Chapter 479 — Fermentation

The thick smoke and flames over the execution ground had not yet fully dispersed when the officiating priests and church knights turned and walked away—this spot, reeking and watched by a crowd of ignorant commoners, had put the priests and knights in a foul mood. On ordinary days they would have lingered gladly, savoring the awe and terror of the people around them, but now they plainly had no stomach for it.

There was still a mountain of trouble to deal with in the cathedral district, and the pamphlets' effects were by no means confined to the outer city.

The common soldiers in the square withdrew as well, and the gathered crowd dispersed in twos and threes. The brief burning had shaken the dead, oppressive atmosphere of the besieged city ever so slightly, yet it could not lift anyone's spirits—quite the contrary, a great fire in the square had brought people only fear and doubt.

The one burned was a homeless man who could not read... the Church had simply seized someone at random... the essence of heresy trials was intimidation and violence.

Whether the things in those pamphlets were true, the common folk might not have known before—but now the Church had at least admitted of its own accord that part of it was true.

When the crowd had all gone, only a few church menials tending the burning site still kept watch beside the execution ground; they had to wait for the fire to die down completely before clearing away the ashes, lest it start a blaze. And the last few scattered commoners drifted about the edge of the square, though the menials paid them no mind—just a pack of idle fools with nothing better to do.

Several men dressed as farmers and craftsmen's apprentices slipped into a nearby narrow alley after leaving the square, shook off all watching eyes with ease, and gathered in a half-abandoned hut.

A man with unkempt hair and sunken eye sockets spat to one side. "Those bastards... burning an innocent man just like that..."

"They always do," another youth with a dark complexion said in a low voice. "A pity we could not save that poor soul..."

The few gathered in the hut could not help but sigh quietly, and then a blurred, twisting shadow suddenly surfaced from the darkness in a corner of the hut. It trembled twice in the air, swiftly gathered and condensed into a petite figure. "We cannot save everyone, and our mission does not permit us to risk exposure to save people—when such things happen, the only way we avoid standing by is to put the skills we have learned to use, and seize every opportunity to spread chaos and division among the enemy."

Seeing the petite figure emerge, the men in the hut rose at once and bowed respectfully. "Director!"

"No titles during a mission, even when you have confirmed the surroundings are secure. Another offense and each of you gets a demerit—you still have much to learn." Amber waved a hand, and that one sentence changed the faces of everyone before her in unison. Then she looked around the room. "Still, your actions in the square were passable."

This was a special operations squad of the Military Intelligence Bureau, and Amber led it in person.

Frostgate City had been sealed off; the last time anyone had passed through its gates was twenty days ago. But for Amber, master of the profound shadow arts, smuggling a squad and a batch of supplies into Frostgate through the Shadow Realm was no difficult feat—and even without the "Director of Military Intelligence" lifting a finger, the professionally trained agents of the Bureau had plenty of skills to help them slip into the city and lie low in the outer districts.

The lax attitude of the priests and knights in the great cathedral toward the outer districts had been a great convenience to this squad—clearly, those people in the cathedral had no experience whatsoever in countering sabotage by spies. Or rather, in this age, almost anyone facing Cecil-trained intelligence agents would be riddled with holes.

The interim Bishop Luan had devoted most of his attention to keeping the cathedral district running, and for the outer districts, crowded with vast numbers of "useless commoners," he had stationed only a minimum of soldiers and disciplinarian monks to keep order. In the context of this era, that was itself beyond reproach: given the forms of confrontation in this age, only transcendents and the auxiliary forces around them had value, while the vast majority of the lower classes possessed neither the strength to shake the order nor the mindset to resist on their own. For the lower commoners, sufficient force to overawe was enough to ensure order—this had until now been the most "cost-effective" line of thinking.

Yet it was precisely from these lowest districts that the Bureau's agents began their infiltration, and they were past masters at spreading chaos gradually upward.

Five days ago, Amber had brought this team to lie low in the city. Following orders from above, they had distributed the first batch of propaganda materials in the outer districts and kept relaying conditions inside Frostgate to the outside. And the priests of the Frostgate Cathedral had reacted to those materials even more slowly than expected—it was not until the entire first batch had been distributed that they finally took notice.

Then came citywide searches and arrests, and with them plunder and violence.

It was all within Amber's expectations—the church knights of Frostgate and the exiled knights who had fled into the city had been accumulating immense pressure, and given any excuse to vent it, that pressure would at once turn into shameful atrocities.

And they would not think there was anything wrong with doing so.

Though conditions inside the cathedral district remained unclear, Amber could well guess what was happening within the walls of the inner city: part of the propaganda material pointed directly at the conflicts of interest within the Church, while the rest obliquely mentioned Cecil's preferential treatment for "awakened clergy." Propaganda of this caliber alone could not pull the low-ranking clergy of the marginal districts over to Cecil's side, but it was enough to stir a degree of wavering and confusion.

The city had been sealed off for sixty days; the internal contradictions that ought to ferment had already begun to ferment. At this moment, any form of fanning the flames would produce an effect without precedent.

And as the atmosphere within the cathedral district grew tense, those in charge at the Frostgate Cathedral would have even less capacity to spare for the outer districts—they might even conclude that the outer districts' problems had been thoroughly resolved by their "effective purification rites," and thus let down their guard.

Which would make the Bureau agents' subsequent activities all the easier.

Amber stroked her smooth chin—this rather stylish thinking pose was one she had learned from Gao Yang, and it made her look more authoritative. "How is the magic-net terminal working? Has the footage been sent back?"

A tall, lean agent patted the black metal case set by his feet. "In good shape—and the miniaturized magic-net terminal is much lighter, very convenient to use."

This tall, lean agent was the very man who had earlier carried the burlap sack through the square.

And the black metal case by his feet was plainly a magitech device—slightly narrower at one end, with a crystal set into the front of its casing and another directly on top. The whole case was less than half a meter long; wrapped in straw and the like, it fit neatly into a burlap sack.

It still had considerable bulk and weight, hardly what one would call portable, but to anyone who had seen the prototype of the magic-net communicator, this device was already impossibly small—black technology.