Chapter 378

Chapter 378: Trapped

The cluster of shadows in the Spirit Realm faded, and the noisy clamor and overwhelming malice that had filled the entire space quickly dispersed.

Agatha raised her left hand and calmly used her gaze on the gaunt heretic lying at the edge of the triangular area. He curled on the ground in pain. The black chains extending from his body were already broken; smoke and dust rose from the shattered links as they crumbled segment by segment into sand-like powder.

Now that the Abyssal demons bound to him by the symbiotic pact were dead, this heretic’s life was also about to end—but for the moment, he could still answer a few questions.

Agatha did not really expect this stubborn heretic to cooperate, but she still walked over slowly and stopped at the edge of the triangle, looking down at the dying cultist.

“You actually managed, right under the Church’s nose, to completely corrupt and replace a whole piece of infrastructure, even to the point of replacing every priest there… That surprised me,” she said slowly. Her voice seemed to carry a low echo from a tomb; the dizzying sound could wear down most people’s will. “How did you do it?”

The dying heretic struggled to lift his head, but only showed a trace of a mocking smile. There was no fear left on that gaunt face. “You guess?”

Agatha was unmoved: “Your nest is inside Frostholm, isn’t it?”

“Heh…” The cultist’s head trembled. He braced himself and forced his body to roll so he lay on his back on the pale ground, facing Agatha’s gaze from below. “Don’t waste your effort. So what if it is in Frostholm… You won’t find it… The day you find the sanctuary will be the day we succeed, foolish priest…”

Agatha’s face stayed expressionless. She lightly lifted her Gatekeeper’s cane and tapped the tip against the cultist’s chest: “What are you really trying to do? Corrupt the city-state with that so-called ‘elements’? Or do you imagine you can use those ‘replicas’—things that cannot even keep themselves stable—to replace the living people in the city? What connection do you have with the power in the Deep Sea? Is it related to the Abyssal Trench Project?”

A cluster of pale flame flared at the tip of the Gatekeeper’s cane. The fire seared flesh and soul alike. The agony made the cultist’s whole body twitch and spasm, yet the heretic, already lost in fanatical faith, only clenched his teeth until they ground, glaring at the Gatekeeper before him. The clacking between his teeth squeezed out only a chilling, twisted laugh: “Heh… heh… The promised… is about to descend… No one… no one will escape…”

Agatha finally frowned. She slowly raised her arm, and with the Gatekeeper’s cane she lifted the cultist little by little into the air. The pale flame burned his body, already twisted from his long symbiotic pact with the Abyssal demons, so that he dangled like a tattered rag in a fire.

Her voice was icy, like sound drifting through a crypt: “One last question, you heretics… How can you speak the name of the God of Death?”

Within the pale flame, a smile slowly spread across the skeletal cultist’s face. He seemed especially delighted; when he saw the Church’s Gatekeeper puzzled by this question, even the pain brought by the Cremation Fire seemed to lessen by half.

“The Abyssal Lord brought us the revelation… All faiths in this world point to the same place… We who have received the revelation have already stepped past those so-called boundaries… Gatekeeper, do you really think your God is any different from the Holy Lord?”

Agatha’s expression changed at once. The cultist before her had dared to mention the Abyssal Lord in the same breath as the God of Death. Such blasphemy sent anger surging through her. Yet in the flames the cultist showed a final, relieved smile, giving her no chance to question him further. He let out his last breath, and what remained of his body quickly crumbled into ash.

“…Just a madman’s ravings, all upside down and twisted.”

Agatha’s face darkened. She slowly lowered the Gatekeeper’s cane. The anger in her heart was still there, but it did not interfere with her judgment. Once she had reined in the surge of emotion, she immediately began to think.

Setting aside his last remarks, where he put the Abyssal Lord on the same level as the God of Death, this cultist who had been obstinate to the end had actually revealed quite a bit of information she could work with.

They did indeed have a “nest” inside Frostholm, and they called this nest a “sanctuary”. That meant it truly was a place for conducting rituals, which matched the information she already had. The sanctuary had also been “hidden” by some special method, making it extremely hard to find, and he had just said that the moment the sanctuary was found would be the moment of their success… So the way that place was concealed was very likely tied to the progress of their ritual. The closer the ritual came to completion, the more obvious its hiding place would become…

Was it because holding the ritual would inevitably leak some kind of aura? Or because revealing the sanctuary itself was a necessary step for the ritual to be completed?

The cultist had also said, “The promised is about to descend.” That probably referred to the ultimate “prophecy” in their belief system: the power of the Abyssal Lord would overturn the Mortal Realm. The Abyssal Deep and the Deep Sea, which now lay in the deep layers of the world, would become the new “Mortal Realm”. Those mad annihilationist cultists had always treated the Abyssal Deep and the Deep Sea as their promised land. There was no doubt about that.

But how would this process actually be carried out? By simply dropping “elements” into the city over and over? That was clearly not enough… Those “replicas” could barely keep themselves stable for long; how could they possibly corrupt an entire city-state?

Unless… those annihilationist cultists had found a way to keep the “replicas” stable for a long time. Unless they could create such an environment—or… turn Frostholm itself into such an environment…

Agatha frowned, cut off her thoughts, and lifted her head to look around.

She was still in the Spirit Realm. The things around her were lit by the pale radiance spilling through the cracks in the ceiling, making every outline hazy. Faint noises rose again from all directions. The ever-hungry Spirit Realm shadows were starting to stir once more—a single Feast was never enough to keep them quiet for long.

The young Gatekeeper shook her head, raised her left hand, and put her own eyeball back into its socket.

The vague noises around her vanished at once. The hazy lights and the black and white space blinked back into color, and the breath of the Mortal Realm rushed toward her.

Agatha let out a small breath and reached into her clothes for her eye drops, but suddenly her movements froze.

All around her was utterly silent. There was not a single person.

Agatha lifted her head and looked around. She could not see the black-clad guards she had brought, nor the sewage treatment plant administrator who had fled earlier. She could not even see the ash and remains left behind by the three cultists and the dozen or so “replicas”—

In theory, after she destroyed those cultists and “replicas” in the Spirit Realm, their remains should have appeared at the same time in the Mortal Realm.

The silence around her was too eerie. She could not sense the presence of any living person nearby.

Agatha’s brows knit tightly. She rolled her eyes in their sockets, easing the dryness while carefully studying her surroundings, then slowly walked toward the nearby main door.

The slightly rusted metal door was left ajar, as if someone had left in a hurry and not closed it properly.

With creaking sounds, the metal door was pushed open bit by bit.

Beyond the door stretched a long corridor. The gas lamps along it burned steadily and brightly, yet brought none of the warmth or comfort that light should have given.

“Tap… tap… tap…”

The sound of the Gatekeeper’s cane and her heels hitting the floor rang out clear yet hollow in the corridor as Agatha walked forward slowly.

The entire sewage treatment plant was empty.

But she saw no enemies either.

Just like that, she passed straight through the plant area and came out to the open space outside.

The sky was murky. Heavy, chaotic clouds covered the city-state. Only a few weak rays of light seeped between them, just barely enough to show that it was daytime. Every building in sight lay under this dim daylight, wrapped in a cold, deathly, uncanny atmosphere.

Agatha clearly remembered that when she had come to the sewage treatment plant, the weather outside had been bright and clear—the Sun had hung high in the sky and there had not been a single cloud over the city-state.

The Sun?

A trace of doubt suddenly rose in Agatha’s heart, and then that hint of doubt tore wide open in her mind into a clear split in her awareness. She suddenly realized something and lifted her head again to study the sky.

Only a sourceless, chaotic glow spread through the sky. There was no celestial body that could be called “the Sun” at all.

Agatha tried hard to recall what the Sun looked like, to recall the very concept of the Sun.

She could not remember. It was as if a heavy curtain had been thrown over her reason, keeping her from recalling what the Sun in her memories had been like. Only one thing remained very clear—there should exist in this world something called “the Sun”, something that naturally hung high in the sky, giving off light and heat and shining on all things!

“…cognitive interference, able to affect a Gatekeeper… The intensity is astonishing, and it covers the entire environment…” Agatha murmured to herself. After a brief moment of shock, she quickly calmed down again and looked around once more.

“It’s an Otherworld.”