Chapter 144: The War a Thousand Years Ago

Chapter 144: The War a Thousand Years Ago

"Wegner sent you?!" Lyman was floored, never expecting to hear a familiar name in this place.

"How do you know Mr. Wegner's name? Are you... are you also a Truth Seeker?" Eugene looked at Lyman with the emotional look of one revolutionary spotting another.

"No, no, no, I'm not!" Lyman shook his head like a rattle, quick to distance himself from those crackpots. "I'm just a friend... an acquaintance of Wegner's, sent by him to steal the Judgment Hammer. He never mentioned sending anyone here before. So what's your deal?"

Eugene sighed heavily: "It all started three years ago. I was ordered by the Chief to infiltrate the temple. I graduated from the Seminary, so landing a job as an acolyte was easy. I spent a long time getting close to that old Preacher General to dig up the vault's secrets. You probably don't know this, but that old man likes to..."

"I don't wanna know!!!" Lyman let out a piercing shriek.

Why did he have to have ears—that cursed organ! Why couldn't ears close like eyes do! Before he even knew it, his brain was permanently contaminated!

"You don't have to get so detailed!" Lyman gritted his teeth.

"Uh, I thought everyone liked hearing gossip," Eugene said, looking disappointed.

"Nobody wants to hear your stories about you and the Preacher General!" Lyman snapped. "Just cut to the vault part!"

"Fine, fine... Anyway, I got the way in from the Preacher General and finally snuck in. I saw this gorgeous sword in the vault and figured it had to be the Judgment Hammer, but when I picked it up, the relics around me attacked. I panicked and ran, accidentally bumping into that Altar Screen, and then I ended up here."

So that's why Wegner came to me, Lyman thought. He probably had no clue what happened to Eugene. Great, just like the gourd brothers in that old story—now we're both stuck in this damn painting.

"Pretty much the same for me," Lyman said. "But that fancy sword wasn't the Judgment Hammer. It's called 'Celestial Truth.' I think the Judgment Hammer might be the sword that rusty armor is holding."

Eugene's eyes lit up in realization: "Celestial Truth! That makes sense now!"

"What's the deal with that sword?" Lyman asked.

Eugene replied: "I've heard Celestial Truth was forged from a piece of the sun, filled with the pure divine power of the God of Dawn. It can keep relics with evil, dark vibes in check. When we picked up Celestial Truth, we accidentally messed up its suppression effect, which is why the other relics went after us."

Lyman pondered: "Yeah, whether it was the long-haired doll or the rusty armor, they only went crazy after I took Celestial Truth."

Eugene let out another sigh: "Man, if only I'd recognized the real Judgment Hammer back then, I wouldn't have ended up here, and neither would you."

Lyman couldn't help asking: "Is the Judgment Hammer really that important to you? Why are you Truth Seekers so hung up on that sword?"

This topic fired Eugene up again. He grabbed Lyman's hand and said with the zeal of a preacher: "This goes way back!"

"All your stories seem to go way back..."

"On the surface, we Truth Seekers are a group that studies natural philosophy, but in reality, we worship an ancient god—the god of knowledge. He was badly wounded in the great war a thousand years ago and had to go into a deep sleep, only waking up now and then to give the Truth Seekers prophecies."

"Sounds sketchy. Is it a legit god?" Lyman quipped.

Eugene glared at him, annoyed: "The Dawn Church badmouths our god as an evil deity. You little brat don't actually buy that, do you? You think you're better than us?"

"No, no." Lyman said, brushing it off. He was a dark god himself—how could he look down on other gods? The pot calling the kettle black!

Come to think of it, Eugene had just treated him like a fellow revolutionary moments ago, and now he was calling him a brat. Talk about flipping faster than a page!

Eugene went on: "About twenty years ago, the previous Chief got an oracle. He was told we had to take a sword called the 'Judgment Hammer' from the Dawn Church. Since then, we've been trying every way to infiltrate the church and find the Judgment Hammer. But alas, our grand plan failed at the last step."

Eugene stared at the sky, hands behind his back, letting out a long, weary sigh.

Yeah, this neurotic, edgy energy is exactly like Wegner and the Scholar. Birds of a feather flock together, huh!

Lyman said: "We've got to get out of this place. But since you've been here for three years, I'm guessing you don't know how to leave either?"

"...Do you have to rub it in?" Eugene said, annoyed. "Well then, you tell me how we're supposed to leave?"

Lyman looked around: "Since we're in a painting world, that Altar Screen must be a relic too, right?"

Eugene nodded: "That painting is the original—'Saint Dominique Treating Saint Galad.' Every later work on this theme is a copy of it."

Great, after the creepy doll, the moving armor, and the haunted music box, now we've got a haunted painting. Are you Dawn Church folks secretly filming horror movies down there?

"I think it became a relic because the painter actually lived through this scene and it stuck with him," Eugene said.

"So this world is what the painter saw with his own eyes?" Lyman was astonished.

"Oh, of course. Saint Galad painted it himself."

Lyman: "...What?"

Lyman: "The Galad who took an arrow? He can paint?"

"Exactly!" Eugene said. "This is a famous religious painting. How do you not know that?"

He gave Lyman's white robe a suspicious look.

Lyman stared back without flinching: "What's so weird about that? I don't worship the God of Dawn!"

"This is the first time I've met someone so clueless yet so proud! What kind of education did you get?!" Eugene was totally shocked.

Lyman felt like he was being judged for his education. He wanted to say he'd at least gone to college, but decided not to.

He switched topics: "Does Saint Galad know how to get out of this world?"

"I've asked him, but he doesn't know anything. After all, at this point he's not even a follower of the God of Dawn," Eugene said with regret. "I've been here for three years. This world only lasts one day. Every time the sun goes down, the day resets and starts over. In three years, I've talked to everyone here, including Saint Galad and Saint Dominique themselves. But they only remember what happens in that one day. Nothing else. I talked to them yesterday, and today they don't even know me."

"So their memories reset too..." Lyman murmured.

"Yeah, but these people aren't just puppets. They..." Eugene hesitated, then said carefully, "in a way, they have their own will. They live in this tiny one-day world. Sometimes I even think this relic with its crazy power is actually copying a tiny piece of history..."

Eugene stared off into the distance, lost in thought, "Everyone in this broken little world gets a brief taste of immortality."

Lyman suddenly got chills. In that moment, he felt like he wasn't just inside a fake painting, but had somehow stepped into real history.

"I want to learn more about this part of history. If there's a way out of this painting world, it's got to be somewhere in this world," Lyman said. "How much do you know about Saint Galad and Saint Dominique's story?"

Lyman dug through his thin religious knowledge: "Saint Galad used to be a mercenary. He got wounded in a battle and was saved by Saint Dominique, who was just a regular nun back then. From then on, he converted to the God of Dawn's faith. He kept doing good deeds his whole life and was made a saint after he died."

Eugene nodded: "If you hadn't brought Galad back, Sister Dominique would've led people to the battlefield to save the wounded herself. That's what history says."

"History, huh..."

Lyman remembered what Galad had said earlier: "They fight in the sky; we fight on the ground."

"And this war?" he asked. "Who was fighting who?"

Eugene looked at Lyman with pity, like he was some poor illiterate who never even went to school.

He opened his mouth to answer, when suddenly a deafening roar came from the sky—like thunder mixed with a beast's furious howls. Lyman and Eugene both covered their ears as the monastery's stained glass windows shattered. Even the ground under their feet seemed to shake from the impact.

"Damn it, I got so caught up talking to you that I lost track of time—it's already this hour!" Eugene swore.

"What?!"

"Everything that happens in this world is fixed every day! Right now, the sky is about to..."

Sister Dominique came running out of the chapel.

"What's happening?" she shouted at the top of her lungs.

More people followed her out—mostly the nuns under her care, along with a few injured who could still walk. Many frightened faces peered out from the shattered windows, including the future saint Galad. His already pale face had lost even the last trace of its color.

Eugene and Lyman both stood frozen, staring up at the sky. The others followed their gaze up.

The leaden cloud cover that blanketed the entire mountain range suddenly split open, and a massive dark shape came out of the rift.

It was a creature so impossibly huge that the closest comparison would be some kind of deep-sea fish. Dense scales covered its colossal body, slowly undulating like breathing gill covers. A dozen or so eyes of varying sizes were embedded in its head with no rhyme or reason, like the back of a Surinam toad. Its open mouth bristled with countless razor-sharp fangs, and beneath its lower jaw hung a cluster of writhing tentacles covered with suckers and barbs. Those tentacles drifted slowly through the air, as if gliding through water.

Below the sea of clouds, an enormous deep-sea monster was swimming.

"O-otherworldly demons!" a young nun shrieked.

Lyman's scalp crawled. A current strong enough to numb his skin shot from the top of his head down his spine to his feet.

Next to him, Eugene muttered, "Now you see who's fighting who. This war happened a thousand years ago, during an unprecedented Stellar Conjunction. It went on for years, and eventually, powerful otherworldly demons forced their way into this world."

"Shouldn't we do something?" Lyman gritted out.

"Don't worry. Just keep watching."

The colossal creature swam toward the monastery, casting a pitch-black shadow over the ground as if night had come early.

The monster opened its mouth, and thick fluid dripped from the tentacles beneath its jaw, stretching into fine threads in the air before splattering on the ground. A hissing, corrosive sound rode the wind, mixed with a foul stench of rot and fish.

Panic exploded through the crowd in an instant. Some passed out on the spot, others fell to their knees begging for divine protection, some soiled themselves, and others, out of their minds with fear, ran wildly down the mountain as if that could escape the demons' attack.

Sister Dominique stared at the sky, motionless as a statue. Her lips moved without a sound—whether she was praying to God or cursing fate, no one could tell.

Then a sharp golden light stabbed through the clouds, like a blazing spear from heaven, driving straight through the massive creature hovering overhead!

The monster let out a scream that shook the sky.

The spear of light kept cutting, slicing through its body. The scales that seemed unbreakable melted like butter under the light. The creature's body was cut in half, and black blood gushed out, only to vaporize the moment it touched the spear.

The two halves of the carcass, no longer able to fly, fell helplessly under gravity's pull. Just as they were about to crash into the monastery, the whole pale gray cloud cover boiled!

Another massive dark shape emerged from the clouds!

At first, Lyman thought it was a mountain floating in the sky, its surface rugged and covered with rocky ridges. But then he realized it was a giant bird's beak.

The upper and lower mandibles opened slowly and solemnly, revealing rows of teeth like stalactites and stalagmites in a cavern.

It swallowed the monster's remains in one gulp.

The beak snapped shut with a low, dull thud that echoed across heaven and earth for several seconds, like a heavy gate slamming closed. Then the mountain-sized beak began to retreat into the clouds, finally vanishing above the leaden sea of clouds.

The ground fell silent for a full minute. Then, someone let out the first cheer, and everyone joined in shouting. They clapped, whistled, embraced one another, and shed tears of relief at having survived.

Sister Dominique pressed her palms together, closed her eyes, and murmured a prayer of thanks for God's grace.

Behind the window, Galad stood dumbfounded, a devout, dazed expression spreading across his face. It was in that moment that he decided to convert to the True God.

Amid the jubilant crowd, the calm Lyman and Eugene stood out like sore thumbs.

"Th-that was..."

"You saw right. That was the God of Dawn revealing Himself," Eugene said. "The gods fight the otherworldly demons in the heavens, while mortals fight the corrupted on the ground."

The gods...

That word made Lyman's heart tremble.

Had Lunast and the Little Bird on Ninoir Island also taken part in this cataclysmic war?

The Little Bird had fallen in the divine war, protected by Wind Granny as she awaited the day of revival. And Lunast had been torn apart, his remains crashing to the ground, seized by various factions, his head sealed away on the prison island...

...No, something didn't add up! If Lunast and the God of Dawn had fought side by side a thousand years ago, why would the Dawn Church establish Cape Prison on the prison island, using Sorcery devices based on the law of similarity to seal Lunast's head?

Why would the God of Dawn betray his comrade? Lunast had said he was sealed because he'd offended the God of Dawn—were they on bad terms?

These questions would have to wait until he returned to the real world and asked Lunast himself.

The rumbling in the sky gradually faded, and the leaden clouds slowly dispersed.

Golden sunlight pierced through the clouds and spilled across the land. Every face, illuminated by the light, glowed with genuine joy. Even the most ignorant could see that the battle in the heavens had come to a temporary halt—they had survived.

...Wait.

Golden sunlight?

Lyman stared up at the sky, dumbfounded. Through the thinning clouds, a radiant golden sun hung at the center of the heavens, majestically illuminating all things.

"The sun is... golden?"