Chapter 715 — Beiyila's Intelligence

Countless conjectures and associations surged and ebbed in Gao Yang's mind like a tide, but these questions clearly could not be answered by Beiyila. He could only file them away in memory for now and turn his attention to another matter:

The three church leaders back then had come into contact with the knowledge of the gods after sharing their senses, and that was how they were twisted—so why had the other ordinary believers gone mad all at once as well?

He raised his question, and Beiyila sighed faintly: "Faith—it binds us all together."

Gao Yang's expression abruptly turned stern.

"Faith in the gods is a chain. It took us many years to figure this out. Praying to the same object of worship, following the same commandments and codes, shaping body and mind according to the scriptures, seeking the approach and unity of one's personal 'spiritual gift' with the 'divinity' of the gods—this is the foundation of all faith and all divine arts. Mortals obtain the blessing of divine arts through these acts, but at the same time they lock their own souls onto the same chain. This chain is 'the bridge between gods and men.' And the firmer the faith, the sturdier the chain, and the more it can transmit... power of greater strength."

Beiyila spoke slowly, her tone unprecedentedly heavy and solemn.

"Precisely because of this, when the vast knowledge concerning the gods poured into the minds of the three church leaders, as the very first links on this chain, they in an instant spread that knowledge down the chain...

"The shallowest believers at the far edges might not have been affected, because their faith was not firm enough and their souls still kept a certain distance from the gods. But every divine officer capable of using divine arts was unquestionably a link on this chain—whether or not they were on Mingcen Peak at the time, none of them could escape that terrible shock of knowledge.

"The final result was this: everyone on the chain was affected."

Gao Yang drew a sharp breath.

Faith could cause mortals who held the same belief to establish an invisible connection—this was important intelligence he had never grasped before!

Could this connection be related to the mind brand?

Beiyila's account was full of metaphors and mystical terminology, determined by her own breadth of knowledge and worldview, but for Gao Yang, all of it could be summed up simply in two sentences:

The leaders of the three great dark sects had looked upon the secrets of the gods seven hundred years ago.

In that instant, every devout member of the three sects underwent a collective sanity check.

That terrible mass sanity check produced an obvious result: not a single one of them passed.

But perhaps because the vast numbers of lower- and mid-ranking priests had borne the brunt of that psychic shock, or perhaps because the three church leaders had severed their connection to the divine realm in time, this catastrophic failure of the collective sanity check did not bring about the most horrifying outcome of all. The Order of the Three Ashes fell to darkness in an instant, yet there was no dreadful event in which great swathes of members were directly twisted into monsters. After a brief bout of frenzied behavior, they even "awakened" from their madness and reorganized themselves into three new sects: the Order of All Things' End, the Sleepers Eternal, and the Children of the Storm. They even conducted a great deal of research in an attempt to carry out the Defiance Project...

But thinking it over carefully—after enduring that shock, had they truly "awakened"?

Gao Yang gazed quietly at Beiyila before him.

She stood placidly among the roots and vines, not a trace of madness in her eyes; she appeared rational. Yet look at the vines around her, look at those slowly writhing roots, think of how those roots pierced through layer upon layer of palaces and catacombs, think of that colossal tree beyond all imagination... not one thing about it was normal.

Perhaps this was the very essence of the Order of the Three Ashes: those who had returned from madness with knowledge in hand, a heart convinced it had already awoken, imprisoned within a frenzied shell.

Once manifested, it became a dangerous madman.

"After the Mingcen Peak conference, we suffered tremendous chaos and loss. Great numbers of members charged into the Gondor Wastes; of the rest, many mutilated themselves, took their own lives, or sank into permanent madness from which they could not awake, while those who barely held on to their reason hid themselves away. In that chaotic situation, with everything awaiting reconstruction, hiding was easy. Several more years passed, and the frenzy brought on by the psychic shock gradually abated; only then did we secretly rebuild our strength...

"We knew the truth we held was too shocking for the world. Even speaking half a word of it would draw the attacks of nearly every orthodox sect, and worse, might draw the attention of the gods behind them. So we chose to fall into darkness and seek a way to break the deadlock..."

At this point, Beiyila shook her head and revealed a trace of self-mockery: "Now that I've calmed down and look back, our original purpose really wasn't so complicated. It was the long years and prolonged obsession that made everything drift off course—and more importantly, that Defiance Project...

"The ones who brought us the Defiance Project were two elven druids, a pair of sisters named Ferna Whitefrost and Lerna Whitefrost."