Xio and Forsi squatted on the lower canopy of the tree, looking at a relatively open place not far away with dim lights.
They are surrounded by evergreen leaves and filled with gray dust. The dark colors match their brand new night clothes, hiding in the dim night, almost blending into the environment.
"What do you think you are doing?" Xio poked Forsi next to her.
Not far away from them, seven or eight young men and women in black robes, led by a middle-aged man, were jumping up and down around a corpse, their limbs twitching and their expressions crazy.
"Maybe it's a custom from the Southern Continent..." Forsi answered subconsciously as his attention was almost attracted by the rhythmic movements of the crazy dance.
For some reason, she happened to know some of the customs of the Southern Continent. For example, people there generally believed in the God of Death, and they liked to use the unique method of spiritual dance to conduct ceremonies to pray for the great gods to respond to them.
"Although the dance is very out of shape, it should be the spiritual dance from the southern continent. At least the middle-aged man's dance is quite standard."
Although the spread of the belief in the God of Death is not allowed in the kingdom, Forsi was inspired by a rough understanding of the customs of the Southern Continent and wanted to write a masterpiece like "Twenty Years a Slave" by Emperor Russell, so
I spent money to go to the pier to watch the performance of the Southern Continent Circus.
Yes, it is a circus performance. Although proselytizing is not allowed, the upper-class gentlemen of Loen seem to like the simple natural art of the southern continent, so they do not ban performances of spiritual dances and other related customs, but only require all circus bosses to
They are of Loen bloodline to ensure that no extremists will take this opportunity to carry out attacks.
But speaking of it, the route to the southern continent was opened by Emperor Russell... It is really a bit strange for a pioneer in the colonial era to write "Twenty Years a Slave"... and this book
Or he wrote it after he had already served as consul.
Forsi's thoughts were flying in his mind, and he was a little distracted for a moment.
After all, these children's tricks in front of me are really boring.
She and Xio originally thought that those who had the courage to dig graves in Backlund were at least mid-level Beyonders, so they just wanted to deal with Mr. Luo Ge and then find any reason to reject him.
But I didn't expect that the group of people dancing the spiritual dance at the moment were all ordinary people. Only the middle-aged man in the lead had a slight flash of spiritual light, and it seemed that he had picked up some magical item.
"Wait a minute, Forsi, do you feel that the spirit of the corpse has become active again?" Unlike his friends, Xio, who always worked seriously, kept a close eye on the spirit dance scene.
She suddenly patted Forsi who was distracted and spoke in a serious tone.
"What's wrong?"
Looking in the direction Xio pointed, the expression on Forsi's face changed slightly.
In the empty space, the unprofessional middle-aged man was about to perform the last step of the ceremony.
He took out a copper whistle from his pocket, held it high under the rich crimson moonlight, and spoke the Hermetic language with an off-key accent.
"grim Reaper!"
"The Great Death!"
"Please respond to the spirit of the servant's token and help me bring back the soul of this lost lamb!"
After he finished shouting, several boys and girls who were dancing in the spirit suddenly stopped their movements, and their red cheeks quickly lost color due to exercise. Even they themselves did not notice it, but they were still looking forward to "the appearance of death".
"Woo!" The man put the copper whistle in his hand to his mouth and blew loudly. He looked at the corpse with enthusiasm and poured a large ball in the bag at his feet onto the corpse's chest.
It was a ball of warm blood that still remained!
"They also killed people?" Xio frowned.
In her spiritual vision, not only did the corpse lying on the ground have a vague sign of re-condensing the spirit body, but even the spilled blood exuded a strange crimson color, not to mention the whistle just now that had been calling out from the void.
The spirit that emerged from the.
"This should be a messenger, a spirit servant that can only be found in the mid-level order and is good at communicating with the spirit world."
Fors had seen similar descriptions in the Abraham family's "Spirit Realm Insights" and the ancient book annotated by Tristan Eugen, but the tone was still somewhat uncertain.
Could it be that this man was actually a puppet controlled by an extraordinary person, and that the owner of the messenger was the real driving force behind all this?
"Woo, woo, woo!"
A cold wind passed by, and the dead body covered in blood on the ground did not get up in the end. The man who blew the whistle looked at all this with some disappointment and shook his head.
"It seems it still has no effect. Obviously the corpse last time can be moved." A bolder boy stepped forward and touched the corpse's shoulder with his toes, hoping for a miracle to happen.
But after waiting for four or five seconds, the body was still lying on the ground, motionless.
"Kevira, there's no need to try again. The divination says that today's spirituality is not the strongest time. When the full moon comes, we can try again. Maybe we will succeed."
The hooded man played with the copper whistle in his hand. Although his face was slightly depressed, he still comforted the young man and turned to pick up the packages scattered on the ground.
"Okay." The young man scratched his head in disappointment and turned to leave.
Another gust of cold wind blew by, and the young man's neck felt a little chilly. He looked at the companions in front of him with either frightened or excited eyes, as if he had realized something, and slowly turned around.
Behind him, the corpse that had been unresponsive to any touch stood up unsteadily and stared blankly at his chest.
"Teacher, it's successful!" The boy was about to cheer to the man behind him who was also stunned. Before he finished speaking, the corpse followed the instinct of the undead and roughly hugged his arms and bit his collarbone.
, and his flesh and blood suddenly became blurred.
"Ah, help!" The cold breath spread from the wound. The boy struggled to escape, but found that his body was increasingly lacking strength.
The corpse on his shoulder was biting hard on his collarbone, and his eyeballs had rotted away. Only his empty eyes were left looking in the direction of the distant woods, and a heavy sound kept coming from his throat.
"Did it see us?"
Xio and Forsi, who were squatting on the tree crown, looked at each other in shock. They jumped down almost at the same time and pulled out the dagger from their waists.
Although it was not a wise choice, dealing with a dead body and saving a group of ordinary people was within their capabilities.
"I order you in the name of death, stop!"
The man holding a copper whistle kept blowing the whistle, trying to control the dead body in front of him, while the boys and girls gathered around him ran away in a hurry when the dead body just hurt people.
"I order you in the name of death, stop!"
The off-key Hermes language echoed in the dense forest. The man with a hood covering his face pursed the copper whistle between his lips, and large beads of sweat slid down his cheeks.
The corpse was still biting poor Kevera, and his eyes without eyeballs were still staring at the dense forest in the distance, looking persistently at the darkness, looking at the tree that had just jumped down, unable to see clearly.
The two figures suddenly exerted force on their limbs.
"Ho ho ho!"
Its rotten vocal cords could no longer produce a complete sound, and the muscles on its face were stretched by the roaring expression. The gray-skinned corpse let go of the warmth in its hands and rushed straight towards the man not far away, mixed with meat scraps and blood-red teeth.
With dripping liquid drops, he snatched the copper whistle from the hands of the frightened man and ran towards Xiu and Forsi.
"Stop!"
The "Arbiter" waved his left hand forward, and raised his triangular blade with his right hand. The angle was tricky than the part under the corpse's ribs. As long as it dared to rush over, Xio was confident that it could separate the corpse.
"etc!"
Because of his "apprentice" nature, Forsi, whose inspiration was more acute than Xio's, was the first to notice something was wrong.
She did not raise the dagger, but turned sideways to get out of the way, watching the crazy corpse pass between herself and her friend, running towards the darkness beyond.
"My spiritual intuition has not been touched. Its target has never been us from the beginning..." She looked at Xio who looked puzzled and shook her head slightly.
............
In the woods farther away, the running corpse gradually stopped. Its skin, which was already fragile due to lack of blood after death, was bloody and blurred, leaving a series of deep red and almost black footprints behind it.
The frantic corpse knelt on the ground, its mouth still dripping with saliva mixed with blood pointing to the ground. It could not help but make a terrifying friction sound in its throat. It raised its hands high and dedicated the copper whistle in its palm to the man in dark blue in front of him.
A gentleman in formal attire.
"Items from the Spiritual Religion..." Azik Eggers, wearing a half-high silk hat, pinched his forehead and felt a slight headache.
Just now, when he was chasing a familiar aura, he suddenly saw a spiritual dance ceremony being held nearby. He took a look from a distance and happened to encounter the corpse that was out of control.
Originally, he just planned to teach the teacher who was unreliable and led the students to perform extraordinary rituals without permission. However, after seeing the bronze whistle in his hand, Azik changed his mind and chose to let the corpse take the bronze whistle.
Deliver it to yourself.
"You can sleep now."
He didn't even notice that the "Death Archon" whose tone had become colder nodded slightly. After receiving the order, the dead body immediately got up from the ground, ran to a distant place, and dug into the cemetery with both hands toward a piece of moister and softer land.
.
It will bury itself in it.
Azik observed the copper whistle in his palm as if nothing had happened, which was very similar to the item he left in the student's grave. He suppressed the desire to blow it, and recited a line of honorary names with some tangle.
"...the great Ambrosius..."
The stars twinkled in the dark forest. The angel who had nothing to do recently descended on this ordinary open space. He looked at the "Death Archon" who summoned him with some surprise, and wanted to say hello passionately when he saw the copper whistle.
was extinguished in an instant.
Unfortunately, He only rested for less than a week.
"Is this an item from the Spiritual Religion?"
He did not ask why Azik called him so skillfully, but first divided the surrounding space from reality to avoid what would happen later and alarm the demigods in Backlund's urban area.
"I felt an inexplicable attraction, but I...I can't remember the source of this attraction." Azik's expression was slightly painful. The more he recalled, the more confused his memory became.
The last time he felt this kind of torture was when he had just recovered part of his memory, but at that time there was an arrangement by the "God of Mystery", so he could continue to maintain his personality without incident.
But this time, if he insisted on retrieving the relevant memories, or succumbed to the attraction and blew the copper whistle directly, his intuition told him that the person who responded to the whistle was definitely not the weak messenger just now, but
It's something more terrifying.
"You should know that the Spiritual Religion has been planning to 'resurrection' the God of Death, and they seem to have achieved some results." Ambrosius looked at Azik with meaning.
Before the Lord fell asleep, one of the tasks He was given was to monitor every move that the Death Church was involved in.
After the death of the God of Death, only one angel was left in the entire remaining force of the God of Death to take charge of the overall situation. Coupled with the deliberate attack of the Church of the Night, Ambrosius would hardly be in danger.
However, the Goddess of Night has never obtained uniqueness, and the Spiritual Cult does not seem to have mastered uniqueness. It has only been influencing the missing remnants of the God of Death in a way from a distance, trying to resurrect the God of Death by activating extraordinary characteristics.
"I have heard of this plan," Azik answered Ambrosius's question, "In a previous life, I even traced a link in the chain of this plan, but those spiritual cults
The members are just mechanically completing the instructions from the upper level, and even the direction of the ritual is vaguely pointing to the underworld."
"This is almost useless." Azik put down the finger that had been rubbing his forehead.
Indeed, the goddess of the night has a high probability of mastering a Sequence One characteristic, and Russell once also mastered a Sequence One characteristic - now that characteristic may have been transferred to Bernadette, and the Spiritual Religion itself only retains one Sequence One characteristic.
With one copy of Sequence One and one copy of untouchable uniqueness, the God of Death has no solid basis for resurrection.
What's more, there are many factions within them, and the Royal Faction and the Artificial Death Faction, which have mastered Sequence One, are not on a united front... Ambrosius looked at Azik thoughtfully, and suddenly his mind
A slightly out-of-the-box idea came to mind.
The Royal Faction of the Spiritual Religion consider themselves orthodox, so what would their attitude be if this Death God's son, a "Death Archon" returns on his own initiative?
Azik felt this contemplative gaze and swept it away based on his feelings, feeling a little confused.
There is a high probability that Azik Eggers will take advantage of his weakness to steal this Sequence 2 characteristic, and create another "God of Death" with the "Pale Emperor" as the center... Ambrosius smiled slightly,
His half-closed eyes blocked the exotic look in his eyes, and he shook his head slightly.
"It's nothing. I just want to suggest that you donate this copper whistle to my lord. Anyway, your revenge depends on your current strength alone... It's more difficult, isn't it?"
............
Next to the open space where the ceremony was just held.
The injured boy ran away shortly after the corpse released its mouth, leaving only the middle-aged man who was forced to kneel on the ground by Xio and Forsi.
"So you're really just an ordinary person?"
Although the middle school teacher almost peed under Xio's majesty, Forsi still didn't believe that an ordinary person could really make a corpse go crazy through spiritual dance.
"I learned the spiritual dance from an old gentleman..." Glancing at the three-edged blade in Xio's hand, the middle-aged teacher - Copusti Reid, took the initiative