Chapter 295: My Eyes
Rebellion is a race against time, but this time, time did not seem to be on Chris Ding's side; they failed to catch up to the isolated Gondor.
When the two sides met again, he had already gathered over a hundred fully armed Papal Guard soldiers, ready to confront the nearly two hundred rebels before him.
"Our transaction is still valid now." Just as the two sides faced off tensely, with battle on the verge of erupting, Gondor felt a mental ripple from a gem in his pocket.
Time rewound to a few days ago, Florence, the Papal Palace.
His Holiness the Pope had just received a precious gift from the official Hua-Ya Federation—a dark red gem wrapped in layers of velvet inside a box.
At first, he was somewhat puzzled, as there wasn't much interaction between the Luminous Holy Church and Hua-Ya. Sending such an expensive gem so abruptly, their motive was quite perplexing. While it was widely known that he personally enjoyed collecting gems, the other party had no reason whatsoever to curry favor with him.
"Are you wondering why?" Just as Gondor held the gem, turning it over in his hand, a neutral voice echoed from within it.
"Who are you?" Having long held a high position and heard whispers of all manner of secrets, he naturally wouldn't panic like an ordinary person or make a clumsy move like dropping the gem in fright. He merely retorted in a calm tone.
"Bai Mo."
Ordinary people would believe that the collapse of Maysuo was primarily due to Ning Yan Huo's life-gambling curse—a tale of revenge where a common man's rage led to blood staining five paces, always more engaging than intricate conspiracies that used the world as a chessboard. At the behest of the higher-ups, all media outlets sensationalized this narrative, leading the general populace to believe it was the truth.
However, those who knew the truth through satellite and intelligence networks understood that the curse was merely a catalyst; the true mastermind was someone else. Otherwise, a mere curse could never have overthrown the supremely arrogant and lofty Ramdo.
"What do you want?"
"To make a transaction."
"I do not need to make a deal with the devil." Gondor adamantly refused.
"You will..." The gem's ripple suddenly vanished at this point.
Upon sensing the disappearance of the mental ripple, Gondor used his divine power to seal the gem layer upon layer, until he felt it was completely secure. While he couldn't contend with Bai Mo himself, dealing with a mere gem containing a projection of his will was well within his capabilities.
Even after the sealing was complete, he felt it wasn't foolproof enough, so he simply carried it on his person, lest it tempt other weak-willed individuals and lead them astray. After the disaster in Maysuo, which claimed over a million lives, the name Bai Mo had, in Gondor's eyes, become synonymous with that of a devil.
"You can still observe the outside world?" On the battlefield, Gondor's expression drastically changed after hearing Bai Mo's words, for this meant his seals had completely failed!
"I don't just have this one pair of eyes." Bai Mo said indifferently.
"Do you have people on the other side?"
"No, but I have my eyes."
Gondor was speechless.
On the other side, Chris Ding also ceased all superfluous words. Like an empress, she directly commanded her subordinates to launch an attack on the Papal Guard, while she herself confronted Gondor.
Gazing at the middle-aged man draped in brocade robes before her, she recalled the events of the past nearly thirty years. The first time she saw Pope Gondor, he was already His Holiness the Pope, high above all, a benevolent middle-aged man, while she was merely a small orphan who had just entered the convent.
Very fortunately, their batch of orphans received the blessing of the incumbent Pope.
At that time, there was no such thing as primal force (spirit qi), nor had anyone heard of chaotic things like Faith Power. The gap between them was as different as clouds and mud. If nothing unexpected had happened, by the time she matured into a true nun, she would have just been in time for his funeral.
But fate often plays tricks. After primal force appeared in this world, everything changed. Time seemed to flow backward. The current Gondor looked even younger than he had two decades ago; there wasn't a single white hair on his head, and his burly physique filled out the papal robes completely, showing no signs of a man nearing ninety.
"Chris Ding, the Lord will forgive you." Gondor made the sign of the cross over his chest, and then his body began to glow.
As a light-element divine spellcaster, his body was enveloped in a shield composed purely of light. Holding his holy staff, he pointed it at Chris Ding.
Towards heretics, Gondor was utterly merciless, but to those within the Church, his magnanimity bordered on doting. Having lived his entire life without wife or children, he often regarded the younger generation within the Church as his own children. Even with Chris Ding having reached the point of seizing power, he still harbored thoughts of forgiveness for her.
"No!" Having her worldview profoundly altered by Wu Zhi, she now had an unbridgeable ideological chasm with Gondor. She longed to transform the Luminous Holy Church into an organization similar to the One-Wheel Cult, providing greater assistance for her own ascent to power. As a young person rising in the new era, she too believed that strength was the answer to everything.
Her desire for power was, to some extent, also due to her inadvertent encounter with Bai Mo ten years ago. Having nearly died by his hand, she yearned for the day she could achieve her revenge. Yet, she found that no matter how hard she pursued, the gap between them never narrowed, and this unwillingness to accept that became one of the primary catalysts for instigating this rebellion.
Gondor sighed, allowing the boundless light that had been restrained on his body to sweep towards Chris Ding. Behind her, a multitude of rune-outlined creatures were summoned, collectively meeting the enemy before them.
The seemingly harmless soft yellow light, upon contact with these sky-blue-shelled rune creatures, corrosively devoured their existence like sulfuric acid.
But Chris Ding paid no mind to these losses. More rune creatures emerged behind her, gnawing away at the radiant light piece by piece.
Both were Super-class Mages of the Fourth Tier, following the Low, Mid, and High ranks. Able to stir a sliver of the primal force ocean, they could replenish vast amounts of mana every second, making it virtually impossible for their power to be exhausted. The only limitation was the mental drain caused by controlling the primal force, a drain that remained difficult to recover from.
The mage system pioneered in the West, after advancing to the pinnacle of a high-level mage, ascended to the Super-class Mage tier by making contact with the primal force ocean and surviving the tribulation of being assimilated by it.
Unlike the development path of the Spirit Hub System, they did not possess the defense-oriented Xuanhua layer. Instead, they had mana with extremely fast recovery rates and a remarkably high upper limit, allowing them to truly unleash their power as spell-casting turrets.
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