It was said that daemons always took on the most beautiful and alluring forms.
Only then could they tempt the weak-willed into the abyss they had woven for them.
But the lure of appearance was usually only the lowest form of temptation.
Human desire was endless, and among all desires, the one buried deepest, the one that truly separated man from beast, was the thirst for knowledge engraved into the soul itself.
Knowledge was wisdom's curse upon mankind.
It was the forbidden fruit of paradise lost.
Just as the unknown was humanity's oldest and strongest fear, it was also one of the things humanity desired most.
And beyond that door, there was an endless abundance of the thing called knowledge.
Through that deep blue veil, the bewildered seeker glimpsed a labyrinth of interlocking crystals, formed from impossible geometries that could never exist in the mortal world.
Within it, angle and space were twisted.
Time and causality were reversed.
Matter had lost meaning.
Natural law had been ground into dust.
And driven by some most primal craving, countless things that had become tangible "knowledge" drifted freely through that chaotic crystal palace.
That first glimpse had been enough to rob Mitchell of the sight of his third eye, because countless discordant voices had fused into a storm of echoes and flooded his mind.
They carried endlessly shifting principles, so violently unstable that the upheaval spilled over into Mitchell's flesh itself.
Those voices affected one another, until in the end they formed a single sentence whose true shape could not be discerned.
It was a whisper from the endless beyond, a murmur from some being that did not exist in reality or in material history. Every syllable carried chaotic sounds and twisted grammar no mortal should have been able to understand.
Fortunately, Mitchell had not been able to understand those scrambled fragments at the time.
That was one of the main reasons he had survived.
But now, as he vividly recalled that whisper once more, he was horrified to realize that somehow, he understood the surface meaning of the words:
"At the meeting place of lamp and moth, beneath the gaze of lion and king, fallen delight shall seek to destroy the newborn branch."
"Glory will become Its currency, and faith will add to Its strength. Only undying courage and the coercion of the heartless may ruin the plot of the youngest one."
"Everything borrowed has already been marked with a price. But no matter what, change is a good thing."
With every word whose meaning he grasped, Mitchell felt another tremor run through his soul.
And when the full meaning of the sentence finally settled into his heart, he suddenly felt something wet beneath his nose and at the corner of his mouth.
He raised his remaining hand, touched above his lip, then looked down.
What he saw was crimson red.
Mitchell slowly closed his eyes and sank into thought.
Then, in the next instant, he snapped them open again. Ignoring the blood still dripping from his nose, he stared at Priestess Lena with bloodshot eyes and asked:
"Solomon and his bodyguard... mostly the second one. Where are they?"
Blue light flickered in Lena's bionic eye, and the mechanical arms on her back began swaying on their own.
After a long pause, she seemed to come back to herself and answered slowly:
"By the Machine God, they should be on the planet beneath us right now."
"What exactly they are doing, I do not know."
Mitchell's breathing turned sharp and hurried.
He knocked against the life-support frame trapping him and said firmly:
"I know what the path I saw means now... I need to find them immediately."
And as Mitchell began struggling, Priestess Lena stood there like a frozen statue, silently watching him. She neither stopped him nor helped him.
In truth, her strange stillness was not because Mitchell had suddenly started bleeding.
It was because she had sensed something from him.
To be precise, it was the scent of knowledge...
...
The smell of blood hung thick over the once-holy square before the cathedral. Beneath the reek of human fat and the sour decay of exposed organs, the believers who had once been full of fervor no longer had the strength to continue punishing their own flesh.
They numbly raised the blades in their hands and cut into their own skin, adding fresh badges of glory to bodies that were already ruined.
Some had already died from overzealous punishment, having been far too unskilled in the art of harming themselves.
Above them, on the platform, the peerlessly beautiful woman who called herself the Perfect Child smiled like a blooming flower, watching her lovely believers with encouragement in her eyes.
"They cry out the name they worship. What devotion. Wouldn't you agree, preacher of the cursed one?"
The corner of her mouth, marked by a faint reddish beauty mark, curled upward into a seductive smile. Then her pink eyes shifted and landed on the massive pyre-post behind her.
An old man was bound to it with chains covered in thorns. Judging by how severely cracked his lips were, he had gone an entire day without water.
Faced with the Perfect Child's question, he only lowered his head in silence.
"Ah, right. I forgot. You can't speak anymore."
The peerless woman smiled with apologetic gentleness, her eyes curving like soft crescents, as though she truly pitied the old man's misfortune.
But for someone who could not even react properly to her teasing, the Perfect Child clearly had no interest in wasting more time.
Her gaze turned toward the nearby inner city, where bright lights gleamed beneath the protection of heavily guarded defenses.
"Oh, according to the plan, that side should be starting soon too."
"What a magnificent idea it is. To use our power to grant eternal happiness to those at the bottom."
At that thought, a strange, mocking expression appeared on her face.
Just as she was preparing to leave this appetizer behind and head toward the place where the real feast would begin, a presence approaching from the darkness suddenly made her expression turn serious.
She turned her head, the teasing look gone from her face, and stared into the darkness bordering the outer district.
Just moments ago, she had sensed a psychic presence whose strength was by no means weak.
And that presence clearly did not belong to anyone she had seen before.
Step. Step. Step.
As though to confirm her suspicion, a series of heavy, powerful footsteps emerged from the darkness beneath her narrowed gaze.
It was Gaia, who had finally found this place.
And now, as she took in the blasphemous sight before her, as her furious gaze passed over the followers of the Cult of the Perfect Lord mutilating themselves and met the strange pink eyes of the woman on the platform, all the resentment and suppression she had endured since arriving on this world erupted at once.
She slammed the heavy crate off her back and drew the longsword hanging at her waist, which was now trembling violently and buzzing with intense force.
In that instant, the killing intent rising from both sides tore skyward like something tangible, rushing straight toward the purple-haired woman who watched it all with growing interest.
(End of Chapter)
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