Chapter 89: Next Stop
After that, Angel didn’t bring up “meat chunks” and “experiments” anymore.
We chatted about other things, and the Pope told me to re-seal the meat chunk and not to worry about it; he would handle everything.
Once the invisible barrier of “Contrary Image’s End” was lifted, I was just about to leave when Isaac came up the hill with some people and informed Angel, “Pope, the little boy has woken up.”
The little boy he mentioned was the only survivor in that house.
“We settled him a bit, gave him some food, and he regained some spirit. The boy told us there’s a path east of the forest leading to another village south of Hill Forest. If we go further, we can reach the Castle of Silence, which means we won’t have to trek around the mountains and can possibly resupply.”
“On top of that, the heretics who came here last night weren’t just one bunch. There were also a few rats… The boy couldn’t remember clearly but said there were at least five. They seemed to have seen us and ran off toward Hill Forest, while the one that the little guy turned into an ice sculpture is probably just staying behind to create a distraction.”
At that moment, Angel had already put the meat chunk back into a cloth bag tucked away in a corner of the tent, making it quite inconspicuous.
He brushed his robe sleeve and casually asked, “Leave one ‘bl**d sacrifice’ behind?”
“Yes, Your Holiness. I find it strange why these people showed up here. If it’s surveillance, this area is too wide; it’s quite far from Alectine City, and the rats likely have ulterior motives. We should—”
“Isaac.” Angel interrupted him. “Take some people to pursue. If you don’t spot them in half an hour, don’t go too deep. Come back right away. Tell all the Captains of Knights to pull back their searchers. Rest well; tomorrow morning, we move on.”
“Understood.”
With orders given, Isaac turned to leave, and I quickly shouted, “I want to go too!”
Angel was quick on his feet and grabbed me by the back of my collar.
“You stay here.”
“…Let go of me.”
My collar tugged uncomfortably as I shot him an annoyed look.
“Absolutely no reckless actions.”
“……”
“To be honest, you left the group without permission and recklessly approached the heretics… Even though that was an accident, I’m still a bit upset. I wanted to scold you but thought better of it. You’re bound to fight them; just don’t do it where I can’t see you…”
“That’s not it! I couldn’t find you!”
I swatted his hand away and stepped back, fuming, “Where the heck were you?”
This guy just disappears whenever he feels like it and gets mad at me for not following orders!
However, the Pope sidestepped my accusations, “I sent a squad of knights, an elite team from the Judgment Fist led by Captain Safiros… Ah, you’ve seen him, right? Let him and his people stick with you. You can move freely, but don’t stray out of their sight.”
I squinted, “Oh, you’re letting them spy on me?”
Angel frowned slightly, “It’s to protect you. If there’s a special situation, they’ll notify me immediately and prevent you from running too far or doing something foolish. Just in case you lose control… Hmm, they’ll also do the cleanup, so you won’t have to worry about it.”
“…It’s still spying.”
“I’m doing this for your own good! Why does it sound so awful when it comes out of your mouth?”
“Hmph.”
I turned my head, refusing to speak.
My mind felt all jumbled.
And with all this, Isaac was already quite far away.
“Silvya, be careful. You mustn’t let those madmen discover your powers and identity,” Angel continued to ramble in my ear. “The Jester never lacks for tricks, and those who fall under his command tend to be insane scoundrels. The heretics act without restraint; they have nothing to lose, but we do. If you recklessly approach them, you might end up in a tricky spot…”
I remained silent, quietly gazing down the hillside at the several large pits being refilled by the knights in the rain.
Those pits almost buried everyone in this village.
Before they starved to d*ath, they were slaughtered and toyed with like livestock.
The Gate of Truth…
The Jester.
…………
The search knights withdrew, camping around the village. Soon, Isaac returned, looking empty-handed.
Thanks to the downpour, there was no hot soup for dinner; we had to gnaw on cold, wet hardtack.
Moreover, as we continued moving south, the rain hadn’t let up for a day, making even rest challenging. Even if the clergy from the Faith Organization worked together to dissipate the clouds for a short while, the ground remained muddy, and knights could only find relatively less damp spots to wrap up in their cloaks and try to sleep for the night.
Of course, it wasn’t a good sleep.
But the next day, we had to keep moving.
Fortunately, both Isaac’s “Judgment Fist” and the elite clergy from the Faith Organization, dispatched from the three major royal cities in the Western Continent, were composed of highly capable members. Despite the trying journey, very few of them fell ill, and morale remained high… they were even quite spirited.
Both groups belonged to the elite of the church, but they often clashed, each thinking they were better than the other, so bickering was common.
Judgment Fist thought the Faith Organization “carried themselves too high, waddling like a bunch of fat geese,” while the Faith Organization thought the Judgment Fist “were nothing but reckless idiots,” even looking down on Isaac, privately calling him a “brute cow.”
Yet, surprisingly, both sides respected me.
Especially after word spread about my taking down a Tier Three heretic in one blow, their gazes towards me changed. The members of the Faith Organization would give a bow and spout flattering praises, while the knights, less skilled with words, exchanged fervent glances that made me uneasy and forced me to smile back.
The little boy we rescued was kept in the group where he was reportedly helping transport supplies from the rear, but I hadn’t seen him.
That evening, the lead group, including Isaac and me, made it through the Hill Forest and arrived at the next village, which was already submerged. The houses had collapsed even worse; there was no food, and not even a single person in sight.
So, we settled briefly and continued onward.
Due to the flooding, many roads had been destroyed, making our progress genuinely tough. Much of the time we were wading through water, hardly getting a moment to catch our breath.
Throughout the journey, the Pope consistently remained mysterious, often disappearing without a trace. But whenever the team stopped, he would suddenly pop up and chat casually with me for a bit before vanishing again.
I pondered on what he said, reflecting on his speculations, and gradually, some things became clearer in my mind.
After witnessing the sinister results of the heretics’ experiments, I could largely imagine just how insane those people had become—perhaps even more so than I initially thought.
The Gate of Truth, in its quest for power “beyond the gods,” was willing to forsake humanity, conducting horrific live experiments, forcing “patients” to consume repulsive substances, watching as people died, and those like me and Irush, who could adapt to the preliminary experiments, would be forcibly taken to the next site for further, yet-to-be-remembered experiments.
And later, for some unknown reason, they decided the experiments had failed and turned to a different direction, involving implanting disgusting tumors in people… Although we still weren’t sure what that entailed, as Angel speculated, it would eventually devour enough flesh and bl**d, break free from its host, and turn into something like the Teresa Monster.
After Teresa died, the terrifying monster emerged, absorbing human flesh and bl**d to form a powerful, fiery body. Victoria and I barely managed to slay it, but if Angel’s guess was correct, that thing couldn’t even be considered a “complete form.”
Even with so many orphans dead, and pools of fresh bl**d drained empty, that amount wasn’t enough for the monster… the tumor, that was harbored within Teresa, to feel satisfied. It was clearly still asleep, lurking inside the nun, providing her with the burning power of infernal fire, only to truly manifest when Teresa unexpectedly died.
Unlike this current situation, Teresa had managed the Cataloma Orphanage for several years, and the disappearing children had undoubtedly provided enough bl**d to turn the tumor into a monster.
And the Tier Three heretic I killed was much weaker compared to Teresa back then—perhaps he had only been implanted with the tumor recently, and the bl**d he absorbed wasn’t enough to morph into a terrifying monster. It was just a tumor…
In Angel’s terms, it was an “egg.”
It hadn’t grown yet.
However, once it truly grew, it would burst out of the heretic’s body, becoming a dangerous entity akin to the Abyss, exceedingly hostile to humans.
With this line of thinking, everything seemed to connect.
The “truth” was becoming rather clear.
According to Angel, the Gate of Truth was resorting to all means to gain power, solely for the purpose of… wanting to battle against the church and obtain absolute sovereignty over faith.
The Holy Church stood as a massive mountain blocking their path, and the heretics hated and loathed it, cunningly plotting for hundreds of years with a single aim: to bring this mountain crashing down, so they could stand atop and entice people to turn towards the Gate of Truth.
To achieve this, their chosen methods were not to relieve the people or benefit the world, hoping to gain public trust and develop missionary work to spread their doctrines. Instead, they took the most extreme route—desire, violence, and destruction.
They stirred the base desires for power in the common people, brutally harming them to gain god-beyond-human strength, attempting to unravel the human social order that took hundreds of years for the church to establish and maintain.
By doing so, they aimed to regress humanity to its most primitive, survival-of-the-fittest state.
By then, the world would resemble a true medieval European era, after the full collapse of the Roman Empire, where the culture, economy, and industry of Western Europe came to a grinding halt, with countries battling each other without restraint or rule, and the madness of lords led to widespread suffering, a nightmare lasting hundreds of years.
The Gate of Truth likely hadn’t realized this.
Or even if they did, their politicians wouldn’t care…
Given their reckless and consequence-ignoring methods, I would lean toward the former.
The clearer my understanding of these matters, the stronger my hatred for the Gate of Truth grew.
…………
Thunder rumbled in the sky, and rain poured down.
The southern lands of Silgaya had plunged into a true state of despair, with torrential rains causing floods, cutting off transport, and enveloping the vast earth in heavy clouds, making it seem as if the whole world had turned indistinct.
Natural disasters, man-made calamities.
As the marching team moved further south, I became acutely aware of this.
This fertile land, renowned for its agriculture, was undergoing the largest disaster in centuries. The farms that people relied upon for survival were utterly destroyed; rice and vegetables buried by sewage, and under the enormous clouds above, birds hardly flitted about. Countless civilians had fled north, many dying of starvation or drowning along the way, corpses floating in puddles, rotting, watered by the rain, and no one to give them a proper burial.
The sights we encountered were heart-wrenching.
The land managers in this world seemed severely lacking in disaster response knowledge and means, or perhaps they were truly powerless. Throughout this journey, I hadn’t seen a single soldier from the Republic, only the dead and half-dead people.
And the rain fell mercilessly.
After several days of long trekking, the Castle of Silence, dubbed the granary of the southern Silgaya, lay ahead.
