Chapter 48

Chapter 48: Vigilance

Before the statue of the Storm Goddess Gamona, the candles of the divine blessing burned with a calm, steady light. Daylight fell from the dome above, spilling around the statue and making the city-state’s Bishop, cloaked in pitch-black robes, seem as if he bathed in divine grace.

Bishop Valentine raised his head in that light and quietly fixed his divine gaze on Vanna’s still-steady gray eyes. His words seemed to carry a kind of magic. Faintly, Vanna heard the sound of gentle waves rising and falling in her mind, and then the rolling crash of thunder followed. With the help of that outside force, the power of the Goddess finally tore through the veil and exploded in her heart.

Vanna suddenly sucked in a deep breath, as if she had broken free from suffocating depths and leapt back onto dry land. Her chest rose and fell sharply, and her heart pounded. The feeling of the God’s divine gaze pressed down on her like a vast weight. In that half-dazed state, she heard Valentine’s voice continue in her ears:

“The Vanished had records in history. The prophetic vision dream you experienced was also an objective fact. With both of these in place, your normal reaction should have been to first assume the threat exists, and then seek a solution. Yet just now, you subconsciously questioned whether the Vanished truly exists. That means you are, deep down, avoiding the message that the prophetic vision dream brought to you.

“Inquisitor, you are subconsciously denying the existence of the Vanished. That itself is proof that the ship is real. It seems it truly is drawing near the borders of the civilized world.”

Vanna felt a thin layer of sweat form on her forehead. Yet that “veil” that had always hung between her and the Goddess now felt as if it had vanished. This actually eased her heart a little, and the Bishop’s words made her realize what had happened:

Without knowing it, she had already been influenced by the Vanished.

This was exactly the trait many terrifying Visions or Anomalies possessed: they twisted the perception of those who came into contact with them, making people subconsciously ignore and deny them. In this way, the influence grew larger and larger without anyone noticing.

This kind of subconscious ignoring and denial was originally a natural defense of intelligent beings, an instinct to avoid danger. But when dealing with an Anomaly, that very instinct became the source of carelessness. In the end, it quietly turned people into victims of Visions and Anomalies.

As an Inquisitor who often dealt with supernatural powers, Vanna knew this kind of knowledge very well. But she had never thought that she herself would fall into such a “mental trap”. Her own strong will had not worked at all?

“I don’t know when I came under its influence,” she said calmly. Standing before a Bishop who was also a devout Believer, Vanna did not hide the weakness that had just been exposed. Being affected by a Vision or Anomaly and slipping into a mental anomaly was the most normal thing in the world. Shame and concealment would not help. “After waking from the prophetic vision dream, I came straight here. I did not speak with anyone on the way, and I did not touch any scrolls or relics. I believe I did not suffer any outside corruption in that period.”

“But you just now clearly showed a deliberate avoidance of the prophetic vision dream… so the influence must have started earlier,” the Bishop said. Valentine focused his divine gaze on Vanna’s face, as if he watched every change in her eyes and every shift in her breath. “Have you come into contact with anything abnormal lately? It may have been corruption from the Vanished, leaving an anchor in your subconscious ahead of time.”

“Lately…” Vanna frowned. Then she suddenly remembered the “sacrificial victim” who had fallen at the Black Sun ritual site in the sewers. She remembered the green fire flashing in the person’s eyes, and she remembered her own severed finger.

Her eyes widened. Vanna suddenly looked straight at the Bishop and asked: “The day before yesterday, I led the team to clear out that Black Sun ritual site in the sewers. After I came back, did I report any nameless corruption at the scene? Did I report that there was a ‘sacrificial victim’ there who had been corrupted?”

The Bishop shook his head: “No… you sent those cultists to the Cathedral and then went straight back.”

Vanna’s heart gave a jolt. “What about the others who joined the operation that day? Did anyone report anything like that?”

“There were no such reports at all. Every file only recorded matters related to the Black Sun heretics.”

Under the Goddess’s statue, the Bishop gazed at Vanna, and Vanna gazed back at the Bishop.

“It seems we have found the moment when the corruption first ‘came ashore’,” the Bishop said with a quiet sigh. His expression stayed calm, but in his eyes, strength brewed like a storm about to break. “In the holy name of our Lord Gamona, Inquisitor, are your memories from that night still clear and complete?”

Vanna took a deep breath: “In the holy name of our Lord Gamona, I still remember every detail from that night.”

The Bishop nodded. He turned and lit a special incense, then set the bronze censer at the base of the statue. As he did so, he spoke in a steady voice: “What happened at the time?”

So Vanna laid out everything that had happened in the ritual site beneath the sewers, just as she remembered it. She did not skip a single detail. With the help of the holy incense, her memory and her thoughts were clearer than ever. The events of that night returned to her as if they were happening again.

She still remembered the moment the sacrificial victim suddenly opened his eyes. She remembered the emerald flame that leapt in the hollows of his eye sockets. She remembered the fire falling onto her finger, and how she had decisively carried out the purification by cutting that finger off. On the way back to the Cathedral, she told herself in silence: the corruption has been completely purified, the corruption has been completely purified, the corruption has been completely purified…

She muttered those words to herself the whole way back. Every Guardian walking beside her muttered the same words as well.

No one thought anything about it was wrong.

Looking back now, she felt how terrible and eerie that scene really was. Under the bleak night sky, the Church’s squad of Guardians walked through silent, empty streets. Every single one of them murmured the same sentence to themselves over and over until they returned to the Cathedral.

And during all of this, they still believed they were acting normally: watching the captured heretics, cleaning the filthy ritual site, escorting the cultists on the way back…

“…The spirit-form flame fell upon the soul. The purification you carried out at the level of the flesh by cutting off a limb was useless. It only gave you a deceptive comfort,” Valentine said at last. “The correct action would have been to burn incense at once, sprinkle holy oil on the ground to form a temporary holy ground, and then call upon the Goddess through a ritual prayer to carry out purification of the ‘spirit’.”

“…This was my fault,” Vanna said heavily. “I should have been more alert and more quick to react.”

“It was a mistake, but not a sin,” the old man said with a shake of his head. “You are very powerful, but as an Inquisitor you still lack some experience. Luckily, you have now broken free of the influence. That means the corruption left on that sacrificial victim was not too strong. It only interfered with you on a mental level. From the incense ritual just now, I could roughly judge its strength.”

Here he paused, as if he weighed and judged something in his mind. Then he went on: “The Guardians who acted with you should have been affected even less. They only stood around you. Their influence should fade quickly as they keep praying in the Cathedral.

“In general, the corruption you all suffered at the time was fierce and strange, but the source had already been cut off. So the later effects were not truly frightening. From your performance just now and from the incense’s feedback, I would say that even if you had not come here today, you would have noticed something was wrong by yourself in a few days.

“More than this, we need to worry about what comes next.”

“The future…” Vanna repeated the Bishop’s last word. Her expression slowly grew serious.

Yes, the future. This matter was not over.

The scenes shown by the prophetic vision dream were warnings sent down by the Goddess. What she had come in contact with so far was most likely only the prelude to a coming storm.

“The Vanished has not appeared within the sight of the civilized territories for many years,” Valentine said. “Many people believed it had already gone back to Subspace and become one of the countless shadows in the deepest parts of the world. But now, it seems that Captain Duncan still clings to the Mortal Realm.”

Bishop Valentine spoke slowly as he turned, gazing up at the statue of the Storm Goddess.

“A century ago, the Vanished fell into the depths of Subspace,” he said. “There was no clear proof, but many eyewitness reports mentioned a great storm roaming the nearby sea at the time. In some ways, that storm played a role in the ship’s fall…

“The storm is our Lord’s divine authority.”

Vanna frowned: “You think Captain Duncan means to… take revenge on the Goddess?”

“It is hard to say,” Valentine replied. “Even for a ghost returning from Subspace, the idea of taking revenge on a deity is almost unthinkable. Gods dwelled in the Divine Realm. The Divine Realm lay hidden above the Mortal Realm. Everything in the world only ever fell downward from the upper world. No one ever heard of anyone climbing in the opposite direction, from the Mortal Realm up to the higher ‘Divine Realm’…

“But if Captain Duncan wishes to take revenge on our Lord’s agents in the Mortal Realm… that is very possible.”

“The holy Storm Grand Cathedral, as the headquarters of the Deep Sea Church, is a Pilgrimage Ark that sails hidden on the Boundless Sea,” he went on. “It comes and goes without a trace. The Pope, His Eminence who sits aboard that ark, holds the power to wield the storm in the Lord’s stead. He is not an easy target.

“By comparison… the city-state of Pland, fixed upon the sea, obvious, and open to the world, naturally becomes a better choice. Aside from the Storm Grand Cathedral, Pland is the Storm Goddess’s greatest faith anchor in this world… and it is a faith anchor anyone can visit.

“From that point of view, it is only natural that a vengeful wraith would choose to land in Pland.”