Chapter 129: The Slanted Ceiling and the Mountain of Laughing Corpses - 1
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 129: The Slanted Ceiling and the Mountain of Laughing Corpses - 1
There is water at the bottom of the Abyss. A slightly viscous water that laps at your ankles.
I know this from personal experience. If you want to argue, try setting foot on the floor of the Abyss yourself.
Though I had just made a discovery of the century, people are more important than facts. I decided to do a headcount first.
I shouted into the pitch-black darkness.
“Is everyone alright?! By the numbers! One!”
“Two!”
Callis, tense and alert, was the first to answer. A true soldier. The military habits hadn't washed off her yet.
“Three!”
Next was the Undying, who was good at rolling with the punches. After that, silence fell.
A moment later, the Regressor’s voice came through.
“…I’m fine. Azzy, Nabi, and Tyr are, too.”
Seriously?
“Wow, you’re not going to say your number? Have you no sense of timing? Can’t you read the room?”
“Why do I need to say a number? All that matters is that everyone’s okay, isn’t it?”
By that logic, I can read everyone’s minds, so I don’t need to check in the first place!
As for the animals…
“Woof, woof…”
“Meeow…”
They’re alive, so that’s that. Right. The Beast King wouldn’t go down that easily.
I berated the Regressor.
“We’re doing this for reassurance since we can’t see each other. Seriously. Do you think we’re counting off because we’re idiots?”
“Hold on. I’ll check… Seven Colored Eyes. Azure, activate.”
For a moment, a blue light swirled in the Regressor’s eyes. I gave a disgruntled look at the Regressor, who had secured her vision with a cheat-like skill.
“Do you really have to say things like ‘Seven Colored Eyes, activate’ out loud? Isn’t that a little childish?”
“It’s to help me focus! What’s wrong with saying it out loud?”
“I mean, you can’t even bring yourself to say the number ‘four,’ but you have no problem spouting embarrassing lines like ‘Seven Colored Eyes.’ Is that that phase they say middle schoolers go through? But you never even went to middle school.”
“Hey! I need to survey our surroundings, so be quiet!”
The Regressor, provoked, snapped back before scanning the area with her depth-perceiving eyes. Alright, then. Shall I steal a glimpse of her perspective again? Show me what you see.
And just like that, I read the scene the Regressor was witnessing.
The first thing I saw was Tantalus, tilted and upside down. The prison building was lodged into a slope, and we, suspended by ropes, were somehow hanging inverted, our feet planted on the damp ground.
The ground we had been standing on just moments before was now the ceiling. The sight of the world turned upside down was so surreal it felt as if we had stepped into an abstract painting.
One might think Tantalus had simply tilted and hit the bottom, but that wouldn’t explain the vast emptiness we had seen below us just a moment ago.
If there had been a bottom in the first place, it would have stopped at a tilt instead of flipping completely over. Something beyond common sense must have occurred the moment the ground inverted. Perhaps the Abyss had no bottom because it was a place one could only reach by being turned upside down.
After surveying the easily identifiable ceiling, the Regressor cast her gaze toward the bottom.
“…Huh?”
There was something there.
From a distance, it looked like a large mountain. It had a gentler slope than the tilted Tantalus, but it was clearly a mountain with a summit and a ridgeline.
A gentle mountain, existing here at the bottom of the Abyss. Lapping water.
…And a bizarre texture beneath our feet.
The Azure Eyes, the eyes that see depth, couldn’t distinguish fine textures well… but the material that made up the mountain felt alien, even through them.
Why did every rock in sight… have five protrusions that looked like fingers and toes?
Ah, no. Those weren’t rocks. Nor were they protrusions that looked like fingers.
This was…
“Awooooooo!”
Azzy howled. She leaped from the ground, digging her claws into the inverted Tantalus like a bat and clinging to it. She barked furiously, as if she didn’t want to go anywhere near the ground, and scrambled to grab the support to which we were all tied.
But no one could answer her cries.
We were too overwhelmed by what filled this land.
“…Blood. It’s all…”
It didn’t take an expert’s opinion to realize it. The scent of blood had, at some point, completely filled my nostrils.
Should I even call this blood? Or perhaps…
“Callis. Stay still. Something is wrong,” the Undying muttered, sensing the ominous atmosphere.
Just then, the night lights switched on, replacing the vanished daytime lights.
The prison, lodged in the earth far away, began to glow faintly. It was the dim light of the night lamps installed throughout the building. At the same time, the searchlights mounted on the prison walls to spot escapees began to move.
The yellow searchlights, unaware that the world had been turned upside down, faithfully tracked the human shapes far from the prison, swiveling back and forth…
The round beams of light trembled madly.
Madly.
“Ah…”
Someone let out a gasp.
The yellow light cutting a circle through the darkness looked like the trembling pupil of a person gripped by terror. The light zigzagged as if trying to take in the entire mountain. The circular beam wandered aimlessly.
And everywhere the light touched, without a single exception…
There were human figures.
“The massacre of 300,000, the Overlord’s legacy… A mountain of corpses in a sea of blood.”
It was a tragedy that could only be achieved through sheer numbers.
300,000. 300,000 human beings, thrown alive into a pit. The first to hit the ground would have died instantly. The second and third, too, would have perished from such a fall. Perhaps the first 10,000 died that way.
But after enough bodies had piled up, when the height of the fall decreased and the ground below became a soft cushion of flesh…
No one knows when that was. Probably no one will ever know. Even the Overlord who pushed them into the pit likely didn’t care. To him, they were lives not worth a second thought once they were dropped.
In any case. At that point…
Some would have rolled down the mountain of corpses alive, while others would have been crushed by the bodies pouring down from above before they could escape. Limbs might have been broken and twisted. They would have writhed in agony with shattered skulls and mangled bodies. In the process of throwing 300,000 people, some must have ended up in a state too horrific to even imagine.
Screams and wails, despair and terror. Hostility and rage, curses and pleas directed at those falling, or those pushing.
One by one by one by one, the dead or dying piled up.
And as 300,000 bodies accumulated, the mountain of corpses became more than just a pile of bodies.
On the surface, it was a mountain of corpses, but that was only the external view.
The piled corpses created pressure equal to their height. Unlike the ones on the surface, the bodies buried deep inside were crushed beyond recognition. Blood, filtered through skin and cloth, was squeezed out, creating a new source of water. A liquid more akin to bodily fluid than blood flowed from the mangled flesh, forming a shallow sea.
No wonder the sound of the lapping was clearer than I’d expect from blood.
It was a desecration of humanity that only 300,000 deaths—a slaughter of that magnitude—could create.
“So that’s what this was…”
Just then, the searchlight that had been erratically zigzagging stopped as if it had found something. Immediately after, all the other searchlights, having spotted the most ‘human-like’ figure, converged on it.
Five beams of light illuminated the very peak of this horrific mountain of corpses.
In the Abyss, where no insects live and no mold grows.
Isolated from the rest of the world, neither rotting nor crumbling.
Atop a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood that had persisted for 1,300 years…
A woman was kneeling at its summit.
As if in repentance for this terrible sin, as if mourning all the dead, she knelt with her head bowed, her open palms resting on her knees.
It was a posture a graveman of Mother Earth might take, and she wore a loose priest’s robe similar to that of an Earth Sage. Six rings were fastened around her right wrist. Her jet-black hair was let down, long and loose, and since there was no wind, it wasn’t disheveled but even had a faint sheen.
A jet-black staff lay horizontally across her palms. Anyone would have thought her a Taoist of Mother Earth—
—except for the crucifix impaled through her abdomen.
“A cross? Why is a symbol of the Sanctum here?” Tyr’s brow furrowed instinctively upon spotting the emblem of her sworn enemy.
Why was there a cross in the Abyss, the hell of Mother Earth? And why was that cross at the apex of a tomb, piercing through a woman’s stomach?
The answer came from the Earth Sage.
“Long ago, our Order of Gaia had a Grand Master. She was said to be the first to use Earth Art, the Grand Master of all followers of Mother Earth.”
Splash, splash.
While everyone else stood frozen in the pitch-black darkness, the Earth Sage alone walked forward. The splashing of blood marked her footsteps.
“When the Overlord summoned gravemen to bury the 300,000 corpses, most who went were dregs seeking a fortune, ready to defile the name of Mother Earth. They were cowardly, despicable vultures circling the dead… with a few exceptions. To prevent these false gravemen from insulting Mother Earth, the Grand Master went there herself, along with her companions.”
Thanks to a few dedicated followers of Mother Earth, the misdeeds of the unqualified majority were overlooked. That was true not only now, but back then as well.
The era when the Monk King and the Overlord fought was when the Order of Gaia was at its most prosperous. There were many dregs, but there were also many true gravemen, and they worked more diligently than the unqualified to comfort those who had suffered through the war.
That was how the faith in Mother Earth was maintained in those days.
And the Overlord despised the Gaian faith for demanding rites for the dead. He hated it so much he wanted to rip it out by the roots.
“I learned this by visiting a cave halfway up the highest mountain, a temple of Mother Earth. The Grand Master’s trail vanished completely after that.”
If the Overlord had wanted to condemn the gravemen for their immorality by gathering the unqualified, he shouldn’t have killed them.
He should have shown the whole world their greed, adorned in burial goods and fattening themselves on the deaths of others. That way, he could have shifted the outrage over the massacre onto the Order of Gaia.
But the Overlord didn’t do that. He killed all the gravemen. While it’s not wrong to say he was a tyrant who couldn’t control his temper, it’s more reasonable to assume there was another reason.
For example, what if someone who buried the prisoners refused the burial goods? What if they displayed a nobility that no one could condemn?
“However, I know better than anyone that it would have been impossible for a bunch of amateur vultures to dig a pit large enough for 300,000 bodies in just three days.”
The number of gravemen gathered was small for the scale of the work, and the deadline was far too short. So people just assumed the Overlord must have used his own soldiers.
But what if that wasn’t the case?
“Because the Grand Master intervened. Because before the vultures who smelled death arrived, she used her power to create a tomb for those who were to die. Because the Grand Master buried all the corpses by herself. The Overlord was forced to face his own karma. And so, his goal thwarted, the Overlord… brutally murdered the Grand Master and the other gravemen. To him, unable to shift the blame, the gravemen who would wander the world were nothing more than heralds who would sing of his depravity.”
That was the secret history of the Abyss that the Earth Sage had uncovered.
Until now, she had never doubted it. After all, few in this world were as deeply involved in the Gaian faith as she was.
“But, I was wrong. The Overlord did not kill the Grand Master.”
Yet, in this moment, the Grand Master had appeared in the Abyss. And with a cross stabbed through her back.
Considering that the faith of the Sky God was a trivial belief not even worth sowing discord with back then, the scene before them meant only one thing.
“The ones who killed her and erased all of history were the minions of the Sky God. The cowardly prophets who peek into the future. Those who stood with the Monk King and instigated the Overlord’s fall. It was them… This is the place where they brought about our fall, where they killed and defiled the Grand Master.”
This mountain of corpses may have been the Overlord’s work.
But this Abyss, and the Grand Master’s death upon the mountain of corpses, impaled by a cross—this was none other than the work of the Sanctum.