WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Hydrogen B

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Chapter 129: The Slanted Ceiling and the Mountain of Smiling Corpses - 1

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There was water at the bottom of the Abyss. Water that lapped at my ankles, with a slightly sticky feel.

I knew because I had experienced it myself. If you want to argue, go step on the bottom of the Abyss yourself.

I had just made the discovery of the century, but people still mattered more than facts. I decided to check who was here first.

I shouted into the pitch-black darkness.

"Is everyone all right? Sound off! One!"

"Two!"

Callis, tense as could be, answered first. A soldier through and through. She still had not shaken off military life.

"Three!"

The immortal, always quick to adapt to a situation, answered next. After that, silence fell.

A moment later, the regressor's voice came.

"...I'm fine. So are Azzy, Nabi, and Tyr."

Seriously?

"Wow, you're not going to sound off? Read the room, will you? Can't you match the mood?"

"Why do we need to say numbers? Isn't it enough to know everyone's fine?"

By that logic, I could read everyone's minds, so there was no need to check at all!

As for the beasts...

"Woof..."

"Meow..."

They were alive, so that was enough. Right. Beast Kings were not going to fall that easily.

I berated the regressor.

"We're checking so we can be reassured when we can't see each other. Honestly. Do you think we're counting off because we're idiots?"

"Wait. I'll check.... Seven-Colored Eyes, Fifth Color. Azure Eye, open."

Blue light flickered in the regressor's eyes for an instant. I looked disapprovingly at her as she alone secured a view with that cheating skill.

"Do you really have to say something like 'Seven-Colored Eyes, open' out loud? Isn't that embarrassingly childish?"

"It's to focus my mind! What's wrong with saying it out loud?"

"You can't even say 'four,' yet you're perfectly willing to say something embarrassing like Seven-Colored Eyes, Fifth Color. Is that the disease middle-school second-years get? Though you never even went to middle school."

"Hey! Be quiet, I need to look around!"

The regressor snapped at me, then looked around with eyes that could see depth. Now then. Should I steal another look through her perspective? Show me what you see.

So I read the scene the regressor was seeing.

The first thing I saw was Tantalus, overturned and tilted at an angle. The prison building had crashed down the slope, while we, hanging from ropes, had somehow managed to stand on the damp ground while dangling upside down.

The ground we had stood on moments ago had become the ceiling. The sight of heaven and earth literally turned upside down felt so unreal that it was as though we had stepped into an abstract painting.

At a glance, it looked as though Tantalus had tilted and struck the bottom. But that could not explain the endless void we had seen below just moments ago.

If there had been a bottom from the start, it would have stopped when it tilted instead of overturning. The instant the ground flipped over, something that defied common sense must have happened. Perhaps the Abyss had no bottom because it was a space that could only be reached by turning it over.

After inspecting the easy-to-see ceiling, the regressor cast her gaze toward the bottom.

"...Huh?"

There was something there.

From a distance, it looked like a massive mountain. Its slope was gentler than that of tilted Tantalus, but it was unmistakably a mountain, with a peak and ridges.

A gentle mountain beneath this Abyss. Water sloshing around us.

...And the strange texture beneath my feet.

The Azure Eye, which saw depth, could not distinguish fine textures well.... Still, even through that eye, the material making up that mountain looked alien.

Why did every rock in sight have five protrusions, like fingers and toes?

Ah, no. Those were not rocks. Nor were they protrusions shaped like fingers.

This was...

"Awooooo!"

Azzy howled. She leaped from the ground, dug her claws into the upside-down Tantalus, hanging there like a bat, and clung to it. As if she did not want to go anywhere near the ground, she barked furiously and hurriedly grabbed the support holding everyone tied up.

But no one could answer her cry.

We were too overwhelmed by what filled this land.

"...B-blood. All of this is...."

I realized it without needing an expert's opinion. My nose was already full of the scent of blood that had crept in unnoticed.

Could this really be called blood? Or...

"Callis. Stay still. Something is wrong."

Even the immortal sensed the danger and muttered those words.

Then, in place of the vanished daylight lamp, the nighttime lights came on.

The prison, buried far away in the ground, glowed faintly. Dim light shone from the nighttime lights scattered throughout the building. At the same time, the searchlights mounted on the prison walls to track down escapees began moving.

The bright yellow searchlights, unaware that the land had been overturned, diligently swung back and forth as they pursued human-shaped figures far from the prison....

The round beams trembled wildly.

Wildly.

"Ah...."

Someone gasped.

The yellow light cutting a circle through the darkness looked like the trembling pupil of someone seized by terror. It zigzagged as though it wanted to survey the entire mountain. The circular beam wandered without purpose.

Every part the light touched.

Without exception.

Held a human shape.

"The massacre of three hundred thousand, the Conquering King's karma.... A mountain of corpses and a sea of blood."

It was a tragedy that could only be achieved through overwhelming numbers.

Three hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand people had been thrown alive into a pit. The first people to strike the ground must have died instantly. The second and third probably died too after such a fall. Perhaps that was how the first ten thousand died.

Once enough people had piled up, the difference in height diminished, and the bottom became soft with heaps of flesh.

I did not know when that happened. Probably no one did. Even the Conquering King, who had pushed people into the pit, likely had no interest in it. Once they were thrown in, they were lives whose survival no longer mattered.

In any case, at that point...

Some people would have rolled alive over a mountain of corpses. Others would have been crushed beneath the bodies pouring down before they could escape. Their arms and legs might have broken or bent the wrong way. Their heads could have split open, and they would have suffered with twisted limbs. By the time all three hundred thousand had been thrown in, some may have been left in horrific states beyond imagination.

Uproar and screams, despair and terror. Hatred, rage, curses, and pleas directed at those falling or throwing them down.

One by one. One by one. One by one. One by one.

The dead, or those about to die, piled up.

As three hundred thousand accumulated, that mountain of corpses became more than a pile of bodies.

It looked like a mountain of corpses from the outside, but that was only how it appeared from without.

The piled-up corpses created pressure equal to their height. Unlike the surface, the bodies buried inside had been crushed beyond recognition. Blood filtered through skin and clothing and was squeezed out, forming a new water source. Liquid closer to bodily fluid than blood flowed from the mangled bodies, creating a shallow sea.

No wonder it sounded so clear for blood.

Only three hundred thousand deaths, only a massacre on that scale, could create such an insult to humanity.

"So that was it...."

At that moment, a searchlight that had been wandering in zigzags found something and stopped. Immediately, every searchlight found the most human-looking shape and rushed toward it.

Five lights illuminated the summit of that terrible mountain of corpses.

In the Abyss, where there were no insects and no mold.

In a space isolated from the entire world, where nothing rotted or crumbled.

At the peak of a mountain of corpses and blood that had endured for thirteen hundred years.

A woman was kneeling at the summit.

As though repenting for this terrible sin, as though mourning every corpse that had died there, she sat with her palms open on her knees and her head bowed.

She wore loose priestly robes like Jiseon's and held the posture an Earth Mother burier might take. Six rings encircled her right wrist. Her long black hair had been left loose, but with no wind, it was neither tousled nor dull. It even held a faint sheen.

A black staff lay across the corpse's palms. Anyone would have thought she looked like an Earth Mother ascetic-

-except for the cross stake piercing through her abdomen.

"A cross? Why is the Sanctum's symbol there...?"

Tyr reflexively frowned upon seeing the symbol of an old enemy.

Why was there a cross in the Abyss, the Earth Mother's hell? Why was that cross driven through a woman's abdomen at the summit of this grave?

Jiseon gave the answer.

"Long ago, our Church of the Earth Mother had a Great Master. The Great Master of all Earth Mother believers, who was said to have been the first to use earth arts."

Splash. Splash.

While everyone stood frozen in the pitch-black darkness, Jiseon walked alone. The sound of blood sloshing became her footsteps.

"When the Conquering King gathered buriers to bury three hundred thousand corpses, most who went there were riffraff seeking a fortune, people who would sully the Earth Mother's name. Cowardly, contemptible vultures circling corpses.... With a few exceptions, of course. To stop false buriers from disgracing the Earth Mother, the Great Master personally went there with her companions."

Thanks to a few devoted Earth Mother believers, the wrongdoing of the unqualified majority had been hidden. That was true not just now, but back then as well.

The era when the Victorious King and the Conquering King fought each other was the golden age of Earth Mother believers. There were many riffraff, but there were also many true buriers. They worked more diligently than the unqualified ones and comforted the people who had endured the war.

That was how faith in the Earth Mother had endured in those days.

The Conquering King hated the Earth Mother faith, which demanded rites for corpses. He hated it enough to want to tear it out by the roots.

"I learned that when I visited the cave halfway up the highest mountain, a temple of the Earth Mother. That is, I learned that every trace of the Great Master had completely disappeared afterward."

If the Conquering King had gathered the unqualified and meant to condemn their immorality, he should not have killed the buriers.

He should have displayed them before the whole world, wearing grave goods on their bodies and filling their bellies through the deaths of others. That would have let him shift the people's outrage over the massacre onto the Church of the Earth Mother.

But the Conquering King killed every burier instead. He may well have been a tyrant who could not control his temper, but it was more reasonable to think there was another reason.

For example, someone who buried prisoners may have refused the grave goods. Or perhaps they showed a nobility that no one could easily condemn.

"Still, I know better than anyone that it would have been impossible for a few incompetent corpse vultures to dig a vast pit that could bury three hundred thousand people in three days."

There were too few buriers for the scale of the work, and the deadline was too short. So people had only assumed that the Conquering King had used his own soldiers.

But what if that was not the case?

"The Great Master thwarted the Conquering King's plan. Ahead of the corpse vultures drawn by the smell of death, she used her power to make a grave for those about to die. She buried every corpse herself, leaving the Conquering King to bear the full weight of his deeds.

"Unable to achieve his goal, the Conquering King brutally murdered the other buriers, including the Great Master. Since he could no longer shift the blame, those buriers who would wander the world were no different from messengers who would sing of his ugliness."

That was the secret history of the Abyss Jiseon had uncovered.

Until now, Jiseon had never doubted it. Few people in this world were as deeply connected to the Earth Mother faith as she was.

"But that was not it. The Conquering King did not kill the Great Master."

Yet here was the Great Master, appearing in the Abyss at this moment. With a cross driven into her back.

Considering that the Church of the Celestial God at the time had been a petty faith not even worth setting against others, there was only one meaning behind the sight before us.

"Those who killed her and caused all that history to be forgotten were the Celestial God's lackeys. Cowardly prophets who peered into the future. Those who stood with the Victorious King and hastened the Conquering King's fall. It was them.... The ones who brought us down, killed the Great Master, and dishonored her."

The mountain of corpses might have been the Conquering King's work.

But the Abyss, and the Great Master killed by a cross-shaped stake driven into her atop that mountain of corpses, were the work of the Sanctum.

Footnotes:

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