Chapter 143: Temple Church
“Can you recognize this?”
I stared at the rotting, grotesque face, my brows furrowed.
Mad Dog? What the heck, I’ve never heard of that name. But the Star Association is Magipanny’s disciple organization; how could these folks be dead here? Has Magipanny been here?
Or is it St. George?
“Muse is pretty hot-headed. He once had a spat with Leah, and I remember he got into a fight in this armor,” Carlos continued, standing up and glancing at the other corpses scattered on the stairs. There were plenty of dead folks, and some stone steps were obviously damaged, riddled with wounds.
The man paused for a moment before adding, “The clerics who died here don’t seem like members of the Faith Organization. Some aren’t even wearing proper clerical robes. It’s more likely they were loyalists around St. George. They must have had a chaotic fight here, with some even charging into the church.”
He scanned the area around him, then his gaze fixed on the main entrance. “I have this feeling that this was a battle without victors…”
Saying that, Carlos unsheathed his sword with a clang, the blade shimmering with a flicker of thunder light, gripping it tightly in his right hand.
As I looked ahead, the stone steps led to the end, revealing the resplendent Temple Church. The enormous double doors, towering at five or six meters, were half-open, revealing a dimly lit, shadowy hall. On the walls and stained glass windows, I could vaguely make out more dried bloodstains. A rancid odor wafted out, strong enough to make me hold my breath and tighten my nerves.
“…You step back, let me go first.”
I waved my hand at Carlos, my tone brooking no argument, and stepped forward. He understood and shrugged, gesturing for me to go ahead, eyes narrowing as he followed me with his sword drawn.
At the entrance, I didn’t stop. I stepped over the charred female corpse leaning against the door and boldly strode into the church.
Suddenly, my vision darkened.
Above, light streamed in from the stained glass and high dome skylights, illuminating the dim yet extraordinarily spacious church foyer. The marble columns glowed golden, and the stunning relief murals on the walls sparkled, creating a dazzling sight that was almost blinding.
The jewels embedded in the columns, the gold decorations scattered around, and the artful designs left me momentarily speechless. In a split second, I even forgot why I was standing here, my mind filled only with admiration for the world’s architectural wonders, leaving just one lingering thought:
How much wealth did this church drain from people when it was built? How many lives did it consume, all for the pursuit of a tiny fraction of people craving the extreme luxuries that humanity could possibly enjoy?
It wasn’t until I caught sight of those black bloodstains on the gaudy pillars and the scorched marks on the red carpet, or those horrendously mangled corpses sprawled across the shattered granite floor, that I snapped back to reality.
Then, I caught a whiff of the foul, rotten air.
Perhaps due to a lack of ventilation, the odor was even stronger than that in the square.
I found myself in the center of the hall, quite conspicuously, my brow furrowed. After waiting for a moment, no one came to stop me, nor did I hear any sounds.
“Cough, cough…”
The acrid smell nagged at me, forcing a soft cough as my voice echoed throughout the hall, lingering longer than expected. Even I was a bit startled.
Suddenly, behind me, I heard a thud. I whirled around to see Carlos jumping down from somewhere, sheathing his long sword, and spreading his hands, as if to say, “Sorry, but it’s safe here for now.”
Implying, he too couldn’t sense any signs of life.
My brow furrowed even deeper.
Carlos approached me, equally captivated by the church’s opulence, his face serious as he looked around. “This place… one could casually take out just one thing and secure three generations of luxury and comfort, right? Tsk, tsk.”
“You’ve never been here before?” I asked, glancing sideways at him, surprised. “Surely not.”
“Just never stepped inside,” Carlos shook his head, strolling over to the nearest marble column and reaching out to touch the lamp embedded in it. No surprises there; that lamp was made of pure gold.
“The Temple Church isn’t like those public churches in regular parishes. This is the power center of the Holy Church. Unless one has special reasons, no one can easily set foot here except for the clerics who serve this place, the Council, and the owls.”
“Not even the Pope Knights?” I began to wander around, hoping to find any surviving souls or figure out what had happened here.
“If there’s a reason, of course they can.”
“So you’ve never been here?”
“I really have no interest whatsoever in what goes on here, especially in the people here. I never ask for them, and the Council, naturally, isn’t inclined to waste time on someone like me, so… Ah.”
Clang! Carlos accidentally knocked down the lamp. The noise echoed throughout the empty hall, startling him. He quickly tried to put it back, but after fiddling with it, it seemed almost impossible, so he forced it back into the socket, tilting it askew without caring, turning back to me with a shrug, looking innocent. “It was a bit loose to begin with; can’t really blame me.”
“……”
After exploring the opulent church foyer for a while, I found nothing except corpses and bloodstains, along with plenty of signs of a struggle. Here, like outside, had witnessed a fierce battle, with dead folks among the Pope Knights and a few bishops.
Moving from the foyer to the main hall, I immediately noticed the ceiling, twenty or thirty meters high, had a massive hole, and it seemed the fighting had reached a fever pitch here. Burned murals, twisted gold sculptures, broken statues, and scattered gems—many of which were obviously very valuable and had been utterly ruined—created a chaotic scene. One woman was pinned to the wall by a bizarrely styled white spear, bl**d trickling down, solidifying into a chilling, tragic sight.
This space was larger, with gardens, chambers, long corridors, dining halls, and kitchens filled with golden and silver tableware, all scattered about like dazzling debris.
Unlike the outside scene, the storage room in the Temple Church kitchen was packed with hundreds of bags of grains, but they had long since become a paradise for bugs. The meat hanging in the slaughterhouse was spoiled and stank, flies buzzing all over. Down below, the wine cellar brimmed with an array of fine wines, where over twenty chefs and a few nuns lay, their bodies half-decayed and sprawled, surrounded by empty and half-empty bottles, likely having succumbed to a drunken stupor before d*ath.
Carlos nonchalantly grabbed a bottle of wine from a display case, took a swig, and exclaimed that the wines here were nearly irreplaceable treasures. Letting them rot here was practically a crime against nature!
All that talk was just an excuse for him to justify “stealing wine to drink.”
“Little Shay, come over here and take a look—”
Not long after leaving the kitchen’s wine cellar, I heard Carlos calling me from a chamber in the main hall. The empty echoes reverberated throughout the hall as I walked over. Stepping into the chamber, I discovered more corpses lying over tables of rotting food, sprawled among heaps of exquisite wines, all dead in a disarray.
Some had died on the tables, some were against the walls, and a few n*ked men and women lay entwined together, much like the ones in the wine cellar. Most of the corpses were also half skeletonized, making it difficult to distinguish between genders, discernible mainly by pelvic bones and the length of hair.
This place resembled an opera hall, featuring a stage, with seven or eight long tables adorned with delicacies, now withered and blackened beyond recognition. Yet, if one examined the plate sizes and the types of wine served, one could almost imagine what a scene of song and dance, revelry, and indulgence must have unfolded here.
“They held a wild banquet here.”
Carlos pointed at a few dead bodies on the stage. Among them were likely men and women, barely clothed. It seemed that not even the flimsiest of garments could have naturally decayed thoroughly in just one or two months. The ones with clothes made clear that they had been completely undressed while hugging and performing their “acts” just before dying.
“It looks like these were the church’s servants or members of the Choir of Saints. Only the most devoted of followers would be sent here to serve the Temple Church and the Council.”
“The Last Supper…”
I muttered, picking up a leftover wine bottle from one of the tables, sniffing it. “Sniff, sniff… The wine likely had poison mixed in it. These folks must have died by s*icide.”
“Such things can be seen with the eyes. Why playact with smelling? Can you sense what kind of poison it was?”
“……”
I set down the wine bottle and shot Carlos a disgruntled glare.
“Just like the ones in the kitchen, they drank Cantarella, a mysterious poison passed down from the Church’s early days,” he explained. “It’s colorless and tasteless. Once ingested, it causes extreme lethargy. Coupled with alcohol, it gives a great high for a short while until they suffocate and d*e in a haze of confusion.”
“How do you know?” I challenged.
Carlos raised the small bottle in his hand, shaking it at me. “I checked for this when I came. Found it on the dining cart. I pocketed two bottles, and there are plenty left unused. This stuff is rare; it’s enough to buy the finest Horned Horse on the black market for a single bottle!”
“…Oh.”
I didn’t want to indulge him any further or linger here. “The final madness for these people. They must have known for at least a month or two that they wouldn’t survive.”
Why was that?
Was it due to internal strife or the Mother Deity…
Maybe it was a bit of both.
Feeling trapped, they must have thought, rather than anxiously waiting to d*e every day, it was better to indulge in a sweet, swift end. They likely were convinced that they would no longer be food for the Abyss—and prior to their d*ath, they had likely hit rock bottom.
“I never once thought…”
Having exited the chamber and returned to the main hall, Carlos gazed at its grandeur and stillness, suddenly sighing, “If there were a devout follower here—I mean a truly devout one, adhering strictly to doctrines, believing in truth, and having genuine concern for the people. If such a person stayed here too long, watching these riches and fine wines every day, could they keep their original intentions intact?”
“Perhaps one day, they would be blinded by these golden things.”
“……”
Perhaps that was indeed the case.
“Let’s go.”
Confirming there were no living souls in the main hall, Carlos compared the map and noticed a path leading to the second floor behind the hall, so he suggested, “Let’s head upstairs and take a look.”
Exiting the hall, we ascended the spiral staircase, me in the lead and Carlos trailing behind. Although we both had pretty much assumed there wouldn’t be anything alive upstairs, we still had to be cautious. It wasn’t about fear or anything; it would be particularly embarrassing to take a tumble if ambushed, especially in front of Carlos.
The walls on either side of the staircase were similarly embellished, each one resembling a work of art. Some portraits hung on the walls, with golden monuments standing beneath them, most depicting famous figures from history. I glanced twice before losing interest, while Carlos appeared thoroughly absorbed.
“Servants of the Deity, willing to sacrifice everything for the Deity and the people…” Oh, how noble and touching…
“The Council should reward the ones who wrote these inscriptions on the monuments…”
Once we reached the second floor, the layout was indeed complex. As we expected, decayed corpses, dark bloodstains, and weapons stuck in the walls were all that remained—too quiet, sending chills down my spine.
But there was a route leading to the rear hall, that opened to the grand assembly hall, requiring us to cross an arched bridge to get there.
Not that we couldn’t reach the grand assembly hall from the lower foyer, but that route only led to the first floor of the grand hall. The second floor served as the Temple Church’s “forbidden area” for regular clerics, originally accessible only via a heavily guarded arched bridge, reportedly watched by at least two Pope Knights. This was the only passage marked on the map.
The upper hall, that third layer, was the Council’s assembly chamber.
Following the map, Carlos and I arrived at the arched bridge. It was outdoors, spanning several dozen meters, grand and spacious but had been blown apart, severely damaged. Gruesome, unrecognizable bodies lay at the end of the broken bridge, with more below.
Those in clerical robes, donning Pope Knights’ cloaks, a few from the Choir of Saints— all dead right here.
The broken bridge didn’t pose a problem for the two of us. After leaping over easily, we entered through an arched stone door, reaching the second floor of the grand hall. Here, the windows were fewer, and the light dimmer; in the gloomy hall, besides the lingering unpleasant odor, all that met the eye was a row of towering golden statues standing against the walls.
These statues were completely golden, even the bases were gold, standing more than five meters high, posing variously—some stood solemnly with staffs and robes, others clad in armor, brandishing weapons, arms raised in cries. I didn’t want to think about whether they were truly made of pure gold, but they all shared one commonality: each wore a Pope’s crown.
Without a doubt, these were the effigies of past Popes.
The sculptures extended from the hall’s entrance to its end, where one could faintly see a statue facing the entrance, larger than the others, which, unlike the rest, bore no crown, instead dressed in a hooded robe, hands clasped before it, holding a small effigy of a holy tree. Rather than looking like a Pope, this figure seemed more like that of a prophet.
As Carlos and I approached the hall, we noticed a remarkably luxurious altar placed before the statue of the “prophet.” The altar was all gold, encrusted with jewels of various hues, atop it sat a half-covered sacred cabinet draped in red cloth.
It seemed like a shrine; beside it were two rows of candle holders, and behind the statue hung the Church’s cross along with a grand mural.
The mural depicted a group of people kneeling in worship, facing the figure clad in a gray robe, with a hood shielding its face.
That person glowed with golden light, holding the same holy tree effigy, looking down in a salvific manner, mirroring the golden statue before it.
Carlos knelt to inspect the base of the statue.
There, it clearly read: The creator of human history, the leader of the Holy Light’s great path, the first Pope of the Holy Church, Patrick Jera Adrian John I.
