Chapter 687 ·This Is Too Heretical!
There was no need for further elaboration; Hughes immediately understood the value contained within it.
Transcendents had gradually declined, even withdrawing from the battlefield before Castel rose to prominence—was it because they were weak?
Of course not. Every Transcendent had their own specialty. Even when facing machines of steel, they always possessed their own unique advantages.
But the problem lay in their scarcity.
Training a Transcendent required at least over a decade, and strict talent requirements were imposed as well.
That meant there had to be a complete system to select those with talent, cultivate them, and instill in them a sense of identity and loyalty toward the organization.
It was far too inefficient.
Castel’s schools could complete literacy education through Literacy Class in just a few months, and within a few years, they could cultivate a batch of engineers with basic competence. If each engineer could exert even one percent of a Transcendent’s effectiveness, then training Transcendents would become an utterly unprofitable endeavor.
Just like how firearms, whether in range or accuracy, were completely inferior to bows and arrows, yet the Empire had successfully crushed enemies on all sides by using firearms. The reason was simple: the cost of cultivating a qualified archer was enough to raise an entire squad of musketeers.
Scaling and standardization—those were the true forces that changed an era.
Only now did Hughes nod in genuine agreement.
Even if Tata had been messing around with everything else, the mere fact that he had perfected modular ritual deployment and placed Transcendence Rituals into the hands of Mortals was already an achievement of immense merit.
But Tata’s introduction had not yet ended.
He rubbed his hands together and walked toward a noticeably larger ritual module.
“Lord, our previous ritual required the use of Coyote. I have made improvements in this regard.”
“That’s not bad. The output of the Coyote breeding farm has never been able to scale up. It has always been a bit troublesome. What did you use as a substitute?”
Hughes looked over with interest. Yet Tata did not bring over any animal. Instead, a charred-black Fathers from the Silent Sanctum grinned, showing his teeth, and stepped forward.
Hughes: “.”
No. No way!?
Under Hughes’ mixed gaze of shock, conflict, and disbelief, the Fathers entered the position originally occupied by the Coyote. The ritual module detected the entry of the vessel and began to rotate slowly.
“Ahem, Lord, didn’t I previously research using humans to generate—converting the Pollution within the human body into electrical energy? Since it’s already converted into electricity, I thought we might as well make use of it…”
“Wait.” Hughes raised a hand and rubbed his brow. “If I remember correctly, the principle of this Storm Generator was to offer sacrifice to the Sea God and obtain Bestowal in return. The Coyote inside was merely a ceremonial offering. In reality, it functioned like a fully automated merit machine, didn’t it?”
“What’s a fully automated merit machine?”
“…Don’t worry about that. I’m asking—what does this have to do with Pollution power generation?”
“Oh, I made some improvements afterward. Once humans replaced the Coyote, the offering became a human. That part is the same as with the Coyote. But when receiving Bestowal, humans are different.”
“The human body can store Pollution. Animals may be eroded and mutate due to Pollution, but they cannot retain it within their bodies.”
“So I thought…”
“Since receiving Bestowal results in being contaminated by Pollution, why not conveniently use that Pollution to generate electricity?”
Crackle! Crackle!
A burst of electrical sparks flashed across the Fathers of the Silent Sanctum.
Within the ritual module, she rotated just as the Coyote had. But unlike before, the aura of Pollution around her grew increasingly intense. Immediately afterward, arcs of electricity began flickering across her body.
“Will this be dangerous?”
“Yes. Yes, it will…”
The electricity did not spare her simply because she had generated it. Hughes clearly saw her flesh turning red from the shocks.
If one could see visible arcs like that, the voltage had to be tens of thousands of volts, right?
Hughes had not often seen someone struck by tens of thousands of volts—but he had taken off a wool sweater at night with the lights turned off.
Wool sweaters easily produced sparks from static electricity, and that voltage could reach tens of thousands of volts.
But the current of static electricity was so small it was practically negligible. What the Fathers carried now was clearly not.
Moreover, due to the ritual’s requirements, she was still rotating…
“Hahaha! I feel power filling my body!” the Fathers of the Silent Sanctum laughed loudly and pointed forward.
Boom!
A bolt of lightning descended from the sky. In an instant, silver serpents writhed across the ground, and the Target Dummy at the testing ground was blasted into smoking blackness.
Hughes stared in complete stupefaction.
“H-How did you do that?”
“It’s similar to controlling Extraordinary Power. The ritual granted me the power of electricity. The sky has already gathered enough lightning. With just a bit of guidance, I can cause the thunderbolt to strike,” the Fathers said while spinning within the ritual module.
Her voice became bizarre due to the Doppler Effect.
Hughes scratched his head painfully. It was probably that the ritual’s high-voltage electric arc had broken down the air, channeling the energy from the thunderstorm outside. That was likely how it worked.
As for the details—who knew how Tata had achieved this ritual? It might well have been accomplished through exploiting some kind of glitch again.
After the demonstration, the ritual gradually came to a halt. The Fathers, who had been spinning and discharging electricity all this time, also stopped. Her face was even darker from the electrical burns.
Hughes squinted for quite some time before finally recognizing her—it was Helena, Ignati’s deputy. She seemed to hold quite a high position among the Burial Ones. Why had she personally stepped forward to conduct the experiment?
And she had served as a… biological storage battery?
“Well, Lord? The Storm Generator can now precisely control its attack direction. In terms of power, it’s no weaker than the Dragon’s Breath Cannon!” Tata said excitedly.
“The power is there, and the accuracy is decent. But aren’t you moving backward instead of forward?”
“Uh…”
“How many Transcendents do we have? And how many can withstand this kind of torment?” Hughes glanced at Helena. Her clothes were perhaps reinforced by Extraordinary Power and remained largely intact, but the arm exposed at her sleeve was already cracked, and her fingertips had even begun to carbonize.
Yet Helena did not care in the slightest. For the Burial Ones, this was no different from scraping some skin—if the head did not fall off, it was all minor injury.
Hughes suddenly remembered that she had been spinning inside the ritual just now. At that speed, wouldn’t anyone else’s brains have been shaken into mush?
“In any case, this thing of yours has limited practical use. It may enhance Transcendents somewhat, but this ritual occupies such a large area that it cannot be moved. It can only be used for defense…”
Hughes did not continue. He felt that this ritual might be somewhat useful to the Silent Sanctum, but Castel had no real need for it.
“Regarding that, I have an idea,” Helena suddenly spoke up.
“Since these steel plates can form a ritual, could I weld them into a frame, mount myself inside it, and find a way to make it move? Then I could strike people with lightning while moving.”
Hughes: “???”