Badge in Azure

While the second head inquisitor knew that the ones from the Black Dungeon were their own, he felt himself shivering when he thought of the head warden.

It stemmed from the depths of his soul. Even if he advanced to level ten, he still had no way of wiping the feeling away. He even began to suspect that the head warden had advanced to level 11. Otherwise, why am I so scared of even thinking of him?

Saleen’s men were still after their targets. The wardens and knights from the Tribunal had lost all will to fight. Any who continued to resist were killed.

Nailisi left a magic bug egg on each of the dead bodies, letting them hatch. After Saleen and his people left, the magic bugs would finish eating the dead bodies and hide, waiting for their next meal to arrive.

Saleen’s followers did not attack the ones who gave up resisting. They let Don and his demons take away their weapons and equipment.

The number of the demons grew and they led the ones who lost the will to fight to a flatland. Saleen cast Fire Rain. Countless water drops appeared in the air and burned.

The ones on the ground looked at the fire raining from the sky with dazed expressions. They only knew that their time was up.

Shrieks were heard all over the Skywell. Believers who chose to surrender had remorseful looks of varying degrees on their faces. Saleen pretended that he saw nothing.

He did a rough calculation and found at least 2000 people had surrendered. The number differed from his speculations, and there was no way he could take so many prisoners with him.

Saleen landed on the ground and gestured at Nailisi, who opened the purgatory of purification. She had the demons chase the believers who had surrendered into the purgatory.

Over half of the ones who entered the purgatory of purification dropped to the ground immediately, writhing painfully on the ground. They were unable to see what was in the sky. They were only able to feel a huge hand tear at their bodies and their souls.

There were over 300 people who saw no change. Nailisi let those people out. The 300 truly turned their backs on the Lord of Glory. Saleen pointed at them. “Don, these people would be your subordinates from here on out.”

No noise was heard from the purgatory of purification after about 10 minutes. Nailisi only let the believers who were barely alive out. The powers within the believers’ bodies was drawn, and they had lost their faith. All of them looked dazed.

Saleen asked Don, “do you have any use for these people?”

Don nodded. “No problem, as long as they’re alive, I have ways to coerce them into believing in a god. It’s simply a matter of time.”

“Time is something we don’t have. I’d venture into Cloudflow territory next to look for another temple.”

“Then these people’s lives would be shortened.”

“Do it. You have one day. Would that suffice?”

“I need less than that.” Don answered.

Don lay down divine rune charm arrays. He did not believe in the Goddess of Myers, but it did not prevent him from using the Goddess of Nature’s powers. The Nature Faith had an encompassing doctrine, enabling it to tolerate the presence of false adherents.

Don had the Heaven Knight armor and the chlorite embedded in it was capable of storing large amount of power of faith, which came in handy to activate the divine rune charm array.

The purified adherents were able to have their powers restored, at the cost of giving up a part of their lifespan.

They were forced to fall so their power of faith would not be too pure. Saleen did not care for any of that. Having them become false believers of the goddess would be better than continuing to serve the Holy See.

Regardless of how they fell, the Holy See would no longer be able to tolerate their existence. Gods had no time to discern such matters, especially one who loathed other gods intensely like the Lord of Glory.

Saleen took out the Heaven Knight armors that he had crafted when Don was out to lay out his huge array. It was a given that the armor did not fulfill Don’s requirement and the material it were crafted from was ridiculously simple.

It was crafted with metalized steel rock as the main material, which was mixed with bone armor of magic beasts and bits of refined steel. The lining was made of magic beast pelt.

The most important aspect of the armor was that fragments of fossilized gods were added, enabling it to serve some of the functions of the original Heaven Knight armor.

Don was unable to recruit elite troops, and the armor was very fine equipment for conventional troops.

Saleen only prepared 90 sets of armor of high quality, which was reserved for the 100 demons. Some of the demons had acquired equipment, so Saleen only had to take care of the remaining 90.

Don felt pleased seeing Nailisi distributing the armor to the demons and giving them weapons. While he had a ragtag band of soldiers, his training would make the 2000 and additional 100 demons into fearsome killing machines in no time.

What pleased Don even more was that while the 100 demons were truly considered his assets, the remaining 2000 were all troops from the Tribunal.

He approved immensely of Saleen’s methods, as it was the most direct way of getting revenge: making the adherents of his enemies his warriors. Nailisi’s purgatory of purification was a surprise like no other to him.

He never anticipated the existence of equipment capable of robbing others of their faith. If the Holy See knew that something like that existed, they would probably come to kill her at any cost.

Such a piece of equipment was simply too terrifying. If there was no limit to how the equipment worked, the Holy See would be robbed of everything they accumulated sooner or later. However, according to Don’s knowledge, there was no equipment with no limits.

Nailisi and Saleen had wanted to purify every single adherent in the Holy See, but doing so would require them to at least put them into the purgatory of purification. There was no adherent who would just walk into such a place obediently. If Saleen wanted to purify them, he had to first take them prisoner. It was akin to catching a rat stealing food.

Even mages knew that it would suffice to simply kill it on the spot. There was no need to use any high level magic on the rat.

The battle began early in the morning and ended at noon. Without a level ten professional around to take charge, battles became meaningless. Saleen was reassured as to how future battles would be fought.

It would be reserved for the powerful ones. Anyone below level nine would not be a qualified soldier. Anyone below level seven would best go home and plow the fields instead.

Furthermore, from the notes gathered in the astrology tower, ancient humans with power lower than level four were not even qualified to become farmers. Saleen had been able to deduce how things worked back then.

Alchemy machinery back in ancient times was not as advanced as it was at present. The best way of clearing and opening up lands was to use large magic beasts. However, there was no completely docile large magic beast. There were times where they would get angry. Being a farmer was not an easy job. They needed to have means of subduing animals weighing over a thousand pounds to get the job done.

Don was still being busy with his work, and Saleen did not care about how he was getting the task done. Saleen found a place to lay out the magic map and began to discuss their next destination with Sika.

Not much time had passed in the outside world since they had entered the temple. Only a little more than a month had actually passed. It was not even mid-autumn.

There were only four of 24 temples built by the Goddess of Myers in Cloudflow. One of them seemed to be on an island. The island was several thousand miles away from the mainland.

Saleen was unable to find images of the island on the magic map, which meant that the island was more than 2000 miles away from the mainland.

“Saleen, why not go to the Tanggulasi Empire. Here, you see.” Sika pointed at a marker marking the location of the temple. “It is far away from the vital points of the Holy See. We get to see a lot of enemies there.”

“Sika, we can’t do that. The Holy See is watching our every move. There are already two temple ruins found by the Holy See. We picked both places clean, leaving nothing behind. If the third was found by the Holy See, they would be able to do what we did, mobilizing holy masters in the thousands to calculate the locations of the remaining temples.”

Sika understood right away. Even if the third temple’s location was discovered by the Holy See, they would not be able to calculate the locations of the other temples. But if the Holy See was able to find the fourth temple, they would definitely know what Saleen was up to.

To the public, the Holy See had been around for more than a millennium. The actual history of the Holy See was far longer than that. The Lord of Glory had wanted to sneak into Myers Mainland during the Third Dynasty.

However, the Lord of Glory’s power was insufficient for him to preach on the plane, and the power of humans was still strong.

During the Third Dynasty, humans were still capable of waging wars against believers of all manner of gods by using power equipment. There were very powerful humans on Myers Mainland. Even if a god advented personally, they would get nothing.

The Holy See had been laying low for nearly 10 thousand years, so they knew a lot about the history of the mainland. They would definitely pay attention to anything that had to do with the Goddess of Myers.

While the temple construction projects were carried out secretly by the Goddess of Myers, when the secrets of the temples were discovered, the Holy See would be able to determine the goddess’ intent for carrying such projects in the first place.

Once the Holy See came to such conclusions, they would stop at nothing to prevent the goddess from being resurrected.

Saleen did not care about the goddess’ plans, but he cared a lot about the contract between him and the goddess. He needed to carry out her plans until she was resurrected.

The greater the number of temples he unearthed, the greater his luck would become. Saleen had no doubt about it, and he had gotten solid proof. The luck that he had acquired was incapable of being calculated using any formulas, even astrological ones.

“So where do you intend to go? Don got over 2000 subordinates so he can’t just die. Even Nicholas is enticing three holy masters to fall,” Sika pointed somewhere far away. Three devout holy masters stood before Nicholas and were listening to Nicholas’ lecture about the lies of gods.

“I know what to do, we’ll start from here.” Saleen pointed somewhere outside Alchemy City, about 5000 miles south of Sreeger Island. “There is a temple here and Cloudflow paid next to no attention to it. Alchemy City did not do anything with the place, so that makes it the only safe one. We’ll head back to Metatrin and depart from the sea, sailing alongside the edge of the Stormy Sea, circling around Sreeger Island and head there before anywhere else. It will take us more than a month. The Holy See won’t be able to find us and they’ll go nuts.”

“Go back?”

“Yes, I need to ask Teacher about progress with the Magical Element Tower.” Saleen said as he put away the magic way and unleashed Elemental Stone Statue Soldiers to clear up the place. He began to set a teleportation portal.