Gun of Ashes

Something seemed to be subtly writhing in the air, an invisible presence, yet its movement created ripples that influenced the surrounding things, allowing humans, with focused attention, to barely discern its outline.

The priest looked with an uneasy heart at the emptiness ahead, and on that barren expanse, he could see an outline resembling a human, like a ghostly apparition.

As one of the few left to stay in the Static Holy Temple to maintain this vast relic, the priest had long been accustomed to the various oddities within this dormant sanctuary, after all, it was said to be the origin of the Demon Hunters, where the Evangelical Church refined Secret Blood to wage the counteroffensive against demons.

These were mythical stories, yet the priest did not know much, holding a low position in the Evangelical Church, otherwise, he wouldn’t have been transferred to this deathly silent place.

He retreated uneasily, until he leaned against the ancient stone pillar, of which there were many in this vast space, one after another, supporting the dome and extending into the endless darkness.

For an ordinary person, living in the Static Holy Temple was a harrowing experience. It seemed the new Pope did not wish for information about this place to leak. Since his reassignment, the priest had never left; sometimes, he even felt as if he were dead, buried deep within this shadowy underground.

But what he had encountered before was nothing compared to his current ordeal.

Struggling to calm his breath, yet his heart still pounded wildly, the priest could clearly see the dust falling from the darkness above, and he could distinctly see that the dust, which should have fallen freely, seemed to encounter something during its descent, its trajectory subtly warped, sketching an eerie humanoid figure in the air.

Like a ghostly apparition, uncanny and bizarre.

He drew a short sword from beneath his robes, originally provided by the new Pope as a weapon, with a slight coating of Holy Silver on its blade, supposedly for the priests’ self-defense, but they all knew that if something truly anomalous appeared, they would be utterly powerless. His mind was stretched to the limit, but in the next moment, the vague ghost vanished.

As if it had suddenly crumbled into nothingness in the air.

Was it a hallucination? Or something else?

The priest was in a daze, but suddenly a suffocating sensation surged into his chest, as if something had gripped his throat, preventing him from even making a sound. He struggled hard, but the resistance was futile, his face turning ashen, appearing almost dead, with his head down, half-leaning against the pillar.

Such silence lasted for several seconds, and the priest slowly lifted his head, but his eyes now showed a completely different expression.

Lawrence looked up at the palace that was so familiar in his memory, observing its current ruin, he was somewhat lost and didn’t expect his defection to be successful, nor did he believe he could survive to this point, having almost driven the Evangelical Church to a dead end.

But today he wasn’t here for nostalgia. He looked down at his own hand, this tangible reality felt quite good.

With deeper research into the Authority of Gabriel, Lawrence became increasingly aware of its eerie nature.

Not just the power to usurp another’s life, but its mysterious and unknown operational method, which Lawrence had never encountered before...

Yet today, he wasn’t here to study that. Lawrence stowed away the drawn short sword and began advancing in the vastness of the Static Holy Temple, coming here today for one purpose only.

It was a black well, as though all light would be absorbed into it, inside swirling pure darkness.

Along the way, Lawrence encountered no one, but the Static Holy Temple was always like this, being a last fortress established under the Evangelical Church’s control for many years, continually expanded and deepened over time. Like the Saint Nalos Cathedral, few understood its entirety; getting lost and starving within it was a real possibility.

Standing before the well, Lawrence’s gaze was heavy. Long before defecting from the Evangelical Church, in his unrelenting pursuit of the Truth, he became aware of the Well of Ascension’s weirdness.

According to the Demon Hunting Order’s regulations, every deceased demon hunter had their body thrown into this well, as it had been for centuries. Hard to imagine how many corpses piled beneath, or whether these Secret Blood-laden remains would truly remain docile in death.

Moreover, there were those voices, frequently echoing in his mind, emerging from the Heart Core Network. In his research on the Authority of Gabriel, Lawrence could confirm that the Static Holy Temple constituted a massive demon, possessing an extensive Gap, thus connecting all demon hunters.

Yet the question remained, how did the Evangelical Church accomplish these feats. The deeper his excavation into history, the clearer he sensed the world’s distortion and fragmentation.

Standing at the brink of the well, gazing into that solid darkness, in a brief stare, Lawrence felt his vision twisting, the scene before his eyes began to whirl, spinning together like a vortex, ultimately swallowing him whole.