Chapter 166
Do-Jin dragged himself back toward the surface once he felt like his body had recovered enough to function without collapsing.
Karin took charge of cutting a tunnel through the packed snow. She was basically a high-performance mole at that point, carving a path upward much faster than even her own magic probably could’ve.
“Hup!” Her head popped out of the pure white snowfield with a clean sound. She climbed fully out in one smooth motion, then stuck her head back into the hole she made.
“I’ll pull you up!” she said.
She grabbed Do-Jin as he crawled up from the inside and yanked him out like he was nothing more than a marble she fished out of a pouch. The moment he flopped onto the snowfield and lay flat on his back, a message thundered into existence.
[The Sanctuary welcomes the souls of the returning martyrs and projects visions of the past.]
A storm of snow-mist rose from all directions and began forming the shape of enormous buildings.
“Oh, wow!” Karin exclaimed.
In contrast, Do-Jin simply murmured, “What the hell...”
The empty snowfield around them instantly transformed into the center of a massive city made entirely of condensed snow-fog. The fog didn’t just form the buildings. It recreated the people who once lived here, capturing even their movements with an eerie level of detail.
Inside the city that flickered and collapsed with every gust of wind, countless silhouettes were butchered. Their screams echoed nonstop from every direction.
“What is happening? What happened at the summit of the Sanctuary...!”
“Aaaaagh! Y-you...! Why are you...?!”
“What are you doing?! Why would you...!”
Karin squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears, clearly unable to stand the sound.
“This feels less like the Sanctuary and more like a haunted house built out of the leftover rage from some kind of massacre,” Do-Jin muttered.
The slaughterers and their victims were not all human. The shapes were rough since they were just fog silhouettes, but their sizes alone made the differences obvious. Some looked human, others looked like dwarves, and a few were towering giants.
“We shall be immortal! We shall be chosen!”
“Those who refuse or fear the choice are sinners!”
The killers shouted with voices soaked in religious madness.
It was incredible that something recreated with nothing but drifting snow could feel this disgusting. If he had witnessed the real thing with his own eyes, he probably would have unloaded every spell he knew into these lunatics without thinking twice.
They made this shit way too realistic, Do-Jin thought, scowling as he watched a spear bury itself into the back of a woman who was running with a child in her arms.
Seeing the fanatic who threw the spear shake with laughter like he found the whole thing hilarious, Do-Jin swept his flame across that fog-shaped body and erased it. Though it was a pointless act, he did it only because he wanted to quell even a fraction of the disgust clawing at his chest.
“Let’s go, Karin. I shouldn’t have dragged you into a place like this.”
There was no reason to stand around in this endless reenactment of a massacre, so Do-Jin pulled Karin to her feet.
She gave him a confused look. “No, that’s not what I...”
Her voice trailed off, and she closed her mouth. Her expression had turned completely serious. Do-Jin thought she was reacting to the scenes around them, but she looked like she couldn’t even spare a thought for that horror show.
“Don’t tell me your strength is getting restricted again—”
“No. It’s not,” Karin said quickly. “It actually feels better than before. Really, you don’t need to worry.”
Something about her tone felt off, and Do-Jin tried to pry further, but Karin refused to answer. He even threatened to send her back by force if something was wrong with her body, but she stomped the ground hard enough to punch a crater into the snow and insisted she was perfectly fine, leaving him with nothing to say.
“Fine. But if you feel anything is wrong, even for a second, we go back down. No matter what happens.”
Karin nodded with all the enthusiasm of someone promising not to die.
At that, their climb resumed, one human and one vampire trudging through the mountain again. Nothing physically tried to stop them anymore. The screams echoing through the air still blew in with the snowstorm, yet Do-Jin found himself getting used to the noise. The constant physical exhaustion probably helped dull his attention to the haunting ambience.
Eventually, they reached a point where the mountain split open into an artificial cliff, and beyond it lay a structure that looked like a temple carved directly into the rock.
Did the avalanche happen just to reveal this damn thing?
The temple entrance stood open. More accurately, the door that should have been blocking it lay shattered. A pitch-black hole yawned in the rock like the mountain was opening its jaws to swallow them whole. It felt endlessly ominous, but turning back after coming this far wasn’t an option.
Do-Jin stepped into the temple.
This place is a complete wreck.
The inside was filled with nothing but snow, ice, and debris. Everything had collapsed so thoroughly that even imagination couldn’t piece together what the original interior looked like.
“There are bones here,” Karin murmured.
She pointed at several bones scattered among the rubble.
“I guess giants were a pretty common species back in their era,” Do-Jin said, glancing up at a massive arm bone that hung from the ceiling like some kind of grotesque decoration.
Do corpses even rot in this extreme cold? he wondered.
Maybe the temple had been warm inside before it was exposed. He kept thinking it over as they walked deeper until they reached a wide, open chamber. Nearly everything had collapsed here too, yet the traces of ornate decorations poking through the wreckage suggested it had once been an important place.
“Do-Jin, look over there!”
A very unusual ornament waited in the center of the room. An old woman had been nailed to a pillar. Her mouth slowly opened as she asked, “Who are you guys?”
She was alive. She should have been dead from the moment someone ripped her eyes out and drove a sword through her heart to pin her in place, yet somehow, here she was defying all logic.
Aww man, there’s still no quest update... great.
Do-Jin kept his guard up because the whole situation reeked of trouble, but Karin reacted completely differently. She rushed forward and tried to yank the sword out of the pillar right away. Just then, a sharp crack rang out before she could reach the pillar. A bright flash erupted, and Karin got blasted backward like she ran into a divine landmine.
“Karin!”
Do-Jin shouted in shock, but she managed to regain her footing and landed without a scratch. He was ready to chew her out for the reckless stunt when a weary voice cut in.
“Even after all these years, the seal refuses to weaken...” the old woman muttered, her tone full of bitter resignation. She turned her hollow, eye-less sockets toward them. “I shall ask again. Who are you two and why have you come here?”
Do-Jin answered carefully, “We’re ordinary adventurers, and we came here because a spirit we met in a dungeon asked us to bring their remains back to their Sanctuary.”
“Ordinary adventurers...” The old woman turned her head toward Karin, as if already knowing what she was. However, there was no further comment.
“And who are you?” Do-Jin asked.
The old woman took a moment before she finally spoke. “I was one of the priests who served the Star.”
“What happened here?”
If the quest were supposed to end with simply delivering the remains, the system should have responded by now. Instead, the place kept throwing insane phenomena at them, and the quest window refused to update. Something was missing, and this lone surviving priest was the only lead they had.
“A lot of things happened...”
No one could guess how long the old woman had been trapped alone in this place, but it had clearly been ages, judging from how desperate she seemed for someone to talk to.
“We received life from the Star, served the Star, and returned our life to the Star at the end. We believed that was the natural way of living. But some disagreed.”
Her tone stayed flat as she explained that a group had appeared who worshipped a new star.
“They offered their faith to a red star that represented death and ruin, claiming that the believers would be spared from death and destruction.”
Her words sounded exactly like the kind of cult doctrine the world never ran out of. An unavoidable apocalypse would come and everything would collapse, but the believers would be saved and live forever in comfort, the same tired line every fanatic movement relied on.
Bella and Laves... So these were probably the roots of the Church of Bella and the Cult of Ruin.
Do-Jin thought that calling them roots felt generous. It looked more like civilization had been wiped and rebooted at some point.
“Their belief alone was not a problem. We believed the Star created all things, even strange events, so we accepted them. But one day, their belief crossed a threshold.” The old woman recited the next line like she was reading scripture. “We must prove our faith and devotion. Only then shall we be saved from the destined destruction.”
And that was how the massacre began.
“Those who followed the Star of Creation embraced the others, but the ones who worshiped destruction wanted to turn everything else into a sacrifice. They believed it was their duty to bring ruin even a single day closer.”
They wanted to speed up the apocalypse to get in their god’s good graces sooner, and they were convinced they would earn salvation and glory faster if they proved their devotion through slaughter. That became their absolute doctrine and their entire purpose.
“So this disaster is the result of all that bullshit.”
Do-Jin thought it through. The Church of Bella had its bloodline wiped out in some forgotten era that never even made it into the records. But the Cult of Ruin might have survived into the present, even if they were hanging on by a thread.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” Do-Jin asked carefully, doing his best not to show how much he wanted to hurry things along and get the quest over with.
The priest paused for a brief moment before answering, “This place is filled with many forces clashing and trying to overpower one another. The light of the Star of Creation still lingers faintly from when this Sanctuary was whole, and the grudges and thoughts of those who died here remain as well. All of it mixed together and twisted me into this state.”
“And how do we fix it?”
“I do not know. But... if the shattered relic were to be restored to its original form, there may be a chance for the Sanctuary to return to normal.”
Finally, there was an actual clue to move the quest forward.
“They tore off a piece of the relic and carried it to the peak of the mountain. They meant to offer it to their star. But they never succeeded. The Star of Creation, who had always been gentle, unleashed its fury upon them.”
So that might have been why the mountaintop looked like someone sliced it off with a colossal blade. Asking the old woman for more details wouldn’t help. She had been stuck here like this since that era.
“So do we just climb higher, find the relic fragment, and bring it back?”
“I cannot promise that will solve everything. But it is the only hope left to hold.”
“We’ll bring it back.”
There was no other way to advance the quest anyway, so the only option was to climb up there and tear everything apart until they found it.