Chapter 324

Chapter 324: Critical Intelligence

In the last clear moment of his life, Belazov saw the figure standing at the edge of the wreckage.

The man’s tall, thin, and slightly pale face was reflected in Belazov’s pupils. At the same time, he also saw the black chains floating in midair, and at the end of those chains, the Abyssal demon—“Smokewisp Jellyfish”.

After a brief moment of shock, Belazov finally remembered one scene after another. He remembered this figure. He remembered those moments that had always been blocked from his conscious mind. He remembered that when he set foot on Dagger Island, this tall, thin heretic had been standing on the shore. When he entered the “secret room”, the heretic had walked at his side. When he returned to the Sea Swallow, the heretic had been standing inside the cabin…

Belazov’s eyes went wide. The charred skin on his face seemed to crackle as it split. He wanted to shout, wanted to speak, but only a low hissing came from his chest. At the same time, the tall, thin figure with the pale face finally lowered his head and looked down at the dying General.

“I admit I was careless,” the tall, pale man said calmly. His voice almost held no emotion at all. It was as if he was not speaking to a person, but muttering to a piece of rotten wood. “When you were walking around the ship, I only thought you were checking on the posts and positions—General Belazov, I must admit, your acting was excellent.”

Belazov only stared at him, eyes locked on the man. Fury boiled in his chest, but he could no longer drive this once-strong body to move.

“What a pity. You were just about to become an Envoy,” the tall man said with a hint of regret, shaking his head. “You would have brought the Lord’s radiance into the city-states, freed the mortals tormented by filth, and allowed the first paradise to descend upon this dirty, twisted Mortal Realm. Such a glorious chance, and you threw it away… you were only a step away.”

“Her… etic…” Belazov finally squeezed a trace of sound out of his chest. His teeth and bones scraped with a harsh creak. “You… will never lay your hands on…”

“Save your strength, General,” the tall man said, stepping forward. He looked down at the body lying in the center of the wreckage, already half among the dead. “Calmly accept your death. The Lord’s divine blessing will let this pitiful shell of yours be born again—you’ve wasted your chance to become an Envoy, but the merciful Lord still won’t abandon your suffering soul…”

With that bewitching whisper, the tall man slowly reached out his right hand. The Smokewisp Jellyfish floating behind him rose and writhed in response. From its gauzy, mist-like body, a growing red glow began to seep out. The blood-red light reflected in Belazov’s darkening pupils as his body grew colder and colder. His consciousness seemed to fade away completely, no longer reacting to the outside world at all.

“That took more work than it should have,” the tall man said, shaking his head. At last there was a trace of feeling in his voice. “Damn it. If it weren’t for that Queen… tsk.”

A sticky, eerie sound of writhing and sliding began to echo. The seawater surging around the wreckage started to bubble with abnormal black foam. In the foam, strange, mud-like material slowly rose up and spread bit by bit toward Belazov’s corpse.

But just one second before that mud-like substance touched the body, it suddenly stopped.

Even the seawater around them seemed to freeze in place.

The tall man stared in shock. He instinctively tried again to connect with the Smokewisp Jellyfish, hoping to use the power of a Abyssal Deep spell to complete the next step of the ritual. But in the next second, he saw the General’s lifeless body suddenly move.

“Your vitality really is stubborn,” the tall man said, frowning despite himself. “Wouldn’t it be better to calmly accept your fate, General Duncan?”

“No.”

The big body lying at the center of the wreckage, almost burned to charcoal, opened its eyes again. Duncan looked at the cultist, his gaze carrying a calm gaze, a gaze that saw straight through the Abyssal demon bound to him by a symbiotic pact. “Continue. ‘If it weren’t for that Queen’—what comes after that?”

The tall man blinked.

Something was wrong.

He did not know what had happened, but in that instant all his instincts suddenly screamed. A terrible sense of danger seemed to pour out of his soul and flood his mind. He stared at the body whose eyes had opened once more. His instincts told him to step back, but his legs refused to obey.

Then the tall man finally noticed the strange changes in Duncan’s body. Duncan’s breathing was steady and strong. His voice was low and calm. His eyes were full of life. The man who had been dying just a moment before now seemed to have regained all his vitality.

The General even sat up.

“‘If it weren’t for that Queen’—what comes after that?” Duncan rose slowly to his feet. In this tall, burly body, he could even look down at the cultist. He stared into the cultist’s eyes and spoke with steady seriousness: “The Queen you mentioned… you mean the Frostholm Queen, Ray Nora?”

As he spoke, Duncan’s gaze slid past the cultist’s shoulder and fell on the Smokewisp Jellyfish floating in the air behind him.

The jellyfish had already begun to react.

Abyssal demons could sense things that mortals could not. Even without eyes, nose, or mouth, that cloud of smoke clearly “saw” the truth inside the burned shell before it. It trembled, and the trembling grew more and more violent. Threads of black shadows leaked from its edges, prying at the passage between the Abyssal Deep’s Deep Sea and the Mortal Realm.

Duncan could not help feeling a bit helpless. If not for this Abyssal demon, it would have been easier to keep pretending to be a dying General and squeeze more information out of the cultist.

“Who are you?!” The cultist finally reacted. The intense wrongness he felt and the constant danger signals from his symbiotic demon were enough to show how serious the situation was. Even if he could not understand what had happened, he knew that the soul inside this shell was no longer the original one. “If you are only passing through, I have no wish to clash with you…”

“Getting polite all of a sudden?” Duncan raised an eyebrow. This cultist was sharper than the two he had met in the graveyard. “Then why don’t you tell me what you and your fellow believers are planning to do? And how that connects to the ‘Queen of Frostholm’?”

As he spoke, he suddenly lifted his head and looked at the Smokewisp Jellyfish floating in the air: “Don’t run.”

The Smokewisp Jellyfish suddenly shook hard. The black cracks spreading out around it shattered at once, breaking apart with a harsh tearing sound.

Abyssal demons were chaotic and dull, but driven by instinct, they still seemed able to “understand” a warning.

Only now did the tall man realize that his symbiotic demon had just tried to open a passage to the Abyssal Deep. A wave of late-coming terror clutched his mind. But he no longer had the time to communicate with his demon—because the “outsider” occupying the General’s body was looking at him with a calm, icy gaze.

“I… am just a nobody,” he said, lifting his head to meet Duncan’s eyes. He seemed to force a smile onto his face. “I don’t know the entire plan. You…”

“Then who does know the entire plan?” Duncan asked, expressionless. “Where are they hiding?”

“My fellow believers… they…” The tall man spread his hands, his expression twisting into something between a smile and a smirk. “They will be glorified because of me—”

Duncan’s brow twitched. Before he could react, a violent surge of energy erupted from inside the cultist’s body. In the next second, the cultist’s body swelled as if filled with air and exploded into a ball of fire.

Duncan only had time to raise his hand. The ghostly green flame formed the Veil, blocking and transforming the flames and shock wave that rushed toward him. When the explosion faded and the surface of the sea grew calm again, the cultist had already turned to ash.

Only a ball of black smoke drifting in the air remained—that was the Smokewisp Jellyfish, which quickly fell apart and vanished after losing the medium of its symbiotic pact.

Duncan stared, stunned, for a long moment before he came back to his senses. He could only look at the bits of debris floating near the wreckage and let out a sigh: “These crazy people really are ruthless… If they weren’t so brainless, they wouldn’t have ended up believing in a cult.”

As he spoke, he shook his head.

The cultist had already blown himself to pieces. No amount of regret would change that. Still, even though he had not gotten more clues from the man’s own mouth, Duncan had already gained plenty of useful information by “possessing” Belazov.

And among all that information, the most useful thing was without a doubt the cultist’s final mention of the “Queen”.

From the sound of it, the Frostholm queen who had died in a rebellion half a century ago… had caused great trouble for some operation of the cultists. That trouble had lasted all the way to the present. Even now, they still had to spend much more effort whenever they acted.

Duncan raised a hand and rubbed his chin, then lifted his gaze in thought.

Night had grown deep. The pale light of the World’s Wound shone faintly over the distant sea. At the end of the water, he could see the lights of the city-state’s coastline.

He did not know where Dagger Island lay, but it was clearly not far from Frostholm’s main island.

He might as well use this body to go to Frostholm—its appearance was a bit tragic, but at least it would not fall apart halfway like the last body.

Duncan let out a breath and walked toward the edge of the wreckage. At the same time, he called for AI in his mind, ready to have it carry him to the nearby shore.

But in the next second, he suddenly stopped.

He lowered his head in surprise.

This body… refused to follow his order.