The Lich Without a Soul Vessel

There was another structure far more complex — something like a vibrating hexagon, with a number of what appeared to be smaller spheres around its outside, though their boundaries were indistinct. He sensed instinctively that this should be glucose. There were another dozen or so distinct structures besides, the simplest being a single isolated sphere, which should have been an iron atom, and so on. In this way, Evan had stumbled, quite by accident, onto the chemical structure of matter itself.

The chemical structure of matter wasn't nearly as simple as what he'd learned in high school in his previous life. What those textbooks had described had been an utterly idealized abstraction — the true information content here was far richer than anything on those pages. A realization dawned on Evan: scientific description, at best, captured one or two threads of the information involved, when in truth it contained a virtually uncountable amount.

Evan even felt a kind of despair at the sheer scale of it. If a single simple water molecule contained this much information, then without a sample to work from, how could anything be created from nothing? The principle was simple enough — in this world, matter could be created through a creation array. In his previous life's world of science, that should, in theory, have been possible too, but the sheer volume of information required meant particle accelerators could only manage to produce a handful of very simple particles.

One mana crystal spent, Evan bottled the mass of honey. Shuang tasted a bit and said, "That really is honey."

"Of course it's honey. Though the cost is a thousand times, maybe a hundred thousand times, what ordinary honey costs. This was just an experiment — there's no reason at all to produce honey this way. Nature is a marvel, producing everything at the lowest possible cost, something no amount of human labor could match." As he spoke, Evan took out another mana crystal and placed it into the creation array, removing the honey he'd used as the reference sample. An idea had occurred to him — he wanted to see whether he could synthesize matter using only the information he'd just perceived in his mind.

He activated the creation array, merged his awareness with it, focused his thoughts, and began to hold the image of the water molecule from before in his mind. He had already stripped away a great deal of the information. Within the array, water began to appear.

He stopped, thought it over carefully, and — worried something might go wrong — checked everything once more before reactivating the array. This time, he held the structure of glucose in his mind. The array gave off a low hum, and a white powder began to appear. Shuang watched Evan run his experiment.

Evan stopped; the crystal was down to roughly half. He gathered the white powder into a bottle, took a pinch, and tasted it — a faint sweetness filled his mouth. Pure glucose, and it should have been the levorotatory form. Seeing him taste it, Shuang dabbed a little onto her small hand and tried it too, letting out a surprised sound. "It's a lot like honey, but not as rich."

"Of course it's not as rich as honey. This is just glucose, the main component of honey — honey has a great many other components besides," Evan explained with a smile.

"Why is it a white powder?" Shuang asked, another question ready.

"It's crystallized glucose — the purest form of glucose there is. Honey has a large amount of water in it, along with fructose and other nutrients," Evan said.

"I see. Too bad it took a mana crystal — in your words, the cost is terrifyingly high. I'm off to sleep." Shuang yawned and flew off.

Evan looked at the creation array. Creating matter this way made no economic sense whatsoever — not unless there was some vast, extremely cheap source of energy to draw on; otherwise the cost was simply prohibitive. And yet the underlying principle of the array had other uses entirely, uses that might carry enormous significance. Refined properly, it could reveal the structure of matter — not a bad microscopic detection device at all. It could serve, in this other world, as something like an ion microscope, or even a scanning tunneling microscope.

Evan found himself turning the idea of its structure over in his mind. It wasn't without inherent flaws, of course — being an alchemical array, it couldn't be used by ordinary people, unlike a microscope back on Earth.

Regardless, he decided he'd build a working model when he had the time. Something stirred in him — if this really worked the way he thought, it would be an era-defining invention.

Night had fully fallen by now. Sky City continued sailing south through the sky. It was time for Evan's daily cultivation, and today had brought more than enough events to sort through — best to organize his thoughts properly first.

He sat cross-legged on his bed and began reviewing and reflecting on the day's gains and losses. He wondered how Roland preserved all that information — those archive cabinets had been remarkable. He'd forgotten to ask about it today; he'd have to ask tomorrow.

Evan reflected on the day's events, then began his regular practice, settling into meditation. The lights in the room had long since gone dark. Sky City sailed smoothly through the night sky. In his mind's eye, Evan could see Sky City itself, vast as a mountain against the heavens, its mystic light flickering. Through the eye of his spirit, everything felt wondrous beyond words.

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The next morning, Scarlett had breakfast ready early and had already gone out to practice her dagger work. Evan and Shuang ate breakfast; Jessica and the others were up as well — they, too, now had a servant, one of the unfortunate women and children from the recent campaign.

After several more days of flight, they returned to Hollingburton. Evan filed his report and went to see Ortlando. Ortlando greeted him with a smile. "Actually, I've been expecting you. Once you become a magus, you're entitled to enter the library in the demiplane — though no one's obligated to remind you of it. It's entirely up to your own initiative. You've finally come."

Ortlando handed him a library card. Evan didn't stand on ceremony and headed straight for the demiplane. Shuang didn't come along — once back, she went off to see her monster friends instead.

Card in hand, Evan entered the library — a freestanding building, oddly without doors or windows, more like a monument than anything else. It didn't look especially large. Evan had been to the demiplane before and had assumed it was simply some kind of memorial marker; he'd had no idea it was actually a library. Within a certain range of it, the library card in his hand flared with light, and Evan vanished into it.

Everything went dark before his eyes, and then he found himself inside. The interior was bright, and looking from within toward the outside, everything was strangely clear. Seated at the entrance was a robed attendant in black. He looked to be of great age. Evan bowed to him and said, "Elder, this is my first visit. I don't know the rules here — I'd appreciate your guidance."

The attendant looked him over, a green glow flickering in his eyes. "Another of my own kind — how delightful. I am Elzin. A pleasure to meet you."

Only then did Evan notice the man was little more than skin stretched over bone, his eyes glowing green, his voice dry and rasping — harsh to the ear, and yet unmistakably pleased. A lich. Evan's curiosity about Hollingburton deepened all the more. He'd assumed he and Boniface were the only liches on campus; he hadn't expected to encounter one here in the library. Judging by his appearance, there was no telling how many years he had been a lich.

"An honor to meet you, elder. I'm Evan Wang. I hope you'll guide me going forward," Evan said at once.

"Heh heh, of course, of course. I've been here over a thousand years now. The world's long since forgotten me. Little one, if you've come looking for books, there are some on the Death shelves well suited to you — they go into great detail on the specific methods of lich cultivation. I can't be bothered to move, so off you go." With that, he closed his eyes again, his broad robe wrapped around the lich's frame as he lay back in his chair, without a sound, as though he didn't exist at all.

Evan entered the library proper. Row upon row of books whispered to each other on their shelves. Some books had illustrated figures perched right on their covers, of every shape and description, chattering among themselves; some monstrous figures gnawed on bloody corpses. It was nothing short of an ocean of fiends.

The moment they noticed Evan, they all shrank back into their books at once. After a moment, they cautiously poked their heads back out to steal glances at him. Evan paid them no mind — he knew they were nothing more than illusions, traces left behind by whoever had written each book.

Following the attendant's directions, Evan made his way to the shelves beginning with "Death." It felt like stepping into some grim and terrible graveyard — the books gave off intermittent wails and sobs, along with the occasional piercing shriek.

Evan shook his head. Necromancy was frightening enough on its own; these necromancers had apparently gone out of their way to make their books even more so when they wrote them. No wonder ordinary folk had no love for necromancers — not a single one of these books seemed remotely normal.

He scanned the titles: A Pictorial Guide to Ghoul Evolution, How to Deepen a Subject's Resentment Before Death, and more — titles alone enough to raise the hair on one's neck, each one a wicked tome in its own right. As he browsed and made his selections, having gone through two shelves' worth, he spotted one book lying quietly in a corner, oddly still, and reached out to pull it free.

The Silence of Death — Return to Death. Evan picked up the book and opened it. It wasn't without illustrations, but they were all peaceful — occasionally a breeze seemed to stir through a scene, only the wild grass bowing its head. This was a book that probed into the nature of death itself, its content running deep. It touched on a visualization of death — not a visualization of Hadir, but something more like an abstract image of a black hole. The instant Evan looked upon that image, his eyes went distant for a moment, and he startled back to awareness. This was a visualization — and a magical archetype as well. Evan saw, without exception, all things decaying, all things returning into death's embrace. He kept the book in hand.

He browsed further and picked up another: An Inquiry into the Artifacts of Death. This was a book on alchemy, though strangely, it wasn't about forming something from external matter — rather, about condensing the aura of death within the body itself, falling under the category of internal cultivation. Evan took it in hand as well, then turned and headed for the exit, stopping to register both books with Elzin. Seeing which two books Evan had chosen, Elzin's expression turned strange, and he offered a word of caution. "These books are for your eyes alone — keep them well, and be careful no one glimpses them by accident. Anyone who hasn't reached magus rank would likely not be able to bear what's inside, mentally."

After Evan had gone, Elzin muttered to himself, uncertain. "Those two books — no one's borrowed them in eight hundred years, I'd wager. They've got nothing to do with the Elemental school at all. What made him choose those two?"

Evan had no idea of this. As instructed, he kept the books carefully stored away, reading them only at night. The new year had arrived, and Shuang was overjoyed, playing herself into a frenzy. Evan attended Hollingburton's New Year celebration as well, but sat quietly off to one side, his mind constantly on his cultivation. He studied the two books thoroughly, though he didn't adopt their contents wholesale — instead, he wove them together with what he already knew. The Death Saint Weapon — a scythe — had already begun to take faint shape within his body, while the black hole had taken the form of a single, pitch-black eye. He already possessed the Death's Eye magic, though that worked as magic cast through the eyes; this new power, he decided simply to name the Death God's Eye.