Chapter 37: Activation

Chapter 37: Activation

“Already dead…”

Edwards turned his head. With those pale-blue eyes, he looked toward Bernadette’s Invisible Servant. His gaze was no longer cold and wooden. A strange light flickered in it, filled with disbelief.

Only at that moment did he seem to realize that he had long since died and then “come alive” again, fundamentally no different from William, Poli, and Green, against whom others had to be on guard.

That change lasted only two short seconds. Then Edwards’s face suddenly twisted. His already bluish-white skin swiftly darkened and tore apart, inch by inch.

Beneath his skin, chunks of fresh red flesh began rotting at a visible speed, dripping foul-smelling pale yellow liquid.

With a swish, Edwards raised the iron-black axe in his hand.

Puff!

That axe struck hard into the crown of his head, as though he wanted to stop bad thoughts from surfacing in his mind.

The axe was both heavy and sharp, splitting Edwards’s skull directly and cleaving all the way down between his brows and eyes.

Drip. Drip. Drops of milky-white brain matter slid down the axe wound and across Edwards’s twisted, torn face, as if a little milk had been poured over fresh red strawberries.

“Do not… do not come near me…” After giving himself an axe strike to the head, Edwards spoke to Bernadette’s Invisible Servant in a strained, hoarse voice.

Before his words fully faded, his expression returned to blankness, his eyes gradually turned wooden, and he turned around, walking step by step toward the forest from which he had come.

His tall, thin, withered body bent slightly, as though his back had suddenly hunched.

Bernadette had asked that probing question because she carried too many doubts and worries about entering the mausoleum. She had no choice but to indirectly point out the problem with Edwards himself and see whether his answer might reveal more clues. Who would have thought that this knight once famous across the Northern Continent during Roselle’s era would react in such an intense and bizarre manner?

After two seconds of silence, Bernadette had the Invisible Servant speak toward Edwards’s back.

“Your descendants are all living fairly well. They have achieved certain things.”

With his back to the mausoleum, Edwards paused in his steps. Then he continued forward, passing through the invisible boundary and disappearing into the forest.

His destination seemed to be the stone-pillar graveyard where the dead could obtain “rebirth.”

At the same time, Bernadette raised her head and looked toward the sky.

The faint blackness spreading there had clearly dissipated quite a bit, but a certain indescribable feeling had appeared in its place. Because of it, the entire primitive island underwent a subtle, impossible-to-describe change.

Suddenly, Bernadette, hidden at the edge of the invisible boundary, reached back and touched her own back.

She felt something heavy there, as though something had appeared on it.

After her left hand touched the target, Bernadette discovered that what had appeared was a length of hair.

At present, she wore an Intis-style women’s shirt with large lace flowers at the collar on the inside, and a patterned indigo captain’s coat over it. Below that were beige trousers and boots that reached close to the knees. On her head was a feathered tricorn hat. She looked like the captain of a pirate ship.

With such an appearance, her chestnut hair had originally been tied into a half-bun, just reaching her back. Now, although her hairstyle had not changed, her hair had suddenly grown by a large length, falling all the way to her waist.

Immediately afterward, Bernadette lowered her head and looked at her right palm. She saw the nails of all five fingers growing outward at the same time.

The Queen of Mysteries did not show surprise or panic. Following the instincts of a Prophet and the experience accumulated over many years, she took a few steps forward, passed through the invisible boundary, fully left that primitive forest, and entered the open area where the Black Emperor’s mausoleum stood.

During this process, Bernadette also had the Invisible Servant return to the spirit world.

Only three or four seconds later, she felt the ground begin to shake faintly. The mausoleum also trembled visibly.

By instinct, Bernadette turned and looked toward the primitive forest.

With one glance, her gaze froze briefly.

Those enormous trees of deep green, almost black, waved their branches, pulled out their roots one after another, and then, like humans, approached Bernadette.

The entire primitive forest had “come alive”!

Watching that dense tide of trees surge toward her, almost blotting out the sky, Bernadette unexpectedly felt as though the end of the world had arrived and every place would be covered by forest.

The huge red dragons whose skin flowed with flames swiftly flew into the sky. The eight-legged demonic wolves began madly rushing between the trees… All the supernatural and mutated creatures on the island became restless, moving toward the mausoleum.

Although she was a Prophet, Bernadette still had not expected one simple question, one that had not directly named the matter, to trigger this degree of mutation. It was as though that question were a key opening a door connected to the abyss.

Above the gray fog, Klein saw even more. Combining it with the mysticism knowledge he had mastered, he formed certain guesses.

“Edwards’s condition differs from William, Green, and the others in a certain way. He is like a loophole in the order of this primitive island, or rather, a shadow…

“When he realized that he had long since died, that loophole, that shadow, was discovered by the order and began undergoing ‘repair.’

“And the ‘repair’ brought about the strengthening of that order, causing the entire island to mutate.

“I can sense that this contains a certain degree of the Black Emperor’s power. It influenced Edwards, allowing him to still preserve part of his own will after his ‘rebirth.’ But where did the primitive island’s original order come from?

“Eh…”

As Klein’s thoughts spun rapidly, he suddenly noticed that Bernadette herself had also begun undergoing a certain mutation.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Bernadette faintly heard her own heartbeat.

The rhythm of this heartbeat was rather chaotic, as though two sounds were mixed together.

Two… Bernadette’s heart stirred, and she calmly returned her attention to herself.

The next second, she confirmed that the heartbeat she heard came from two sources:

One came from her heart. The other came from her abdomen.

There seemed to be an additional heart in her belly, slowly expanding and contracting.

Moreover, that “heart” was growing little by little!

Without needing to use her Mystery Prying ability to look inside her abdomen, Bernadette directly sensed that a fetus had appeared in her belly.

It grew from the size of a raisin to the size of a normal human palm, and it continued growing without pause. It seemed that before long, it would develop fully, tear open its mother’s abdomen, and crawl out bloodily.

Without realizing it, Bernadette had become pregnant with a fetus. Neither her spiritual intuition nor the Sealed Artifacts on her body had detected it in advance or stopped it. They seemed powerless against this influence.

Earth Mother… Primordial Moon… Mother Tree of Desire… Three divine names instantly flashed through Bernadette’s mind.

As far as she knew, there were not many mystical forces that could cause such a mutation. Most originated from domains related to the Earth and Moon pathways.

The Sequence 0 of the Planter pathway was called Mother. The Primordial Moon could make stones gain the ability to reproduce. The Mother Tree of Desire was suspected to grasp a portion of the Moon pathway’s high-Sequence Beyonder characteristics.

Bernadette did not hurry to deal with the fetus in her belly. First, her eyes deepened once more as she used her Prophecy ability to peer into what her best next choice would be.

This time, it took her only a second to obtain the corresponding prophecy:

“Hope of survival lies inside the mausoleum.”

Without hesitation, Bernadette stretched out her right hand and rapidly sketched one star-glowing word after another in midair.

These words, similar to the language on the Blasphemy Slate, swiftly interwove into a strange symbol, opening a Secret Door that seemed to lead into the depths of the spirit world.

The Secret Door opened. A strong wind blew out, transforming into a man with a human upper body and a lower body of flowing air, wrapped in white cloth.

“The Sage’s Forehead Ornament,” Bernadette instructed in a calm yet dignified voice.

The man respectfully acknowledged the order, then removed an item from one strip of white cloth wrapped around his body.

At its core was a vertical eye made of “diamonds.” It flickered with pure light, giving one a feeling of extraordinary holiness and wisdom, yet it also seemed rather cold, without warmth.

Bernadette immediately took the ornament and “embedded” it in the center of her forehead.

This was a Grade 0 Sealed Artifact. Bernadette ordinarily would never carry it with her, because its negative effects were far too severe.

However, at this moment, one ability of the Sage’s Forehead Ornament was extremely important to her. For it, she was willing to endure the consequences that all deviant and alien magic would be unusable and that its Beyonder characteristic would gradually influence her body, merging into it bit by bit.

If she could not remove the Sage’s Forehead Ornament within a short time, Bernadette would be equivalent to having a Sequence 2 potion poured onto her body. By then, she would either, as a lucky person, successfully advance to Sage, or lose control, go mad, and become a monster. Without supplementary ingredients or the corresponding ritual, the probability of the former was almost negligible.

After a diamond vertical eye appeared on her forehead, Bernadette’s body began to turn illusory, decomposing into stream after stream of complicated knowledge.

In an instant, she became a pure information-flow creature.

The fetus in her belly did not obtain that state. With a plop, it fell to the ground.

It was slightly half the size of a normal infant. It had already grown facial features and limbs. Its skin was wrinkled and flowed with viscous pus.

As it separated from the mother’s body, the still-not-fully-formed “it” gradually degenerated, swiftly dissolving into the air.

The infant was clearly unwilling. It tried hard to open eyes sealed by mucus and opened a mouth filled with sharp teeth, attempting to make a final struggle.

At that moment, above the gray fog, Klein bent a finger and tapped the edge of the mottled long table.

Pa.

He magnified the probability that the infant’s struggle would fail.

The infant finally could no longer maintain itself and completely dissipated in front of the forest, which was pressing forward in a dark mass.

At the same time, the flood of information formed from Bernadette passed through the heavy stone door and entered the Black Emperor’s mausoleum, reassembling into her original body.

During the process, she seemed to glimpse a black shadow.