Chapter 95: When the Flower of Sin Blossoms (8)
And so, feeling a bit of pressure in our hearts, I think Sword Demon Miss felt it too. We fell into a simultaneous silence, just brandishing our torches and slowly making our way up the staircase. I hurried up from behind to walk alongside her.
The bluish stairs, illuminated by the fiery glow in front of us, spiraled upward against the curved walls. Though steep, it wasn’t nearly as long as I had imagined.
Rounding half the spiral, we found ourselves on the second floor of the domed building. The floor was still made of large bluestones, and in the cracks between the stones, I could clearly see some red moss that looked just like the stuff on the prison walls earlier—although it was sparse, only creeping through the crevices, it glimmered a sickly bright red under the torchlight, more vibrant than fresh bl**d.
And that peculiar medicinal smell, mingled with a hint of iron, seemed to intensify as we pressed forward…
The sound of my hard-booted footsteps on the floor echoed sharply in the dark, enclosed corridor.
Thud, thud, thud…
…crunch.
“Hmm.”
As I walked, a sudden, dry and somewhat crisp sound came from beneath my feet, and I halted.
I seemed to have… stepped on something.
The sound was faint enough not to scare me, but the feeling of stepping on something unexpected in the dark still made my heart race. My first instinct was to hope it wasn’t something gross…
“What…”
Stepping back quickly, I lowered the torch and bent down to look: “What’s this?”
By the light of the fire, I quickly discerned what I had stepped on.
“This is… a vine? A withered plant?”
“Hmm?”
Sword Demon Miss paused beside me, leaning down to have a look as well.
It looked like some sort of plant…
Or maybe a root-like thing.
It had grown from the moss in the cracks, looking like it had long since wilted. The stem and leaves were all dry and shriveled up, completely crushed under my foot and unrecognizable…
But it was definitely a plant.
At least it wasn’t something disgusting that would send shivers down my spine…
“Phew—”
Realizing this, I unconsciously sighed in relief, lightly patting my chest, then frowned and slowly crouched down.
“Hey, Sword Demon…”
Holding up the torch with my right hand, I carefully picked up some of the crushed dry bits with my slender fingers and said to her, “Have you noticed… the color of the moss here seems much redder than what we saw on the garden wall earlier…”
Hmm…
Earlier, while inspecting those prison cells, I noticed the moss-like plants on the walls were a bl**d red color, but that looked more like splattered bl**d, and the fine stems were still mostly a vibrant green.
But now, here…
This moss emerging from the cracks should be the same kind as the ones in the garden and outside the church, but it looked like it had been soaked in bl**d… the stems were all a deep crimson.
And…
I held the dry bits to my nose and took a gentle sniff.
…sure enough.
It was the rich scent of Sin Fire…
Rich enough to make me slightly choke; d*mn it…
“ACHOO—”
I couldn’t help but sneeze.
Shaking my head and brushing off the dry bits from my fingers, I stood up and turned to see Sword Demon Miss looking puzzled, her face comically clueless. I opened my mouth to speak, and after two seconds of eye contact, my eyes widened in realization: “Wait, you can see this, right? The red moss in these cracks is…”
“I see it.”
Before I could finish, Sword Demon Miss straightened up and answered first, her tone oddly flat: “I was just thinking… I’ve never seen this type of plant before. bl**d-red moss… I’ve never seen it in all of Silgaya; it’s not a naturally growing plant.”
…Ha.
Of course, you’ve never seen it…
I felt a bit of a headache coming on and instinctively rubbed my forehead: “Well, then…”
I wanted to ask her why she wasn’t reacting, making me almost think we were caught in another illusion, but the words caught in my throat, and I swallowed them back down.
Forget it…
It would just turn into yet another dead-end conversation. Our brains always seem to run on different circuits.
“So after thinking for so long and looking down for ages, what’s the conclusion? Sword Demon, my dear.”
I asked her this more as a rhetorical question, not really expecting her to have any insights…
“I don’t know.”
As expected, Sword Demon Miss quickly shook her head: “But… we might have seen something similar in that previous illusion… those vines that move like bl**d vessels. That’s what I was thinking. We should avoid touching these things.”
“…Oh.”
Hearing her say that, it did sound familiar.
I hadn’t expected Sword Demon to actually remind me of something.
In the illusion, I recalled that nearly the entire castle—be it towers, walls, or even the tents outside—was covered with these things…
Even the ground had been stained bl**d red…
So this was indeed the erosion of the power of sin…
And what the illusion showed was the culmination of that erosion, wasn’t it?
Those tendrils like bl**d vessels; I had a vivid memory of them, not from earlier at the castle walls but from when I was chased around in the Land of Dragons by one of those things, leaving me in a miserable state…
Those things grew on a massive egg…
And that egg was a terrifying entity that birthed the Goddess of Sin, bringing her to life again… And now that kind of thing was back in this little church.
The egg…
The bl**d vessel tentacles…
Wait…
Does this mean—
“Hey Sword Demon, we might need to hurry it up.”
Realizing the worst possible scenario, I genuinely started to feel a bit anxious. The bad premonition in my chest intensified, and I spoke more urgently, my pace quickening: “I have a feeling the Eye of Wisdom is just an elite monster before the boss fight, and there’s likely a bigger problem waiting for us in this domed building…”
“What?”
“Oh come on, let’s go already and not waste any more time!”
I hope I’m wrong…
d*mn it.
What unspeakable horrors has the church conjured up here…
Ignoring the moss in the cracks, I stepped forward, quickly heading down the corridor. Soon, I could hear Sword Demon Miss’s footsteps following closely behind.
Thud, thud, thud…
The sound of our footsteps echoed clearly in the dark, narrow corridor.
As we continued deeper, the bl**d-red moss spread quickly beneath our feet and in the stone crevices, and before long, it was growing right out of the gaps in the stones, damp and fuzzy, as if rooting itself in the rocks, staining the bluestones with bright red.
This was the power of sin…
No doubt about it.
Though there wasn’t that blazing, burning crimson fire, the powerful force of sin… was slowly eroding the back hall of this little church in some way I didn’t quite understand…
And this time, it wasn’t an illusion.
With that thought in mind, I walked a bit further, suddenly spotting a large, decayed door in the middle of the corridor, surrounded by bl**d-soaked plants and vivid red walls, which appeared right in front of me.
