Lich for Hire-Chapter 11: Buying Counterfeit Goods

Common sense told Ambrose that there was no way Alkhemia would sell him genuine living mercury for five hundred gold. But curiosity got the better of him. He just had to see how convincing their fake really was.

The clerk leaned in with a conspiratorial air and handed him a small vial of silver liquid.

It had a nice weight to it and was heavy in the hand.

It was promising enough until Ambrose took one careful glance and sighed in disappointment.

"It's separated into layers already... This isn't living mercury at all. It's just plain mercury."

Ambrose didn't specialize in alchemy, but he was a practitioner, at least. That was more than enough.

A thin fraction of genuine living mercury had been mixed with regular mercury, but they weren't quite miscible. As a result, the living mercury had separated into a thin layer on top with a slightly different hue.

To the untrained eye, it might look fine, but anyone who'd ever handled the real thing could tell at once.

This five-hundred-gold knockoff was simply too shoddy.

The nervous clerk said guiltily, "Haha, I knew you were an expert! Don't worry, that's just a sample for people like you who can tell the difference. Let's, uh, move on to the real talk."

She hurriedly swapped the vial for another one.

This time, Ambrose had to admit, the result was impressive.

Even under close inspection, there wasn't a single visible flaw. If it was a fake, it was a very good one—he'd probably have to uncork the sample to be sure.

"So both are five-hundred-gold fakes despite the difference in quality?" Ambrose asked dryly.

"Of course not. That first one's five hundred. This one's at least three thousand."

Ambrose was about to demand a test sample when a thought struck him. His tone shifted admiringly. "Oh, I get it now. This isn't living mercury. It's dead mercury. No wonder it looks identical. Clever trick."

The clerk's eyes went wide. She immediately hushed him, whispering,"Keep your voice down! Do you want me to lose my job? Are you buying it or not?"

Now she was truly panicking. She'd only been trying to get a small commission. Who could've guessed that such a "young alchemist" would see through the entire scheme in seconds? The fake was made by the Alchemists' Council itself. It was supposed to be perfect, undetectable!

Yet he'd spotted the trick without even opening the vial.

"Great," she thought. "Just my luck to run into one of those cranky old masters pretending to be young. He's probably three hundred years old and bored out of his skull!"

From her face alone, Ambrose knew that he'd guessed correctly. The trick itself wasn't even complicated.

Living mercury was actually the result of one of Alkhemia's failed experiments, an attempt to create a new kind of slime.

What they ended up with was a mercury slime in a permanent vegetative state. It had no will, no movement; only the instinct to devour metal.

If that little quirk hadn't made it commercially useful, the whole project would've gone straight into the trash.

But even a vegetative slime was still alive. And all living things, sooner or later, would die.

Dead mercury slimes didn't rot. They looked exactly the same as living ones. Even the city's best alchemists couldn't tell the difference unless they dropped in a bit of metal.

The living ones would eat it; the dead ones wouldn't.

Then, some genius came up with a brilliant scam: slice off a piece of living mercury slime and mix it with a dead one to get something in between.

It could still dissolve metal, but only weakly.

To a buyer, it would simply seem as if the product had lost some potency during transport. Maybe, they'd think, it just needed time to recover.

The really low-grade fakes were probably knockoffs by amateurs trying to make a quick buck—maybe even this clerk herself.

Only when Ambrose had seen through the inferior counterfeit did she present the superior one.

Alkhemia knew the genuine article was too expensive to sell in bulk. If they couldn't afford to maintain the living samples, they'd just die off anyway and bleed the city's finances, hence this cost-saving solution.

Ambrose could easily imagine how many fools had already paid full price for these superior counterfeits.

It was clever, but also downright shameless.

But what else could he expect of the City of Alchemists, Alkhemia? It was the richest city on the continent, as well as among the most morally bankrupt.

Ambrose had been ready to walk away.

He was planning to sell his goods to his acquaintances from the Elegiac Society, after all.

Sure, he was short on money, but money made from scams always found its way back out again. And if the Dullahan failed to hide his stash of gold and had his illicit activities discovered by his wife, a legendary bone dragon, then he'd be dead twice over.

A beating from both of them would smash his phylactery to dust. No profit margin was worth that much.

He was just about to hand back the vials when a thought stopped him.

If mercury slimes can die... does that make their bodies carcasses?

Alchemy wasn't Ambrose's strongest suit, but necromancy was his specialty.

He almost asked whether the Alchemists' Guild had ever tried necromantic reanimation on dead mercury slimes, only to choke back the question at the last minute.

What if they hadn't? What if he had just stumbled upon something they'd missed?

Telling them would hand the Guild a free breakthrough—and knowing them, they wouldn't pay him a single coin in royalties.

So instead, Ambrose leaned forward and said, "Three thousand's too steep. How about a discount?"

"The price is fixed," she said stiffly.

"That's for genuine goods. This is a counterfeit."

"I still can't go lower!"

"Then throw in two bottles of the cheap ones."

......

A few rounds of haggling later, Ambrose walked out with one superior counterfeit, one inferior counterfeit, and two bags of enchanted seeds thrown in for free.

Apparently, living mercury wasn't exactly flying off the shelves.

He'd meant to browse for other supplies. After all, running a fief full of living humans took preparation. But his mind was now wholly consumed by one thing and one thing only: that bottle of living mercury. His instincts screamed that this would be a business opportunity.

Ambrose left Alkhemia at a dead sprint, transforming into a wisp of smoke and diving straight through the roof of his old castle.

Dropping his disguise, he resumed his skeletal form and headed straight for the laboratory with his two bottles of counterfeits.

Inside, Isabel was still diligently brewing Basilisk Oil. Under Ambrose's guidance, she'd mastered the formula, producing ten full flasks with only one failure, a solid result by any standard.

But when Ambrose's hollow eyes passed over the discarded materials, Isabel felt her heart stop.

Would the lich punish her for wasting ingredients? Would he... use her for an experiment?

The skeletal lich said nothing, expression unreadable as always, his hollow gaze fixed on her as he slowly approached. The sheer pressure of his presence made Isabel's survival instincts scream out.

"Where's that genius alchemist when I need him?" she thought in despair. Wasn't he an undead too?

He might only have given her a few pointers, but in some sense, he was already her new master.

"Master, come save your student!" she prayed mentally.