Chapter 398: Hellfire (10)

“Liya, why do you want to become a Saintess?”

Gentle sunlight spilled across the Saintess’s softly beautiful profile; even her pale-golden long hair and clear eyes seemed soaked in spring water under the evening glow.

She gazed at the little girl who had just been chosen, so tenderly.

“T-to... to become a Saintess?”

The timid little girl hid behind the carriage curtain, only two limpid, wide eyes peeking out to secretly size up this legendary Saintess. Hearing the question, she panicked for a moment; her whole small face scrunched up adorably.

“Yes.”

The Saintess soothed her, patting Liya’s little head. “Becoming a Saintess is not as easy a road as you imagine, nor is it only that boundless radiance you can see. This road means hardships and tedium beyond what you can picture; it is a duty and a burden heavy enough to crush anyone.

“So before I formally become your teacher, I need you to answer this question—and you need to think it through in the process. Otherwise, you might regret it for the rest of your life.”

“Think... about the question...”

The little girl, still so young, seemed unable to grasp the deeper meaning, so she simply voiced her simplest thought. Turning her head, she spoke with boundless yearning:

“I want to... save people.”

“Save... so, so many people.”

The wind lifted the carriage curtain, revealing the desolate scene outside.

People wrapped in heavy, sealed garments and wearing strange masks walked past one sheet-draped corpse after another, writing down one cold number after another on paper.

From a tent came a woman’s anguished sobs—her son and husband had just passed.

A youth with faint red blotches still on his skin lay on a crude sickbed, his vacant gaze beyond where sunlight could shine.

Crows cried, starkly mournful.

This place had just been ravaged by a brutal plague. If the Church’s Saintess had not happened to pass through, there might not have been a single living person left within a hundred li.

This was also the first trial experienced by little Liya, who had just been chosen as a Saintess candidate.

She showed immense sympathy and compassion, letting her eyes pass over each person in pain, busying herself with decoctions and passing things along. Her small body could not do much, but every single thing she did, she did with utmost seriousness.

Just like the quality required of every Saintess, the light of humanity had already begun to shine within her still-childlike frame.

“If I can... I want to save everyone. I want to be as amazing as the Saintess!”

The little girl wore a firmness beyond her years, clenching her chubby little fists, speaking in all seriousness.

“Save everyone... that’s very hard, you know.”

“I’m not afraid of hardship!”

“You may even have to pay a price that’s hard to bear,” the Saintess said, looking deep into her.

“I’m not afraid to pay it either! The uncle next door told me that a Saintess is synonymous with devotion and selflessness, that a Saintess’s love must be given to every person!” Stars sparkled in the little girl’s eyes.

“Every person... You truly are kind.”

The Saintess smiled gently—then the carriage jolted. The clamor of voices and the knights’ angry shouts cut off the important question-and-answer between teacher and disciple.

“Come, let’s take a look.”

The Saintess patted Liya’s shoulder and led her out of the carriage.

“Save me... please save me, I’m innocent, innocent!”

Before the carriage, a man covered head to toe in red blotches, clothes in tatters and face wet with tears, knelt down in front. Two strong knights pinned ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) him to the ground to keep him from crashing into the sacred carriage.

The people stood far off, not daring to crowd closer, yet pointing and cursing him without pause.

“Liya, look at him.”

The Saintess pointed at the man and said:

“He is the source of this plague. To save his own son, he chose to trade with an Evil God. The result of the plague’s spread is that over a thousand people died. It’s true that his son came back, but he himself also contracted the plague—and worse than anyone else.

“And now, he wants us to save him.”

“Please, Saintess, I beg you. I’m innocent. I didn’t know it would be like this. I didn’t even know it was an Evil God. I only wanted to save my son!”

Tears and snot ran together on the man’s face. If he weren’t being held down, he would surely have rushed up to clutch the Saintess’s feet:

“My son is only three years old. He’s still so little. I’m his only family. He can’t be without his father. I beg you, merciful Saintess, please save me too. Once I’ve settled my son, you can throw me in prison if you want. Please, save me...”

“What a pitiful man.”

The Saintess sighed.

The man rejoiced and kowtowed hard. “Saintess, please, please...”

“Though I suppose ‘I didn’t know anything’ is probably a lie.”

The man’s face froze.

Liya stared blankly at him. Her small head still couldn’t process the complexity before her eyes.

She only felt that this person was both hateful and pitiful.

But then the Saintess placed a pill into Liya’s palm.

“Now, whether to save him or not is up to you.”

“Eh?”

“For you as you are now, this is cruel. But I don’t want you, when you truly face such a situation in the future, to make a choice you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”

“So, choose, Liya. Do you save a father—or do you kill an evildoer?”

“This is your first lesson from me.”

The Saintess looked quietly at Liya, as if speaking of something trivial, her gaze still gentle.

But Liya held that pill as if it were a block of ice that a thousand years couldn’t melt; she felt the warmth drain from her whole body.

The warm evening glow turned into a deep, cold sea, surging over her...

“I...”

...

...

“Never thought I’d suddenly remember something from so long ago.”

Liya’s mind gradually cleared; her gaze was still a little dazed.

“What was my choice back then?”

She couldn’t recall—perhaps she had forgotten.

All these years, to become the Saintess she longed to be, to become someone like her Saintess teacher who could save everyone, she had crammed too many things into her head. Those things that “didn’t matter” naturally got swept into the deepest corners of memory.

“So cold.”

Liya suddenly shivered, hugging her shoulders, white breath slipping from between her cherry lips.

“But cold... is normal too, right.”

Her gaze turned to her surroundings.

It was a sea.

A pitch-black sea.

Like a mire that swallowed everything, it lay settled at the bottom of an unimaginably vast space. Looking down from above, Liya couldn’t even see an end; she could only feel her own smallness.

But what rose and sank in that sea were not cute creatures like octopuses.

They were... people.

Deformed, twisted, suffering people.

They struggled in the mud-sea, they wept, they begged for help. Just looking at them, one could tell what kind of torment those souls were enduring.

“Ah, you’ve come.”

Suddenly, the people bobbing in the mud-sea seemed to notice her and surged this way in frenzy. They raised their hands high, swaying like seaweed, trying to grasp something.

“Have you come to save us?”

“Save us... please, save us...”

“It hurts, it hurts so much...”

“Save me... you must save me...”

Countless cries for help rose like an agitated swarm of bees, their furious buzzing stabbing into Liya’s mind like needles.

“Don’t... Be quiet!”

Liya clutched her head in pain.

And then the entire mud-sea truly fell silent.

As Liya wondered at it, she saw the mud-sea wriggle. A bent figure parted the countless bobbing human shapes and walked out.

It was an old woman—or rather, should have been an old woman—because her deformity far exceeded the norm. Liya could only tell her age from the wrinkles covering her face.

But she was more lucid than most in the mud-sea. She was not merely a broken record of pleas. She came before Liya and knelt with reverent prostration:

“Envoy from outside... have you finally come to save us?”

“Envoy... me?”

“Yes. The aura on you tells me you’re the envoy we have awaited for so long—the envoy from that great deity.”

Great deity?

Which one did she mean? The Goddess?

But wasn’t the Goddess precisely whom they should be worshiping? Why use this strange phrasing, “envoy from a great deity”?

Liya looked at the old woman, hesitated, and asked:

“You... are the natives, aren’t you?”

“Yes... we are the natives of this land.”

The old woman lifted her head; turbid tears flowed. “We have waited here for a thousand years.”

“Waited a thousand years... what does that mean?”

Liya’s mouth fell open. “Isn’t this supposed to be Kanteville? The Golden Nation without hunger or pain...”

“No! This is not any Golden Nation at all!”

The old woman roared in fury; the wrinkles on her face writhed like twisted bark:

“We were deceived by an Evil God! This is not a holy land without hunger and pain, with only happiness and joy. This is... the Evil God’s pasture!”

“Evil God? Pasture?”

Liya felt as if struck by lightning, her wide eyes even wider.

The old woman’s words were the complete opposite of everything she knew.

But Liya was not stupid. From the scene before her, the old woman’s words, and some earlier clues, she quickly pieced together part of the truth:

“So, the Evil God disguised itself as the Goddess Aimier and deceived you?”

The old woman looked at Liya, fell silent for a moment, then nodded hard. “Yes. We were all deceived. This Kanteville—an entire one million people—were deceived, turned into lambs raised by the Evil God.”

“...”

Liya’s mind was in chaos.

Every word the old woman spoke was like a heavy hammer pounding her heart. She once again felt that sensation of sinking into the deep sea, wrapped in deathly stillness and crushing pressure.

“Then... you called me here...”

“As you heard, please... save us.”

The old woman spoke with utmost earnestness:

“The time when the Evil God will swing down the butcher’s knife and harvest us completely is not far. When that time comes, all of us will become the Evil God’s food.

“So before then, we hope you can save us—purify the defilement upon us, erase the mark of the lamb from us.”

“Purify the defilement...”

Liya froze for a moment, then shook her head vigorously. “No, I can’t. I can’t do something like that...”

“You can. You certainly can.”

The old woman lifted her head and looked into Liya’s eyes.

At the same time, a million twisted people—a million suffering souls—raised their heads together from the black mud-sea. The eyes on their deformed faces burned as they fixed upon Liya.

“Are you not here precisely for this? You are that deity’s... Saintess.”