WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 129

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The Slanted Ceiling and the Mountain of Smiling Corpses - 1

There was water at the bottom of the Abyss. It sloshed around ankle-deep, with a slightly sticky feel.

I knew that because I had experienced it myself. If anyone wanted to argue, they could go step on the bottom of the Abyss first.

Even after making this century-defining discovery, people still mattered more than facts. So I decided to check who was here first.

I shouted into the pitch-black darkness.

"Is everyone safe?! Roll call! One!"

"Two!"

Callis, tense to the bone, answered first. A soldier to the end. Still hadn't shaken off military habits.

"Three!"

The immortal, good at rolling with any situation, answered next. Silence followed.

A little later, the regressor's voice came.

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

No, seriously.

"Wow, you're not even calling your number here? You really have no sense at all. Can't you match the mood?"

"There's no need to say numbers! Isn't it enough to know everyone's okay?!"

By that logic, I could read everyone with mind reading anyway, so there was no need to check at all.

As for the beasts.

"Wo, woof...."

"Nyaaah...."

They were alive, so that was enough. Right. No way a Beast King would drop that easily.

I barked at the regressor.

"Isn't this to reassure people because we can't see each other? Seriously. You think we number off because we're idiots?"

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

Blue light briefly swirled in the regressor's eyes. I watched with disapproval as she secured vision alone with her cheat skill.

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

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

"You can't even say four, but you can say embarrassing stuff like Seven-Colored Eyes, Fifth just fine. Is this that middle-school second-year syndrome? Though you never even went to middle school."

"Hey! I'm checking the surroundings, so shut up!"

The offended regressor snapped at me, then looked around with the eye that saw depth. Well then. Should I steal her viewpoint again? Show me what you're seeing.

So I read the scene through the regressor's eyes.

The first thing I saw was Tantalus, flipped over and tilted on a slant. The prison building was buried down the slope, and we, hanging from ropes, had somehow ended up upside down with our feet on damp ground.

The ground we had been standing on had become the ceiling. Heaven and earth had literally flipped, and the sight felt so unreal it was like we had fallen into an abstract painting.

At a glance, it looked like Tantalus had tilted and slammed into a bottom. But that couldn't explain the vast void we had seen below just moments ago.

If there had been a bottom from the start, it would have stopped while tilting, not flipped upside down. Something beyond common sense had definitely happened the moment the ground inverted. Maybe the Abyss had no bottom because it was a space you could only reach by turning over.

After scanning that easy-to-read ceiling, the regressor dropped her gaze to the bottom.

"...Huh?"

There was something there.

From a distance, it looked like a large mountain. It had a gentler slope than tilted Tantalus, but it was clearly a mountain with a peak and ridgeline.

A gentle mountain beneath this Abyss. Squelching water.

...And that strange texture against our feet.

The eye that saw depth, Azure Eye, couldn't distinguish fine textures well.... But even to Azure Eye, what made up that mountain looked wrong.

Why did every rock we saw have five protrusions like fingers and toes...?

No. That was wrong. Those weren't rocks. They weren't finger-like protrusions either.

This was.

"Awooooooo!"

Azzy howled. She sprang off the ground, dug her claws into upside-down Tantalus like a bat, and clung there. Barking fiercely as if she didn't even want to go near the ground, she hurriedly grabbed the support beam the others were tied to.

No one answered that cry.

They were too overwhelmed by what filled this land.

"...It's blood, huh. All of this...."

No expert appraisal was needed. My nose was already full of the blood scent that had drifted in before I noticed.

Should I call this blood? Or...

"Callis, stay still. Something is strange."

Even the immortal spoke with a sense of dread.

Then the night lights came on, replacing the vanished day lights.

Far away, the prison jammed into the ground glowed faintly. It was the dim light of the night lights lit throughout the building. At the same time, the searchlights mounted on the prison walls to track escapees began to move.

The pale yellow beams, unaware the land had flipped, faithfully swayed around as they chased human shapes far from the prison....

The round light shook wildly.

Wildly.

"Ah...."

Someone let out a breath.

That pale yellow circle cutting through the darkness looked like the trembling pupil of someone in terror. The beam zigzagged as if trying to survey the entire mountain. The round light wandered without direction.

Every place it touched. Not a single gap.

There were human forms.

"The massacre of 300,000, the Tyrant King's karma.... A mountain of corpses and sea of blood."

It was a tragedy that only numbers this large could create.

Three hundred thousand, 300,000 humans were thrown alive into a pit. The first people to hit the ground died instantly. The second and third probably died from that fall too. Maybe even up to ten thousand died that way.

After enough bodies piled up, the height difference shrank, and the bottom became soft with mounds of flesh.

No one knew when that point came. Probably no one at all. Even the Tyrant King who shoved people into that pit likely didn't care. To him, they were lives whose survival or death didn't matter once dropped.

Anyway. At that point.

Some had rolled alive across a mountain of corpses. Others were crushed by bodies raining down before they could crawl out. Limbs might have snapped and bent. Heads cracked, twisted arms and legs writhing in pain. While 300,000 were being thrown in, some likely ended up in forms too horrific to imagine.

Uproar and screams, despair and fear. Hatred, rage, curses, and pleas toward those falling, or those throwing them.

One by one, one by one, one by one, one by one. The dead, or those about to die, piled up.

And as 300,000 piled up, the mountain of corpses became more than a mere pile of bodies.

On the outside it looked like a mountain of corpses, but that was only what could be seen from outside.

Piled corpses create pressure equal to their height. Unlike the outside, the bodies buried deep within were crushed beyond recognition. Blood filtered through skin and clothing and squeezed out, creating a new water source. Liquid closer to bodily fluid than blood flowed from mangled flesh and formed a shallow sea.

No wonder the sound had seemed too clear to be just blood.

It was an insult to humanity that only 300,000 deaths, only a massacre on that scale, could produce.

"So that was what it was...."

At that moment, one wandering searchlight zigzagging through the dark found something and stopped. Right after that, every searchlight spotted the shape most like a person and rushed toward it at once.

At the summit of this dreadful mountain of corpses. Five lights illuminated that highest point.

In the Abyss, where no insects lived and no mold bloomed.

In a space cut off from the whole world, without rotting or crumbling.

At the top of the mountain of corpses and sea of blood that had lasted for 1,300 years.

A woman was kneeling at the peak.

As if repenting this horrid sin, as if mourning every corpse that had died, she bowed her head with open palms resting on her knees.

She wore loose priestly robes resembling Jiseon's, in the posture an interment priest of Mother Earth might take. On her right wrist were six rings. Her jet-black hair was long and unbound, and maybe because there was no wind, it was not disheveled and even held a faint sheen.

Across the corpse's palms lay a black staff, and to anyone's eyes she looked like an adept of Mother Earth-

-except for the cruciform stake piercing through her abdomen.

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

Tyr, spotting her archenemy's symbol, frowned on reflex.

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

The answer came from Jiseon.

"Long ago, our Mother Earth Faith had a Grand Patriarch. The first to use earthcraft, the Grand Patriarch of all Mother Earth Faithful."

Splish, splash.

While everyone in the black darkness stood still, Jiseon alone walked forward. Her footsteps left wet sounds in the blood.

"When the Tyrant King summoned interment priests to bury 300,000 corpses, most who went there were riffraff chasing sudden riches, trash trying to stain Mother Earth's name. Cowardly, vile corpse vultures circling for bodies.... Except for a few. To stop fake interment priests from insulting Mother Earth, the Grand Patriarch went there in person with comrades."

Because of a handful of devoted Mother Earth Faithful, the rampage of the unqualified many was hidden. Not just now, but then too.

The era when the Victor King and the Tyrant King fought each other was the peak age of the Mother Earth Faithful. There was lots of riffraff, but also many true interment priests, and they worked harder than the unqualified, comforting people broken by war.

That was how the Mother Earth Faith endured in those days.

And the Tyrant King hated the Mother Earth Faith, which demanded rites for corpses. He wanted to rip it out by the roots.

"This humble one learned that fact by visiting Mother Earth's sanctuary, the cave halfway up the highest mountain. Namely, that the Grand Patriarch's traces vanished completely after that."

If he had gathered unqualified people to condemn their immorality, the Tyrant King should not have killed those interment priests.

He should have shown the whole world how they wore grave goods and fed themselves on others' deaths, then shifted anger over the massacre onto the Mother Earth Faith.

But he didn't do that. He killed every interment priest. Calling him a tyrant unable to control his temper was not entirely wrong. Still, it was more rational to think there was another reason.

For example, someone burying prisoners refused grave goods. Or someone showed a dignity too sacred for anyone to easily slander.

"Still, those clueless corpse vultures could never dig in three days a pit huge enough to bury 300,000. No one knows that better than this humble one."

Compared to the scale of the work, the gathered interment priests were too few, and the deadline was far too tight. So people only guessed that the Tyrant King must have used his soldiers.

But what if that wasn't true?

"Because the Grand Patriarch interfered. Because she made graves for those fated to die with her authority before the corpse vultures drawn by the smell could arrive. Because the Grand Patriarch buried every corpse alone. So the Tyrant King received his karma in full.

And when the Tyrant King failed to achieve his aim.... He brutally murdered the other interment priests, including the Grand Patriarch. Since he could no longer shift blame, interment priests roaming the world would be nothing less than messengers singing of his ugliness."

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

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

"But it was not so. The Tyrant King did not kill the Grand Patriarch."

Yet in this moment, the Grand Patriarch had appeared in the Abyss. With her back stabbed by a cross.

Considering that in those days the Celestial God faith was too insignificant to even be worth sowing discord with, the scene before our eyes meant only one thing.

"The ones who killed her and erased all history were lackeys of the Celestial God. Cowardly prophets who peered into the future. Those who stood on the Victor King's side and urged the Tyrant King's downfall. It was them.... The ones who ruined us, killed the Grand Patriarch, and shamed her here."

That mountain of corpses might have been the Tyrant King's work.

But the Abyss itself, and the Grand Patriarch nailed to a cross atop this mountain of corpses, were the work of the Sanctum.

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