Sum'gial had managed to create a bunch of slimes with eyes; some were failures, some used the tactile sense of the slimes to see. He briefly considered creating some slimes for his army or as servants. The problem with creating undead or slimes for these positions was the learning curve. No living or undead being was born to know.
The souls he had were those of reckless adventurers, paladins, magic users who called themselves wizards. While he was capable of interfering with souls, trying to create a new soul was almost as hard as trying to become a god without becoming transcendent first. Despite all the memories of an archmage, this was a project that would take hundreds of years, which he didn't have, thanks to his unruly neighbours.
The troubles left by the predecessor didn't end with unruly neighbours. Thanks to the promiscuous past of the necromancer, he had sons, daughters, ex-lovers; he had wanted to get rid of most of them when E'nathyr attacked him.
As he searched for a blueprint that could be used for legion armament for reference, he was curious about whether magic enchantments were modular. Most of the magic enchantment done before had been due to wizards casting talents, but modular magic enchantment would be a breakthrough.
He wanted a unique design that would satisfy him as an archmage, but his OCD could never be satisfied. For frost wights, he should design a slowing curse which should make their squishy enemies tremble. The slowing curses in Orbisar were odd though; they were temporal. For some reason he felt these curses could affect spacetime.
Vyrgil didn't have an army yet, but his future army would be composed of zombies and ghouls, basically slow-moving targets. Unlike the frost wights, these undead didn't have consciousness; most of them didn't even have a way to target their enemy. He needed armaments for these to deflect damage to their enemies and be sturdier than existing ones; Vyrgil's luck should solve the rest.
The main reason E'nathyr, the dark dwarf stronghold, brain eaters, the surface dwarven stronghold, and even the Tower of Bones were so close to each other is because mithril ore could be picked up just by walking around. The abundance of valuable minerals made them peaceful, but no living being could pick up as much mithril as the undead.
The amount of mithril hidden in the vaults could possibly arm all of his army, though the mithril itself was too soft to be made into any armaments. He was pretty sure Vyrgil could make some alloys to make some suitable changes to it.
He found four books on the subject matter, all of which were related to necromancy and cursed armor. He found out that the library had become more and more organized thanks to the non-stop efforts of Ahr'zel and his followers. The current library was bearable; despite some books being off by millimeters, he could tolerate being in the library.
Galileon POV
Galileon was odd, even for a devil. Other than his meticulously taken-care-of hair, he only wore diapers. Despite his old frame, he moved around with nimble movements that would make a monkey jealous. He was a warlock and a merchant. To be more specific, he had made a deal with an earth dragon, providing wealth for spells. He was one step away from becoming a transcendent, despite being good at numbers, he couldn't understand half of what he was reading.
…
`[EARTH] → [BIND] → [MOLD] → [PACK_c] → [HURL_v] → [SPIN_ω] → [FRACTURE_Φ] → [ANSWER]`
[EARTH]/[BIND]/[MOLD]: gather loose stone or peel it from the wall (minor transmutation).
[PACK_c]: densify to desired brittleness (glass-pack for shatter, ceramic-pack for armor-punch).
[HURL_v]: impulse grant.
[SPIN_ω]: stability (low ω slug) or dust-cone (high ω + wide Φ).
[FRACTURE_Φ]: pre-scored crack lattice; defines slug vs buckshot vs cone.
…
He could understand every word separately, but it didn't make any sense when put together, and this was a spell he used as a warlock every day. Just this one spell would take a mortal hundreds of years to understand. He realized that he was not intelligent enough to understand what he was reading without instructions, and this was a basic spell.
Galileon knew that he had no choice but to come to the Tower of Bones, but he knew that he had a choice going forward. Ahr'zel was an ambitious individual, and he knew that to make a horse run, he would have to feed it rather than whip it.
Galileon looked at Edgar the squeaky. Despite his enormous frame, he was good at delicate work. This devil was even odder than him, possessing the physique of a northern barbarian along with scars that would scare a grown adult to pee his pants, but he had a squeaky voice the lich referred to as helium breath, which Galileon couldn't understand.
Dantae was another odd fellow. He only wore a dancing outfit and spoke in a sing-song way. Apparently, he wasn't aware of the sing-song speech. His clothes felt like looking at a peacock, colorful and ostentatious.
Leonaro, a female devil with muscles like steel, had demanded equal rights the moment she arrived. Galileon wasn't sure what the lich said to her that satisfied her, but he was staying away from her.
Galileon had made his own deal with both Ahr'zel and the lich. The lich had taken his sweet time with the contract, but it was finally signed. Because Galileon had taken a shortcut by signing a contract with an earth dragon, his strength couldn't exceed the dragon's. The lich would solve this problem, but Galileon couldn't understand why the books' alignment had to be corrected three times in the library.
A problem for another day; now he had to correct the alignment of Rock Smash for Beginners by Veyn'dor D'Veyn two more times.
Malvek POV
Malvek had been buying up every grain sack he could get his hands on in E'nathyr and reselling it with a merchant's smile. In the eyes of the drow matrons, he was just an insignificant profiteer, a mongrel with a lucky nose for shortages. That suited him perfectly.
In reality, almost all the grain he resold was already dying from the inside. He mixed in gray-kiss mold that did not kill, only clung to lungs and guts, leaving its victims tired, slow, and short of breath. The rest he laced with parasite eggs that would hatch into little gut-biters, gifting cramps, fever, and nights spent in the latrine instead of on the training grounds. He couldn't kill anyone outright, but he could make sure that when the time came to march, E'nathyr's warriors would be sick, weak, and a heartbeat slower than they should be.
Almost forty percent of all foodstuffs in E'nathyr had passed through his hands. That was the sweet spot: high enough to rot morale, low enough for the matrons to blame "poor harvests" and "bad storage." He spent gold like he was drinking mycelbrew, and the city watched, amused, as the strange half-breed squandered his fortune. On parchment, he theoretically controlled a million gold coins he could use; in practice, it was the same money changing hands again and again. He bought low, sold high, took payment in scrip and promises, sold those promises to desperate merchants, and let the numbers grow fat. By the time the coins circled back to him, he had increased that million by half—on paper and in damage done.
He had also brokered a deal between the Tower of Bones and the dark dwarves. The stout creatures had originally shown no interest in the quarrel between the lich and E'nathyr. When Malvek approached their thane, the dwarf had simply grunted, "We don't care who wins, only who pays in good metal."
Now, thanks to Malvek's careful wording and generous gifts, they had a perfectly legitimate reason to withhold support from the dark elves without offending anyone important: business.
To cut off the flow of armaments from the dark dwarves, he had spent a small mountain of mithril. The dark dwarves, like their uncorrupted cousins, worshipped only the forge. They cared nothing for drow politics or liches or gods—only for the weight of ingots and the ring of hammer on anvil. Deny them payment in the right metals, and their forges simply "fell behind" on drow orders.
The brain eaters, on the other hand, had eagerly swallowed the theory of E'nathyr's expansionist dreams. They would not actively cooperate with the city, but they would watch. The psychic mind-controllers had no interest in the undead—no brains to eat, no minds to bend, only cold soul-flame and bone. Malvek still remembered the elder's thought pressing against his mind:
"Empty skulls and dead nerves bore us. We will not feed your enemies for free."
The next move he would make would be a political one. Food and armament problems were "logistics," and thus beneath the notice of most matrons—things for stewards and slaves to fret over. But politics? Accusations, alliances, omens and scandals? That would drag their painted eyes away from their mirrors and altars at last. And when the matrons finally turned their gaze to the cracks he had carved into E'nathyr, it would already be too late to seal them.