The carriage jolted along the road. Inside, Isabel watched the castle draw steadily closer, her heart weighed down by mixed emotions.
After the paladins had arrived, all the humans in the castle were dismissed, forcing Isabel to return to her former home territory.
The lord who had once persecuted her was already dead, his lands annexed by the Porcupine Knight. So, upon receiving Anbaixiu's summons, this Porcupine Knight swiftly tracked down Isabel and her brother, loaded them into a carriage, and dispatched them straight back toward the castle.
Sitting beside Isabel, Raul appeared excessively excited. He continually rubbed the skeletal controller in his hands. Even though the aberrant skeleton linked to it had long since been destroyed, Raul still couldn't bear to part with the useless trinket.
It was proof that he had once stood above his peers, the physical token of his very first taste of the privileges of power.
Thus, returning to that castle and returning beneath that master's banner filled Raul with intense anticipation. He was practically itching to serve Lord Lich once more.
Unlike her brother, Isabel harbored no such longing to return.
Granted, that Lord Lich was far more benevolent than other lords, but what could the ultimate fate of any human who served an undead truly be? Surely it would end in being turned into a zombie or a skeleton.
Even if one were transformed only after dying of natural causes, eternal servitude remained the inescapable end.
Could such a fate truly be considered a blessing?
Isabel had striven so desperately to become an alchemist precisely because she refused to resign herself to her lot in life. She refused to end up like the other girls her age, marrying some unremarkable man off the cuff, wrecking her body with backbreaking labor, bearing children, and closing her eyes forever after a few short years.
She did not want to be laid in a grave in her thirties or forties. She wanted a different life.
Fortunately, Raul had always supported her, affording Isabel enough spare time to learn to read and write and to "steal lessons" wherever she could. When she finally became an apprentice alchemist, she had believed that diligence alone could alter her destiny—only to discover that, after several years, her master had taught her virtually nothing.
Alchemy was supreme, exalted knowledge; mere hard work was nowhere near enough to pay its tuition.
At first, remaining an apprentice for the rest of her life had seemed acceptable. It paid more than tilling the soil and was far less exhausting; perhaps she might even live past fifty.
Yet who could have anticipated the relentless string of disasters? Heavier taxes, persecution, flight, and ultimately becoming a lich's servant.
Memories of everything she had experienced in the castle flashed through Isabel's mind. Was she truly destined to spend the rest of her days within those stone walls?
Isabel felt utterly lost. She was merely a girl raised in the countryside. Becoming an alchemical apprentice was already the pinnacle of her existence; her modest intellect and worldly experience were nowhere near enough to answer such complex dilemmas.
Yet deep within her chest lingered an unyielding reluctance.
If only she had been blessed with a good teacher, would her life have turned out differently?
Whenever the thought of a teacher crossed her mind, the figure that surfaced was not that stern, bald old man, but rather the young ghost she had glimpsed a handful of times in the castle.
That teacher had offered her guidance only a few times, yet she had learned more from those brief encounters than from all her previous years combined.
*Right... since Lord Lich is unharmed, Teacher ought to be safe and sound within the castle as well. Perhaps I can seek some guidance the next time we cross paths.*
At the thought of that generous instructor, Isabel found herself considerably comforted.
At any rate, she was still young. There was plenty of time before she would ever be turned into an undead.
The wheels rolled on until they came to a halt before the castle.
The same familiar, somber gloom hung in the air. Even under a clear, bright sky, the fortress seemed perpetually shrouded in shadow.
Stepping inside, Isabel immediately saw the imposing Lord Lich, his skeletal frame as terrifying as ever.
Upon spotting Isabel and Raul, Anbaixiu had no intention of wasting breath on pleasantries. He tossed a fresh controller straight to Raul and commanded, "The paladins made an utter mess of the castle. Raul, here is a batch of construction skeletons. You are in charge of restoring everything to how it was."
Cradling the new undead controller, Raul trembled with sheer excitement.
As for Isabel, Anbaixiu led the young girl directly into a new laboratory, using Mage Hand to levitate a heavy stack of documents over to her.
"You have one night to finish reading these materials. Starting tomorrow, the assembly of aberrant skeletons will be in your hands. This is my design for an aberrant skeleton production line; your duty is to assemble this small-scale line."
Anbaixiu's words left Isabel completely dumbfounded.
What aberrant skeletons? What production line? And what on earth was she supposed to finish in a single night?
Yet Anbaixiu had no intention of offering explanations. Tossing her a slim booklet, he added, "This is the table of contents."
Leaving behind that final remark, Anbaixiu exited the laboratory, leaving Isabel standing alone in a daze.
There had been no polite greetings upon their reunion, no inquiry into what she had endured, nor any reprimand for her flight. That brisk, pragmatic efficiency was precisely as it had always been.
In the eyes of this Lord Lich, she was merely an instrument endowed with intellect.
Resigned, Isabel picked up the booklet labeled as the table of contents and flipped it open. Inside lay entirely novel alchemical knowledge.
Moments later, Isabel was completely engrossed. Creating the undead ought to have fallen strictly within the domain of necromancy; while not entirely divorced from alchemy, the two disciplines were fundamentally distinct. Isabel possessed no spellcasting ability, and her alchemy remained limited to mixing various reagents to achieve specific reactions. Consequently, casting Animate Dead to turn bones into undead was entirely beyond her power.
Yet Anbaixiu had modified the production process of aberrant skeletons. Isabel would not need to directly manufacture true undead herself; her duties were far more akin to preparing raw materials on a massive scale.
Once the skeletal remains were processed according to Anbaixiu's exacting specifications, they would be fed into a furnace suffused with dark magical power, where the bones would automatically transform into undead and emerge as functional puppets.
It sounded straightforward enough, but executing it was anything but simple.
Even though Isabel was merely a technician following instructions, the labyrinth of intricate formulas and principles made her head spin. And this booklet was merely a concise summary; the true operational details were buried within that thick stack of reference documents.
It was hard to imagine just how much painstaking effort the Lord Lich must have poured into deconstructing complex necromantic magic and re-engineering it into an assembly-line technology that ordinary mortals could operate.
If one could resolve the core issue of the dark mana furnace, any petty lord across the realm could produce their very own undead legion.
Isabel was filled with immense admiration for the Lord Lich's ingenuity. Setting race aside, he was an admirable, profoundly erudite scholar who would easily hold his own even in a gathering of prodigies like the City of Alchemy.
She could only wonder why she had never heard his name before.
Isabel brushed aside her earlier anxieties and reservations. This was no time to brood over the future; she had to finish the Lord Lich's assignment first, lest she end up as one of the raw materials for the next project.
Meanwhile, Raul was throwing himself into his work with equal vigor.
Anbaixiu had provided him with several uniquely shaped skeletons, placing him in charge of repairing the damaged sections of the castle. The paladins had wreaked terrible havoc while digging for the phylactery, leaving countless pits and craters that had yet to be filled. Raul's workload was remarkably heavy. Moreover, while these peculiarly structured skeletons were thoroughly obedient, they were nowhere near as nimble as living humans. He couldn't help wishing the Lord Lich would assign him a few dozen human subordinates; that would make the labor vastly easier.
Still, Raul dared not make any demands of his master. Accustomed to serving under feudal lords, he understood his station all too well: only after executing his master's commands to perfection would he possess any right to make suggestions.
With both siblings hard at work, Anbaixiu retreated to his personal laboratory with peace of mind.
He still could not get those magic-draining shortswords of the elves out of his head, convinced there had to be some special secret hidden within them.
The enchantment upon the blades was not particularly complex. From Anbaixiu's perspective, it seemed inspired by the innate abilities of the phaerimm. That creature resembled a long cloth sack sprouting claws, its gaping maw ringed with razor-sharp fangs, presenting an exceedingly hideous and terrifying visage.
Though it appeared to attack with claws and teeth, the phaerimm was actually an exceptionally potent spellcaster. Even more absurdly, it possessed immense natural magic resistance, alongside mastery of a unique spell capable of unraveling virtually any magical effect.
These combined traits rendered the creature the absolute bane of spellcasters; once upon a time, an entire magnificent magical civilization had been ravaged into ruin by these very monsters.
The enchantment forged into the shortswords bore a striking resemblance to that power.
Upon striking a target, the blade unraveled the magical effects sustained upon the victim while simultaneously siphoning and converting their mana, channeling it straight into the wielder's body.
Put simply, these weapons were tailor-made mage killers. Anbaixiu himself had nearly fallen prey to their ambush.
Yet ingenious as the design was, there remained a critical puzzle Anbaixiu could not unravel. By all rights, anyone wielding such a weapon should have crippled themselves the very first time they absorbed external mana. How on earth had that elf survived it?
Had the elves grown some novel magical organ capable of neutralizing foreign mana? Or had they received a new divine blessing from their gods?
*Ah, I really want to dissect a few and find out.*
Having stumbled upon a topic that piqued his curiosity, Anbaixiu felt an itch deep in his bones. Were it not for the handsome sum those elves could fetch, he would have loved nothing more than to strap them onto an operating table this very instant and dissect them piece by piece.
Yet dissection guaranteed no results. If he carved them open only to find nothing of value, wouldn't he have thrown away good money for nothing?
In the end, the anticipation of ransom won out over the pursuit of knowledge.
Even so, while he couldn't indulge in vivisection, Anbaixiu had no intention of leaving the matter unaddressed.
With the elven army poised for a massive invasion, Cicero certainly wouldn't be the only one equipped with such anti-magic armaments. If Anbaixiu did not wish to fall to an assassination by these weapons, he had to engineer a reliable countermeasure.
After pondering for a long time, Anbaixiu felt he could approach the problem through research on mercury soul puppets.
Caressing his jawbone, he sank into deep contemplation.
The City of Alchemy had devolved into a free-for-all war zone; there was no need to purchase those mines when he could simply seize them by force. That meant the large-scale breeding of mercury soul puppets ought to be placed on the agenda as well.
*No, no, how could I entertain such uncivilized thoughts? Lady Rose already agreed to give me the funds to purchase the mines, so how could I resort to crude banditry? I ought to collect the gold from Lady Rose first, and then negotiate prices with those mine owners. Whatever discount I manage to squeeze out will be pure profit earned by my own talent.*
Having made up his mind, Anbaixiu retrieved the Necrotic Codex and sent a message to the Rose of Decay:
[Lady Rose, I believe we can now commence the breeding program for the mercury soul puppets. Shouldn't we also put the plan to acquire the mines onto our agenda?]
Chapter 96