The alchemy book was completed today, and with it another book is being mass-produced and spread as far and wide as possible. Personally, I'm glad that the scholars pretty much demanded that every man woman and child in every civilization learn how to read, illiteracy would hurt the effects of this endeavor.

Once I am done writing for the day I am going to ask Azrezel to help me write a book on necromancy. I imagine that this one will be a bit more mana intensive for the reader as creating bodies with mana is rather expensive, though it does leave open the option of sourcing their own corpses. Necromancy is actually incredibly cheap when it comes to mana, assuming you already have a corpse.

There is some news from the invisible island. There is an event halfway between a purge and a civil war in one of the major countries on the island currently going on. And it is indirectly our fault. From my understanding there were two social groups in the area, I'm not familiar with the specifics but they didn't like each other all that much. It was a kind of rivalry. One of those groups was open to trading with us, while the other shunned outsiders. So naturally, the people that I put in charge of converting them decided to do what they could to improve the social standing of the group that was willing to trade with us, a relatively easy task with the kind of resources we have access too. This resulted in them becoming wealthy and powerful very quickly, and also led to many of them learning our language, culture, and religion, which really irritated the other group. And now they are trying to slaughter each other. Which is good for us, with our support the group that favors us is going to win eventually, we have more resources than they could squeeze out of their entire island, and that is just with what we are able and willing to put towards this conflict.

Huh, now that I think about it could our own enemies be doing something similar? The Angelic council has seemingly infinite funds with which to buy mercenaries and other stuff, but there is no obvious source to their funds. Taxes couldn't possibly be enough for all of that, and neither could their dungeon divers. They don't engage in a lot of trade and we would know if they had some incredibly valuable goods that they could export in bulk. But a very wealthy patron would go a long way to explaining their resources.

It can't be a true immortal, or at least it can't be just one. It has to be something larger, like a well established foreign empire. But from my understanding there aren't a lot of those, and the few that do exist would have little reason to care about us over here, and even if they did they would probably do a lot more than just provide funding to our enemy. It could be some kind of merchant organization, but I'm not familiar with any of those. And besides, we have a lot more valuable stuff that we can produce cheaply than our enemy, and we are very willing to trade. Why would merchants support them over us?

I think that it is plausible that some grand creature, similar to the one that granted me control over Fate, is backing them. Possibly one of the creators of this world? It has to be intelligently designed, otherwise whatever structure the dungeons altered to allow the undead to accept souls properly simply wouldn't be possible. As for why they aren't doing more, well they might be, I can't prove that they aren't. But they aren't doing anything flashy, and I might have an explanation for that, assuming that everything I have said is true of course. I know for a fact that there is at least one of them, so there is quite possibly several of them. Maybe the one funding our enemy wants to avoid being noticed by the others for whatever reason. It is a common enough thing in the stories my dad would tell me that it seems like a reasonable explanation.

I'll admit that I'm more than a little unfairly attached to this theory as it would offer a good explanation for why Willow betrayed us, and for why she's so powerful. Neither of those things had happened until she met with the angelic council, and while it is reasonable that they could have done something to her, Willow is willful enough that I don't think any kind of brainwashing they were capable of would stick so quickly. But against a force equivalent to someone who had completely mastered Fate? No one in the world would be capable of resisting them.

Of course, the vainest way to interpret that, in my opinion anyway, is that the creature that granted me power over Fate wants to test and challenge me for some reason.

In the end though, I have no way to know if this is actually what's going on. It's not like I can ask. And it's not like the scholars would be able to find anyone like this if they didn't want to be found, maybe the oldest of the dungeons could do it but even if they could I can't afford their price.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.