It was late at night in the eerie manor.
Harvey got up and opened the window. A night owl flapped its wings and crashed into the room, rolling a few times on the floor before rapidly decaying and weathering into a pile of ash.
Harvey brushed aside the ashes and picked up the envelope hidden within. Under the bright white light of the study lamp, he read its contents.
“Dear Mage Harvey, regarding the batch of corpses you ordered, due to the recent frequent activities of the Church Judgment Army, there has been an unexpected shortage. We are extremely sorry for this…”
Harvey took a deep breath, and a cloud of green mist surged from his palm, crumbling the letter into powder. “Damn the Church Judgment Army!”
Ever since the Judgment Army went to the battlefield in the Evil Moon Mountain Range, the Necromancers had faced a shortage of the large number of corpses they used for their experiments.
The reason was simple: corpses that had undergone the Church's Requiem Mass could not be reanimated with resurrection spells.
The corpse wranglers certainly didn't want to drag carts of heavy, dead bodies all the way back to Saint Valen to sell.
Thinking of this, Harvey irritably got up and paced back and forth in the study.
Ever since the Spellcaster Union enacted a law prohibiting Necromancers from stealing or purchasing corpses for spell experiments without the consent of the deceased or their families, the situation had been difficult.
Under these circumstances, most Necromancers could only purchase expensive experimental materials from corpse collectors, often sourced from those who died on battlefields and couldn't be buried and given a Requiem Mass in time.
“This is blatant academic discrimination!” Harvey couldn't help but curse under his breath.
He hadn't expected that immediately after being promoted to a junior Necromancer, he would face the dilemma of a shortage of experimental materials.
It wasn't that Harvey particularly valued or was obsessed with magical experiments themselves.
Rather, without corpses, he couldn't convert enough Undead to work for him. Once the production line stalled, his business would plummet.
Without business, there was no money, and without money, how could he repay his hefty student loans!
After all, among the Seven Great Wizard Kingdoms, only the Undead Academy allowed students to apply for student loans and repay them in installments after graduation.
Leaving aside the problem that the Undead Academy indeed had difficulty recruiting students,
this was also the only Spellcaster school Harvey, as a transmigator with not much Spellcasting talent, could normally get into.
Necromancers were different from ordinary Elemental Mages and Arcane Mages; they couldn't earn substantial salaries by being employed by noble lords or Magic Academies, becoming respected magical consultants.
They were even more at odds with divine Spellcasters like Church priests, although the establishment of the Spellcaster Union had greatly alleviated the conflict between the two.
As for Alchemists, without generations of family wealth and accumulated formulas, ordinary people simply didn't have enough capital to embark on that professional path.
...
Arriving at the simple production workshop, Harvey somewhat painedly inspected the few remaining armless and legless Undead standing by the production line.
Using Undead as workshop workers for the assembly line production of his soap workshop was Harvey's first entrepreneurial project after graduating from the Undead Academy, relying on his transmigator's business acumen.
However, the research and development costs for this production line were not cheap.
Harvey, already burdened with student loans, couldn't afford it entirely himself. Fortunately, he had joined an interest club during his time at the academy.
Several wealthy “second-generation mages” in the club were very interested in Harvey's occasional wild ideas.
This led them to generously invest in his first entrepreneurial project after graduation.
But Harvey now somewhat regretted developing this entrepreneurial project.
The Undead, who worked tirelessly without eating or sleeping, were indeed the “007” assembly line ace, but Harvey overlooked the most important point.
Neither living people nor dead bodies were nearly as sturdy and durable as metal parts.
The Undead not only gradually decayed but also frequently clashed with other equipment on the production line due to their overly sluggish response to spell commands.
Just last week, due to slow operation, three fully intact Undead got themselves tangled in the mixer, adding many inappropriate ingredients to the finished soap product.
Coupled with the sudden shortage of corpse sources, Harvey had no confidence whatsoever in the first batch of orders due for delivery a month later.
Purchasing second-hand stock from other Necromancers might be a solution.
Harvey slapped his forehead, deciding to first sound out other Necromancers. In Cold Crow Town, where he was currently located, there were several colleagues engrossed in research who rarely left their homes.
Returning to the study, Harvey eagerly retrieved some letter paper and began writing furiously.
【Hello, Mage Anthony, due to the recent shortage of corpse sources, my experiments are currently stalled. Do you have any surplus Undead available for transfer? Incomplete limbs are fine; the price is negotiable.】
Folding the letter, Harvey snapped his fingers and summoned a messenger night owl with a spell, watching it swallow the letter and flap its wings to fly out the window.
Anthony's Mage Tower was in the valley east of Cold Crow Town. It was currently working hours, so he should get a reply quickly.
Indeed, about an hour later, the night owl delivered Anthony's reply.
Unfortunately, the content was not as good as Harvey had hoped. The other party not only coldly refused the second-hand transaction of Undead but also subtly mocked Harvey for engaging in the low-level work of manufacturing goods for mortals as a noble Spellcaster, claiming it trampled upon the dignity of a Necromancer.
Harvey casually burned the reply, muttering, “What outdated notions of an old-school mage! All they know is researching things like immortality, souls, and the power of death… ”
“Don't you know what it means to be close to the people and solve their needs? Why is making goods for mortals considered low-level work!”
“If you can't make money and enjoy life, what's the point of being immortal? Are you going to live until the day your Mage Tower is demolished?”
Of course, these words could not be said directly to Anthony's face, as Harvey was only a junior mage, while Anthony had already been a middle-level mage ten years ago.
Ever since he transmigrated, Harvey had found that the Spellcasters in this magical world completely disdained the enjoyment of ordinary people's lives and their basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter.
Most Spellcasters maintained only basic physiological needs with bread and water, dedicating all their time to the fervent pursuit of magical research and higher levels of life.
Even Alchemists were reluctant to invent and create commercialized products, immersing themselves wholeheartedly in the creator's delusion of bestowing life upon inanimate objects through Alchemy.
After silently complaining for a while, Harvey still forced himself to cheer up and began to consider how to resolve his current predicament.
He pulled out his graduation thesis, written during his time at the Undead Academy—the initial draft that his mentor had dismissed as a fantasy and rejected.
—“Feasibility Study on Soul Transfer and Mechanical Undead Creation”
Harvey still clearly remembered the scene where his mentor, after reading the initial draft, furiously threw the entire manuscript onto his face.
Indeed, experimental research on souls in the magical world was not uncommon, but to this day, no substantive progress had been made.
Because the truth most people believed was…
The Gods, as creators, truly existed.
Souls could not be created out of thin air, nor could they be arbitrarily stripped, let alone transferred.
This was also the main reason why the Alchemy Exploration Society's Creator Project had always been regarded as blasphemy by the Church and as a delusion by Spellcasters.
Harvey then took out his experimental creation from the safe in the study and solemnly placed it on the desk.
It was a mechanical prosthetic limb produced by the Alchemy Exploration Society, a defective product discarded due to a model error.
Carefully connecting the end of the mechanical prosthetic limb to a blue crystal, Harvey took a deep breath and injected a small amount of magical energy into the crystal.
Light instantly flowed within the crystal, as if something alive was wriggling inside.
A moment later, the rough metal fingers of the mechanical prosthetic limb on the other end suddenly twitched as if electrocuted.
Then, the metal prosthetic limb seemed to come alive, its five fingers instantly spreading open, gripping the wooden desk surface, and slowly moving forward a short distance.
It then convulsed for a while before becoming completely still.
“The soul energy of ordinary insects is still too weak…”
Harvey looked at the dim blue crystal after its energy was depleted, sighing softly.
But… this also fully proved…
The souls of living creatures could indeed be transferred into metal creations…
And drive them!