"They've been dead for a while."
Said the man calmly. He was clad in armor, around thirty years old, with a cold and hard temperament and sharp features, but the aura around him was that of someone who had walked out of a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood.
Beside him, a lady wearing a fitted long robe with her long hair tied up, gentle like the earth, had appeared by the riverbank at some point. Where she stood, flowers bloomed luxuriantly, as gentle and inclusive as nature itself.
"It does look like an evil sacrificial ritual, Mr. Augustus. Didn't you notice anything on your side?"
The lady asked softly.
Examining the corpses was a young man wearing a top hat and a well-tailored formal suit, with a high nose bridge, a broad forehead, and healthy wheat-colored skin. He looked less like someone from the battlefield and more like a gentleman strolling through a high-class dinner party.
He had a pair of golden eyes, and beneath those eyes that seemed to hide lightning, he constantly scanned the surrounding corpses.
After confirming that nothing was missing, he took off the gloves that had just touched the flesh and blood and threw them into the river completely contaminated by blood.
He said casually, "Recently, Extraordinary individuals of the Abyss pathway have been trying to provoke battles between countries. I don't know if that counts."
The gloves fell into the river water, blooming with golden light, purifying the remaining unwillingness, distortion, depravity, and other emotions there, purifying the spirits of these dead.
The gentle lady like the earth picked up the flowers on the ground. Hearing what Augustus said, the flowers bloomed in her hands, and the petals fell into the blood-stained water.
"May the Mother Goddess protect them."
The lady murmured something, while the two men beside her tried their best to organize the known information in their hands and exchanged it to a limited extent with the demigods of other countries.
"An Apostle of Desire wants to start a war? Those demon-worshipping lunatics of the Blood Sect are getting more and more rampant recently," the Intis demigod with a tough guy aura said coldly.
"The small actions of the Blood Sect demons haven't been few recently, but as far as I know, there seem to have been multiple mass sacrifices in Intis recently as well, leading to large-scale deaths of residents in towns?"
"I don't know, I never care about these things."
The Intis demigod said, "But this sacrificial ritual is a bit different from the past."
"Yes," Rupert Augustus said faintly, "The completeness of the ritual is increasing. We were only a little late, and the spirits of these victims have already suffered irreversible damage, becoming dark, twisted, and depraved, beyond saving."
The lady, as steady as the earth, had also finished her prayer at this time. She raised her hand, and the surrounding flowers and trees suddenly grew rapidly, surrounding the distorted and hollow-eyed corpses arranged in various shapes, pulling them into the earth, returning to the realm of the Mother Goddess.
At this time, by the Alexi River, the corpses had been buried, the polluted blood had been purified, and everything had returned to calm again.
"We must catch the mastermind behind this. All these actions of the Blood Sect, according to reliable intelligence, are directed by an Apostle of Desire," the lady said, "Regardless of the friction between Loen, Intis, and Feysac, worshiping the evil god of the Dark Side of the Universe, and possibly even obtaining feedback from demons, must be eradicated as soon as possible."
She dropped a bombshell, and both demigods were shocked. The Intis demigod frowned tightly, "Obtained feedback from the evil god? So, all the recent actions of the Blood Sect have been to serve the evil god they believe in?"
"Yes," the lady said softly, "I can feel the passing of life. There is an unnatural power at work here. This is definitely not the effect of a ritual that a Sequence Five demon of the Abyss could create."
"The demon ritual itself is accompanied by a large amount of flesh and blood sacrifice. The demons of the Abyss want to provoke disputes between countries to plot a situation favorable to them."
The Intis demigod sneered, "That's really interesting."
The lady then spoke again, "If we need to ask for help, it's best to ask for as much help as possible."
"Judging from the completeness of the ritual and the feedback from the spirits remaining here and the surrounding plants, I suspect that the Apostle of Desire has received help from the Dark Side of the Universe and has advanced, obtaining divinity."
The faces of the demigods also sank, and then they each left the riverbank, leaving behind the completely buried corpses and the purified river water.
Just a few minutes after they left, a figure slowly detached from the spirit world.
Tang and another Traveler marionette appeared here.
He first looked at the Hornaches Mountains not far away, at the towering peaks. The distant sun dispersed some of the perennial fog on the mountains, revealing the dense vegetation above, completely ordinary and unremarkable.
But he could feel a throbbing, coming from somewhere in the Hornaches Mountains. It was an instinctive yearning originating from the Law of Beyonder Characteristics Aggregation.
"Fortunately, I know what's on the mountain. Otherwise, if I followed the desires of my heart, I might have suddenly found an uninhabited town and ceiling marionettes constantly shouting 'Hornaches, Fregra' when I walked into the mountains and reached a certain tree."
Tang let out a breath. He didn't plan to go up the mountain to meet Antigonus, the half-Fool and King of Angels, for the time being.
"After all, it's a concealed town created by the Goddess of the Night. Without thorough preparation, even if I wanted to advance to Sequence One of the Hidden Sage, I wouldn't risk breaking in."
He couldn't figure out the Goddess of the Night's attitude towards this. After all, his own buffs were even more stacked than Klein's. Who knew if the Goddess would let it go or give him a tap to make him completely 'quiet'?
Withdrawing his gaze, Tang re-examined his surroundings.
"Those few just now should be the demigods stationed on the border by Loen, Intis, and Feysac. But I didn't expect that it wasn't the Extraordinary individuals of the three major churches on Loen's side who discovered the problem, but the believers of the Earth Mother who noticed the abnormality."
But no matter who it was, it was good that someone noticed.
Putting the Traveler marionette into the System space, Tang re-entered Euclid's space to look for the traces left by the vessel of the Dark Side of the Universe.
"This place has obviously been cleaned up. Extraordinary individuals of the Abyss pathway are also good at anti-divination and anti-prophecy. They have interfered with it, making it impossible for demigods of other pathways to find him through divination. This is simple."
In Euclid's space, Tang looked at the remaining spirituality belonging to the dead, so weak that it was almost imperceptible, and would completely dissipate before long, polluted to the point that only the purest fear remained. Slowly, following the direction the spirituality was spreading, he looked into the distance.
"That should be where the vessel of divine descent is located."
(End of this chapter)