Alchemical Construct Engineer

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

More than five hundred knights, attendants, and blacksmiths who had once served the Augustine Lineage knelt together in the mud, their hands bound behind their backs with rough hemp rope, like livestock awaiting judgment.

A fresh brand marked the side of each person's neck. The seared flesh had curled back and was still oozing blood.

Under the laws of the Most Holy Church, once someone was entered into the register of sinners, they were no longer treated as human.

While alive, they existed only to fill breaches in the Eternal Night Wall. When they died, they were nothing more than bones on the wasteland.

Shien walked slowly into the lifeless clearing. Not far away, Kevin and several other lords watched coldly.

By the usual custom of the nobility, taking stock of property like these prisoners meant first picking out the warriors with the strongest Battle Aura. The rest was little more than prying open slaves' jaws to inspect their teeth or feeling their bones.

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 opportunity.

He stopped at the front of the line, no more than three paces from the first row of kneeling knights, and swept his gaze across their ashen, numb faces.

"Roland is a heap of ashes now. The surname you once swore to serve was wiped away with him by the Sacred Flame."

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

"But you're still alive." Shien stared at the people who had almost lost all hope. "I don't care whom you served before, or what you did while following Roland.

"As long as your hands can still lift stones, as long as your arms can still swing a hammer, as long as you can cut down those monsters crawling out of the Blood Moon, you can earn military merit.

"I established a rule in my territory: earn a thousand work points, and you can have your sinner's brand removed and become free people again. That rule applies to you, too."

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

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

To people who had believed they could only become piles of rotting bones in the Long Night, his words were a rope lowered from above the abyss—a way to live.

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

In Shien's unseen field of vision, feedback from the Canon of Grace and Righteousness quietly surged.

The more than two hundred floating gray-white values had been lifeless before. Now they flickered rapidly, as though set alight.

The gray-white ebbed away in great swathes, gradually turning pale green, with some values 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 turned across his vision, and the hidden panels of more than two hundred people unfolded before his eyes.

Shien began to walk, his gaze moving over them as though he were taking inventory in a storeroom.

First, he picked out the strongest fighters hidden among the crowd.

More than forty heavily armored knights whose panels marked them as at the peak of the Second Tier Bodyguard Realm, or even newly entered into the Third Tier Resonance Realm, were called out of the ranks one by one.

Their Grace Values had begun to turn pale green, but pride still lingered in their bones. Their loyalty was clearly nowhere near enough.

Shien did not mind. On a defensive line that could be torn open by Aberrants at any moment, high-tier fighters were the surest asset he could have.

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

After choosing those blades, he let his gaze pass over the heads of several dozen sturdily built knights.

They held their necks stiffly. The values above their heads remained gray-white, with even a few glaring threads of red showing through. Clearly, they still clung to their loyalty to the Augustine Lineage.

Worse, the Canon's information stated plainly that some had old wounds that would not heal, while others had unstable Battle Aura. They looked formidable but were hollow inside.

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

Kevin watched from nearby, puzzled. He assumed Shien had left some of the strongest fighters behind to curry favor with him and the other lords.

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

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

Passing over those costly pieces of scrap, Shien turned his attention to the middle and rear of the ranks, where a group of mud-covered veterans and low-ranking officers stood.

"You, and you..." Shien pointed out several people.

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

Next came more than a dozen craftsmen attached to the army, who had been 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's frown deepened. To him, Shien's choices seemed to follow no logic at all.

He passed over the knights with the strongest builds, yet plucked 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.

The people who knew how to repair armor, treat wounds, organize supplies, and keep accounts 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-bodied blacksmiths, tanners, 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 the corner of his eye.

A gaunt, dark figure was huddled there.

It was a skeletal old man, his hair plastered to his scalp like dead grass tangled with grease.

More striking still, his right sleeve hung empty. His hand was long gone, leaving only a stump wrapped haphazardly in rags stained with blackened blood.

In last night's insect calamity, someone who could not even run had somehow survived.

Now he crouched in the mud pit, watching the Convicts stirred by the work-point system with his one remaining, clouded eye.

There was no expectation in his gaze, only the stillness of a man who had ceased to care whether he lived or died.

But in Shien's vision, a translucent attribute panel unfolded. When he read it, his heart gave a slight jolt.

[Target: Victor]

[Current Grace Value: 62]

[Current accessible permissions: Basic Panel]

As the Canon's pages turned, the accumulated work of Victor's obsessive, frenzied life appeared as icons glinting dark bronze, suspended before Shien's eyes.

[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 Runic Constructs, Low-Grade Fuel Refinement, Basic Alchemical Array Rune Analysis...

Lv. 3 skills: Alchemical Runic Construct Studies, Construct Mechanical Power Engineering, Biological Bone and Metal Suturing, Design of Manaless Machine Tools...

Lv. 4 skills and above (insufficient Grace Value; access denied)

Shien's pupils widened. An alchemical construct engineer!

In alchemy, every step from apprentice to array master, and then to Construct engineer, was as hard as climbing to heaven.

People who reached this level were rare to begin with.

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

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

But to Shien, this technology seemed almost made for survival in the Graymist Defense Zone.

The Graymist Defense Zone had no stable mana and no complete holy fire system. Traditional alchemy could barely function there.

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

Such things could survive on that wasteland.

As for his missing hand?

That was no problem at all. What had real value was never the 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 the surge of feeling in his chest. His expression stayed cold and hard as he pointed at the old man in chains. "Unlock his chains. He's coming with me."

The Holy City Army soldier guarding him hesitated, then could not help warning in a low voice, "The old man's lost a hand, and he's old and lame. He'd struggle even to push a cart. Taking him to the defense zone would only waste food..."

Shien turned his head and fixed the soldier with a cold stare. "Are you teaching me how to do my job?"

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

Nearby, a sneer curled Kevin's lips as he watched.

Taking a crowd of tanners 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 leg beneath him and slowly rose from the mud pit. His clouded eye fixed on Shien, as though he were trying to see through the young lord.

He saw nothing. Those icy-blue eyes held only calm.

Shien said nothing to him, nor did he put on a show of being desperate for talent.

To a genius persecuted by religion, pity meant nothing.