Chapter 15: On the Shoulders of Giants

The rumors were true after all. Liches were evil creatures! Unimaginably evil!

Face flushed crimson, Isabel fled from Ambrose's study. If he'd been a human lord, the servants would already be whispering all sorts of unsavory gossip by now.

Fortunately, in this gloomy old castle, no one cared about such trivialities.

Down in the great hall, a crowd of restless settlers had gathered, their anxious murmurs echoing off the stone walls. All eyes turned toward Isabel as she descended the staircase.

This was the moment they'd all been waiting for: the official announcement of the land reclamation plan. For many, it was a chance to begin anew.

Isabel had never spoken in front of a hundred people before. Even after summoning all her courage, her voice trembled as she stammered.

"Um... Master Lich says we can begin reclaiming land today... As for the specific arrangements... we'll be dividing the land based on the number of able-bodied workers—"

She didn't even get halfway through before someone interrupted impatiently.

"What about the land we already owned? I had two acres and a house back in my old place!"

"Yeah, and I had one acre!"

"I even had a cow!"

"You said things would get better if we came here, but we're starting over from scratch!"

......

A storm of complaints erupted at once, drowning out Isabel's frail voice.

Overwhelmed, she went pale and stumbled back onto the stairs.

The shouting grew more frenzied by the second; the crowd began pressing toward her, their desperation twisting into something wild and dangerous.

What had gone wrong? They'd come here seeking a new life, yet now they looked ready to tear her apart.

Just as Isabel was about to bolt, an ear-splitting scraping sound sliced through the noise—a harsh, metallic screech like claws raking across stone.

All heads turned toward the source.

Raul stood in the middle of the hall, face cold as iron. In one hand, he held a massive warhammer. Beside him loomed a grotesque skeletal creature, its scythe-like forearms dragging along the floor and sparking against the stone.

The sound had come from the aberrant skeleton, Zha'kix Type I, one of Ambrose's creations. Many of those present had already witnessed this monster's power. When their former lord's soldiers had pursued them during their escape, Zha'kix had single-handedly driven the attackers away.

The thing looked nightmarish, but its strength was enough to crush an entire militia squad.

Raul hefted his hammer and began walking forward.

The same mob that had been on the verge of rioting moments ago fell silent. People shuffled aside without a word, parting to clear his path.

The heavy thud of Raul's boots and the rasp of bone on stone echoed through the hall, louder, somehow, than all the shouting had been.

He stopped beside Isabel and said sternly, "Get up, Isabel. Don't shame Master Lich."

She scrambled to her feet, bowing her head. "I—I'm sorry, I just—"

"Now's not the time to apologize," Raul cut in. "Did you finish what Master Lich told you to do?"

His tone startled her; he spoke like a loyal retainer, utterly devoted to Ambrose.

After helping her stand, Raul turned to face the crowd. His voice was low and steady. "Anyone here have a problem with Master Lich's orders?"

Dozens of uneasy eyes darted toward the skeletal monster behind him. One by one, people fell silent. They had forgotten for a moment just whose domain this was.

Deep within the castle, Ambrose watched the entire scene unfold through a magical projection. He nodded with satisfaction. He'd sent Raul to help Isabel keep order, and clearly, he'd chosen well.

Raul's transformation pleased him greatly. Once someone shed blood with their own hands, even the meekest sheep began to turn toward the ways of the wolf.

With a wave of his hand, Ambrose dismissed the spell and turned back to his true passion: research.

He had already skimmed through On the Reproduction of Wraiths once. The details of the experiments still needed to be fleshed out, but the core principles were now perfectly clear.

Master Morgan's inspiration, it turned out, came from human reproduction.

Humans bore children, and each newborn came with a soul of its own. On a purely spiritual level, this process was the union of two distinct souls giving rise to a third.

By extension, any race possessing souls might, in theory, increase their numbers in similar fashion.

And since these newborn souls have never undergone death, they could not be undead by nature.

If one could replicate this process through magical means—create new souls without the need for flesh—then these newborn spirits could be turned into spirit golems immune to holy magic.

It was simple in theory, but near impossible in practice. Creating life without the aid of a body was a challenge even greater than ascending to the realm of a legend. It had taken Master Morgan a thousand years to develop a ritual capable of such a feat, a rite he had named Soul Embryo.

The entire On the Reproduction of Wraiths revolved around explaining this ritual in painstaking detail.

Creation was hard. Replication, however, was another matter.

Ambrose was confident he could reproduce the ritual. The only issue was the astronomical cost.

Each attempt at the Soul Embryo ritual required roughly fifty thousand gold's worth of materials.

And that was just to create a soul. To keep it from fading, one needed to craft a proper vessel, a body for the soul to inhabit. Otherwise, it would quickly die for lack of a host.

And by "die," Ambrose didn't mean vanish. It would degrade into true undeath. Only a properly constructed spirit golem body could keep the soul alive, while still offering the usual ease of repair and reassembly that made undead so convenient.

The problem was that those bodies cost a fortune.

He'd need at least two hundred thousand gold to make a spirit golem strong enough to rival a high-tier undead.

"Two hundred thousand gold for a single spirit golem with the strength of a high-grade death knight?" Ambrose muttered. "For that price, I could just hire a few human professionals to do the job. No wonder the design never caught on. It's simply not worth it."

Still, disappointment was the last thing he felt. The flames in his eye sockets instead flared with excitement.

He'd just realized something. He could slash that cost dramatically.

Mimetic Soul, a special spell he had obtained upon his ascension to legendary rank, allowed him to craft souls to his own specifications. The aberrant skeletons operated so efficiently precisely because he'd given each of them a custom soul. A human soul, by contrast, would've been clumsy and wasteful in such a body.

After reading Morgan's work, Ambrose was certain he could replace the costly Soul Embryo ritual with his own magic. The expense would plummet.

As for the bodies... his gaze fell on a large glass cylinder sitting on the desk, filled with shimmering living mercury, a fluid with significant resistance to magic. With a few tweaks, the living mercury could serve as the perfect vessel for synthetic souls.

Truly, magical research was a joy beyond compare. Morgan could never have imagined that centuries later, a lich blessed with Mimetic Soul would exist—or that the madmen of Alkhemia would invent living mercury, the ideal material for such constructs.

Now Ambrose, standing on the shoulders of giants, was about to march down a glittering road paved with gold.

"Master Morgan," he murmured fondly, "if you'd lived a little longer, I'd have loved to exchange notes with you. The things we could've built together..."

That was the power of knowledge.

With a soft sigh, he rolled up his sleeves.

His first experiment to create a spirit golem was about to begin.