Chapter 442: A World in Upheaval (1)

Ambrose was a man who never lost sight of what mattered. No matter where he was or what he was doing, the ultimate purpose was always to make more money.

With the orcs and Lyon at each other's throats, walking away from an opportunity like this would be a genuine waste.

The last time Lyon and the orcs had gone to war, Ambrose had been busy dealing with the aftermath of Loss's divine domain—bigger business than war profiteering, so he had let that opportunity slip past. By the time he had a free moment, the orcs had already been routed.

The timing now was perfect. The orcs had clawed back their losses, both sides had returned to rough parity, and Ambrose's undead army had found its market.

The orcs probably wouldn't object to a batch of cannon fodder to help wear down Lyon's holy light reserves. And if they did object, Ambrose had no objection to discussing arrangements with Lyon instead. Undead weren't limited to fighting paladins, after all. Their efficiency against orcs would be considerably higher.

He would need an intermediary, though.

He thought about it and realized he didn't know a single person on the orcish side.

More precisely, every orc Ambrose had ever known was almost certainly dead. He had bad blood with the orcs, and he'd settled the score long ago. He had genuinely never cultivated any connections there.

Not that it mattered much. Ambrose's network was extraordinary, to the point where he didn't even need to go looking. Gustavo Flynn had already come to him.

The dark-skinned alchemist's characteristically humorless face appeared on the magic mirror, and he cut straight to the chase. "I have connections to the orcs, and I want to sell them your undead units. They're being very generous with their gold right now."

Ambrose smiled. "My thoughts exactly. I didn't realize you had orcish connections."

"Alkhemia sold its products to every kingdom except the Emerald Dreamwood. Can you put in some extra time and produce more Mimetic Souls in the near future?"

That was Gustavo Flynn's primary concern.

After receiving the God of Alchemy's divine coin, he had run numerous conversion experiments.

His conclusion was that the profit margins Ambrose had previously presented him were, surprisingly, largely accurate.

It had given him a revised impression of the lich. Ambrose was clearly obsessed with gold, but once a partnership was reached, he was honest enough. At least he hadn't swindled Flynn much.

That said, the coin was burning through resources, and unless profits came in soon, Flynn was going to feel the strain.

"I expected you to go after the dwarven king first," Ambrose said.

Flynn had mentioned taking dwarven business first to offset costs.

But the dwarves had gone quiet, and the orcs had come up first instead. That was a mild surprise.

"Business you can lock in at any time can wait," Flynn said. "Business you have to compete for needs to be the priority. Besides, the dwarven king needs more evidence that your undead are actually effective. After all, our adversary is Lyon."

Ambrose nodded. Fair point.

It sounded implausible to pit undead against paladins, and the dwarven king's skepticism was understandable.

"You're planning to sell the Grunts to the orcs?"

"Among other things. It's our highest-margin product. But will these undead designed for ocean combat work on land?" Flynn was genuinely concerned. This was their first export sale, and a quality issue at this stage would do lasting damage to the brand.

"The Grunt formation works best in water, because the buoyancy keeps them suspended. On land, the only effective deployment method is by airdrop, but the effectiveness will be lower. That said, their low cost is a significant advantage, and I can provide an airship for high-altitude deployment strikes..."

Ambrose had thought through land applications well before this. The Grunt formation couldn't swim through open air, but they could self-correct their trajectory during a fall. Their accuracy would still be quite high even if they were dropped from the air.

The effectiveness against Lyon's troops was another matter, though. Lyon's infantry were well-equipped, far more so than the ocean races who relied on their scales and shells. Humans had fire to work with, and metalworking was straightforward.

So the Grunts would need either armor-piercing tips fitted to their heads, or to rely on air-undead poison dispersal after impact.

Lyon's priests could purify the poison with the holy light, but the Grunts were known as grunts for a reason. These weren't weapons expected to inflict massive individual casualties. From the beginning, they had been designed for attrition. If they could systematically drain Lyon's holy light reserves at scale, that was good enough.

Paladins and priests were powerful, but their mana was not infinite.

"The orcs aren't weak. The fact that they retook that city means they're prepared for a sustained campaign. We're just selling mercenaries, not deciding the outcome of the war. As long as the product satisfies the client, our work is done."

Gustavo Flynn agreed completely with that summary. This was what alchemists did. Once the goods changed hands, how they were used was the client's business. Alchemists didn't concern themselves with that.

They worked through the remaining details. Flynn prepared to depart for the orcish highlands immediately, certain he would clinch the deal.

Just before terminating the connection, he couldn't resist adding, "I half expected you to refuse, or at least hesitate."

Ambrose looked puzzled. "Why? There's gold to be made. Why wouldn't I take it?"

Flynn said, "That version of you from not so long ago might not have agreed quite this readily. You must have noticed it yourself: you weren't always brutal or bloodthirsty. You'd rather take prisoners and collect ransom. You saved the world, once. Old friend, you've changed recently. You've become more of a lich."

Ambrose blinked. It was a strange thing to say. What did "more of a lich" mean? He had always been a lich.

And yet...

After Mr. Misfortune's death, what little humanity remained in him had been fading fast.

Whether he wanted to admit it or not, when he had first become a lich, he had kept much of his human morality intact. He didn't kill indiscriminately. He didn't kill for cruelty. He had restraint that set him apart from other undead.

But Ambrose had since orchestrated a war in the deep sea. It looked like necessity from the outside, but he knew what was happening to him within. He was drifting, steadily, toward the cold indifference that defined a true lich.

Before long, he would be like Black Rose, capable of enslaving entire races without a flicker of discomfort to extract whatever wealth he needed.

Was that a good thing?

Purely rationally, it didn't seem particularly bad. And it was inevitable, anyway.

The undead could sense their surroundings but had no feelings. The world was nothing more than a boring instruction manual through which they experienced no emotions. The only thing left that brought Ambrose genuine pleasure was the accumulation of wealth.

Stripped of emotional stimulus, numbness was natural. That was why the undead lost their humanity.

And the process was irreversible. Ambrose would sink deeper and deeper into his hunger for gold. For a lich, this mode of existence was actually a form of torment, because the pleasure of acquisition couldn't be sustained. That hunger would only grow. One day, even if all the world's wealth were poured into his hands, it still wouldn't be enough to fill the void.

And that day would be the beginning of his eternal suffering.

But Ambrose shook off these thoughts almost as quickly as they formed. "Who cares," he said to himself. "That's decades away, at minimum. For now, let me enjoy my wealthy existence."

He hummed to himself as he stepped into his extradimensional space and got to work producing Mimetic Souls.

The days passed, and the good news kept coming.

When the first batch of Grunt Type Is was delivered to the orcish forces, their deployment in a nighttime raid on a Lyon settlement proved remarkably effective.

The engagement became something of a classic. The orcs had planned a night assault on a Lyon town, but word had leaked in advance. Lyon troops set up an ambush along the route, and when the orcish force appeared, sprang it.

The orcs fell into disarray and retreated.

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