Chapter 972 — Like a Shadow
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The words were written beneath the small prayer stand. The bloodstains had been wiped away, yet the fluorescent marks stood out plainly before Dai Lan's eyes. She saw those lines quivering and twisting, each stroke seeming to have seeped out the writer's entire strength, and it was as though she could see through them the incomparably intense emotions Malм Dunit had felt as he wrote them—
Close to madness.
Dai Lan withdrew her gaze from those frenzied characters, then searched the entire room once more. This time she found nothing further—the officiants responsible for the cleanup had been quite diligent.
The black-haired head maid blinked, turned, and prepared to leave the scene.
Yet the instant she turned, a powerful surge of magical energy abruptly gathered within the room—no, it descended out of thin air into the room as though from another realm!
Dai Lan spun around at once, and the next second she sensed an invisible wind of magic sweeping through the entire prayer room. Threads of black-red aura surfaced from the air, converging and taking shape around the small prayer stand like a vortex, as though the blood once spilled here were flowing backward into some long-vanished body. The dim little lampstand suddenly blazed up, and in the abruptly brightened radiance a tall, semi-transparent figure formed, as though compounded of smoke and light and shadow, hovering in midair!
"Blasphemous heretic!" The illusory, distorted figure fixed its deathly stare on Dai Lan standing within the prayer room and let out an furious roar, while the smoke-wreathed face faintly took on the likeness of Malм Dunit. With that roar he suddenly flung wide his arms, as though embracing or offering himself up, and prayed aloud, "O Lord! Send down the punishment of souls and destroy this heretic who defiles the holy sanctuary!"
The instant that illusory figure emerged, Dai Lan had already assumed a defensive stance. Faint light glimmered in her eyes; pale white halos abruptly appeared across her limbs and torso, and a layer of barely perceptible shielding covered her whole body. The next second, Malм Dunit's prayer summoned a hazy phantom—a phantom like a giant clad in black armor, its face shrouded in black mist, with only a pair of scarlet, murderous eyes burning deep within the fog. It rose above Malм and stepped out in midair, hoisted high a battle-axe wreathed in flame, and brought it savagely down at Dai Lan!
The axe seemed impossible to evade. Dai Lan's body had barely begun to move when the illusory blade had already fallen upon her head, and then from skull to torso the axe passed without the slightest obstruction through the black-haired maid's body.
Nothing happened.
Dai Lan glanced down at her unscathed body, and her figure swiftly faded, vanishing from the room in the blink of an eye.
The illusory iron-armored giant hung motionless in midair for a moment, then likewise began to fade and dissolve. In the prayer room rose Malм Dunit's slightly bewildered murmur: "...A pile of steel... no heart?"
Hasty footsteps came from the corridor, interspersed with urgent, low-voiced exchanges. Then the prayer room's door, already ajar, was flung open, and a squad of fully armed Church knights and a large number of combat officiants poured into the modest room.
The room was utterly empty—no intruders, no anomalies. To the bewildered officiants, there was only a small lamp nearby burning quietly, casting a drowsy, dim light through the prayer room.
...
Pei Yi Wendell's expression was grave as his gaze slowly swept across the great map of the entire Empire. On that map, produced through the painstaking efforts of countless cartographers, patches and swathes of rust color, great and small, could be seen everywhere, spread across the whole realm.