Annan did not care about the students who had escaped.
They had wisely destroyed every stone pillar leading upward. Unless the Contestants intended to stay in the Exile Grounds, the Dawn Layer, or the Ash Layer, they would have to come through here.
Of the ten academies, fifty-six students had been caught. There was an unexpected bonus, too—a living Necromancer!
The Tartun Empire as a whole favored order. For a Necromancer, whose inclinations leaned toward evil and chaos, to live among the City-States and even become an academy student meant one thing: his morals could not be that bad.
Even Necromancers found other Necromancers troublesome. They did not want their own friends and family summoned from their graves, let alone their own souls and corpses disturbed.
And the truly wicked Necromancers usually did not spare themselves. Those who sought eternal life turned themselves into Liches; those who sought youth became vampires; and those who sought power refined themselves into Corpse Puppets.
In any case, they had the ability to turn the souls of the dead into Undead.
Annan had never had the chance to meet one in the Northern Frontier. The vast Breeze City did not have a single Necromancer apprentice. But in Middle Earth, Annan might have a chance to Take Under One’s Wing.
What he wanted was their productivity.
Consider an ordinary human. He could exert between fifty and a hundred and twenty pounds of force, but he would slack off. After twelve hours of continuous work, his efficiency would plummet. You had to house him, find him a spouse, feed him, keep him reasonably content, and deal with the occasional injury or illness.
But the Undead? They could exert anywhere from thirty to two hundred pounds of force, depending on the bones used and the caster's skill.