Chapter 11: The Loosening of the “Seal”
“Ha! Just you?”
The Commander of the Knights Order snorted derisively, his expression dripping with disdain: “Solve the problem? What gave you such confidence? Just because you crushed my Fourth Knights and defeated Sister Kaimilante? Does that really make you think you’re qualified to face that mad god?”
“Little girl, aren’t you a bit naive.”
His words made me squint.
“Oh, and you also took down the body of the evil god in Woodward Forest,” he continued, “That’s quite an accomplishment. The fact you lived through it left everyone dumbfounded. I’ve heard about that legendary battle. That god body was just an incomplete revival without a Fire Seed, a mere tip of the iceberg of power. Yet even then, you nearly died there… You’ve faced such a being; how can you still say such things today? Is it the mind of a child? What do you think the Church is dealing with?”
“It doesn’t matter what it is.”
Facing the Knight Commander’s sarcasm, I maintained a straight face: “At least I dared to stand before it and resist with all my might, rather than concocting some destiny plan and banking everything on the sacrifice of countless innocents.”
As soon as I said this, the Commander’s expression froze.
But he quickly laughed again: “You know, you made an incorrect statement earlier.”
“What?”
“You called yourself the most successful experimental subject, but that’s hardly true. A little unpredictable brat like you doesn’t qualify as a success story. Whether you live or d*e, the Church has already activated a better plan. The fourth phase of the Destiny Plan—you’re not irreplaceable. In no time, there will be something to take your place in the southern part of Silgaya—”
“You mean the Castle of Silence, right?” I interrupted suddenly, cutting him off.
Then, I watched his facial expression shift.
“What happened at the Castle of Silence??”
The Knight Commander was stunned for a full two seconds. He realized, and once again fell into a rage: “d*mn it! You heretics! What did you do? Do you know what you’ve done!? That was humanity’s last hope, the last one!!! You selfish bastards, you’re all damned—”
“Shut up.”
Buzz——
The crimson light in my eyes flared up again, countless images flashing through the Commander’s mind in an instant—towering castles entwined in bl**d vines, a giant eye floating above the castle, a city full of dried bones, people dying in horrific ways in prison cells, heretics burning in infernal fire, and the ghastly, shriveled corpses…
Each scene was heart-stopping, each one tragically horrific, all pouring into the man’s eyes within the power of “Oblivion.” The confusing and dark messages twisted his already furious face into a contorted mask, and he clutched his head, gasping for breath, gritting his teeth to stifle his painful groans.
“See clearly now, this is what you are doing.”
My words remained calm, devoid of any emotional fluctuations: “You keep crying disaster is coming, yet you place the blame on innocent civilians, exchanging their sacrifices for the power you need. Who is truly the greatest disaster for the Western Continent right now? If you think that’s the right thing to do, why don’t you go be an experimental subject yourself?”
“The chivalry of your knights is justice, honesty, sacrifice, and compassion. On the day you became knights, you vowed to protect the God’s people to the d*ath, but why don’t you let your Fourth Knights brothers take the place of the civilians as the Church’s experimental subjects? A knight, rigorously trained, would surely outperform those refugees from Silgaya, right?”
“Why then do they d*e, and not you? Not you?”
“When the Church does this, are you saving the civilians or are you saving yourselves, the holy priests?”
“Don’t! Say! That—!!!”
My bloody, raw questions pushed the man before me, who still seemed to have some empathy, to the brink of emotional collapse; he pounded his head, gasping for air, burying his face in the shadows of the prison cell, and long, long after, he began to sob.
I didn’t say another word, waiting for him to compose himself.
A long time passed.
“I, a dying man…”
After crying and venting, he lowered his head and said to me in a somewhat choked voice: “Alright, alright, I’ll tell you what you want to know…”
In his words, there was no longer the resistance and wariness from before.
“However, all I can tell you is what I know.”
…………
Next, the Knight Commander spoke, and I listened.
He took a long time—almost an hour—to detail everything he knew.
From the aftermath of the Woodward Forest incident, everything he could participate in and understand at his level.
In fact, in the eyes of many high-ranking members of the Church, including the Knight Commander himself, the so-called “disaster” had a sudden onset, catching everyone off guard. Two years ago, before the god body broke the seal and heretics invaded the Western Continent, they weren’t aware of the severity of the situation.
The calamity was ultimately halted under the astute leadership of Pope Angel, along with the efforts of Saint Margaret, Archbishop Anseier, the Church’s First Knights’ Judgement Fist division, the Choir of Saints, and numerous Pope Knights, at a tremendous cost—the loss of two of the most outstanding Pope Knights, Silvya and Anacelis—to prevent the heretics from unleashing their source demon and executing their mad plan to destroy the entire Western Continent.
To this day, this is the understanding held by most clerics in the Church.
However, after the chaos in Silgaya, with the annihilation of the Third Knights Order and the Williams family losing their most outstanding heir, the Fourth Knights Commander indicated that while he wasn’t entirely sure of the process and reasons, he understood that it was the result of a power struggle between the Pope’s faction and Cardinal St. George’s faction coming out on top.
And after victory, the inevitable reckoning followed, as everyone expected.
The Williams family fell from grace, taking down all factions supporting St. George, which suffered severe repercussions—one could say they were uprooted completely.
By the end of that year, the Church was engulfed in a storm of bl**d and chaos, and the major city dioceses, especially the Holy City, witnessed daily scenes of clerics battling each other. Worst of all, Pope Angel underestimated St. George’s will to resist and overestimated his ability to solve the problem…
That’s what people whispered later. At the time, as disputes erupted, countless sudden skirmishes inevitably affected countless citizens from various nations, and the days of discontent began from then onward.
However, since the “Church’s Voice Report” was firmly in the hands of Pope Angel at the time, the narrative was almost one-sided. Everyone was cursing Cardinal St. George, condemning the corruption of the Williams family, while the Pope’s faction intentionally stoked public sentiment, organizing grassroots forces like the “Knowledge Association” under the guise of ‘smash and grab’ against St. George’s Currency Exchange, which left nobles, merchants, and even clerics—including bishops and cardinals—all in the same panic as the common folk—wondering if they could still safely retain their private property stored in the Currency Exchange.
Thus, the radical change in the Currency Exchange happened afterward, and it was imminent.
Even those like the Fourth Knights Commander, who had little involvement with either faction and belonged to the neutral faction within the Church, along with many like him, participated in pressuring St. George’s Currency Exchange.
The Church leveled countless charges, both real and fabricated, against the Williams family and the heads of St. George’s Currency Exchange, applying extreme measures to purge all power that belonged to the Williams family and linked to the Pope’s faction. The Rossius family, which had close ties with the Pope’s faction, ended up reaping the most benefits from this action, gradually devising and controlling the new Currency Exchange system in the following year.
Meanwhile, the once powerful Williams family, which wielded substantial influence in the Church, fell to the status of a guilty clan, with most of its members assassinated by the Choir of Saints.
In their desperation, Cardinal St. George finally appeared in the Holy City, fiercely clashing with Pope Angel in the Temple Church. The rumored battle, lit by golden light, nearly destroyed half of the Holy City diocese, and it was this clash that pushed all the onlookers among the clerics into the whirlwind.
That battle, of course, ultimately ended in failure for St. George.
But—
“The losses in the Temple Diocese, while painful for the Church, were not enough to plunge it into crisis. Even though St. George faced total defeat at that time, what we didn’t anticipate… No, it should be said, it was precisely this out-of-control confrontation that allowed someone like me to uncover the truths hidden by the Church for millennia—truths that only cardinals and saintly figures were entitled to know.”
The Knight Commander said this, and I already knew what he was referring to.
Indeed.
The consequences of that battle exceeded the expectations of everyone involved, including Pope Angel.
Deep in the underground prison that held the Mother Deity, the relic known as the “Chain of Divine Lock” was disturbed in the collision of their immense powers.
The “seal” loosened ahead of schedule.
Originally, according to the Church’s projections, the powerful shackles of the “Chain of Divine Lock” should have been able to contain the “fallen” Mother Deity for another thirty to fifty years, and the “disaster” shouldn’t have sprung upon them at this time. Even losing the most outstanding patient in the “clinic,” the youngest Pope Knight in history, shouldn’t have led to this outcome that pained all those who had invested efforts. The “clinic” still had ample time to draw from past successful experiences and create a second, or even a third or fourth Silvya.
However, that battle shattered all possibilities and hopes.
The situation developed to the very worst extreme.
