Lich for Hire

As someone who had crossed into this world with no special advantages, Ambrose had always made a habit of regular self-examination.

Had anyone gotten the better of him today? Had he gotten the better of anyone? And how could he extract the maximum possible benefit from the situation?

Right now, the most important question was the last of these.

He had seen the Dragon Graveyard in full, and his honest assessment was that it was relatively poor, aside from a pile of bones and some unusual magical byproducts. The dragons themselves were presumably in much the same condition.

Why were creatures as powerful as dragons living in such destitution? Because the islands out here were barren. The real resources were on the ocean floor, and most dragons couldn't swim.

They simply weren't skilled at it.

On land, if any fishmen were to attempt to fight a dragon, they would simply die.

Underwater, a single diving dragon could easily be handled by a small squad of fishman warriors. The dragons were limited to fishing in the shallows; venture into deep water, and they became the prey.

Bone dragons, on the other hand, were excellent divers. In the early years of the dragon clans' exile, Sephris had been the most indispensable member of the community.

He required no rest, needed no air, and could hunt in the ocean around the clock to feed a population of young dragons, including his own daughter, a newly hatched iridescent dragon whelp.

Years passed. The dragon clans adapted to their fishy diet, but only barely.

Reproduction remained a persistent problem, and the population stayed stubbornly low as dragons continued to die from various causes.

The clans were genuinely impoverished: they had too few islands, too little territory, and barely any slaves whatsoever. Even their famed hoards were barren.

So Ambrose's fantasy of carrying off several billion gold from dragon hoards certainly wasn't going to materialize. He needed to think about how to extract profit differently.

Did the dragons have any other valuables on hand?

Their bodies, unquestionably, were walking treasure vaults.

Dragon bone, scale, blood, heart, marrow—all that was worth extraordinary sums, and none of it could be acquired by force. Ambrose alone certainly couldn't fight a hundred dragons.

Even Gareth, who had helped him against his own father-in-law earlier, wouldn't stand by and watch Ambrose massacre the dragons. Alabastra would never allow it.

Trade was the only viable approach.

And trade was straightforward enough. The dragons lacked for everything. Bring them what they needed from the continent, and they would willingly part with their scales to pay for it.

The idea of selling scales might seem strange, but Ambrose had even heard of someone selling a kidney for a phone that would be obsolete within a year in his past life. Desperation was a reliable constant.

Control the supply route, become the sole intermediary, and he would monopolize the dragon trade. History had demonstrated this repeatedly.

Realizing this plan wasn't quite so simple, though.

First, the dragon clans had to choose trade over simply taking what they wanted by force.

Second, the dragon clans could never return to the continent. If they did so, his monopoly would dissolve.

Both conditions meant Ambrose had to undermine any plan for the dragons' return. On that front, he had already made significant progress.

Something about the prospect of draconic extinction had gotten its hooks into Sephris completely. The one thing this old dragon could not stomach was the end of his kind. It was why he had kept vigil over the dragon clans even after his own death, why he had endured being looked down upon by the living dragons he protected, and why he had spent over a thousand years doing the unglamorous work of keeping them alive.

In that way, he and Black Rose were perfect opposites. She was a former queen who wanted nothing more than to destroy her own kind, and he was a bone dragon who had devoted his existence to preserving his.

Ambrose had simply made him see something he hadn't considered: that the dragon clans returning to the continent in their current state would mean extermination, not a return to how things had been. Sephris had been too taken by the githarks' promises and distracted by the tension between the living dragons and his undead existence to examine whether the plan could actually work.

He was now determined to prevent his kindred from walking into catastrophe.

He would do whatever it took to avoid the dragons' returning to the mainland just to die. He certainly wouldn't let the clans be driven to extinction.

"Please wait here in the Graveyard. I'll go contact my kin."

Sephris departed in a hurry, leaving Ambrose and the others behind.

The moment the old dragon was gone, Milena put down her notebook and looked at Ambrose with deep sincerity. "Father, what just happened? Why did he listen to you after you scolded him? I wasn't distracted, I promise, but it feels like I missed something."

Before Ambrose could answer, Aige nodded in agreement. "I'll be honest, I didn't entirely follow the conversation either. Sephris was openly hostile to you at the start. How did you get him to work for you within just a few minutes?"

Aige was genuinely impressed. She and Ambrose had only collaborated once before. Though his methods had been striking then, this was a different matter entirely. She had just watched Ambrose turn the lord of the Dragon Graveyard into a fool.

Was that the talent that had caught the eye of the Elegiac Society's president?

Ambrose didn't have much to explain. He looked at Milena and said, simply, "When you talk to someone, if you genuinely want what's good for them, they'll feel it. Put yourself in their position and look at things from where they're standing. That's how you find where the issues lie.

Sephris clearly cares about the dragon clans more than he cares about himself, so that was the angle I took. Show him what's hurting his people and what might actually help them, and he'll do the rest himself. Sincerity is my ultimate trick. Do you understand what I'm saying, Milena?"

Milena thought hard for a while and eventually said, "I'll remember it."

Ambrose: "..."

Ambrose noted, quite keenly, that she did not claim to understand his methods. She was likely going to try to memorize it by rote.

He ultimately decided not to push her. Some people were built a certain way; forcing her to develop intelligence despite the lack of aptitude she had shown was pointless. He'd have to have a discussion with Black Rose about it: putting pressure on the child was a waste of everyone's time.

With Sephris gone, Ambrose got to work harvesting the Dragon Graveyard.

He wasn't too greedy about things: for every three clusters of dragonbone vines he found, he only harvested two. It was the same principle with everything else. Leave enough to grow back, and never cut the roots.

Gareth walked alongside him and pointed out which parts of the Graveyard had the densest concentrations of rare materials.

Helping cause his father-in-law a significant financial loss was something Gareth was more than happy to help with.

The two of them scoured the Dragon Graveyard, then carefully cleaned things up in such a way that Ambrose's harvests weren't immediately obvious.

By the time they'd finished, they had accumulated a few million gold worth of materials.

Then came footsteps—but it wasn't Sephris. Alabastra appeared instead, in the form of a dragon spirit.

When she saw Ambrose, she rushed forward. "What did you say to my father? I passed him on the way back and he left without a word."

She had been out with the other bone dragons, hunting in the deep ocean and checking the seafloor for valuables.

That was simply what bone dragons did with their time. They had no need to eat, and no need to breathe. Occasionally, something remarkable would turn up.

That day had been uneventful, but on the way back, she had crossed paths with Sephris moving in the opposite direction at considerable speed, barely pausing long enough to acknowledge her.

"Why blame me?" Ambrose said, managing an air of innocence. "I didn't do anything. We just talked."

"Your mouth is more dangerous than any ninth-tier spell," Alabastra said, completely seriously. "If you've deceived my father, I will not forgive you."

Ambrose glanced at Gareth. So that was why the man kept a private stash of gold.

Alabastra was perfectly reasonable under most circumstances, but when her father was involved, reason tended to take a step back.

It was understandable enough: from what Ambrose understood, Sephris had spent the early years of the exile hunting around the clock to keep juvenile dragons fed, including his own daughter. He had protected her through her transformation into a bone dragon and stayed at her side through all of it. That kind of bond ran deep.

Still, Ambrose had a ready answer.

"Don't alarm yourself. I promise it's for the dragon clans' benefit. All I did was persuade him to stop the plan to return to the mainland. For the dragon clans as they are now, returning to land would cause nothing but conflict, conflict that would leave the clans extinct. Honestly, do you really think the githarks' plan might succeed?"

Alabastra's brow creased. She was quiet for a moment. "What do you mean? Are you saying the astral dragons were lying to us?"

Ambrose nodded without hesitation. "Unquestionably. I told you this before: Tiamat was the one who sent them from the astral plane. Nothing good can come from a plan that a Lord of Hell came up with. I'd wager a significant number of the dragons have already been talked into signing infernal contracts. Some of them have probably signed away their souls."

Alabastra's form shuddered visibly. "How can this be? Tiamat is a dragon herself!"

Ambrose blinked. The dragon clans' conviction that shared race meant shared loyalty was genuinely baffling.

"Lady Alabastra, Tiamat is not primarily a dragon. She is, beyond all else, a lord of Hell. A greater devil. Appealing to shared heritage with a greater devil is not just naïve, but dangerous."

"That's still just speculation on your part," Alabastra said, but her spirit dragon form was starting to quaver.

Gareth stepped to her side. His large frame drew her in close. "Don't panic. Your father is more than capable of looking after himself. Whatever the Dragon Queen has planned, I'll handle the fighting, and Tiga will handle the thinking. Everything will be fine."

Ambrose inwardly scoffed at Gareth's affectionate display—the fact that he was showing off while dragging Ambrose into the fray—but given the materials currently in his storage, he decided to be generous.

Unfortunately, things didn't get better after that.

Sephris had been gone for hours. Even by evening, there was no sign of him, no message through any channel.

"Are the dragons so far away that traveling there and back takes this much time? Is there no teleportation array?" Ambrose asked.

Alabastra was visibly tense. "It's somewhat far, but not this far. He should have returned by now, unless something—"

Before she could finish, Gareth was already on his feet, a blade wreathed in black flame appearing in his hand.

"Something's approaching the Graveyard," he said. "The githarks!"

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