, the Small Fry Legion would either need metal armor-piercing arrowheads mounted in bulk onto their snouts, or rely on the toxic payload released by the crushed air undead packed inside.
The people of Ryan could certainly purify such toxins with Holy Light, but the Small Fry Legion wasn't named 'Small Fry' under any illusion of devastating lethality. From the very beginning, they were designed as pure consumables. As long as they drained Ryan's holy magic reserves on a massive scale, the transaction was an undeniable success.
No matter how formidable those paladins and clerics of light were, their mana reserves were never bottomless.
"The orcs are no pushovers in battle either. The fact that they managed to push Ryan back proves they're prepared for total war. We're merely selling mercenaries, not deciding the ultimate outcome of the conflict. So long as the merchandise is worthy of the client's gold, our job is done."
Anbaixiu's conclusion earned Gustavo Fring's full agreement. That was precisely how an alchemist ought to think: once the goods were delivered, barring any manufacturing defects, how the client chose to deploy them was entirely their own affair.
With the details settled, Gustavo Fring prepared to set off immediately for the Orc Mountains, radiating supreme confidence.
Just before severing the connection, however, Gustavo couldn't resist speaking up: "I thought you'd refuse, or at least hesitate for a moment."
Anbaixiu blinked in surprise. "Why? Why on earth would I turn down a chance to make money?"
Gustavo Fring answered, "The old you wouldn't have agreed so readily. Surely you've noticed it yourself: in the past, you weren't cruel or bloodthirsty. You preferred kidnapping people for ransom, and you were even willing to save the world. My old friend, you've changed lately. You're beginning to look more and more like a proper lich."
Anbaixiu was momentarily stunned. It was an odd remark. What did he mean, 'more like a proper lich'?
He *was* a lich to begin with.
Yet deep down, Anbaixiu felt the prick of truth.
Ever since Mister Misfortune's death, what little humanity he had left had begun dissipating at alarming speed.
Whether he cared to admit it or not, when he first underwent transformation into a lich, he had still clung to a great deal of mortal human morality. He avoided wanton slaughter, shunned senseless torture, and possessed a restraint rarely found among other undead.
Yet now, Anbaixiu was masterminding an all-out war in the oceanic depths. While it might look like a necessary response to circumstance, Anbaixiu knew in his heart that he was rapidly gravitating toward becoming a cold, unfeeling lich.
Before long, he would be just like the Rose of Decay, enslaving other races without a shred of guilt, all to amass greater wealth for himself.
Anbaixiu couldn't help pondering: was this truly a good thing?
Setting aside all emotional considerations and analyzing it purely rationally, becoming more like a lich didn't seem inherently bad. In fact, it was an inevitable outcome.
The undead possessed only sensory perceptions; to them, the world was as dry as an instructional manual, incapable of stirring any profound emotional resonance. The solitary spark of joy remaining for Anbaixiu was the thrill of accumulating more wealth.
Bereft of emotional stimulation, one naturally grew numb. That was the fundamental reason why the undead stripped away their own humanity.
And the process was entirely irreversible. Anbaixiu was bound to sink deeper and deeper into his obsession with riches, steadily descending into the abyss. For a lich, such an existence was effectively a form of eternal torment.
Because fleeting bursts of joy could never last, Anbaixiu's hunger for wealth would only swell, until one day, even having the riches of the entire world within his grasp would fall short of satisfying his appetite.
When that day arrived, it would mean eternal agony.
Yet Anbaixiu quickly brushed aside these pointless musings. Shaking his head, he muttered to himself, "Who cares? That's countless years down the road. For now, I might as well enjoy living my life in wealth." Humming a jaunty tune, Anbaixiu strolled into his private demiplane and threw himself into crafting Simulated Souls.
As the days slipped by, a steady stream of good news found its way to Anbaixiu.
Once the first shipment of the Small Fry Legion was delivered into the hands of the orcs, it produced miraculous results during a nighttime raid on a Ryan city.
The engagement was a textbook tactical masterclass. The orcs had plotted a nocturnal assault on a Ryan settlement, only for word to leak beforehand. The Ryan forces set an ambush along their march, springing a counter-trap the moment the orcish vanguard appeared.
Plunged into instant chaos, the orcs routed in disarray.
Seeing the orc main force in full flight, the Ryan troops gave immediate pursuit.
Yet that very pursuit proved Ryan's undoing. Overconfidence caused the Ryan formations to stretch and warp, shattering their defensive legion wards. Seizing that fleeting window, the orcish commander barked an order, and the *Black Tide* hovering above unleashed a high-altitude bombardment.
Under the cover of night, the unassuming legions of undead small fry rained from the heavens like a tempest of steel.
At first, the Ryan soldiers paid it little mind—thinking it was nothing more than an arrow volley that their enchanted armor could easily deflect... or so they wished.
This particular batch of the Small Fry Legion had been fitted with armor-piercing heads. Combined with terminal falling velocity and self-correcting homing capabilities, the kinetic devastation was staggering.
Only the heavy plate armor of the paladins could withstand the barrage, but the orc commander had anticipated as much. He deliberately bypassed the paladins, concentrating the aerial strikes entirely on Ryan's auxiliary infantry. The results were devastating, claiming over a thousand lives in the very first drop.
Immediately afterward, the air undead sealed within the Small Fry Mark I units were released, coating the ground in a lethal zone of virulent poison. Any Ryan soldier who stepped within withered into convulsions and perished in seconds.
Because the venom struck with such terrifying speed, many clerics of light collapsed twitching in death before they could even weave the Holy Light to purge the necrotic magic.
In the pitch-black darkness, the toxic fog worked even better. Bewildered Ryan soldiers blundered headlong into the mist, sending the casualty count soaring.
A full ten minutes elapsed before the Ryan forces finally diagnosed the threat and unleashed Holy Light to dispel the corruption.
Yet those brief ten minutes had bled Ryan white. At that precise moment, the orcs executed a lightning about-face, swarming in from all directions to pin Ryan's paladin core in a vice grip.
As it turned out, the leak regarding the nighttime raid had been an intentional ruse from the start. Their actual target had never been the town, but Ryan's main army.
In all their decades of campaigning against the orcs, this marked the first time Ryan had suffered a complete and utter tactical outmaneuvering. The orcs of the past had never possessed the cunning for such stratagems.
What was far more terrifying than the scheme itself was that the orcs—who historically did nothing but roar and charge blindly forward—had actually demonstrated the discipline to execute such a maneuver. That was no trivial feat.
A battle plan could never be shared in full with common grunts. Thus, during the initial feigned retreat, many orcs had genuinely believed they were losing; once a retreat began, formations snapped and morale disintegrated.
A feigned rout was impossible without elite troops, for an undisciplined retreat almost invariably turned into a genuine slaughter.
Since when had the orcs possessed an elite army capable of executing orders with such iron discipline? It defied their very nature.
Yet the brutal reality stared Ryan in the face. Their warriors had to fight tooth and nail, sacrificing over a thousand paladins just to carve a bloody path of escape.
Much of the credit belonged to the paladins' nearly unbreakable resolve; fearless in the face of death, they battered through the encirclement with Divine Smites.
Following this bitter clash, the Ryan command recognized the orcs' newfound menace and was forced to contract its forces into fortified strongholds, awaiting reinforcements.
Anbaixiu, naturally, made a handsome fortune. The orcs were thoroughly thrilled with the aerial bombardment service, and Anbaixiu also learned the name of the orcish commander: Urbano Pacheco, a remarkably young orc barely twenty years of age, and far from a legendary figure.
Such a thing was practically unheard of in orc society. Who would ever accept the command of a youngling devoid of overwhelming personal prowess?
Anbaixiu was intensely curious about how this young orc had secured the mantle of commander, knowing full well that in orcish hierarchy, claiming supreme military command required slaying the previous commander in single combat.
Yet the orcs were hardly going to share their secrets with Anbaixiu. He could only speculate that it was tied to Gruumsh, the chief orc deity; Urbano Pacheco was almost certainly a mortal blessed by his god.
As to the precise nature of that blessing, Anbaixiu could only guess.
It could hardly be an impartation of tactical genius, could it? The orc deity was notoriously deficient in strategic finesse; Gruumsh was more of a reckless berserker, who had once challenged the elven high god Corellon to single combat... only to have an eye shot out for his trouble.
Still, surviving that was impressive enough. Given Corellon's terrifying might, challenging Corellon in his prime and walking away with merely a lost eye proved Gruumsh fully earned his seat among the greater deities.
Having secured their triumph, the orcs were in no rush to advance further. Instead, they focused on entrenching a fortified bridgehead outside the mountains, adopting a methodical, grinding strategy strikingly similar to Ryan's earlier conquest of the desert.
The Ryan military felt profoundly humiliated; never before had they endured such disgrace.
In the end, they had no choice but to reassign Ange Watson to this front.
In that moment, an empire on the brink of fracturing set aside its internal feuds. Just as Anbaixiu had predicted, an external crisis would only forge Ryan's splintering factions back into unity rather than shattering it apart.
Ange Watson did not disappoint. Upon taking the field, he delivered a masterclass in the art of war, claiming three consecutive victories and slaying one of the orc legends.
Having witnessed Anbaixiu's undead legions firsthand and even commanded them personally, Ange ensured the orcs could no longer pull off any surprise tactical ambushes. Against prepared Ryan forces, the Small Fry Legion struggled to yield significant results.
Just when it seemed the orcs were about to be driven back into the peaks, Urbano Pacheco executed an absurd flanking maneuver. No one could fathom how this young commander had slipped his troops past Ryan's dense cordon, striking straight into Ange Watson's rear. The raid torched the bulk of his supply train and captured countless Ryan civilians, forcing Ange to abandon the orcish fortress he had been on the verge of capturing.
Urbano Pacheco successfully preserved his stronghold, though the orcs suffered grievous casualties. Ryan, meanwhile, failed in its strategic objective of driving the orcs back into the mountains. Both sides took a bloody nose, yet both chose without hesitation to press on with the war.
While the land war ground into a bitter stalemate, welcome tidings were flowing into Anbaixiu's hands from another corner.
In the struggle over the Volcanic Sea, Aige had notched victory after victory. Her territory had expanded from two initial footholds into double digits. The advantage of undead underwater was overwhelming; in the absence of Holy Light to counter them, they were the undisputed kings of the deep.
Aige was shrewd as well. Before her enemies could devise a countermeasure, she chose not to stretch herself thin holding ground, focusing instead on depleting the enemy's numbers.
Her primary target was the ixitxachitl. As corpse after corpse of the devil rays was traded over, the merfolk delivered a steady stream of exiled convicts.
Only upon tallying them did Anbaixiu realize just how many merfolk were condemned for the crime of 'lustful indulgence'—over ten thousand merfolk were now willing to submit to Aige's rule.
A population of that size was more than enough to establish a respectable merfolk tribe.
Aige accordingly paused her military campaign, shifting her focus to gathering the merfolk's power of faith.
For Aige, this was an agonizingly difficult endeavor, as she remained a mere mortal.
Even as a legend, without acquiring a divine portfolio, she had no means of directly channeling faith. She could only slowly and patiently assimilate the power of faith into her physical form over time—a painfully sluggish process.
Yet smooth sailing could never last forever; the Goddess of Fate was notorious for tossing out a few sweets only to deliver a vicious kick to the shins.
Just as Anbaixiu's faction established absolute dominance, the kuo-toa, ixitxachitl, and sahuagin formed a temporary alliance.
This time, it was no loose, fragile pact.
Rather, the deities backing all three races had agreed to collaborate, issuing divine decrees commanding their faithful to unite and crush Anbaixiu's fledgling power.
To settle the fate of the Volcanic Sea swiftly and minimize unnecessary slaughter, the three deities dispatched an invitation, summoning Aige to take part in a war game.
If Aige lost, she would immediately lead all her subordinates out of the Volcanic Sea. If she won, the three deities pledged to bestow a portion of their own power, sparing Aige the grueling process of accumulating faith and elevating her directly to godhood.
Yet the moment Anbaixiu laid eyes on the formal invitation, he sneered and turned to Aige: "Do those three gods take us for complete fools? They aren't interested in playing any war game—they want to wait until you ascend to godhood so they can tear you to pieces and devour you whole!"
Chapter 442