Chapter 211 — The Heretical Undercurrent

The soldiers had sealed off every main road and cordoned the trading house run by the gray elves so tightly that not a rat could slip through—but nothing could stop rumor and that sliver of truth within it from fermenting swiftly on the tongues of common folk. Soon countless tales of darkness, bloodshed, sacrificial rites, and heretical cults were spreading through the town, and the bones carried out of the trading house after nightfall seemed only to confirm everything people were saying.

Duke Baiyu Franklin of the Western Marches arrived quietly at the scene under soldier escort. Frowning, he looked at the trading house still leaking faint whiffs of blood, and at the ignorant commoners craning their necks and poking their heads out to watch from a distance, and his mood was foul.

A duke had no business personally concerning himself with what happened in a small town—except that when the incident occurred, Baiyu Franklin had been winter-hunting at a preserve near Goldwood Town.

Lately, cultist forces had been stirring up trouble all across the kingdom, and not long ago the king had sent word warning him to beware of heretical mischief. Several disturbing horrors had indeed broken out in the Western Marches. Duke Baiyu Franklin, troubled by it all, had chosen this secluded spot for a winter hunt to ease his mind—never expecting the cult business to come at him as though deliberately, surfacing at this very juncture, right under his nose.

"My lord," one of his trusted men said, leaning in and lowering his voice, "shall we disperse those wretches?"

"They're merely ignorant—they have no notion what terror even is," Baiyu said sourly. "I had the soldiers seal the roads to keep those fools alive, but since they're too stupid to understand that, let them gather a street away. Just keep them from disturbing things here."

"Yes, my lord. Your mercy moves the heart," the confidant said, bowing his head. "Will you go in yourself… to take a look?"

"That's precisely why I'm here."

Baiyu pushed open the trading house's main door, and a thick reek of blood struck him full in the face.

Dried dark-red blood was everywhere in the trading house—on the floor, the walls, the ceiling; on every table and chair, every ornament, every windowsill. Blood lay over every surface, as though some madman had dipped his brush in it and painstakingly painted each one. It made the scalp crawl.

And amid those congealed bloodstains could be seen human-shaped impressions of an even deeper hue, uncanny beyond words.

"What are these marks?" Baiyu Franklin sensed a faint fluctuation of magic from the impressions and spoke.

"Corrosion, my lord," said a man dressed as a priest, stepping out from among those tidying the scene. He performed the salute of a Luminous Order follower before the Duke of the Western Marches and answered respectfully. "Judging by the traces, those affected by the dark arts—or those who took part in the cult's sacrifice—first engaged in frenzied self-mutilation in this hall, smearing their blood into every corner of the room. Then they gathered at these spots, where the blood remaining in their bodies began to boil and rot under the evil magic. The flesh and blood they shed formed these corrosive impressions. So when we arrived, all we found were skeletons."

Anger surfaced on the Duke's face. "I don't want excessive detail. I want to know who did this."

"This is a classic sacrificial site of the Assembly of the End of All Things," the holy-light priest replied. "They revere the destruction of living flesh and embrace death. By my judgment, the cultists who performed this evil rite are among the bones collected here. In blood sacrifices of this scale, cultists choose to perish together with their victims, to achieve their purpose to the greatest extent."

The Duke looked into the priest's eyes. "Their purpose? What purpose?"

"They intended to create a plague and spread it simultaneously through the Western Marches and the Mosswood," the priest said, gesturing at the nearby walls. On those blood-polluted surfaces, faint pale-gold runes of holy light glimmered, and wisps of black miasma dissipated swiftly under the holy radiance. "When I arrived, the whole building was already saturated with the breath of plague. Thankfully the Lord guided me to discover the cultists' plot in time, so I could disperse this near-formed evil magic at once and set up a purification ward. My lord, there is no longer any need to fear the plague."

"These depraved, twisted freaks! Their souls ought to be collected by devils and never allowed out of hell!" Baiyu Franklin's anger was rare and genuine, yet he strove to keep his composure, and nodded to the holy-light priest. "Father, you saved this town and the lives of everyone around it! You deserve my thanks and my reward."

"Purifying evil is the path the Lord has set before us," the priest said with sorrowful compassion. "More than any personal gain, I fear those frenzied cultists striking at regions that have not received the Lord's protection."

"The church of the Blood God is right near this trading house, yet its priests knew nothing of the evil at their doorstep," the Duke said, shaking his head. "The first to arrive were you and the holy-light pastors you lead…"

"Do not blame the envoys of the Blood God," the holy-light pastor said at once. "It is simply that their divine arts happened to be of no use here. The power of the God of Holy Light specializes in combating evil; we merely happened to encounter work that was ours to do."

A thoughtful look came over the Duke's face. "Combating evil… The cultists in the kingdom grow ever bolder. What we need at a time like this is the power to combat evil…"

The priest bowed his head deeply. "The servants of the God of Holy Light shall not shrink from the duty."

……

The cultists were plaguing the nobles of Ansu on every side—yet in the Southern Marches, where they had first stirred up trouble, the situation was instead growing calmer by the day.

It seemed that after the Assembly of the End of All Things and the Sleepers suffered setback after setback, the dark sects found this region—bordering the Gondo Wasteland and itself desolate and backward—something of a thorny proposition. With plenty of other targets still available throughout the kingdom, they had for the time being abandoned their plans to keep making trouble here.

Gao Yang could not guess the cultists' thinking, but he was glad to accept this rare spell of calm, and intended to use the opportunity to keep advancing the technological tree of his domain.

The basic rune arrays that Jenny and Rebecca had decoded were gradually proving their worth.

On the desk before him lay a disassembled general-purpose armguard—the "Mark Scorching Ray Gun" currently issued to the domain's soldiers. Compared with the first crude experimental model, the mass-produced armguard was more rationally structured inside, its components more standardized and easier to replace. Once its casing and a layer of shielding were opened, one could see the modular rune trigger, the mana capacitor, the mana-conduction slots, and the scorching-ray substrate at the front of the armguard. Besides these, two empty slots were visible at the mana-conduction position—the expandable area designed on Gao Yang's earlier instructions, for later modification and upgrade.

Jenny and Rebecca stood beside the desk; the latter held out a rune substrate. "Here, for you."

Gao Yang took the substrate. Along the edge of the hexagonal metal plate he saw a neat line of stamped text: General-Purpose — Force Shield Module.

He opened the retaining catch on the mana-conduction slot inside the armguard and seated the new module in place. With a soft click, several runes on the force shield module glowed faintly—energy from the mana capacitor had successfully activated the new component.