Chapter 713 – A Glimpse of the Truth
Chapter 713 A Peek at the Truth
Everywhere.
After the landing party had left the coastal shallows and advanced some distance towards the interior of the Holy Land Island, the mind-numbing sight was finally presented to everyone’s eyes.
Humanoid figures formed as if by blackened silt were everywhere, as if swallowed by their surroundings, “embedded” in all kinds of places – on the ground, on walls, on boulders by the roadside, and even on tree trunks – they had completely blended in with the things that had swallowed them, like a myriad of other things. They have completely merged with the things that have swallowed them, like countless sculptures of strange and frightening styles standing still on this holy island where there are no more living people, and the struggling gestures shown by each “sculpture” are telling everyone the fact that…
“They were once alive.
Shirley’s head felt numb, and the blackened bodies that could emerge at any moment from the mist and merge into the walls or the floor gave her goosebumps, and she followed Duncan cautiously with her arms wrapped around him, trying to avoid the limbs or heads that were struggling upward on the pavement as she muttered, “Those cultists . . are all dead? They’re all dead here? Then those things we saw on the surface of the sea when we came here earlier were them too? Wouldn’t the entire Annihilation Cult be over just like that?”
“The Annihilationists in other parts of the world are still active, they’ve infiltrated countless city-states, they can’t be removed that easily,” Vanna said casually while frowning and keeping an eye on the surroundings, “but at least the Annihilationists in this ‘holy place’ aren’t alive. Annihilationists shouldn’t be alive anymore …… This fanatical dark order has finally suffered a heavy blow …… This is at least good news.”
“Good news, but hardly relaxing,” Morris spoke cautiously, “The key now is not how many Annihilationists died here, but how they died and how they came to look like this …… “
Morris paused for a moment, looking up and around at the buildings shadowed in the surrounding fog: “This is the ‘holy land’ that they have operated for an unknown number of years, they used this place as a haven to avoid the Church’s tracking, and they even built towns and harbors here, which means that this border island has always been a safe and stable place …… at least until this island started swallowing them up.”
“Devouring ……,” Shirley subconsciously repeated the words used by the old scholar, suddenly tensed up and stared at her feet, “This place won’t ‘eat’ us too! This place won’t ‘eat’ us too, will it? Will the ground suddenly sink in, and then we’ll become just like those things ……”
Apparently, Shirley wasn’t the only one who was worried, nervousness was also brewing among the marines – even though the ones who came here were all elite members of the church, as well as “professionals” specializing in dealing with all kinds of anomalies in the border area, when faced with this strange situation on the Holy Land, the marines were all very nervous. Despite the fact that they were all elite members of the Church and “professionals” who specialized in dealing with all kinds of abnormalities in the border area, it was still inevitable that they would feel nervous when faced with the strange situation on the island.
However, just as Duncan was about to say something, Alice, who was walking beside him, spoke up first: “It won’t happen.”
Shelly didn’t react for a moment to the fact that Ms. Doll was answering her own question, “Huh?”
“It won’t devour,” Alice but said casually as if she was rambling, “Because the restoration process is over and the place is now re-stabilized.”
The group came to an abrupt halt.
Duncan realized something and stared into Alice’s eyes, “Are you ‘seeing’ something again?”
Alice was slow to follow the stop, but wore a somewhat bewildered expression after hearing the Captain’s words, “Huh?”
Next to her, Sherry immediately spoke up, “The restoration program is over, as you just said.”
“…… What restore program? I didn’t say anything just now ah …… “Alice scratched her hair, her blank expression was not at all like a fake (of course she couldn’t do this kind of difficult thing), “……You all are looking at me What for?”
Duncan stared intently at Alice for a moment longer, knowing that the mannequin never lied to herself, so in the end he just nodded slowly and exchanged a quick glance with Maurice and Vanna off to the side.
“No additional mental responses nearby.” Morris said.
“Let’s keep moving.” Duncan nodded and led the group on deeper into the island, at the same time he didn’t move to get a little closer to Alice, keeping an eye on the mannequin.
The landing party soon crossed the road in the center of the small harbor, and after crossing a coalescing white mist, they came to an open square.
Vanna frowned as she looked around, “…… It’s hard to imagine that those cultists even managed to come up with a place like this, I wonder just how long it took them to build everything here.”
On the plaza, there were still black humanoid blanks that had been “set” on the ground and had “melted” together with the surrounding things.
From the attitude of the half-exposed bodies and their distribution, it would seem that these people had the last few minutes or ten minutes to escape when a certain event took place – they ran wildly from the interior of the island towards the sea, and all the “bodies” in the plaza were oriented towards the coast. All the “human bodies” in the square were directed towards the coast, and some of them seemed to have tried to save themselves by the power of spells, or “magic incantations”; the ground around these humanoid billets showed traces of destruction by acid or explosions, and it appeared that they had not died during the first moments of their engulfment, and that they had attempted to “save” themselves by crude and desperate means. It appeared that they had not died in the first moments of their engulfment, and had tried to “dig” themselves out by rough and desperate means – but this was of no avail.
They were all transformed into chilling black “statues” in the square, and this process of “transformation” was probably the direct cause of their deaths.
Duncan stepped slowly through these eerie black “statues”.
Suddenly, he stopped, and his eyes fell on one of the “humanoid blanks”.
Vanna immediately noticed, “Captain?”
“This one, it just moved.” Duncan came to the rough humanoid with only the upper half of its body exposed to the surface and whispered as he stared at it. And right under his nose, the pitch-black humanoid moved a little more – it seemed to be lifting its head stiffly and sluggishly, and reaching forward slowly.
Very, very slowly, and its activity would be almost imperceptible to the naked eye if one wasn’t staring intently.
It was also slowly “escaping” in the direction of the shore!
Shirley instantly felt a chill down her spine.
She even suddenly felt that the other humanoid billets around her also started to move, feeling that they were all still alive, and all of them were slowly struggling to move towards the coast, and feeling that their spherical heads without five senses seemed to be turned towards themselves, and an invisible gaze was focusing on them!
She felt her heart thumping furiously, and the tension that had been building up since she landed on the island seemed to immerse itself in every vein, and she felt a sharp stabbing pain in the arm that she had attached to Dog – it made her recall the time when she had just completed her symbiosis with Dog and her own body was still not yet accustomed to it, and she had not felt this kind of pain for many years.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the chains.
Countless chains, extended from those “humanoid billets” swallowed by the ground, were slowly growing in the nothingness, as if they wanted to wrap around themselves, or around Dog, she could no longer tell the “difference” between herself and Dog, she felt that she could not tell the “difference” between herself and Dog. “She felt that her mind was mixing with Gou’s, and she felt as if she had become an …… individual close to Gou, while Gou… …its humanity and intelligence are slowly morphing into something else ……
“…… We dug too deep ……”
A voice that seemed like a million voices overlapping together burrowed into Sherry’s mind, rumbling like it was trying to drill a hole in her memory.
Countless illusory chains spread from all sides of the entire island of the Holy Land, quietly linking on her and Dog.
“…… We dug into the source ……”
Shirley slowly raised her head, and she looked somewhat blankly yet instinctively in a certain direction inland from Holy Ground Island, as if her eyes were strongly drawn to something there.
“…… We are the same as them …… The source reveals a truth to us ……”
Countless storms of debris drilled into Shirley’s consciousness, and in a jumble of flickering fragments of light and shadow, strange “impressions” swept through her memory – extinguished suns, muddy skylights, whistling and roaring in the fog, ecstatic believers, guides, revelations, excavations. Sacred caves, chambers, blinding lights, alarms, writhing shadows, and suddenly …… the island of the Holy Land came to life.
This island is alive.
They dug into something they shouldn’t have – when the sun went out.
The layers of voices were still rumbling in her head, and a “truth”, a “truth” that instantly led to the contamination and transformation of all the Annihilists on the entire island of Sanctuary into humanoid roughness, was being poured into Shirley’s consciousness… —
“…… Humans are a type of highly differentiated Profound Demon, and Profound Demons are primitive casts that are housed in the Profound Sea due to their inability to imbue humanity and intelligence. ……”
Sherry’s eyes slowly widened.
Through the vision she and Dog shared, she saw the world clearly for the first time.
But only for a moment.
In a moment when humanity and sanity faltered, she felt a warm flame ignite in her soul – the dark writhing things and unfathomable floods of information that spread before her eyes suddenly contracted and collapsed into small islands in the mist, and then she felt a large, rough hand pressing gently into her hair.
She and Dog jerked awake at the same time, followed by an instinctive backward movement, trying to get away from the uncountable humanoid roughness of the place.
She accidentally tripped over the chains at her feet and fell backwards in a heap.
But the Captain grabbed her thin arm.
“It looks like you saw something,” Duncan felt the feedback coming from the flame imprint, and only spoke gently after confirming that Shirley’s sanity was returning to stability, “saw what?”
“The island is alive!” Shirley finally came to her senses and snapped her eyes wide, “We’re standing on part of the flesh of the Profound Sage Lord!”
(End of chapter)