Chapter 121 — All Things Perish

The instant he sensed the magic energy surging abruptly within that slave's body, Gao Yang knew something was badly wrong. He hurled himself forward, triggering the knight's Charge skill the moment he set off, and shouted a warning at the registrar, who still had not reacted: "Danger! Get down!"

The registrar reacted half a beat too late. By then the slave's entire body had swollen violently, an ominous red glow bleeding out from his bloated, splitting flesh as countless chaotic, malevolent runes raced across his skin. The wretched man, long since stripped of his senses, finally loosed a scream of agony—but before he could fully burst apart into a bomb, Gao Yang reached him.

An iron gauntlet wreathed in white light swept in from the side, shoving the living bomb away from the crowd. A blurry shadow flickered past Gao Yang an instant later; Amber emerged from the darkness and slammed the utterly frozen registrar roughly to the ground.

The explosion followed. The slave, sent flying, burst like a balloon swollen past its limit, every scrap of flesh and bone in that instant turned to lethal shrapnel spraying in all directions. Even far from the crowd, some of the harder bone fragments still rattled against the wooden table at the registration point, leaving pits of varying depth—had Amber not put the registrar on the ground in time, the poor wretch would have been killed or at least had his face ruined.

Only then did the others begin to react. Soldiers on guard in the distance came running; Hedy raised a magic barrier at once and activated Detect Distortion to check whether any other danger remained. The registrar who had cheated death crawled trembling out from under the table, a perfectly clear boot print stamped across his face.

"Lock down the area. No unauthorized personnel in or out," Gao Yang ordered loudly and rapidly, glancing at the scorched crater left on the docks. "Dock guards, stop those ships and take the slavers into custody—and bring back the last batch of slaves who finished registering! Move!"

At those clear, precise orders everyone sprang into action. Hedy dashed to Gao Yang's side and anxiously looked him over. "Ancestor, are you all right?!"

"Fine. An explosion of that scale can't hurt me," Gao Yang waved a hand. "Any residual aura left at the scene?"

Hedy shook her head, and just as she was about to say something, another voice came suddenly from nearby: "What's going on, what's going on—don't tell me you're still here testing art?!"

Gao Yang looked toward the voice and saw Pi Yun running over. This druid was charged with inspecting the health of slaves arriving in the territory; he and a few new apothecary apprentices of his had been waiting on the other side of the docks, and had come running the moment they heard the commotion.

Amber was still shouting, badly shaken: "How should I know! Someone just up and self-destructed over here! Scared me half to death!"

"A poor slave, suspected of having been made into a living bomb by some evil magic," Hedy explained, her face dark, and gave a rough account of what had happened. "...Very much like Corpse Explosion, but that man was clearly alive right before the blast—he could even walk."

Pi Yun's expression darkened the instant he heard Hedy's description, and a certain complex, deep wariness entered his eyes. He said little, striding quickly toward the very center of the blast.

Though a living man had burst apart right there, there was not much blood or flesh scattered about. The evil art seemed to have produced an extremely high temperature the moment it activated, heating him from the inside out; all the burst remains had been carbonized, and near the scorched crater there was only a great quantity of black, hard fragments.

Pi Yun crouched down beside those carbonized remains. The wrinkles on his face were drawn tighter than ever, his expression terrifyingly grave. This druid, who ordinarily presented himself with a flippant, happy-go-lucky air, had never behaved like this before; even Amber was startled by his face. But a moment later the half-elf lady's attention fell upon the unrecognizable remains.

She turned her face away. "Truly... depraved."

"So you know something," Gao Yang said, coming before Pi Yun and crouching down as he had. "You've seen this evil art before?"

Pi Yun picked up a charred fragment from the ground—a piece of bone already warped out of shape. He scraped the black carbonized matter from its surface, then intoned a few brief incantations. A glimmering green light surfaced within the bone at once, though it flickered and faded, gone in a moment.

Gao Yang's heart lurched at the residual magic reaction in the bone. "Druidic magic?!"

Pi Yun nodded slightly. "All Things Perish, also called the Doomsday Assembly. Have you heard of them?"

Gao Yang frowned. The name stirred a vague impression, but he could not recall it clearly. After a hard effort at memory, it came to him. "That fallen druidic faction? The one formerly known as the School of the Holy Spirit?"

"So you do know," Pi Yun said, tossing the bone from his hand. "This is their work."

Amber looked at Gao Yang, then at Pi Yun, her head full of question marks. "What does All Things Perish do? Is it a cult?"

"A cult indeed," Hedy said, having come over and caught the three of them talking. "They were originally a sect among the druids called the School of the Holy Spirit, which held that the nature gods still watched over the world and that the Sacred Covenant must continue to be fulfilled before the harmony of all natural things could be restored. They were once the most orthodox in transmission of all the druidic factions, the one that preserved the most complete knowledge of the ancient druidic religion. But seven hundred years ago this school suddenly broke with every orthodox faith; nearly half its members, in their madness, charged into the wastes of Gondor to destroy themselves, and the rest renamed themselves the Assembly of All Things Perish, fell into cultism, and were publicly cast out of the druidic community by every druidic school..."

Gao Yang knew this history more clearly than Hedy did. "Strictly speaking, they became a dark sect after the Holy Covenant was concluded. In those days religions stood thick as trees, many of them hostile to one another, but the Holy Covenant made all sects renounce their hatred and swear never to be enemies again. Naturally many could not accept this—and those that could not became what were later called the Xuanming sects. All Things Perish was special, though: it had been a druidic faction, one among the many druidic schools, and no one had expected that a druidic faction, already transformed from a theocratic organization into an ordinary organization of transcendents, would produce a Xuanming sect as well... that caught a great many people off guard at the time."

"The School of the Holy Spirit was the closest of all the druidic factions to the original faith. Even after the Fall of the White Star they maintained the church structure and codes of conduct of three thousand years past, so even without divine arts they were at that time a thoroughly orthodox divine religion. Why, even before the Holy Covenant was concluded, when the heads of the various sects communed with the gods atop Mount Mingcen, the leader of the School of the Holy Spirit was present," Pi Yun added. "So it is not all that surprising that they, like the other dark sects, walked the road to ruin."

"The last time I died, the Assembly of All Things Perish was still a small organization," Gao Yang said, brows tightly knit. "I assumed they would have vanished over these seven hundred years of strangling and suppression..."