Chapter 382: Holy City |
The young priest possessed the most devout faith, capable of hearing the voice of God. But religion had long ceased to be about worship; it had become a tool for oppression and the amassing of wealth.
The priest walked through every corner of the city, witnessing the conflicts between the clergy and the faithful. Upon returning to the temple, he spoke to the god he worshipped. "Lord," he lamented, "I have seen clergymen brazenly seize the property of believers to adorn their own residences. I have seen a bishop deceive an innocent girl merely to satisfy his own lust. I have seen your followers suffering, and I wish to stop those who falsely proclaim your will!"
The god, having dispersed his authority, seemed to have exhausted his former love for his followers. He replied to the priest with a calm coolness, "Go, then. I will not interfere, nor will I watch. But you must know how feeble an individual's power is, how difficult it is to reverse the tide of history. As long as there is darkness in human nature, suffering will never end."
Mankind is born with original sin. Greed is limitless, and the pursuit of profit is instinctual. But just because it has always been so does not make it right. Someone had to change it. The priest sighed deeply. "But no one is born to be a beast."
The god said no more, his silence a tacit approval. The priest left the temple and, drawing upon the remnants of the god's authority, began to spread new doctrines and laws.
When deception and oppression finally vanished from the land, smiles returned to the faces of the believers. They came to believe that God was benevolent, and so they no longer feared him. Instead, they began to indulge their own desires.
The priest returned to the temple, but he could not find the god anywhere. More terrifying than slumber was disappearance.
The god had departed. After the believers' faith ceased to be devout, the Holy City became a godless city.
But the priest knew that the Holy City could do without anything except the one thing it should never lack: a god to shelter them.
The players followed Priest Raki, circling the right side of the long table, passing under the gaze of the tall, downcast statue, and slipped into a narrow corridor cloaked in shadow.
The reliefs carved into the walls on either side of the corridor were worn with age. Doorways were deeply embedded in the walls, like mottled scars on the stone blocks of a tomb passage.
There were six doors on the left and six on the right, perfectly matching the seating arrangement of the players at the long table. Stone slabs above the doors were marked with Arabic numerals. At the very end of the corridor was a stone door marked with the number "0."
The players automatically found their rooms based on their previous seating positions in the main hall. Asakura Yuko glanced at the [Heretic] card in the upper right corner of her vision, and a question suddenly struck her: Heretics could kill during the night, but how exactly was that done?
In any case, knowing each player's room would make killing much more convenient, allowing for a precise choice of target.
She wasn't the only one who had considered this. A tall woman asked with a smile, "Priest Raki, must we enter the room with the corresponding number? I've heard it can be dangerous at night, and I'm quite scared. I was wondering if I could share a room with a friend?"
Priest Raki spread his hands. "You are certainly free to visit other rooms at night to confer, but when danger arrives, any guest in another's room will be more vulnerable."
His tone shifted, and the smile on his face became inscrutable. "However, staying in your own room doesn't guarantee safety either. Ever since the great Holy Lord fell into slumber, the temple itself is no longer truly safe."
After the Holy Lord fell into slumber? The players' minds flashed back to the image of Qi Si on the main throne when they first entered the temple—startled from a dream, looking listless. They truly couldn't fathom how a god-NPC taking a nap could have such a profound impact on the instance.
But a new doubt soon wove its way into their thoughts. Could there be more than one Holy Lord? Was Qi Si, a former player, really the "Holy Lord" mentioned in the instance's backstory?
Of course, that was not a question for the players to consider right now. Fujiwara Shinno looked at Fu Jue and suggested with a faint smile, "Since there's danger everywhere, why don't we pair up, two to a room? A higher-ranked player with a lower-ranked one. If something happens, we can watch each other's backs..."
Fu Jue's gaze swept over him coolly. "This is a faction game. Assuming there are indeed four Heretics, the probability of any two random people belonging to the same faction is only seventeen out of thirty-three."
"We're all human," Fujiwara Shinno countered. "With the Final Instance upon us, there's no need for factional conflict. But we can follow the principle of voluntary participation. People can choose whether or not they want to room with someone else."
The suggestion was reasonable enough. Several players who knew their rankings were lower began to approach those in the top hundred. But Asakura Yuko was not among them.
She had already detected a subtle sense of incongruity.
Normally, even if they decided to cooperate, players wouldn't immediately establish a leadership structure. And even if some were insecure and wanted to share a room, they would discuss it privately rather than advocating for it so publicly.
After all, they were all ranked players. Aside from the obviously dominant Fu Jue, it was unlikely any of them would readily submit to another. Plus, most had a bit of an ego and wouldn't want to reveal a cautious or timid side.
But in this instance, the establishment of a leader had gone far too smoothly, as if it had been rehearsed countless times—including this current plan to share rooms.
—It was as if someone was orchestrating a setup.
"Infighting again? They haven't even figured out the instance mechanics, yet they're already turning on their own kind. What a boring and utterly foolish bunch." Asakura Yuko averted her gaze, walked straight into Room 11, and closed the door behind her.
Soon, the other players had settled their rooming arrangements as well. They pushed open their respective stone doors and went inside.
William stood in his room, his back tense. He scanned every corner with a vigilant eye.
The windowless room was dim. In the center stood a stone bed that looked cold and hard. Aside from a quilt stitched from coarse linen, there was only a stone pillow resembling a brick. At first glance, it looked less like a bed and more like an execution block. A faint, almost imperceptible scent of blood hung in the air, but when he tried to trace it, it dissipated, as if the sensation had been a trick of the mind.
On the stone nightstand sat a grimy oil lamp, its flame flickering weakly, providing minimal illumination. After William stared at it for two seconds, a text prompt appeared above it:
[Name: Light (Consumes 1 Tinder per use)]
[Type: Item (Cannot be taken out of the instance)]
[Effect: Allows exploration outside at night (Duration: one day)]
[Note: Will you cling to a fading hope, cowering before the coming doom? Or will you risk it all to embrace the darkness and death?]
William walked over and gripped the lamp's bronze handle, feeling a bit of his tension ease.
"It seems even non-Heretics can explore at night, as long as they use this item... That makes sense. I was wondering how a faction-based instance could possibly pin all hope for the main quest on a single faction."
"But the fact that it consumes Tinder is a bit of a problem. Acquiring Tinder seems quite difficult so far. I don't even know how much is needed to unlock the main quest's ending, and now I have to waste it on something with an unknown return..."
He muttered to himself as he lay down on the bed, but sleep would not come. He had been a pastor for a time in the real world, and even after returning to a secular life, he still couldn't shake the habit of worrying about others.
Even when things had nothing to do with him, when they weren't his responsibility to bear, he couldn't help but take them upon himself, agonizing over how to solve them and earnestly trying to persuade everyone to follow his advice.
In the real world, this had caused him a lot of trouble; he had even entered the Weird Game because an impatient robber had smashed in half his skull. But thankfully, the Weird Game was different from reality. Most players were happy to have a leader step up and take responsibility, and his personality finally found its use.
Now, William couldn't help but start calculating. Assuming each player could only obtain one piece of Tinder, how could they allocate its use to maximize efficiency? Then he came to the sad realization that in a faction game, the players would most likely ignore his coordination efforts...
Time crept into the latter half of the night. William lay with his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Suddenly, his peripheral vision caught a strange gleam of light. It shone from a corner of the ceiling above, casting a beam straight down onto his bed.
"Does this room actually have a skylight?" William turned his face toward the light source and stared, his pupils contracting abruptly.
It wasn't a window. It was the face of a statue carved into the wall, its eyes shooting out crimson light. Its mouth was opening and closing, as if chewing on something...
It was an arm—a human arm. With a sickening crunch, the statue chewed bone and flesh, swallowing it down. Its mouth dripped with blood and gore...
...
Qi Si sat in the main hall of the temple. He listened as the players entered the corridor, the sounds of their discussion rising and then fading away. The scuff of their footsteps grew scattered and then sparse, suggesting they had entered their respective rooms.
Night descended upon the Holy City, and the entire world returned to the domain of darkness. The believers, their souls rooted with blood-red vines, huddled within their tightly shut homes, their eyes closed, their vision sinking into blackness.
Flor's corpse climbed out of its grave in the cemetery, mingling with the horde of the dead that roamed the land. Through his eyes, Qi Si saw the Holy City at night.
Countless bodies appeared in every corner, their flesh and blood flaking off like withered petals, only to be drawn by some invisible force to one spot, where they coalesced into a giant, fleshy tumor.
The tumor rolled swiftly down the city's main avenue, devouring all flesh and bone in its path. The fragments of authority, once scattered like points of pale gold light, now converged around it. Golden veins bulged on the grayish-white, rotting flesh, pulsing as they writhed.
In a single moment, the veins spread until not a single gap could be seen, making the mass resemble a golden world-fruit from a distance. Suddenly, there was light in the world. The rays streamed out aimlessly, like fireworks from a planet crashing into the sun. They exploded in the sky, giving birth to phantom images of golden vines that enveloped the golden sphere within.
Qi Si knew what it was. A flood of images flashed through his mind: the boundless World Tree, the magnificent and solemn temple, the blurred silhouette of a god, a long table lit by a single candle, an eye of flesh and tentacles writhing in the sky, a rain of fire falling from above...
He knew. It was a divine embryo. Before his own birth beneath the World Tree, he too had once been such a fruit.
"So this is where it was..." Qi Si chuckled.
The former Holy Lord had bestowed his authority upon his believers to be shared among them. Thus, the authority of time and space was scattered throughout their flesh and blood. Now, someone was trying to gather that authority once more to create a new god.
The motive was no longer important. What mattered was that a monster was being born in the Holy City, and it was unknown when it would awaken.
"You can't control it." Qi Si glanced at Priest Raki, who stood in the shadows, and made his judgment. "After completing the initial steps, it gained consciousness and instinct. Every night it collects its offerings, it will descend and feed. That's why you couldn't even stop me... from discovering its existence."
Priest Raki remained silent. His gray-blue eyes, turned away from the light, looked sinister and cold.
Qi Si watched him for a few seconds, his smile widening. "You don't need to be so wary of me. I can roughly understand your thinking. You believe their lives came from God, yet they were not entirely devout. This makes you regret ever begging a weakened god to bestow his grace."
"And now that the god has vanished, you believe they should offer up their flesh and blood to reshape the god's authority and bring about his return. I approve of your idea. In fact, I might be able to tell you a few necessary steps you're unaware of—so, would you like to pray to me?"
Silhouettes of history materialized in the void. The godless temple was cold and silent. The clergy continued to commit atrocities in the name of God, just as they always had.
The believers' discontent grew daily until conflict erupted. In a city without a god, the clergy would also lose its reason to exist.
But just then, hideous monsters stormed the Holy City, destroying homes and devouring flesh... and the people realized they needed a god.
The priest was silent for a long time before sighing. "I don't believe in your benevolence."
"But your caution is useless, and we do have a common interest—for instance, we both want to kill those outsiders," Qi Si said, tilting his head with a smile. "You need a god to exist, and I only need its authority. A god without authority is still better than a half-dead monster, isn't it?"
He used the tone of a casual suggestion. Though he was clearly discussing the terms of a deal, it sounded like an aimless chat, making it easy for one to forget his identity and feel as if he were an approachable friend.
The priest asked, "What can you give me, and what would you require of me in return?"
"I know you don't care about the lives of those believers. The only reason you've had them 'donate' their flesh and blood is because you're bound by the rules. But I... I might be able to transform them into heretics who can be crucified and executed." Qi Si casually flipped open the book before him. The word "Heretic" was written in large, menacing letters.
He curled a finger and tapped the table lightly. "As for what I require..." he chuckled. "Perhaps I'm just as eager as you are to see my old friend resurrected."
This was a lie. Aside from being tricked by him into the real world with no way back, Li was in no mortal danger for now. Even if Priest Raki sacrificed the entire city of believers, Li would most likely remain trapped within Chang Xu's body...
But Qi Si's words were laced with sincerity, and based on his current knowledge, Priest Raki had no way of guessing the truth behind it all.
Outside the temple, Flor's corpse was waiting at the door. Qi Si looked up at Priest Raki. "Go on, open the door."
Priest Raki complied with a placid expression. Through the crack in the door, one could glimpse the horrific scene of corpses dancing wildly outside.
Flor stared with lifeless eyes as he entered the temple. He was steeped in the stench of decay, and dirt from the cemetery dripped from him, soon leaving a shocking trail of filth across the pristine hall.
Qi Si raised his right hand. The history page inscribed with the word "Heretic" landed in Flor's arms and erupted in a beam of crimson light.
"From now on, you are a Heretic."
The faction identity was successfully transferred. Anyone could be an incarnation of the Scarlet High Priest, including the follower of a different god.
With the appearance of the new Heretic, a declaration from the rules echoed from the temple's dome:
[You are a follower of the night. Please go out and select a target.]
[If you are certain who you wish to kill, knock on their door three times.]
Flor staggered into the corridor behind the statue and came to a stop before Room 12—Fu Jue's room.
He raised his hand and knocked lightly on the stone door.
"Thud... thud... thud."
[You have killed the player in Room 12.]
Qi Si listened to the voice of the rules with a faint smile. He didn't think he could kill Fu Jue by simply exploiting the instance's mechanics, but so what?
Making a low-probability choice is, in itself, an interesting thing to do, isn't it?