Chapter 712

Chapter 712: Peeking at the Truth

They were everywhere.

After the landing party left the shallow shore and walked some distance toward the interior of the Holy Isle, that hair-raising scene finally appeared before everyone’s eyes.

Humanoid Husks that looked as if they were made of pitch-black sludge could be seen everywhere. It was as if the environment around them had swallowed them and “embedded” them into all kinds of places—the ground, the walls, the boulders along the road, even the tree trunks. They had completely merged with whatever had devoured them, and now stood frozen on this Holy Isle that no longer held any living people, like countless strange and frightening sculptures. Every “sculpture” showed a posture of struggle that told everyone one simple fact—

They had once been alive.

Shirley felt her scalp crawl. Those black human shapes that could appear at any time out of the fog, half fused into walls or the ground, made goosebumps run all over her body. She hugged her arms and followed carefully at Duncan’s side, trying her best to avoid the limbs or heads that strained upward from the road as she muttered: “Those cultists… are they all dead? All dead here? Then those things we saw on the sea when we came over—were those them too? Don’t tell me the whole Cult of Annihilation ended up like this?”

“The Annihilators in other parts of the world are still active. They’ve infiltrated countless city-states. They won’t be wiped out that easily,” Vanna said, frowning as she watched their surroundings. “But at the very least, there should be no Annihilators still alive in this ‘sanctuary’… This fanatical dark Cult has finally taken a serious blow. That is at least some good news.”

“Good news, but not very relaxing,” Morris said carefully. “The key problem now isn’t how many Annihilators died here, but how they died, and how they ended up like this…”

Morris paused and looked up, letting his gaze sweep across the blurry buildings in the fog. “This is the ‘sanctuary’ they have run for who knows how many years. They treated this place as a safe harbor to hide from the Church’s pursuit. They even built a town and the Harbor here. That means this little border island was always a safe and stable place… at least, it was until the island started to devour them.”

“Devour…” Shirley repeated the word the Old Scholar had used, then suddenly tensed. She stared at the ground beneath her feet. “This place isn’t going to ‘eat’ us too, right?! What if the ground suddenly sinks and we turn into things like those…”

She was clearly not the only one worried about that. Tension was also building among the assault squad members. Even though everyone here was an elite of the Church, and “professionals” trained to handle all kinds of anomalies along the border seas, it was still hard not to feel nervous in the face of the strange situation on the Holy Isle.

But just as Duncan was about to say something, Alice, walking beside him, spoke first: “It won’t.”

Shirley did not realize at first that the doll was answering her question. “Huh?”

“It won’t devour us,” Alice said casually, as if it were nothing. “Because the Restoration Protocol has already ended. This place has settled down again.”

The group suddenly stopped.

Duncan realized something. He stared into Alice’s eyes and asked: “Did you ‘see’ something again?”

Alice stopped a beat after everyone else. When she heard the captain’s words, she showed a blank, confused expression. “Huh?”

Shirley spoke up right away: “The Restoration Protocol has ended. You just said that.”

“…What Restoration Protocol? I didn’t say anything just now…” Alice scratched her hair. Her confusion did not look fake at all (and of course, she could not pull off that level of acting anyway). “Why are you all looking at me?”

Duncan stared at Alice for a while longer. He knew this doll never lied to him, so at last he only nodded slowly and quickly exchanged a look with Morris and Vanna.

“There are no extra mental signatures nearby,” Morris said.

“We keep going,” Duncan said with a nod. He led the group deeper into the island. At the same time, he silently moved a little closer to Alice, ready to watch the doll at any moment.

The landing party soon walked along the main street of the small Harbor. After they passed through a patch of thick white fog, they came out into an open square.

Vanna frowned as she looked around. “It’s hard to imagine that those cultists could build a place like this. I wonder how long it took them to make all of this.”

All across the square they could still see black humanoid Rough Husks “embedded” into the ground and fused with the things around them.

Judging from the poses of those half-exposed bodies and where they lay, it seemed that when some event occurred, these people still had a last few minutes—or a dozen minutes—to run for their lives. They had sprinted from the island’s interior toward the open sea. Every “body” on the square faced the coast. Some of them even seemed to have tried using spells to save themselves. The ground around some Rough Husks showed scars of acid and explosions. It looked as if they had still been alive in the first moments of being devoured, and had tried to gouge themselves free with brutal, desperate means—but it had done nothing at all.

They had all become these chilling black “sculptures” on the square. This process of “transformation” might have been the direct cause of their deaths.

Duncan walked slowly between the eerie black “sculptures”.

All of a sudden, he stopped. His gaze fell on one of the Rough Husks.

Vanna noticed at once. “Captain?”

“This one moved just now.” Duncan walked up to the Rough Husk whose upper body alone stuck up above the ground. He stared at it and spoke in a low voice.

Right under his eyes, the pitch-black figure shifted a little again. Its head slowly, stiffly lifted, and its arm stretched forward little by little.

It moved very, very slowly. If one was not staring straight at it, it was almost impossible to see it move at all.

It was still slowly “running away” toward the coast.

Shirley felt all the hair on her body stand up.

She suddenly had the feeling that the other Rough Husks around them were moving too. She felt they were all still alive, all slowly struggling and crawling toward the shore. She felt that their featureless round heads were all turning toward her, and that countless invisible gazes were landing on her at once.

Her heart pounded wildly. The tension that had been building in her ever since they landed felt like it was soaking into every blood vessel. She felt a sharp, stabbing pain in the arm that connected her to Dog. It reminded her of when she had just formed the symbiotic pact with Dog and her body was still not used to it. She had not felt this pain in many years.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw chains.

Countless chains stretched out from the Rough Husks that the ground had swallowed. They grew slowly in the empty air, as if they wanted to wrap around her, or around Dog. Shirley could barely tell the difference between herself and Dog anymore. She felt her thoughts tangling together with Dog’s. She felt as if she had also become an “individual” similar to Dog, and Dog… Dog’s humanity and wisdom were slowly shedding away into something else…

“…We dug too deep…”

A voice that sounded like countless throats speaking on top of one another drilled into Shirley’s head. It rumbled as if trying to bore a hole in her memories.

Countless phantom chains spread in from every side of the Holy Isle and quietly latched onto her and Dog.

“…We dug down to the source…”

Shirley slowly lifted her head. Dazed yet driven by instinct, she looked toward a certain direction in the interior of the Holy Isle, as if something over there strongly drew her gaze.

“…We are the same as them… The source revealed a truth to us…”

Countless stormlike fragments poured into Shirley’s mind. Within the flashing, chaotic shards of light and shadow, strange “impressions” swept across her memory—the extinguished Sun, murky daylight, the howling and booming in the fog, ecstatic believers, guidance, revelation, digging, a holy cavern, a secret chamber, blinding lights, alarms, writhing Shadows, and then… the Holy Isle suddenly coming to life.

This island was alive.

They had dug up something they never should have touched—at the moment when the Sun went out.

Those layered voices still roared in Shirley’s mind. A “truth”—a truth that had instantly corrupted all the Annihilators on the Holy Isle and transformed them into Rough Husks—was being poured into her consciousness bit by bit—

“…Humans are a kind of Abyssal Demon that has been highly differentiated. Abyssal Demons are the original molds that were contained in the Abyssal Deep Sea, because humanity and wisdom could not be poured into them…”

Shirley’s eyes slowly widened.

Through the shared sight between her and Dog, she saw this world clearly for the first time.

But she only saw it for an instant.

In the moment when her humanity and reason were about to fall apart, she felt a warm flame light up inside her soul. The dark wriggling things in front of her and the flood of incomprehensible information suddenly shrank and collapsed into nothing but a small island in the fog. Then she felt a rough, big hand gently press down on her hair.

She and Dog jerked awake at the same time. Instinctively, they both backed away, wanting to get far from the countless Rough Husks here.

She tripped on a chain under her foot and fell backward in a mess.

But the captain caught her thin arm.

“Looks like you saw something,” Duncan said. He felt the feedback from the flame mark and only spoke gently after he was sure Shirley’s sanity was slowly stabilizing. “What did you see?”

“This island is alive!” Shirley finally came fully to her senses. Her eyes flew wide. “We’re standing on a piece of the Abyssal Lord’s flesh!”