Chapter 29: Aftereffects of the War Front

Chapter 29: Aftereffects of the War Front

“Do not save me… Do not save me…”

Klein was inside Sefirah Castle and had accommodated The Fool card, giving him the status of a King of Angels. He would no longer be directly contaminated by Mr. Door’s cries, yet the meaning within those words still made his scalp tingle, his pupils dilate, and terror surge uncontrollably in his heart.

He had originally believed that Mr. Door had always been calling for help. But what he now heard was:

“Do not save me!”

…

In silence, Klein listened as that ethereal, faint voice, which nevertheless stabbed at his spirit body like steel needles, cried out for more than ten seconds. Then it suddenly changed.

“Help me… Help me…”

This time, even the language used had changed to some extent.

…Expressionless, Klein leaned back against his chair and listened for nearly ten more seconds.

Then he ended the maintenance of the historical void images of the Master Key and the Crimson Lunar Corona, allowing the space above the gray fog to return completely to calm.

Phew… He exhaled. His fingers instinctively tapped the edge of the mottled long table as he muttered silently to himself,

“Mr. Door really is half-mad. But the mad part isn’t the Him who desperately shouts. It’s the Him who appears calm, rational, and capable of communicating with people… The latter can still influence the former to some degree and distort the content of His cries?

“When Mr. Door is clear-headed, what He shouts is actually ‘Do not save me’… For a King of Angels who has been exiled and sealed for more than a thousand years, that absolutely isn’t a normal reaction—unless He believes that if He returns to reality, He will bring about a disaster even He Himself does not wish to see… A completely out-of-control King of Angels?

“Combining this with how Mr. Door kept inducing the Emperor to go to the moon occupied by Outer Deities when communicating with him, there is another possibility:

“After being exiled, Mr. Door no longer had the protection of the barrier left behind by the Original Creator. He encountered the corruption of one—or even several—Outer Deities, losing most of His rationality. His state is only a little better than the Chained God’s…

“The Apprentice pathway can roam the cosmos at Sequence 3, and Mr. Door’s honorific name includes the title ‘Guide of the Endless Cosmos’… Does this mean that this King of Angels might already have come into contact with Outer Deities and been affected to a certain degree before He was exiled?

“Mm. What did the crimson land, pyramid-like building, and starry sky in different positions that Miss Magician saw at the end represent? It didn’t seem to be within the current star system, nor was it very similar to the mausoleum required by the Black Emperor… Was it the nest of some Outer Deity influencing Mr. Door? Or was it one of Mr. Door’s anchors, a legend He left behind on some other planet with living beings when He became a Planeswalker? Most likely the latter, because when Miss Magician saw that scene, she didn’t suffer contamination from the cosmos…”

The more Klein thought, the heavier his mood became, because this might, in some aspect, truly reflect the coming of the apocalypse.

The apocalypse absolutely would not stop happening simply because one refused to think about it or pretended not to know!

No wonder the Yellow Light Venithan prophesied that the day the curse was lifted would be the beginning of the Abrahams’ true disaster… Mr. Door has been constantly crying for help, causing the Abraham family to be unable to produce another demigod. Perhaps, in a certain sense, that is a form of protection… Though it caused the Abraham family to lose their status and most of their precious things, leaving them ordinary, at least their bloodline survived… Heh. In that prophecy, the method to resolve the curse lies in the hands of an Apprentice who has received help from a hidden existence… Klein chuckled softly and gained an idea of how to respond to Miss Magician.

He planned to have Fors the Magician tell only part of the truth when speaking with her teacher.

First, she would emphasize that Mr. Door was already half-mad and extremely dangerous, and that even communicating with Him carried immense risk. Second, she would not mention the second curse-removal ritual, which was relatively easier to accomplish, and would only speak of the one that required sacrificing one demigod each from the Seer, Marauder, and Apprentice pathways.

With the first point, the Abrahams would be able to understand why their ancestor had persistently called for help: He had already lost His rationality and could do any terrifying thing.

This would effectively eliminate the psychological knot in the Abrahams’ hearts, stop them from helping Mr. Door escape, and lead them to believe in The Fool more quickly and more fully.

The second point would dispel the fantasies of a small number of extreme Abrahams, because they had no ability to complete such a ritual.

At the same time, revealing the ritual itself would also strengthen the Abraham family’s trust in Fors the Magician.

“Leaving aside the question of how many Mystics still exist, every demigod capable of becoming a Bizarro Sorcerer is harder to catch than the last, and most are concentrated in the Secret Order. To deal with them is to provoke Zaratul. Even if the Abraham family still has demigods of their own and can briefly use a Grade 0 Sealed Artifact, they still won’t be able to complete the ritual preparations so easily. Mm, dealing with Parasites is the most dangerous. One careless mistake and they might pick an avatar of Amon as their target. At that point, it would be equivalent to delivering dessert to Amon…

“Also, later I’ll use The World Gehrman Sparrow’s tone to remind Miss Magician to beware of extremists in the Abraham family…” Klein thought for a moment and began responding to Fors the Magician’s earlier prayer.

…

After returning from the fog of history to the real world, Klein boarded a steam train and arrived at Constant City, the capital of Midseashire, once Loen’s second-largest city, and the front line of the previous war.

“…The destruction is severe…” After getting off the train and leaving the platform, Klein stood on high ground and gazed out over this purely industrial city.

Although this was his first time here, he had seen many photographs of Constant in newspapers and magazines in the past.

Those photographs were all black and white, recording every aspect of the city.

Among them, three things had left the deepest impression on Klein.

First, chimneys and blast furnaces stood everywhere, as though a forest had been artificially created. The visual impact was powerful, and compared with Backlund, this place better represented industry.

Second, concrete and reinforced steel were widely used in its buildings. Compared with Backlund’s similar structures, they were taller, larger, and more densely packed.

Third, many places were stained with coal dust, including the surfaces of human bodies. However, the air quality was somewhat better than Backlund’s, because the winds from the Midsea were strong.

Now, the towering blast furnaces, chimneys, and tall buildings had grown sparse. Everywhere, only piles of ruins remained.

Relatively speaking, however, the factory districts had suffered less destruction than residential areas, because many of them were steel mills and arms factories, equally important to the Feysacians.

“The number of people who died here must be counted in the hundreds of thousands…” Klein sighed inwardly. Carrying his suitcase, he descended the steps of the steam train station and truly entered Constant City.

On the way to the hotel, he continued acting as a Miracle Invoker and randomly selected a robust man in his early thirties.

“I am a wandering magician. The magic I’m best at is fulfilling each person’s wishes. Would you like to give it a try?” Klein, who had once been thin-skinned, could now strike up a conversation with strangers very naturally.

The sturdy man glanced at him and impatiently waved his hand.

“Can you bring my father, mother, two brothers, and one child back to life?”

After saying this, he did not wait for the magician opposite him to respond. Slightly irritable, he walked toward the nearest public carriage stop and struck his left chest with his right fist.

Klein stood where he was, maintaining a faintly upturned smile at the corners of his mouth as he quietly watched the man leave.

He remembered a magazine he had seen earlier on the steam train. Several of its pages had published photographs showing the current state of Constant City’s major cemeteries.

Those gravestones stood like the chimneys and blast furnaces that had once filled the city, while the racks holding ashes resembled tall buildings that had not yet collapsed, one after another…

The entire city of Constant seemed to have been buried in its cemeteries.

Suppressing his smile, Klein walked around the long-dry fountain ahead and headed toward the nearby hotel.

On the way, he heard many pedestrians discussing which places nearby were haunted and where terrifying monsters had appeared.

“When I passed by the Maris River earlier, I heard many people crying and shouting in the water. I didn’t dare look. I ran back into the city like the wind…”

“What’s that compared to what I saw? I saw something even more terrifying at 9 Hyacinth Street! There was a face pressed against the window there! A very pale face!”

“Behind my house, several passersby disappeared. Bloodstains dragged all the way into the nearest ruins, but the police didn’t find any bodies…”

“How terrifying. May the Goddess bless us!”

“Storm above, let those ghosts and monsters stay far away from us.”

“By the way, City Hall has posted an announcement saying that if anyone discovers anything similar, they must immediately report it to the police station.”

It seems the previous meat-grinder-like war left many corpses without time to be properly pacified, turning them into ghosts and monsters. Phew. Many times, some of the dead may not even have bodies left to preserve… Mm, there must also be quite a few Beyonders who lost control due to mental breakdown or physical mutilation… Also, the vast majority of those who consumed potions without following the proper procedure likely lost control too… The Nighthawks and Mandated Punishers will definitely clear out these incidents step by step, but at least in Constant City, people may have to coexist with supernatural events for quite a long time. After all, some ghosts and monsters are good at hiding and avoiding pursuit, and their instincts are naturally cunning… As Klein walked without looking sideways, he gained a new understanding of Constant’s general situation.

Here, encountering supernatural incidents was no longer a coincidence, but an everyday possibility with a certain probability.

At that moment, Klein saw a team of Nighthawks wearing red gloves and black trench coats pass through the intersection ahead, but he did not recognize any of them.

As expected, the Cathedral of Serenity has sent the more mobile Red Gloves teams to assist… Uh, is there some abnormality nearby? Klein nodded almost imperceptibly and, following his spiritual intuition, cast his gaze toward an apartment building behind a pile of ruins.

On the fourth floor of that building, behind a bay window, a highly decomposed face was pressed against the glass, watching the outside. Pale yellow liquid tinged with black slid down the window drop by drop.