Ch.155Report on the Downfall of Diligence (20)

# The Sacred Fire Dies Down

The sacred fire died down. Hans slumped weakly, coughing. He was too feeble to resist as Kain searched his body.

“The scar is large, but there’s no bleeding.” Even the bite marks from Sister Grace were relatively clean. “Did the Shadow heal it?”

Kain remembered how the knight had treated him in the Black Forest. Hans chuckled.

“Why? Want to learn?”

“I’m intrigued. Healing from a wicked shadow.”

“Not everything dark is evil.” The exhausted Hans rested his head on the floor. “Darkness is concealment and rest. Even the righteous must stand in the shadows to escape the predators of an unjust world.”

“That’s not about you,” Kain retorted. “In an unjust world, the most unjust one was hiding in the shadows.”

Laughter erupted, quickly transforming into violent coughing that tore at his throat. Hans looked up at Kain and Maria with hazy eyes.

“The woman is an inquisitor, but you’re not, right? Are you planning to kill me? Or put me on the stake? If neither, do you intend to present me at the Pope’s breakfast table?”

“No. I plan to bring you before an Imperial court.”

“It’s too late.” Hans shook his head. “He’s coming. The blind one. That crazy bastard carrying a scabbard.”

“How do you know that?”

“He’s ruining everything we’ve done. Everything we’ve accomplished over the past 10 years, he’s taking it all. But even he… can’t stop it. No one can stop the Demon King.”

That again.

Kain stared blankly at the laughing man. He was tired, too exhausted to stand.

But if the Knight of the Scabbard was coming, he couldn’t afford to waste time. The knight would surely kill Hans and drag his corpse away as some mindless monster.

“I’ll protect you.”

Hans seemed too drained to even laugh now. Maria looked at Kain in surprise, but Kain spoke firmly.

“I’ll protect you from him. The Empire can keep you safe. You need to stay alive until you face trial. I’ll protect you until then. I’ve already faced him before.”

Maria chimed in. Kain felt sorry seeing her hands trembling slightly, but she seemed determined not to show it.

“It’s up to you. What’ll it be? Will you help us, or be turned into minced meat and dragged away by him? You don’t seem to have done anything nice to him either. That knight guy seemed to hold quite a grudge. He’ll be delighted to see you, right?”

Hans finally resigned.

“What exactly do you want from me?”

Stretched out on the ground, he showed no fighting spirit. Kain asked first.

“Why do you say the Demon King can’t be killed?”

“Because it appeared differently to each person. To kill it, we’d need consensus, right? Like ‘Aim for the head’ or ‘Block the sword.’

The Demon King wasn’t like that. It wasn’t some tall human with goat legs and horns on its head. It was… something else.

The Demon King Arianne saw was her mother. She suddenly threw down her sword and cried, ‘Mother, please don’t hit me,’ which made me think she’d gone mad. To my eyes, it didn’t look like a woman.”

“What did it look like to you?”

“A drunk man. Someone who drank when sober and either broke something or crashed into something when drunk. Sometimes both. Yes, to me it looked like my father. Ha. William the Chaste was really strange—he said he saw a stake.”

“A stake?”

“During his squire days, he did something that got him tied to a stake on the training ground. Blindfolded, stripped naked, and tightly bound, while passing knights poked his groin with poles. Why did the knights impose such punishment, and what did he do? Aren’t you curious?”

Kain felt only disgust. He simply organized the facts, devoid of emotion.

He already knew the Demon King’s shadow evoked fear. Initially it was just unsettling, but as one got closer to the source, it revealed inner fears. But he hadn’t expected that even its final form would appear differently to everyone.

That was strange. If the Demon King had no physical form…

“Didn’t you say you sealed the Demon King in Ismene’s body?”

How could they seal something like that?

“Ah, Ismene… she was a pretty child. You must have done this too. When you see a beautiful flower while walking, you gently bend down and pluck the petals one by one, carefully so they don’t tear…”

Maria’s eyebrow twitched. She approached Hans and mercilessly stomped on his fingers.

“Aaaaargh!”

“Is that how you did it?”

“Hey, you crazy bitch!”

“Should I tie you to a post and strike your groin? Let me tell you, I have no intention of touching it with my hand. I’ll caress it with my dagger. No, wait. From now on, for every nonsense you spout, I’ll cut off one joint…”

“We put it in!”

Hans screamed. Neither Kain nor Maria understood what he meant. Lost in thought, Maria unconsciously pressed harder on Hans’s fingers.

“Get your foot off! Aaaaargh! Arius, Arius told us! Don’t fear what’s before you. The thing you hate and despise so much is right in front of you, so cut it down, he taught us!

William ‘cut down the stake,’ and I ‘chopped up’ my father. Arianne ‘sliced’ her mother! Everyone did it that way.

But that wasn’t all. It came back together. Can you believe it? ‘It’ wriggled and took form again!

Then, Arius taught us again.”

“Taught you what?”

“That we can’t completely eliminate fear, but we can bury it. Like putting it in a jar and burying it in the ground. He said we could drive it away like that. Conveniently, there was a suitable ‘vessel’ there. The only one that hadn’t broken among what we’d brought.”

“No.”

Maria inadvertently stepped back.

“No. No way. That couldn’t be it. Right? What I’m thinking, that kind of thing, it’s not that, right?”

“What else could we do?” Hans snorted as if it were the stupidest question. “We stuffed it in like making blood sausage. We had no choice.”

Maria backed away, understanding what those words meant.

“You sick bastards. You sick bastards! And you… and you still! You! You call yourselves heroes!”

“…So it wasn’t just cutting off limbs.”

Kain gritted his teeth.

“…It wasn’t just cutting off limbs. You butchered the entire body.”

“I told you. We ‘put it in.’ Arianne couldn’t even do that properly. That cowardly woman, that pale woman turned bright red and collapsed saying, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t!’

Do you know how angry Arius was? He asked if she’d take responsibility if the seal broke because of her! But in the end, that Arianne did nothing.”

Kain clenched his fist.

“But hatred, fear, and resentment are emotions and thoughts. How do you ‘put’ those into someone else’s body?”

Hans snickered.

“Ah, that’s the achievement of our great ancestors. The ancestors of the Life Tree Order accomplished it. They mastered the art of binding grudges, hatred, and thoughts of revenge with sorcery and passing them down through generations.

Just as the tree of life sprouts and continues life through cycles, the roots of hatred follow the same path. The Demon King is precisely that seed of hatred.

It’s hatred condensed over a long time, spreading throughout the world, drawing in hatred, contracting, and spreading hatred again.

The Black Phoenix Faith teaches how to pass on, use, and utilize that hatred. How about it? I could teach you if you join.”

“Who taught you this?”

“Arius the Temperate. He knew everything. The true meaning of the Fifth Crusade. All previous crusades merely planted hatred throughout the world. As the world’s hatred ripened, the Demon King gained strength. With hatred vast enough to cover the wasteland.”

“Lies.” Maria glared. “Where did you hear such nonsense? The Demon King first appeared 10 years ago. The crusade to fight the Demon King was first formed then. Nothing like that happened before.”

“Did it really not happen?” Hans tilted his head and smiled.

“Or was it just not revealed? Hmm? Smart folks. Think about it. Do you announce everything you do?

No, right? It was probably the same back then. The Demon King must have fallen countless times. By people like you who move in the shadows.

But the Demon King, who feeds on hatred, grew too large to hide. Large enough to mobilize a crusade. So I’m very excited. How much larger will it grow from now on?”

Kain recalled the story Elisabet had told him. When the radical faction of the Life Tree, feeling robbed of what was theirs, committed atrocious crimes throughout the Empire, a massacre was carried out in the wasteland where their families lived.

Of course, the Empire must have known about the innocence of the wasteland people. But they couldn’t contain their hatred. And that hatred was incited by the Life Tree radicals.

But they weren’t the first either. Tracing back, it ultimately goes back to the early Empire following the Prophet of Life and Death, and the faction following the doctrine of Light and Fire “driving out” the Shadow and Darkness faction.

Kain couldn’t imagine how many more cycles of hatred existed beyond that. But it was certain that the flow of hatred had been passed down through generations in different forms.

People like himself. How many more had secretly defeated the Demon King?

That too was beyond measure.

“The Demon King cannot be killed,” Hans confirmed.

“It is hatred itself. Condensed, concentrated hatred. The Empire, the Life Tree, and the Two-headed Eagle Order have already become one with hatred. There’s no escape. As long as these exist together, the curse will be eternal.

Your precious Empire and Two-headed Eagle Order drove us to the wasteland! You wouldn’t give such land even to livestock! You rounded up Life Tree Order people from all over the Empire, abandoned them there, and when we tried to reclaim our rights, you captured and killed us all!

So our ancestors cursed the Empire. That they would receive our innocent blood. That your descendants would pay the blood price just as we shed blood!”

Hans snarled. Kain shook his head.

“But that was in the early days of the Empire. It has nothing to do with you…”

“No. It does.”

Hans pointed at Kain with his crushed finger.

“I could never understand why my life was always miserable. Other families were just as poor as mine, but at least their fathers didn’t beat their children like dogs or wander around drunk every day.

Fucking and beating, fucking and beating! They didn’t do that either! What was it? Why the hell was he like that? I couldn’t understand. So I stuck a knife in my father’s stomach and asked. He said he was sorry. His parents and their parents were like that, so he thought it was okay for him too.

I still didn’t get it. Only after joining the crusade and receiving wisdom from Arius did I understand. Ah, the noble blood of the Life Tree flows in our family.”

Hans’s words seemed incredibly sweet. Kain looked down at him stoically.

“You’re insane.”

“How else would you explain it!” Madness flashed in Hans’s eyes.

“Beating children generation after generation—how do you explain this if not as a curse! I understood. It’s because I’m a priest of the Life Tree. Our family was a Life Tree priest family! We had the duty to carry hatred and pass it down through generations!”

Hans even jerked his body.

Despite burning the evil darkness, hatred still remained in his body. Not a curse, but his own hatred. The flames he had carefully stored since childhood.

A madman who couldn’t control his anger was ranting, arbitrarily piecing together old hatreds to justify why his own hatred was righteous.