Chapter 389: Even the Lord of Dawn Wouldnt Believe It
Chapter 389: Even the Lord of Dawn Wouldn't Believe It
Chapter 389: Even the Lord of Dawn Wouldn't Believe ItJames Watson was puzzled by Ambrose's confidence.
"Do you actually know what the Blood of Dawn is?" he asked.
"I've heard of it," Ambrose said. "A sword stained with the Lord of Dawn's own blood, if I recall correctly."
"It's not that simple." Watson's voice turned weighty. "Lyon has three great artifacts. The first is the Draconic Armaments. The second is the Crown of Dawn, which converts the faith of the people into holy light. Neither are fit for day-to-day usage. The third, which has thus seen the most use, is the Blood of Dawn."
Ambrose nodded. "The Silvermoon Knight used it to kill Master Morgan. I've heard the story."
Lyon had never publicized the details of its campaigns against the undead, but Black Rose had been there. She had lived it.
When Black Rose fled Lyon, she had been hunted and pursued the entire way. With all other paths closed to her, she had been driven into the Umbral Depths, where she had thrown herself into the Sea of Mercury. Master Morgan had protected her soul through that ordeal and helped her complete her lich transformation.
Morgan, who had established the theory of spirit golems, was a powerful lich who commanded vast numbers of undead and numerous spirit golems that could withstand holy light.
When the Silvermoon Knight led his forces into the Umbral Depths, the maze-like terrain had blunted Lyon's numerical advantage. The undead had worn them down through ambush and attrition, taking a heavy toll on Lyon's forces in the process.
And Black Rose herself had been at Morgan's side. Her Death Gaze was a devastating tool against the living.
Despite all of that, the Silvermoon Knight had cut through every obstacle and reached Morgan.
It wasn't only because of his own power. The Blood of Dawn had been the deciding factor.
"If I'm not mistaken," Ambrose said, "it has two effects. The wielder can resurrect after death, and it blinds the undead. Is that right?"
Watson was mildly surprised, then decided he shouldn't be. This lich's network of contacts was extraordinary.
"That's correct. The resurrection effect is, in some sense, secondary. If you can kill the wielder once, you can likely kill them a second time. The truly dangerous effect is the second. The Blood of Dawn severs the undead's perception entirely.
"Not just sight, but all your senses. You enter a void so total that you cannot even perceive the destruction of your own soul. It's the Lord of Dawn's mercy, in the form of an end without pain."
The undead had no eyes nor ears. They experienced the world through perception, reading it the way a scholar reads a comprehensive text. Without that perception, Ambrose would be unable to tell whether he was standing or lying down. He would have no orientation whatsoever.
That was the Blood of Dawn's true power, and the perfect counter to the undead.
Watson saw that Ambrose had gone quiet, and pressed on. "And beyond that, the Blood of Dawn is the Holy King's own sword, the blade that killed the Dragon Tyrant. It carries dragon blood in the steel. A permanent haste enchantment is built into it, along with resistance to most time-based effects..."
The former High Inquisitor continued at length, working through the artifact's properties one by one with the thoroughness of a man cataloguing reasons to be afraid.
Ambrose got tired of it all. "Why are you listing all this? I'm not planning to go up against it directly."
He wasn't a fool. Why waste his time against a weapon that specifically countered him?
"You've built an enormous stage to demonstrate your power to the world. You can't avoid this fight."
"I never said I was avoiding the fight. I said I wasn't planning to face the artifact directly." Ambrose paused. "Actually, I was a little worried about seven legends being a genuine problem. But the way you're talking about it, it sounds like the paladins and priests don't matter compared to the artifact. If that's how they're thinking, they're going to lose worse than I expected.
"Does the Lord of Dawn teach you to put all your faith in a single artifact? When you're actually on the battlefield, and the artifact fails to perform as expected, what do you think would happen to morale?"
Watson stopped and stared. "The artifact... failing? Did you—Did you receive a divine oracle?!"
What an alarming thought! A lich, receiving guidance from the Lord of Dawn? Was the Lord of Dawn telling this undead that the artifact wouldn't work?
He wouldn't have believed it before, but Watson had seen the royal family's corruption for what it was. Whether Lyon still had the Lord of Dawn's protection was genuinely uncertain.
And Arthur Lyon's own heroic spirit was in this lich's keeping. Whose side the Lord of Dawn was on wasn't a question Watson could answer confidently anymore.
Ambrose clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't get carried away. Even if the Lord of Dawn wanted to deliver a divine oracle to me, I wouldn't be able to receive it. Holy light and dark energy are fundamentally incompatible. He'd incinerate me the moment he tried."
Watson exhaled with moderate relief, though he couldn't entirely shake the feeling that this lich had some trick he hadn't accounted for.
"What exactly is your plan?" Watson asked.
"If I tell you, can you guarantee you'll keep it secret?"
"You know my character. What I agree to, I honor. And you know my current situation, too. There's no reason you can't tell me everything."
He accompanied this with what he clearly intended to be a sincere and trustworthy expression.
Ambrose said, "You haven't actually agreed to anything. You've described your character, said I could trust you, and used that to push me to answer. I stopped using that trick three centuries ago."
Watson's expression shifted. He had indeed done exactly that, intimating that he was trustworthy while never technically promising anything. He had expected the lich to miss the deception.
Naturally, the lich didn't.
"So what do you want?" Watson said, his composure cracking slightly. "I came all this way to warn you. Isn't that worth anything?"
"Now you're appealing to guilt. Have you ever met an undead who felt moral obligation?" Ambrose shrugged. "If you want to know, here's my offer. Swear to the Lord of Dawn that, no matter how vicious, how cruel, how underhanded what you learn turns out to be, you will not reveal it to anyone in any form, even in your sleep. If you break that oath, your god will judge you for it."
Breaking an oath to a deity, especially one sworn by a faithful, was not a small matter. The consequences ran significantly deeper than mere social embarrassment.
Watson had initially been tempted to swear such an oath, but not after all the qualifiers that Ambrose had added: "vicious, cruel, underhanded." If the plan was truly that bad...
That said, even if he had chosen to leave Lyon, he was still a priest of light, and looking the other way wasn't something the Lord of Dawn approved of.
How could he be so cowardly as to ignore evil just because it was inconvenient?
James Watson found himself lost. This might very well be a turning point in his life.
If he didn't intervene, a plan of great evil might succeed. But if he did, the royal house would continue rotting the empire from within and dragging everyone down with it.
Such a moral paradox applied maximal pressure to people who genuinely cared about doing the right thing. Watson's heart thumped. He felt short of breath.
While he had been High Inquisitor, decisions like this could easily be settled by Lyon's law. The law was clear. But ever since resigning, he had lost that clarity. Watson found himself navigating by instinct in a profoundly uncomfortable manner.
This was Watson's particular limitation: he wanted to be good, lacked the resources to be good all the way through, and couldn't quite manage to be bad either. Revolution required commitment he couldn't summon.
Ambrose watched Watson's struggle with visible satisfaction. At the very least, James Watson was paying off the interest on his old debt of refusing to pay Ambrose's ransom.
Watching the old man clutch at his chest with an expression that suggested he was being personally persecuted by the universe, Ambrose finally relented a little. "Look, we're old acquaintances. I'll offer you a discount. I won't tell you the details of the plan, but I'll spare one citizen of Lyon for every thousand gold you get me. If you can manage a few million gold coins, every last soldier in that legion will walk away with their life. What say you?"
Watson stared at him. Then he roared, "I don't have any money!"
He had resigned. He wasn't receiving a salary anymore. Watson had never taken a bribe or dipped into unauthorized funds in his entire career, and he had left Lyon with no possessions to his name. He didn't even have a single gold coin, let alone a thousand.
Ambrose immediately lost interest. "Then leave. I'm not running a charity."
He had someone escort Watson back to his boat, then returned to his work.
Gods didn't listen to prayers without offerings, and neither did liches.
Watson was ushered out by a cluster of undead, climbed back into the small boat he'd arrived on, and sat for a moment watching the island vanish via an illusion.
He reached into a pouch and produced a magic mirror.
Ambrose had distributed them freely early on to accelerate the God of Alchemy's accumulation of power through widespread use.
Watson had received one, along with many others. He had chosen to deliver the warning in person rather than through the mirror, not trusting an alchemical device with information that sensitive. But the mirror still had its uses.
Rather than contact Ambrose, however, James Watson reached out to his son, Cade.
The mirror showed a noticeably drunk Cade. Watson delivered a thorough scolding—this son of his had been the most indolent of his children since childhood. He was always choosing the path of least resistance, and always looking for comfort.
But Watson had no one else to consult right now. His eldest had cut all ties with the family. Allen was far too busy. Cade, for all his laziness, was the sharpest of the three, and at the moment the only one who actually had any money.
He explained what had happened and asked: "How much do you have? Lend it all to me. That lich runs entirely on gold. He'd sell all his plans to me if I paid him enough."
Cade was still surfacing from the haze of alcohol, but the content of the discussion seeped through quickly enough. "Father, think about what you're saying. He tricked you again. You told me yourself that the Holy King's heroic spirit is in his hands, and apparently voluntarily at that. I don't know what that lich is planning, but the Holy King has accepted this lich's goodness and integrity. Who are we to question that?
"And I'll say something slightly impertinent, Father. In your entire life, have you saved as many people as this lich has? Even a tenth as many? The Lord of Dawn doesn't believe that he'll arrange for a massacre. Why should we?"