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Chapter 64 - Epitaph
Chapter 64 - Epitaph
Chapter 64: Epitaph
Storm Province, Myriad Feet City, Kane Cathedral.
Two holy spirit statues made of adamantine stood on both sides of the podium. One wore a bronze crown, held a gorgeous ceremonial sword in his right hand, and stroked a dragon crouched under him with his left hand. The other held a simple straight sword in his hand and was blowing an ancient horn.
Unlike the other seven Holy Spirits who had all anthropomorphic symbols removed and were only allowed to use the Holy Brilliance patterns as symbols, the eighth Holy Spirit, Hermit, was allowed to be worshiped with a Holy Spirit statue.
Due to this, the Eighth Order was often criticized by the Holy Spirits Church. Of course, such criticism typically stopped at the verbal level.
After all, that was the Holy Spirit Kane who had walked the human world twice and left behind countless holy traces. No matter how much one prohibited idol worship, it was difficult to convince the masses.
The Patriarch of the Eighth Order, Adrian, whose hair and beard were grizzled, sat on the podium. Behind him was the acute-angled holy emblem that symbolized the Eighth Holy Spirit.
The silver holy emblem was colored by the surrounding candles’ faint flame, and the air was filled with the rich smell of incense.
Adrian closed his eyes and crossed his fingers as he patiently listened to his subordinates report the latest news to him.
Most of it were trivial matters, be it the preparations for the annual sacrament for the Riel royal family or the religious donation collection arrangements for the different provinces—other than the unruly Blackwater Province.
These were all matters that had long been planned. It didn’t change much from year to year.
However, since they were talking about the Blackwater Province…
“…It’s believed that the Silver Blood Daughter, Nizemar, has already reached a cooperation with the bishop of St. Dewey Church. Regarding the recovery of Judgment 4, it’s possible…” the gray-robed deacon said worriedly.
“There’s no problem,” Adrian said slowly.
He knew what the other party was worried about.
Once there were more than two things, there would be a distinction between closeness and indifference. Just like the two Holy Spirit statues behind him, they respectively symbolized the two descents of the Eighth Holy Spirit 1,000 years ago and 800 years ago.
And within the parish, there had always been a long debate about which represented the essence of the Eighth Holy Spirit. After 800 years, the outcome of this debate was the appearance of the Divine Grace and Holy Seminary.
As the Patriarch, the most important job for Adrian as head of the parish was to maintain the balance of power between the Divine Grace and Holy Seminary factions.
The gray-robed deacon said worriedly, “Nizemar’s successful recovery of Judgment 8 from the Dragon Breath Province has already greatly increased the Holy Seminary’s influence. If we let her leave the Blackwater Province again…”
“You don’t have to worry. The matter in the Blackwater Province won’t succeed,” Adrian said in a confident tone.
“Why?”
The gray-robed deacon asked in confusion. In his impression, the Patriarch rarely said anything with such certainty.
Adrian opened his turbid eyes and looked at him.
“Do you know why the Holy Spirits Church, including the Eighth Order, has gradually withdrawn its forces from the Blackwater Province 14 years ago? Furthermore, it has withdrawn almost all of them in recent years?”
The gray-robed deacon replied nervously when he heard the sensitive subject raised, “Isn’t it because of the current Duke of Thorn…”
“No.”
Adrian shook his head, closed his eyes, and continued, “Simon Walde is just a cover. The real reason isn’t that the Blackwater Province abandoned us, but that we abandoned it. Therefore, Nizemar is destined to be unable to do anything in the Blackwater Province. Alright, that’s not something you should care about… Is there anything else to report?”
The confused gray-robed deacon immediately replied, “The 17th search for the Kane Horn has also ended in failure. The Platinum Palace is quite displeased with our progress…”
Before the gray-robed deacon could finish speaking, he stopped because a horn sounded from afar.
It was continuous and long.
He froze in place like a statue and could only stare in that direction in a daze, unable to make a sound.
When Adrian heard this sound, he turned around in confusion and looked behind him.
Then, he froze in place as well.
The horn sounded from the statue that symbolized the descent of the Holy Spirit more than a thousand years ago.
The adamantine statue was trembling slightly, and the long bugle call sounded throughout the church.
As if his soul was trembling, the old man—who had been the Patriarch for more than 40 years—could only cry out in alarm, “By the Holy Spirit…”
However, before he could finish speaking, the horn suddenly stopped.
Right on the heels of that, with a crack, a fine crack quickly extended all the way from the top of the Kane statue.
The statue cracked?
It was as if a bucket of cold water had been poured over Adrian’s head.
As the Patriarch of the Eighth Order, he naturally knew what this meant. This was a prophetic omen of trouble in the last chapter of Kane’s New Testament. It meant that the Holy Spirit—who had once walked the mortal world twice—was about to descend to the mortal world.
But why?
The two of them stared at the crack in the statue for three minutes. During this period, no one dared to move or say anything.
After a long time, Adrian lowered his voice and said to the deacon, “Inform the Sealing Temple to help me prepare the teleportation nexus to Platinum Province.”
…
At this moment, all the Kane figurines on the Vic Continent that had been blessed by the Holy Spirits Church trembled slightly as Vincent blew the Kane Horn. Countless people stopped and watched the miracle.
The trembling ended, and with a soft crack, a tiny crack appeared on all the blessed figurines on the continent.
At this moment, after discovering that the figurines had cracked, countless cries, excitement, sorrow, ecstasy, anger, doubt, fear, doubt, and confusion sounded in every corner of the Vic Continent.
Such majestic emotions echoed at the same time, even stirring ripples in the Moon Realm and disturbing the dreams of many high-level Moon Realm existences.
Back to the center of the storm.
Vincent had just blown the ancient horn in the face of the vast sea of undead.
The sea formed by the swath of emerald-green Soul Fire reflected in their pupils instantly turned into bubbles and dissipated when he blew the lingering horn.
The tens of thousands of undead in front of him instantly collapsed weakly like marionettes that had their strings cut. Only the crisp sound of bones colliding when they collapsed proved that they had been advancing a few seconds ago.
Vincent stood rooted to the ground in a daze. After a long time, he looked at the horn in his hand in awe.
“Kane Horn, and Presiding Judge William Kane…” he muttered.
For some reason, he suddenly recalled what that person had said the first time he met him—those extremely arrogant words he had heard back then.
“Release the fate of all mankind from the hands of the gods?”
Even now, this sounded extremely arrogant.
However, to Vincent, who had witnessed the miracle in front of him, that no longer seemed to be an unreachable goal.
…
“He’s real. At least that horn is real. No, he must be the real Kane who descended.”
Nizemar held the silver, cracked Kane figurine and suppressed her excitement.
She, who was usually extremely indifferent, was trembling uncontrollably. Her eyes had unknowingly been dyed with a faint layer of silver.
The bishop frowned as he stared at the silver Kane figurine—or to be precise, the crack on the statue before saying, “You should know what this means, right?”
Regarding this, Nizemar only turned her head and replied in an almost fanatical tone,
“Of course, it means Judgment, a trial of all filth!”
The fanaticism in the other party’s tone and the silver light that suddenly burst out of his eyes made the bishop take half a step back.
Just as the legends said, the Eighth Order’s Holy Relic hunters were all fanatical radical believers.
The bishop was secretly speechless.
When the other party took the initiative to cooperate with him, he too had been advised by his subordinates to reduce contact with those lunatics. However, he wrote them off as exaggerated rumors when he found the other party’s words and actions very normal. Thus, he agreed to the cooperation, but from the looks of it…
With this in mind, the bishop looked back at the receding Tide of the Undead in the distance.
Although he was a conservative in the Church and only believed in the creation model of the Seven Holy Spirits and not the eighth Holy Spirit that allowed mortals to be sanctified, he had to admit that what was happening in front of him was an out-and-out miracle.
So was the person who claimed to be William Kane real?
If he was real, could the disaster prophesied to befall the church in the mortal world be true?
…
It wasn’t just the 50,000 Undead who broke through the walls. Even the hundreds of thousands of awakened Undead in the graveyard returned to their solitude under the sound of the requiem horn.
William, who was under the Holy Sepulchre, also heard the distant horn. Then, he sensed that the constant trembling outside suddenly disappeared.
This shocked him.
No way. That horn didn’t have such an exaggerated effect in-game.
It only increases the range of Placating the Undead halo by five times. It can at most affect an area of a kilometer. How can it send all the undead in the graveyard back to their solitude?
William thought in confusion.
Then, a possibility that made his head hurt surfaced in his mind.
Could it be that the eighth Holy Spirit worshiped by later generations has really manifested?
Strictly speaking, the Kane Horn wasn’t a magical tool, but a holy relic. It was a product of special processing of the fragments of the Light Realm left behind by the Holy Spirits after the creation of the world, and it was the still-flowing Creatons themselves.
He named this Holy Artifact in his name. Coupled with the fact that it resonated with the faith in Holy Spirit Kane over the centuries, he might have created something.
With this in mind, William added another item to his list of things to do—confirm the status of the so-called Eighth Holy Spirit.
Gods in this world weren’t to be worshiped for no reason.
Back then, the Holy Spirits Church’s personality worship of the Seven Holy Spirits created the Seven Calamities, wreaking havoc across the continent and poisoning thousands of miles.
If the mantra of ‘once on shore one prays no more’ came true, and he created the Eighth Calamity in his name, he wouldn’t be the one smiling.
Cass looked at the man in front of him who suddenly revealed an uncertain expression and asked anxiously, “What’s wrong? Is there a problem?”
Cass’s words pulled William back to his senses. He squatted down and gently picked up the corpse of the dead faerie.
“Nothing… Let’s continue. To extraordinary creatures like faeries who don’t rely on natural reproduction, their death and rebirth are one. Every faerie will leave behind newborn seeds after death.”
As he spoke, a faint golden flame ignited in his hand, and Liz’s aged body instantly turned into golden dust that filled the sky.
Cass’s breathing quickened when he saw this scene. The fire in William’s hand happened to extinguish at this moment. When the dust dissipated, a pearl-sized golden gem floated in his palm.
Cass looked at the gem and asked nervously, “This is?”
“The Dream Egg, or it’s also known as the seed of a faerie. Place it in a bud that hasn’t bloomed during the full moon, and a new faerie will be born when the flower blooms during the next full moon.”
Seeing Cass’s fervent gaze, William suddenly couldn’t bear it. He hesitated for a moment before telling the truth.
“Of course, that isn’t a resurrection, but the birth of a new faerie. Although the new faerie will inherit a portion of the former faerie’s memories and personality…”
That’s not the Liz you know.
William didn’t finish his sentence.
Typically, it took a very long time to condense the seeds of a faerie from their remains. But after William asked about how Cass came here, he decided to help speed up the process.
If he only relied on vengeance as a driving force, it was very easy for him to take the wrong path.
Once his heart collapsed, he would give the Lunar Monsters a chance.
Therefore, the motivation to fight had to be something beautiful, something that he was willing to protect.
Otherwise, fighting the Moon Realm would also become sustenance for the Moon Realm to become powerful.
“Thank you…”
Cass carefully took the golden gem from William and thanked him in a hoarse voice.
“I’ll bring you somewhere later and train you to use this power until you can completely control it. Can you accept that?”
As William spoke, he walked to the black stone plaque in front of the central sarcophagus.
He had previously heard Cass’s story that Judgment 4 had been pulled out from there.
In that case, was Blake buried here back then?
With a nervous heart, William blew away the thick dust covering the stone plaque.
…
Cass seemed to answer him from behind, but he couldn’t hear him clearly.
All his attention was attracted by the words on the stone plaque.
The inscription was as follows:
I wish to commemorate my fellow Judges: Coles Jackdaw, Blake Saba.
They slept here forever to seal the Rotten Moon wraith.
A warning to future generations: before the resentment dissipates, don’t open the seal there for a thousand years.
24th Valley Moon, 899 Platinum Calendar
What… What kind of joke is this?
After being stunned for a long time, William took a few furious steps to the sarcophagus.
With their strength, why would the two of them need to sacrifice their lives to seal the Rotten Moon wraith?
He pressed his hand on the sarcophagus and took a deep breath before opening the coffin.
Other than a mess of crow feathers and a door-sized sword, there was nothing inside.
It was an empty grave.