Chapter 96: Reflections on the Future

The carriage jolted and swayed along the road. Seated within, Isabel watched the castle draw ever closer. Mixed emotions warred in her heart.

The paladins had forcibly expelled all the humans within the castle. Isabel had no choice but to return to her former lands.

The lord who had once oppressed her was already dead, and his territory had been swallowed up by the Porcupine Knight. Acting on Ambrose's orders, that knight had quickly found Isabel and her brother and sent them back toward the castle by carriage.

Beside her, Raul looked almost overly excited. He kept rubbing the bone controller in his hands. Even though the aberrant skeleton it had once controlled was already destroyed, Raul could not bring himself to throw away this now-useless object.

It was proof of the time when he had stood above others—and the first time he had ever tasted the benefits of power.

Raul was filled with anticipation. He couldn't wait to serve his lich lord again.

Unlike her brother, however, Isabel didn't miss the place quite as much.

It was certainly true that the lich lord was far more merciful than the other human lords, but humans who followed an undead lord would surely end up as zombies or skeletons in the end, wouldn't they?

Even if that only happened after their natural deaths, they would be bound to eternal servitude.

Was that really a good outcome?

Isabel had worked so hard to become an alchemist in part because she was unwilling to accept the life laid out for her. She didn't want to marry some passable man like everyone else her age, wear her body down with backbreaking labor, bear children, and then close her eyes forever after a few short years.

She didn't want to be buried in the ground in her thirties or forties. She wanted a different life.

Thankfully, Raul had always supported her. Because of that, Isabel had had some free time: time in which she had learned how to read, traveled around, and picked up what lessons she could. At last she had become an alchemy apprentice, thinking that she had succeeded in changing her fate. It was only during her time with Ambrose that she discovered that her master had taught her almost nothing.

Alchemy was a highly technical discipline, in which knowledge was prized above all else. She couldn't afford all that knowledge with just her hard work alone.

Even remaining an apprentice for life wouldn't have been so bad. The pay was better than farming, and the work far less exhausting. Perhaps she could have lived into her fifties.

Who could have imagined the disaster to come? Forced to flee her home because of the sharp tax hikes, she had finally ended up becoming a lich's servant.

Scenes from her time in the castle replayed endlessly in Isabel's mind. Was she really going to spend the rest of her life there?

She felt utterly lost. She was just a girl raised in the countryside. Becoming an alchemy apprentice was already beyond anything she had aspired to. She didn't possess enough wisdom to answer such a complicated question.

She couldn't help but feel upset.

If she had had a good master, would her life have turned out differently?

When she thought of teachers, the image that surfaced in her mind was not the stern, bald old man who had first taken her in as an apprentice, but the young man she had seen only a few times in the castle.

He had guided her only briefly, yet what she learned in those few moments surpassed everything she had learned from the previous few years combined.

"If the lich lord is fine, I suppose Master must still be in the castle as well. Next time we meet, maybe I can ask for some guidance."

Thinking of how generous the youth had been with his knowledge, Isabel immediately felt more at ease.

After all, she was still young. She had plenty of time before she was forced to become an undead.

The wheels rumbled on. Isabel and Raul soon found themselves before the castle once more.

The same familiar gloom hung in the air. Even under clear skies, the castle seemed perpetually shrouded in shadow.

As she entered the castle, Isabel came across the imposing lich lord himself. That skeletal frame was just as terrifying as ever.

When Ambrose saw Isabel and Raul, he offered no pleasantries. He tossed Raul a new controller and ordered, "The paladins made a complete mess of the castle. Raul, there's a batch of construction skeletons here. You're in charge of restoring everything to its original state."

Cradling the new undead controller, Raul trembled with excitement.

As for Isabel, Ambrose led the young woman directly to a new laboratory, then hauled over a pile of thick, heavy documents with Mage Hand.

"You have one night to read through these," he said. "Starting tomorrow, you'll be responsible for assembling aberrant skeletons. This is my design for the production line. Your task is to put this small-scale production line together."

Ambrose's words left Isabel completely stunned.

Aberrant skeletons? A production line? And all in one night?

Ambrose offered no further explanation. He tossed her a small booklet and said, "This is the index."

With that final remark, he left the laboratory, leaving Isabel standing in a daze.

There was no concern about what she had been through, no reproach for her escape. The lich was exactly as focused as he had been.

In the eyes of her lich lord, she was nothing more than a tool endowed with intelligence.

Sighing softly, Isabel picked up the small booklet—the supposed index—and flipped it open. Inside, she found entirely new alchemical knowledge.

Before long, she was utterly engrossed.

The creation of undead was a necromantic art. Though it was tenuously related to alchemy, it was also fundamentally different. Isabel had no spellcasting ability; her alchemy was limited to chemistry, really, except with magical ingredients. She could not simply cast a spell and turn bones into undead.

But Ambrose had reworked his scheme of creating aberrant skeletons completely. Isabel did not need to create undead herself. Instead, her role was akin to large-scale materials preparation.

Once the bones were processed according to Ambrose's specifications and fed into a furnace saturated with dark magic, they would automatically transform into the aberrant undead he had designed.

It sounded simple, but in practice, it was anything but.

Despite having been given the specifications for the entire process, Isabel was overwhelmed by the abstruse formulas and principles involved. This little booklet was only an overview; the real details lay in the thick stack of documents beside her.

It was hard to imagine how much effort this lich lord must have invested to dismantle and reassemble complex necromantic spells into an assembly-line process that an ordinary person like her could operate.

If the core design—the dark-magic furnace—were easily accessible, then any minor lord with a territory could produce an undead army.

Isabel felt genuine awe for her lich lord's abilities. Setting aside matters of race, he was a respectable and erudite scholar, one who would surely be outstanding even in a genius-filled city like Alkhemia.

She couldn't help but wonder why she had never heard his name before.

Isabel refocused and cleared her mind. Now was not the time to think about the future. She had to complete the lich lord's task first—or her body might very well undergo the process she had been tasked to develop.

Meanwhile, Raul was also hard at work.

Ambrose had prepared several specially shaped skeletons for him before assigning him to repair the damaged parts of the castle. The paladins who had dug for his phylactery had left the place in ruins. Many pits had yet to be filled in. Raul's workload was immense, and although Ambrose's specially designed skeletons were obedient, they were far less flexible than humans. More than once, he found himself wishing the lich lord would assign him a few dozen human subordinates. It would make the work so much easier.

But Raul did not dare make such a request. Accustomed to serving under lords, he understood his position well. Only after completing the tasks assigned to him would he be qualified to offer suggestions.

Both siblings threw themselves into their work. Ambrose returned, reassured, to his personal laboratory.

He couldn't stop thinking about the pair of mana-draining daggers taken from the elves. He was convinced there was some special secret hidden within them.

The enchantment itself was not particularly complex. In Ambrose's estimation, it seemed to draw inspiration from the unique abilities of Phaelinn, creatures that looked like long cloth sack with claws, their openings ringed with jagged teeth. They were grotesque and terrifying.

Though their claws and fangs stood out, Phaelinn were actually highly proficient spellcasters. More absurdly, they possessed powerful innate magic resistance and wielded a unique spell capable of disrupting the effects of most magic.

These traits, lumped into a single entity, made them a nightmare for spellcasters. In the past, Phaelinn had almost taken down a great magical civilization on their own.

The enchantment on those elven daggers bore a striking resemblance to that ability.

After striking its targets, it disrupted the magical effects on their bodies, absorbed their magic, converted it, and injected it into the wielder.

Put simply, these daggers were mage-killers. Ambrose himself had nearly fallen victim to them.

Yet for all their brilliance, one crucial detail baffled him. How could the dagger's wielder safely absorb foreign mana? What was going on with these elves?

Had they grown new magical organs capable of neutralizing the absorbed mana? Or had they received some new divine blessing?

"I really want to dissect a few and take a look for myself..."

Discovering a subject that intrigued him so deeply made Ambrose's bones itch. If not for the fact that those elves could fetch a fine price, he would have put them on the operating table and taken them apart piece by piece already.

Dissection didn't guarantee that he would find anything. And if he failed, he would be tossing gold away.

In the end, the lure of gold overcame his thirst for knowledge.

Still, even if he couldn't dissect the elves, Ambrose had no intention of letting the matter rest.

The elves were about to launch a large-scale invasion. Cicero could hardly be the only one who possessed such a weapon. Ambrose needed to develop a countermeasure before he fell victim to these daggers himself.

After long consideration, he decided that the research on living mercury might provide a breakthrough.

Stroking his chin, Ambrose sank into deep thought.

Now that Alkhemia had become a chaotic war zone, there was no longer any need to purchase any mines. He could simply seize them outright. Large-scale cultivation of his living mercury slimes would immediately be viable.

"No, no, that won't do. How could I think something so uncivilized? Lady Rose already agreed to give me money to buy the mines. How could I resort to robbery? I should get the funds from Lady Rose first, then negotiate prices with the mine owners. How much I can drive the price down is up to my skill as a negotiator."

Having made up his mind, Ambrose took out the Necromantic Codex and sent a message to Black Rose. [Megaman Tiga: Lady Rose, I believe it is time to start breeding living mercury spirit golems en masse. Shall we put the plan to purchase mines that we discussed before on the agenda?]