Chapter 550 - 15: Dumasong’s Forge
"Move... get out of the way! If you’re not going, I am!" His voice was dry and hoarse, filled with a feverish haste.
He brushed past Murphy’s shoulder, slipping by like a fish. He hurried to catch up to the person with dark-red eyes ahead of him, his own eyes glinting with the very same fanatical light.
One, two, three...
More and more of the gray-skinned people queuing behind discovered the person who had stopped moving.
One by one, they began to squeeze past Murphy. They shoved him with their shoulders and urged him onward with impatient mutters, their eyes fixed only on the furnace platform drawing ever closer. It was as if Murphy were nothing more than an inconvenient stone blocking the path to paradise.
"Don’t block the way!"
"Hurry up and move!"
"Get to the back!"
The crude, brief shouts were incessant.
The gray-skinned people grew rougher, their gazes increasingly hostile.
They couldn’t seem to comprehend why someone would stand still. In their minds, it was an unforgivable hindrance.
Soon, a dozen people had cut in front of Murphy, and he had been shoved several steps back from his original spot.
But even so, he showed no sign of moving forward.
This was clearly more than the gray-skinned people could tolerate.
A particularly tall and sturdy gray-skinned man with charcoal-colored skin and eyes like burning coals finally lost his patience. After another attempt to squeeze past Murphy was thwarted by his own large frame and Murphy’s refusal to fully step aside, his temper snapped.
"You!" he snarled. "What the hell are you doing? If you’re not going to jump, then get to the back of the line! Don’t stand here getting in the way and holding everyone up!"
The gray-skinned people behind him also showed open impatience and hostility.
"Yeah! Get to the back!"
"If you don’t want to jump, then scram!"
"Stop taking up space!"
A chorus of agreement rose up. To them, this path to the furnace was sacred and singular. Any hesitation was sacrilege.
Murphy looked at their agitated faces, then glanced toward the line ahead, a procession that endlessly devoured lives.
He didn’t argue, nor did he explain.
Under their increasingly hostile glares, he calmly turned and began to walk back, moving against the flow of the crowd.
The gray-skinned people paid no mind to someone walking away from the front. They even made way for him—or more accurately, they eagerly squeezed forward, impatient to advance one more space.
The farther back he walked, the longer the line seemed to stretch.
And so, Murphy walked on, slowly brushing past one eager figure after another as they all hurried forward.
His dark figure, a solitary shape in this ashen, one-way flood of bodies, seemed starkly out of place.
He didn’t know how long he walked, but the end of the line was still nowhere in sight.
He could still feel the waves of heat and hear the clang of smithing from the furnace, but both had weakened considerably.
Just then, a withered, ice-cold hand shot out from the side and seized the sleeve of Murphy’s black robe!
The grip was weak, yet urgent.
Murphy stopped and turned his head.
A gray-skinned woman had grabbed him.
She was smaller and more frail than any of the others he had seen, little more than a skeleton draped in gray skin. A few drab, tattered rags barely preserved her modesty. The skin on her exposed arms and neck was shriveled and wrinkled, a deeper shade of grayish-brown.
At that moment, her eyes were fixed on Murphy, filled with desperation.
"Stop! You can’t go any farther! You can’t go on!"
Murphy glanced from the withered fingers clutching his sleeve to her eyes and asked calmly, "Why?"
"Why?" The gray-skinned woman seemed to find the question absurd. "Because if you keep going, you’ll die! You’ll actually die!"
"Die?" Murphy’s gaze swept past her, toward the seemingly endless darkness at the back of the line. "Don’t you also die by jumping into the furnace?"
"That’s different!" The gray-skinned woman nearly shrieked but forced her voice down. Her body trembled with agitation, and a flicker of piety crossed her eyes. "Jumping into the furnace is purification! It’s a return! It is to enter the embrace of the great Dumasong! Our souls will have their impurities burned away in His divine fire, and we will be reborn!"
But then her voice dropped again, laced with a chilling tremor, as if the mere mention of the name could invite disaster. "But to go back... going that way means walking toward the Apostate, toward the false god who stole the light and dreams, the one who brings eternal night and maddening nightmares—Oriane!"
"Oriane?" A barely perceptible flicker crossed Murphy’s jet-black eyes. "And who is Dumasong?"
Hearing this, the desperate look on the woman’s face froze.
Her murky eyes widened, and she stared intently at Murphy as if seeing him clearly for the very first time.
She took in the spotless black robe that was so out of place, the expression that was calm to the point of indifference, and the jet-black eyes, deep and bottomless, that seemed to reflect the vanity of all things.
"You... you don’t know Dumasong?" Her voice cracked with utter astonishment, and her fingers unconsciously loosened their grip on his sleeve. "You... you’re not one of the Returned? Where did you come from?"
Her gaze swept over Murphy, her expression shifting rapidly from desperation and fear to confusion and wariness.
Murphy said, "I am..."
But the gray-skinned woman slowly released her grip on his sleeve.
She no longer looked at Murphy. Instead, she turned her gaze back toward the stone path ahead, in the direction of the furnace.