Chapter 530 — The Day of Departure
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
"Is that all she said to you?"
Inside the lord's manor, Gao Yang studied Wright before him and asked, curious.
"Yes," Wright nodded. "She asked me about the doctrines of the New Church. She showed no excitement at any point, offered no rebuttal—and no support either. I could not begin to guess what she was after."
Gao Yang rubbed his chin and gave a slight shake of his head. "Her aims have always been buried deep."
Emily hovered nearby, fiddling curiously with the pen stand Gao Yang kept on his desk. Suddenly she turned her head. "That lady has light everywhere around her."
Emily possessed a powerful affinity for holy light, all the more so now that she had become a spirit being, so Gao Yang did not dismiss the little girl's offhand remark. "What kind of light? The same as the holy light around Wright?"
Emily tilted her head up and thought, swinging her head from side to side. "Not quite the same—the light around Uncle is pure white, but the light around her is pale gold."
Gao Yang's brows drew together. "Pale gold holy light..."
He could not help recalling what Camille had reported to him earlier.
Camille, once a senior researcher on the Defiance Project and someone who had come into direct contact with the power of the gods, had sensed something peculiar about that "Saint Princess." His judgment was that Virolde was either connected to the gods or had been to the divine realm...
"Been to the divine realm" of course did not mean literally setting foot in the kingdom of the gods as a mortal. This touched on a concept in religious studies: scholars held that the realms of the gods were not directly connected to the mortal world, but were separated by several layers of barriers beyond mortal comprehension. Under normal circumstances a mortal could never reach the divine kingdom by any means, but on certain special planes, the power of the divine kingdom radiated and spread into the vicinity of the mortal world, and a portion of a mortal's life structure—such as soul perception, dreams, extrasensory feeling—might have the chance to touch these outspread divine domains.
In most cases such contact brought terrible consequences. The mortal mind could not withstand the immense torrent of information from the divine realm; the one who touched it would be swallowed almost instantly by endless visions and memories, and their physical form in the material world would be twisted into something indescribable. The few who returned alive brought back knowledge of the gods.
Such rare "contact" had occurred more than once in history, and those fortunate souls who had touched the divine kingdom and returned unharmed, retaining their human minds, had essentially all become saints and prophets in the legends of the various sects.
As far as Gao Yang knew, the Sunstar Church, the strongest of the orthodox faiths, possessed many special rites of divine grace, some of which concerned "contact with the divine realm." But to truly step into the divine kingdom and return safely was itself a matter of chance one could not seek; these rites were in essence more like a form of "catalysis," temporarily amplifying a person's spiritual gift through the power of sacred relics so that they might hear a whisper of information from the divine realm.
Virolde, as the Sunstar Church's "living saint," had most likely undergone such a special rite.
Had she successfully touched the true divine domain during the rite? Had she seen "that world"?
If that were true, then Virolde must be the most devout follower of the God of Holy Light. Even if she had not been before, after entering "that world" and standing face to face with the God of Holy Light, she surely was now.
And yet a follower of the God of Holy Light devout to the utmost extreme... why would she calmly listen to Wright expound those heretical doctrines of the New Church?