Chapter 36 – A Call From the Soul
There was one thing that Aistride hadn’t told anyone else. Since entering this city, she had felt as though some familiar yet strange presence was pulling her in, secretly beckoning her with a peace treaty she didn’t fully understand.
This presence had an irresistible pull on her, leading her straight to the bell tower as soon as she entered. She stared blankly at the inscriptions on it, feeling dizzy and disoriented, as if she had encountered these runes somewhere before.
It was like a small part of something sealed away deep in her mind had been unlocked, making her question her own identity.
This door, whatever lay behind it, seemed to hold something very important to her, something that belonged to her and was waiting for her.
The call grew stronger and heavier, as if it wanted to pull Aistride’s soul right out of her body.
Behind the door, a humanoid silhouette started to form, revealing a girl with bizarre, elongated horns on her head. Her long silver hair cascaded down to her ankles, though it was slightly duller, more like a faded, dusty silver-gray.
Who??……….
Aistride held her forehead in pain. In the face of the light emitted by this silhouette, she felt incomplete, fragmented, as if pieces of herself, long separated, were finally finding their way back home.
She struggled to accept this reality, but strangely, she didn’t feel the usual rejection she would expect. It felt natural, even though it was bizarre.
When she met up with Tillysha, Aistride wanted to tell her about the odd phenomenon she was experiencing but, surprisingly, couldn’t utter a word.
It was as if her instincts wanted to keep this secret hidden from everyone.
In her heart, a deep yearning arose, this calling from her soul urging her to explore the world beyond this door.
Thus, Aistride acted as if nothing was amiss and informed Tillysha about the bell tower.
Despite being in a dire situation, with a teammate in grave danger, Aistride inexplicably couldn’t care less. All her attention was fixated on the door of the bell tower, as if, in the face of this silent soul-call, everything else became insignificant.
Upon hearing Aistride’s discovery of what seemed to be a ‘door’, the Brilliant Sun and Moon team sprang into action. Tillysha carried Yimi, while Princess Filisia, wielding her massive sword, guarded them as they cleared out the obstacles, eliminating all the wandering demon corpses along the way until they reached the bell tower.
Just as Aistride had described, the bell tower bore many peculiar inscriptions, but what stood out the most were the six recesses carved into the tower’s wall.
Beneath them lay a carved mural depicting various people, their faces uniformly etched with suffering and despair.
The mural was more conceptual than realistic, using an eerie style to vividly portray the faces of refugees struggling on their journey, their anguish and hardship laid bare in heart-rending detail.
A female refugee lies exhausted by the side of the road while her child clings to her, crying incessantly. Yet, this tragic scene garners no sympathy from others who show varying expressions but share the same underlying misery. The last remnants of kindness towards strangers have been crushed by the harsh realities of their lives, leaving the fallen refugees unattended as everyone rushes on their own way.
Tillysha touched the mural, and with a ‘snap’, a piece of the brick from the mural fell off. She picked it up; it depicted the fallen woman.
“Tillysha sister! Yimi, Yimi!”
Hearing Wenfu’s frantic call, everyone turned around to find that Yimi’s face was sprouting fine green fur, and her complexion was growing increasingly darker, filled with pain.
Examining her condition, they realized she had only two minutes left before she succumbed to demonification.
Time was running out.
“Tillysha…” Aware of Yimi’s dire situation, Filisia looked at Tillysha, whose expression remained as calm as ever, her emerald-green eyes brimming with composure.
Her demeanor and aura gave everyone a strange sense of reassurance.
After a brief thought, Tillysha acted. She slipped the fallen brick into one of the six recesses.
Sure enough, these recesses were designed to accommodate these specific bricks.
Tillysha had encountered similar mechanisms countless times before. Her experience told her that these mechanisms required the specific contents from the mural to be inserted into the recesses in the correct order.
Looking at the text on the mural: “The bonds are only tied by the one who can untangle them; infinite ruin leads to life.”
“The bonds are only tied by the one who can untangle them…”
As time ticked by, everyone watched anxiously as Yimi’s skin grew darker. The usually radiant Gold Elf was now as cold as a corpse.
No one dared to interrupt Tillysha during this critical moment, all placing their last hopes on her.
If she failed, not only Yimi, but they too would soon succumb to demonification and become monsters.
In this perilous place called Ruglien, where survival chances were slim, everyone knew that without Tillysha leading them, they probably wouldn’t have even made it out of the Orc territory.
With just one minute remaining, Tillysha’s hand glided over the mural before her eyes snapped open in revelation.
She comprehended it.
Her eyes scanned the mural, finding her targets before extracting the bricks and fitting them into the correct recesses one by one.
The first brick corresponded to a man in shackles with a tattooed face and some physical disability, the second to the fallen woman, the third to a man locked in a cage by the roadside, the fourth to a n*ked girl beating the cage in an attempt to free the man, coins scattered around her, and the fifth was a sick man abandoned by his family.
Yes, Tillysha had been searching for the appropriate bricks to fit these scenarios.
She noticed that all these forms of suffering were present in the bricks and confirmed her deductions.
So, this mural represented five kinds of suffering, not without patterns. These sufferings they had witnessed along the way could very well be the root cause of the former “Light Race” being turned into the Demon Race.
The slave uprising in Orc territory symbolized the oppression by the slave owners, which explained why the Coleman Forest, the entrance to Orc territory, was a one-way passage—outsiders could leave, but the Orcs were kept inside.
The first was slavery.
The mass famine and cannibalism in Werewolf territory indicated the severe food shortage, where they had even started eating their own. This reflected the entrance through the “Forest of Gluttony,” where any creature would become ravenous and lose all reason.
The second was famine.
The Fire Demons trapped in their volcanic habitats, unable to leave their burning homes, symbolized their nightmare being the very soil they depended on for survival. The sandstorms at the entrance mirrored this—allowing no one to enter or leave.
The third was imprisonment.
In the ruins of the Faceless Ones, where they fought over mere coins to the d*ath, the suffering was greed, not thievery as Tillysha had initially suspected. The suffering was the insatiable greed for survival.
The offer of money, the ultimatum of either staying forever in the dark or accepting payment—it wasn’t theft, it was exploitative taxation.
Even based on the experiences of human demonification under the Empire, the ones who demonified were often from the poorest classes; these Faceless Ones were no different. These unfortunate individuals lacked the courage to plunder, often being led by the nobility to direct anger towards other unfortunate ones like themselves.
In life, they quarreled over a penny, and in d*ath, their disputes escalated into bloody battles where lives were lost over insignificant sums.
Their stinginess was legendary—greedy even over the coin in Wenfu’s hand, for in life, that coin represented the hope of survival for them and their families.
Thus, the fourth wasn’t theft, but the scourge of heavy taxes.
The fifth and final one was self-evident.
A glance at Yimi confirmed the correspondence—it was the sick man abandoned on the roadside, watching helplessly as the refugee convoy passed him by.
But…
When Tillysha placed all the bricks in the slots, she hesitated. There were six recesses, but they had only encountered five Demon Race territories.
What was going on? Did she miss something, or was her assumption fundamentally wrong?
Looking at Yimi, she realized they had only thirty seconds left.
Yimi’s state was grim. Her skin began cracking, her hair turning brittle and yellow, resembling a desiccated corpse.
Tillysha clenched her fists slightly and closed her eyes.
Which piece was missing?
There were only five stages, so why were there six recesses? Was she supposed to predict the next stage?
No, it couldn’t be that. She must have overlooked something crucial.
“Hmm, if only I hadn’t lost sight of everyone in the first place. This wouldn’t have happened…” Wenfu’s quiet self-reproach reached Tillysha’s ears. It wasn’t the moment to dwell on Wenfu’s grumbles, yet the words made Tillysha pause.
Not together?
That was it!
Each time they moved into a new Demon Race territory, they had always been together—except this time. They were separated once they entered.
“Good job, Wenfu. Thank you for reminding me.”
“Huh?! Meow?!” Wenfu stared in confusion as Tillysha complimented her unexpectedly.
What in the world had she reminded Tillysha of?
Tillysha removed the brick from the fifth slot, moving it to the last one. She chose the brick depicting a farmer whose wife had been abducted by a nobleman’s carriage and had fallen to the ground.
She had almost overlooked this crucial detail. Yes, the fifth type of suffering was forced separation from loved ones—and the ensuing hardships.
In the correct sequence:
Slavery, famine, imprisonment, taxation, separation, plague.
All six pieces were now in place.
“Boom Boom!” Once the six bricks were inserted into the recesses, the wall of the bell tower underwent a transformation right before everyone’s eyes.
“Clang, clang…” The misty bells of the tower rang without a breeze, the sound waves resonating endlessly, echoing through the shadowy ghost town.
The bells pierced their eardrums, everyone felt as if something had collided with their brains. The sound was grand and cleansing, washing away whatever grime had clung to their souls.
Their senses became clear, then blurry again; perhaps just a fleeting moment, or perhaps a long while had passed by.
The tolling bells quieted down. Reopening their eyes, everything was back to normal. Before them stood a sunlight-drenched but broken-down town, its structures telling tales of years of wear and tear.
The moss-covered clocktower previously had seemed abandoned for a long time; the dark-toned scenery now devoid of shadows, adding layers of antiquity instead.
Everything seemed to have reverted to the day the city fell.
“Yimi, Yimi!”
Cheers from Wenfu directed everyone’s attention towards Yimi, who had returned to her original form but was still unconscious.
“Did we succeed??” Filisia glanced around the city, sensing a subtle change in the entire town. The oppressive darkness had been replaced with an aura of ancient history, as if that was how the city was meant to be all along.
“What about the demon bodies?” Looking around, the city showed no signs of any demonized bodies, as if all that had just been a dream.
Tillysha contemplated the rusted bronze bell.
“Snap!” The fragile brickwork collapsed, revealing the mural beneath in its entirety, which then crumbled, revealing a staircase leading downwards into the earth.
“Have we passed this test?” Filisia questioned hesitantly.
Tillysha used Divine Analysis Technique, checking the status of everyone present. The demonification buffs had been eradicated.
“Seems so.”
Silence fell over the group.
All realized that walking down these stairs would lead them to confront what might be the core of Ruglien, perhaps even facing Ruglien’s true ruler.
The path lay right beneath them, and there was no turning back.
Amidst the impasse, one figure stepped forward and without hesitation, descended the stairs.
“Aistride sister?”
“……” The silver-haired elf girl turned around, sparing Wenfu a glance before continuing her descent without a word.
“Wha…Wenfu? What’s wrong?”
“Mmm…Meow??” Wenfu shook her head, confused.
Had she imagined it? If Aistride normally radiated chilly serenity, this time her gaze was devoid of any emotion—only cold.
Tillysha’s expression changed ever so slightly as she glanced back at Aistride.
………Was that her imagination?
(Starting from this chapter, the plot is about to speed up, likely concluding within this month. Pursuing a story without flaws might cause one to overlook important details, like this book.)
(Without complex relationships and ups and downs, the writing might become monotonous. Initially, I didn’t plan to finish this book; a lack of conflict points wouldn’t make for an exciting read, and it’d be a torment to write. However, sticking to the principle of giving readers a proper ending and never abandoning a story, this book and Tillysha will reach a conclusion.)
(And it won’t be a bad one.)
(Also, I have a lot of new ideas for my next book. While plotting, I’ve relived the excitement of writing bl**d Princess, but I still lack inspiration. I need to go out and seek that inspiration and my original intentions again.)
