Chapter 483 — The Program
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Ever since the civil war in the Southern Region ended, all the church forces throughout the South had entered a kind of interregnum. The most influential, the Church of the Dark Luminary, had been sealed within the Dark Wall City, and its missionaries' activities had ceased along with it. As for the churches of the alien gods beyond the Church of the Shining Luminary—those that had always been relatively weak and scattered—they swiftly caught the scent of danger and voluntarily halted or reduced the frequency of their activities in the South. One could say that with the end of the Southern war, the propagation of faith across this land had in substance become a vacuum—the only thing still spreading was the "New Faith of Holy Light," or rather the "Pure Doctrine of Holy Light," slowly seeping outward from Xuanyao City.
And with the launch of the "public-opinion offensive," this slowly permeating New Faith would rapidly fill that vacuum. Correspondingly, the influence of the old Church of the Shining Luminary would suffer extremely grievous blows in the process.
Cecil's printing presses began to turn.
Newspapers and propaganda materials blanketed the entire Southern Region. Every day, every hour, every minute, every second, exposés and discussions of the Church of the Shining Luminary appeared before people's eyes.
Under the pens of Godwin Orlando and Wright, these articles dissected that colossal beast, the Church of the Shining Luminary, in an extremely cold, extremely clear and straightforward manner. For the first time, the Church was not presented as a lofty transcendent power, not as a holy collective haloed with divinity, but as an ordinary force that relied on strength to sustain itself and on money to operate, laid bare before everyone. After stripping away all the ornate rhetoric and concealment, people saw for the first time how the Church actually worked—how it controlled the dissemination of theological knowledge, how it maintained the purity of its top members, how it recruited newcomers, how it amassed wealth, how it maintained armed force to secure its own position, how it fabricated lies to strike down its competitors...
Once every detail had been dissected clean, every link in the Church of the Shining Luminary's operation became utterly devoid of anything sacred.
And on this foundation, news from Frostgate City began to quietly appear on all the prominent pages of the newspapers, as current-events items interspersed amid the "popular science columns."
As the chief writer of the news pages, Godwin Orlando's command of prose revealed its formidable power. His articles required no invective, contained no vehement emotional expression; he merely quietly stated the facts about the Church of the Shining Luminary, and already thousands upon thousands of people had been awakened.
Yet newspapers alone were not enough.
In Xuanyao City, inside a special building at the edge of the mages' district, Gibri was striving to calm her feelings.
This building had originally been part of the Magical Technology Research Institute, but with the establishment of the Magic Net Communication-Broadcast Composite System, it had been partitioned off and made independent as the control hub of Magic Net communication and broadcasting. On its upper floor, technicians had worked overtime on renovation and construction; drawing on the experience of the first Magic Net broadcast, this place had been converted into Cecil's first "studio" with practical significance.
Though she considered herself to have strong psychological fortitude, though she had previously been full of confidence, now that the moment had truly arrived, Gibri still felt an irrepressible nervousness flooding her heart.