Chapter 30

Chapter 30 “One Hell Of A Messed Up Scene”

While Inquisitor Vanna mused over the troubles ahead with the two drivers steering the hugely heavy mechanical spider, it soon folded its long metallic legs into its abdomen to allow the wheels underneath to glide it across the city streets.

Cultists who worship the sun god are a big problem for modern civilization — unfortunately, there was more than one similar plague out there.

There are always malicious eyes thrown from the depths of subspace to the human world, and there are always those stupid mortals who would try to infect those ominous forces. Between this collusion of ancient gods and mortals, there are also twisted items, forbidden heirs, and remnants of taint left from ancient times lurking in the depths of the city-state, always trying to move, always trying to pry the order of society apart.

Of all these threats, the Sun God’s followers were the ones who most alarmed and troubled the protectors of Pland.

They are not only cultists that randomly gathered together but the product of the lost history from the old world. Worst of all, these heretics had a structured “faith” in place, like the Church of the Deep Sea that Vanna was a part of.

This faith revolves around the “Era of Order” under the old sun, which was not only self-contained but even had a corresponding “true solar calendar”. Of course, the calendar wasn’t recognized by modern society. To these heretics, they are the descendants of an ancient civilization that has long been lost, and believe that the glorious ancient civilization will be revived one day.

As the Inquisitor of the Deep Sea Church, Vanna was not interested in the heresies of the cultists, but she wouldn’t ignore how stubborn and unified the followers of the Sun God were in their goals. The fact that they could survive one blow after another over countless years told the threat they posed to the city.

But their resurgence in Pland still surprised Vanna.

Since that unprecedented blow four years earlier, the Sun God believers here had been so badly wounded that, according to several investigations, the heretics must have moved their main members to the nearby island cities. Some are even believed to have moved farther north to the Frost Port city-state, leaving only the stubborn few basically unqualified to be in the inner circle of the cultists.

These minions hid in the sewers, relying entirely on their knowledge of the underworld and the little twisted blessing given to them by the Black Sun to evade the guardians. For four years, their numbers got smaller and smaller, and all they could do was cling to what little they had to survive.

Vanna walked straight to the corpses, and after seeing the situation of one of them, she subconsciously frowned.

It was a cultist with a golden mask—no doubt the priest directly in charge of the sacrificial ritual on the blasphemous altar.

There’s a terrible hole in his chest.

“...... What’s going on?” Vanna frowned even harder, “Did this fanatic get too excited at the end of the ceremony and sacrifice himself? I hadn’t heard of cultists who worshipped the Black Sun doing such a custom.”

“This is exactly what is strange and bizarre about this – he did not sacrifice himself,” said the guardian who brought Vanna over. Shaking his head with a slightly odd expression on his face, “According to the description of the cultists caught at the scene... their ’emissary’ was sacrificed by a sacrifice...”

“Sacrificed by a sacrifice?” Vanna suddenly raised an eyebrow, “What is this crazy talk?”

“It’s indeed very much like crazy talk,” the guardian spread his hands helplessly, “in fact, by the time we arrived, most of the cultists here were already in a semi-mad state.”

“Already in a semi-mad state?”

“Yes, their sacrificial rituals obviously went terribly wrong. Many of them were infected with madness, and most had even begun to slash and kill each other. They all seemed to think of each other as if they were... some kind of ‘monster’ occupied by a terrible existence. It’s their frantic frenzy that alarmed the watchmen patrolling nearby, resulting in the exposure of this site... There were only a few left who could soberly answer our questions when we apprehended them. The ones that did insisted that the emissary had been sacrificed.”

“Caught in the madness? Hacking and killing each other? And think others are occupied monsters?” Vanna’s expression immediately became serious, “Have you checked? Is it the result of being polluted by the black sun?”

“There is no trace of outside contamination, but rather a spontaneous madness—the factors that caused the madness are rooted in their own mental world,” said the guardian. Then he raised his finger to a young lady in a long black dress walking among the cultists, “Ms. Heidi has arrived. If it is confirmed that these cultists are not contaminated by the black sun, we can only think of a way to resolve the issue using hypnosis.”