Endless Wilderness Troll Valley.
Beholder Kike, dispatched to the depths of the wilderness by a single word from Levis, now stood precisely where Aierlinni had once stood, complaining with a face full of misery:
"Ah, I never should have come to the surface back then."
Old Beholder Kike had started singing the same old tune again.
He had always believed that with his intelligence and talent, having escaped the beholder nest, where in the Underdark could he not make a living?
With psychic powers so unlike those of his fellow creatures, if he could sneakily learn a few psychic spells from the Mind Flayers, then find some nook to hide in and slowly infiltrate a small tribe of Gnolls or Ogres, he would surely become a lord of one region. With some proper management, he could then sweep across the land in every direction.
Or, failing that, he could lie in ambush somewhere and catch—no, rescue—a Drow eldest daughter being persecuted by her sisters or mother. Then he could lure her into signing a "contract of sale," and become her Beholder "silver finger" from then on.
Mm, silver finger—that should be what it was called. It was a new term he had picked up over the past few months while mingling around Zelandia, from novels and storybooks secretly circulated among the populace.
After the lord's commercially terrible film, Meteor Garden, became a huge success in Water-Drawing City, all kinds of novels and storybooks began springing up between Water-Drawing City and Zelandia. Their authors all hoped their own works would become the next to be adapted into a light-and-shadow drama, allowing them to gain both fame and fortune, perhaps even leap into Water-Drawing City's upper society in one stroke.
Among those countless storybooks, one titled The Silver Alchemist, written by who