Chapter 1 Silence in the Holy Image Palace

Silence reigned in the Holy Image Palace. The wide, magnificent temple was completely enveloped in an eerie tranquility. A hazy, swirling mist drifted from an unknown source, almost uniformly covering every inch of the palace floor. In the dimness, a twilight-like glimmer filled the air, but this light held no warmth; it only radiated a thick malice and maddening gloom.

This twilight glow had never appeared in any previous Chaos Tide, so Karasuss and the others didn't know what it meant. However, after experiencing those illusions, Hao Ren understood that it was a sign of Lockmarton.

It was seeping into the real world, first with the enormous shadow floating over Luan City, and now with the twilight radiance filling the Holy Image Palace.

There were no survivors in the palace, but neither were there any corpses. Not even the slightest trace of battle could be found.

"No one... and no bodies..." Hao Ren murmured in a low voice, "This place was supposed to be the gathering point for the Church's most powerful warriors, but they've all vanished without a trace, without even a hint of resistance."

Lily ran back and forth in front of the group, occasionally bending down to sniff the air with her sensitive nose. Soon, she trotted back, wagging her tail, "Landlord, there's no smell of blood either!"

Karasuss took a platinum scepter from his dimensional pocket. The scepter released a constant, warm white light in his hand, slightly dispelling the thick malice and madness in the air. His expression was grave. "It looks like everyone disappeared at the same time, otherwise there would be at least some trace. What kind of power could do this? Even the magic array in the palace shows no signs of activation... That array is directly controlled by the Pope's brainwaves. With just a thought from His Holiness, the Holy Image Palace would enter its highest defense mode. No matter how urgent the situation, His Holiness wouldn't lack the time to activate the array, would he?"

Hao Ren didn't say anything. A thought suddenly flashed through his mind: unless the Pope had no intention of activating the magic array at all.

"Uncle, where's that 'Gatekeeper' you mentioned?" Lily suddenly asked.

Karasuss pointed towards the corridor ahead, "Go through this corridor, through the garden area, and you'll find a teleportation array and spiral staircase leading to the upper level of the Twin Towers. But now, I don't know if the teleportation array is still usable, so we can only take the spiral staircase."

In the oppressive silence, the long corridor finally came to an end. After passing through an archway with intricate and gorgeous decorations, a garden suddenly appeared before everyone's eyes.

The garden was quite large, complete with fountains, ponds, and sculptures, resembling an exquisite and well-equipped high-end garden. However, a dim dome could be seen above the garden: this garden was actually built indoors.

The plants in the garden were unexpectedly not withered, even more lush and verdant than usual. However, all the plants were covered in a pale gray and yellowish hue, strange and full of decay.

This immediately heightened the vigilance of everyone preparing to enter the garden.

Lily walked in the front, the first to step into the garden. Hao Ren followed behind the husky girl. Suddenly, as Lily crossed some kind of boundary, a layer of faint white light radiated from her body.

The husky girl was stunned by this sight, but Hao Ren reacted instantly. He immediately took out his pistol and spear from his personal space, loudly warning, "Be careful! There are Chaos Spawn nearby!"

Lily's constitution of automatically glowing upon entering a Chaos Domain had become a particularly useful fully automatic alarm.

Karasuss had been with the head wolf for a long time and knew what the sudden release of Order Light meant. The high-ranking monk instantly silently cast several protective spells on the knights and sub-race barbarians beside him. At the same time, he held a scepter in one hand and a sacred energy orb in the other, speaking rapidly, "Which direction?!"

At this time, Lily finally reacted. She quickly turned to look at her tail, finding that the fur on her tail had uncontrollably puffed up, and the light fluctuating on the fur was converging in one direction.

"Underground!" the husky girl shouted, "The power of Chaos is below! What's underground?!"

Karasuss was stunned for a moment, then hesitated for two seconds before saying, "The garden area underground... that's the resting place of the Holy Spirits, where the holy souls of the past receive the Goddess's protection and attain immortality..."

Lily glared back at the high-ranking monk, "Woof in your face! Speak human!"

Hao Ren took over before Karasuss could speak, "He means it's the tombs of the past Popes!"

As he spoke, he couldn't help but recall the words the nightmare shadow had said before it dissipated, remembering the name the nightmare shadow mentioned: Benedict III, the Pope of the Holy See more than two thousand years ago.

He couldn't help but curse inwardly, "What the hell, so that's what that monster meant..."

As he cursed inwardly, the entire Holy Image Palace seemed to shake violently.

A low hum came from underground in the garden. Icy cold air broke through the ground, instantly covering the surrounding vegetation with a layer of frost. Then, the nearby soil began to undulate and churn at a visible rate!

"Here they come!" Hao Ren shouted, simultaneously drawing his gun and firing without hesitation.

A burst of blue light erupted rapidly. Countless glittering and translucent fragments scattered from the point of explosion. Beneath the fragments, a twisted, unstable thing emitting black smoke could be seen rushing out of the ground due to inertia—however, the crystallization of ectoplasmic erosion was not something that ordinary things could resist. The black figure was covered in crystals as it rose, turning into a huge crystal when it emerged from the ground. Then, it shattered with a bang, without even letting out a howl.

But this was only the first.

One after another, black monsters emerged from the earth. The power of Chaos rapidly filled the surrounding space like a tide. The forms of these monsters were bizarre. They weren't all meat blocks shrouded in smoke as Hao Ren had initially guessed—some had a large number of tentacles, some were covered in eyes and sharp teeth, some were simply standard meat spheres, and some still retained a faint human shape. Apart from the monsters that still retained some human form, they looked like randomly deformed lumps of flesh, and the only thing these monsters had in common was that they were all shrouded in black Chaos smoke and released powerful mental fluctuations!

Karasuss suddenly exclaimed in a lost voice, "That's... the Church's insignia?!"

Hao Ren followed the other's gaze and saw that among a group of monsters, there was actually one wearing clothes—it was a nightmare shadow that barely maintained its human form. It was draped in a tattered cloth, from which only the style of the clothing could be vaguely discerned, but a pale gold circular emblem on it was clearly visible.

"It probably hasn't rotted away yet," Hao Ren said quickly, "This proves it, these are indeed the Popes of the past!!"

A huge shock swept through the Church warriors present. These brave and fearless soldiers were completely unable to accept the fact that the Popes of the past had been corrupted into monsters—this corruption may have started a long time ago, and in the accumulation of thousands of years, every Pope sent to the Holy Mausoleum had become like this. Or it may have only been corrupted recently, but in any case, these monsters came from the Holy Mausoleum and had the Church's insignia. One monster had even spoken the name of a Pope from two thousand years ago. These facts were enough to make the devout monks and knights lose any will to fight.

However, those monsters would not stop just because of the humans' wavering. While the Church warriors were at a loss, they had already formed a black cloud in the garden area, followed by swift and powerful attacks.

That was the most dangerous, most elusive, and most difficult to resist power: a mental attack.

A wave of dizziness and all kinds of bizarre hallucinations swept over him. Hao Ren seemed to see the monsters wrapped in smoke gradually condense into an unprecedentedly huge entity. They turned into a mountain, a storm, an endless and invincible source of power. In this power, a powerful voice echoed in his mind:

Submit! Submit to this power! Submit to your fear! Submit to your fatigue! Submit to...

Hao Ren stared, and all the illusions vanished, "Submit to your ass! My year-end bonus depends on this fight!"

"How could you..."

"Nonsense—you guys were still rotting in this basement when I was playing Inception with demigods!"

However, although Hao Ren and Lily (the husky didn't know what she did, but she wasn't bewitched by the mental illusions either) broke free from this powerful mental attack, the situation was still rapidly deteriorating.

The reason was simple—they weren't just facing the monsters in front of them, and they weren't the only ones under attack.

More monsters—or rather, the distorted souls of the past Popes—were awakening in the underground mausoleum. The quantitative change in mental attacks would inevitably lead to qualitative change, and the Church warriors and sub-race barbarians, composed of mortals, did not have Hao Ren's powerful mental resistance. Their mental defenses were collapsing, and they couldn't hold on for long!

Illusions continued to emerge. At first, they were just phantoms in the spiritual world, but gradually, even bizarre shadows appeared in the real world.

The weaker soldiers and barbarians had fallen into a trance. Their spiritual world began to become a springboard, allowing more distorted shadows to enter the real world.

Hao Ren felt that his various senses were declining. All kinds of non-existent negative feelings were emerging out of thin air—it hadn't reached a critical point yet, but he felt that it would be very dangerous if this continued. Even if he was fine, the ordinary people around him would probably have big problems.

With a "bang," another distorted soul was turned into crystal dust by his ectoplasmic pistol. Then, he turned to look at Karasuss and shouted loudly, "You guys retreat immediately! Leave this to me—I'm going to purify the entire mausoleum area in one go!"

However, Karasuss slowly turned his head, his eyes unfocused, seemingly unable to recognize Hao Ren at all.

"Damn it... it looks like even the most reliable one has failed..."

At this moment, Hao Ren's mental connection suddenly opened, and the voice of the Data Terminal came:

"Partner~ We've managed to get the material teleporter beta 1.0 working over here. Want to send you some stuff to test it out?"

Hao Ren was stunned for a moment, then overjoyed, "Hurry up! Send me someone with a combat power of 20,000! This place is getting crazy!"