Alchemical Artificer

Morning mist still shrouded the ruins of Roland's camp.

More than five hundred former retainers of the Augustine Lineage—knights, attendants, and blacksmiths—knelt together in the mud, their hands bound behind them with coarse hemp rope like livestock awaiting judgment.

Each bore a fresh Sinner Brand on the side of the neck. The seared flesh curled back, still oozing blood.

Under the laws of the Most Holy Church, anyone condemned as a convict ceased to be treated as human.

Alive, they existed only to plug gaps in the Eternal Night Wall. Dead, they were nothing more than bones on the wasteland.

Shien walked slowly into the lifeless clearing. Kevin and several other lords watched coldly from nearby.

By the usual customs of the nobility, taking stock of captives like these meant picking out the warriors with the strongest Battle Aura first. As for the rest, one merely pried open a slave's mouth to inspect the teeth or felt the frame beneath the skin.

They waited to see how this young lord, newly risen to the head of the vanguard, would grind his new slaves' dignity into the mud.

Shien gave them no such satisfaction.

He stopped at the front of the group, only three steps from the first row of kneeling knights, and swept his gaze over their ashen, numb faces.

"Roland is a pile of ash. The Sacred Flame has wiped away the name you once swore loyalty to as well."

Several old knights in the front row flinched, their shoulders trembling faintly with humiliation.

"But you're still alive." Shien stared at the nearly hopeless crowd. "I don't care who you served before, or what you did under Roland.

"If your hands can still carry stone, if your arms can still swing a hammer, if you can cut down the monsters crawling out of the Blood Moon, you can earn military merit.

"I set a rule in my fief: earn a thousand work points, and you can have your Sinner Brand removed and become free people again. That rule applies to you too."

A cold wind swept through the ruins. The muddy clearing fell utterly silent.

Then an uncontrollable tremor began to spread through the ranks of more than two hundred people.

To people who had thought they could only end up as rotting bones in the Long Night, those words were a rope lowered over the edge of an abyss—a way to live.

Several young knights jerked their heads up. Disbelief filled their bloodshot eyes, then gave way to a will to survive so fierce it nearly burned through reason.

In Shien's unseen field of vision, the Canon of Grace and Righteousness quietly stirred in response.

The more than two hundred gray-white values hovering there had been lifeless. Now they began jumping rapidly, as though set alight.

Great swathes of gray-white dispersed, gradually turning pale green, with some even deepening to dark green.

Pale green was enough. At a thought, Shien deducted a sum of Reward Value without hesitation.

Accessing a basic panel did not cost much, but scanning more than two hundred people at once still stung. At a time like this, though, the expense was necessary.

Illusory parchment pages flipped across his vision, and more than two hundred hidden panels opened before his eyes.

Shien began walking, his gaze sweeping across the crowd as though taking inventory in a storeroom.

He first picked out the elite fighters hidden among them.

One by one, he called out more than forty heavily armored knights whose panels marked them as being at the peak of the Second Tier Bodyguard Realm, or even newly advanced into the Third Tier Resonance Realm.

Their Grace Values had turned pale green, but pride still lingered in their bones. Their loyalty was clearly far from secure.

Shien did not mind. On a line of defense that Aberrants could tear open at any moment, high-tier fighters were always the surest asset.

Once he kept them at his side, he would have plenty of time to raise their Grace.

After choosing those blades, his gaze passed over dozens of burly knights.

They held their heads stubbornly high. The values above them remained gray-white, with even a few glaring streaks of red showing through. They were clearly still fiercely loyal to the Augustine Lineage.

Worse, the information from the Sacred Canon plainly stated that they either had old wounds that would not heal or Battle Aura that was hollow and unstable. They looked strong but had little substance.

Shien did not so much as lift a finger. He left the lot where they were.

Kevin watched from nearby, puzzled. He assumed Shien had left some elite fighters behind to curry favor with him and the other lords rather than taking them all.

If Kevin had been making the choice, he would have taken every knight and left the old, weak, sick, and injured to the other three lords.

This fourteen-year-old lord was still naive. For Kevin, that was a good thing.

Passing over those costly rejects, Shien turned to the middle and rear of the group, where mud-covered veterans and junior officers knelt.

"You. And you..." Shien pointed out several people.

At his gestures, warriors and knights with special skills—Lv.4 Logistics Coordination, Lv.2 Basic Battle Formation Command, Lv.3 Battlefield First Aid...—were pulled from the ranks.

Next came a dozen or so army craftsmen hiding at the very back of the crowd.

Their rough hands were covered in calluses, while the skills above their heads stood out sharply: Lv.4 Refined Steel Forging, Lv.3 Timber Anchoring, Lv.3 Armor Repair...

Watching from nearby, Kevin frowned more deeply. To him, Shien's choices seemed to follow no logic at all.

He passed over the finest-built knights, yet pulled menial workers out of the mud one after another.

But to Shien, the calculation could not have been clearer.

At a place like the Eternal Night Wall, a few sharp swords could only kill a few more monsters.

People who knew how to repair armor, treat wounds, and organize supplies were what kept a force alive.

Without them, no number of knights would last long. With them, Blackpine Fief could at least keep running a little longer.

The selection was nearly over. Shien had assigned almost all the young and able blacksmiths, leatherworkers, and laborers with useful skills to Blackpine Fief's group.

Just as he was about to look away and end the division, something at the bottom of the deepest mud pit caught his eye.

A gaunt figure huddled there.

It was a skeletal old man. His hair clung to his scalp like dead grass matted with grease.

More striking was his empty right sleeve. The hand was long gone, leaving only a stump wrapped haphazardly in rags stained with black Blood Scab.

Somehow, a man who could not even run had survived last night's insect swarm.

Now he crouched in the mud pit, his one remaining cloudy eye coldly studying the convicts who had grown excited over the work-point system.

There was no hope in his gaze, only the stillness of a man who no longer cared whether he lived or died.

But in Shien's vision, a translucent status panel opened. When he saw what it contained, his heart gave a small jolt.

[Target: Victor]

[Current Grace Value: 62]

[Currently Available Access: Basic Panel]

As the pages of the Sacred Canon turned, the knowledge Victor had amassed over a life of obsession and madness appeared as icons glinting dark copper in Shien's vision.

[Skill Library]

Lv.1 Skills: Precision Mechanical Drafting, Basic Metal Forging and Cutting, Mineral and Material Identification, Basic Corrosion Prevention...

Lv.2 Skills: Aberrant Material Smelting, Principles of Rune Constructs, Low-Grade Fuel Refinement, Basic Alchemical Array Rune Analysis...

Lv.3 Skills: Alchemical Rune Artificing, Construct Mechanical Power Engineering, Biological Bone and Metal Suturing, Design of Machinery Without Magic Power...

Skills Above Lv.4 (Insufficient Grace Value; Access Denied)

Shien's pupils widened. An Alchemical Artificer!

In Alchemy, every step from apprentice to array master to artificer was as hard as scaling a mountain.

People who reached that level were rare to begin with.

More dangerous still, Victor's skills revealed the direction of his research: mechanical gears, alchemical arrays, and monster bones.

In the Church's eyes, he was a Heretic who had to be burned alive.

To Shien, though, such technology was practically made for survival in the Graymist Defense Zone.

The Graymist Defense Zone had no stable magic power and no complete Sacred Flame system. Traditional Alchemy could hardly function there.

Victor's Construct Studies, however, relied on mechanical structures and Aberrant materials for power.

That was exactly the sort of thing that could survive in that wasteland.

As for the missing hand?

That was no problem at all. The valuable thing had never been his hand, but the designs and principles in his head.

As long as his mind remained intact, blacksmiths could work with their hands for him, and apprentices could build what he designed.

Shien suppressed his excitement and kept his expression hard. He pointed at the chained old man. "Unlock his chains. He's coming with me."

The Holy City Army soldier guarding them froze, then could not help warning him in a low voice. "That old man's missing a hand. He's old and lame—he'd struggle to push a cart. Taking him to the Defense Zone would only waste food..."

Shien turned, his cold gaze settling on the soldier's face. "Are you telling me how to do my job?"

The soldier shut his mouth at once. He hurriedly pulled out his key and knelt in the muddy water to unlock the chains.

Nearby, a mocking smile tugged at Kevin's mouth.

Taking a bunch of leatherworkers and blacksmiths was one thing. Now Shien was treating a half-dead cripple like a treasure.

The chains fell to the ground with a dull clank.

Victor dragged his stiff legs beneath him and slowly rose from the mud pit. His clouded eye fixed on Shien, as though trying to see through the young lord.

He saw nothing. There was only calm in those ice-blue eyes.

Shien said nothing to him and made no show of desperately seeking talent.

To a genius persecuted by religion, pity meant nothing.