Secret World: I Became a God Through Lies

Chapter 410 The Sharp Blade Deep Within the Holy Light

"Holy light descended, like a fine thread sewing up the throat;"
The Virgin Mary chuckled and bestowed fire and chains;
The crown lay quietly moldy beneath the throne.

—Excerpt from Fragments of Calquesa, Act IV

In the early morning in Alleston, before the fog had completely lifted, the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral pierced the sky in the hazy light, as if trying to tear through the heavy silence.

In the church square, the long, drawn-out chimes echoed one after another in the heart of this city of faith.

The tolling of bells is a call to prayer, but also a clarion call to fear. For each toll signifies the beginning of another judgment.

Deep within the Church of Our Lady, a hidden stone trial chamber is illuminated by dim candlelight.

The walls were covered with ash and rust left by the fire. All around was quiet, except for the soft clanging of chains, the echo of cold, damp water dripping, and the occasional low moaning from one of the rooms.

Cardinal Antony Philell sat behind the judge's bench, his face as cold as a stone sculpture.

He was Queen Medusa's most loyal sword and fire on this land of faith.

A middle-aged priest knelt before him, his face pale, wearing a penitential robe, his head bowed, and his expression blank.

"You admit that you privately read heretical texts, questioned the Queen's sanctity, and declared that 'faith should belong to God, not man'?"

Philell's voice was low and deep, as if it came from a coffin. The middle-aged priest's throat moved slightly, and he spoke as if he had used all his courage: "I just... pray for God's mercy."

"God's mercy requires the permission of the Blessed Virgin Mary."

Philell smiled slightly, a smile as sharp as a knife. "Take him to the dungeon. I want to hear a written confession before tomorrow's service."

Several heretics in black robes silently dragged the priest away, leaving a trail of glaring marks on the stone bricks with his blood-red penitential robes.

Phileil tapped his scepter lightly, and the candle flames were instantly torn erratically by the wind, as if even the holy light itself was whispering:
"Heretics must be eliminated."

This was merely a trial in the early morning, but in this church-dominated city, similar stories unfolded quietly every day and every night—unrecorded and unnecessary to be recorded.

Rex Hayes was standing in the side cloister of the cathedral, witnessing all of this.

He was still wearing his priest's robe, and his right eye was covered by that dark blue lens. Through it, even behind the statue of the Virgin Mary, one could almost see hidden bloodstains and secret messages.

He didn't speak, he just stared. Memories flashed before his eyes—the night the four priests were forcibly sacrificed by the Queen in the name of "pacifying the celestial disaster," the towering blood mist, the whispers that shouldn't have come from the gods—they still echoed in his ears.

Medici was their bishop, their queen, their guide, and their butcher.

Rex slowly closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

"Today, it's time to move on to the next step."

"Heretics are plagues."

"Doubt is a sin."

"The Virgin Mary's gaze is everywhere."

These three sentences have become ubiquitous "maxims of faith" throughout Areston.
It is engraved on the threshold of every church, on every religious decree, and even on the title page of every believer's child's book.

They are creeds, warnings, sacred words, and chains.

Rex, walking through this holy city where faith was being quietly eroded, felt as if he were walking through the broken ribs of a huge mourning church.

Medici used the gold paint of religion to whitewash a terrifying empire on the verge of collapse.

He walked through a corridor, a passage reserved for cardinals, where bloodstains from yesterday's torture still lingered on the ground; the blood had turned black and was sticky like a curse.

A picture of the Virgin Mary hangs on the wall, depicting Queen Medici in a white robe, kneeling in holy light.
But Rex's monocle saw that behind the holy light, a pair of hands slowly reached out and tightly wrapped around her neck.

“That’s not a god,” he murmured to himself, “that’s the tentacles of a celestial calamity, devouring her.”

Behind him, a group of believers were undergoing a "test of piety and loyalty."

They stood in neat rows, heads bowed, silent. The judges questioned them one by one:

"Have you ever had strange dreams?" "Have you ever heard someone reciting non-canonical texts at night?" "Have you ever seen the 'drama series' in the Morning Star?"

Rex watched silently as the group was led away one by one, like livestock being led into a courtroom.

He knew that the questions themselves did not constitute a crime, but the “wavering expression” was enough to make a person disappear.

He once saw an old monk who, because he paused during his sermon, was judged to be "lacking in resolve" and was bound alive to the stake, where he was burned to ashes as the bells rang.

"Fire and light illuminate the path, but they also devour the shadows."

He silently repeated to himself that this was something he had never understood in his old pirate days—here, the real fear wasn't in the swords.
But what lies beneath those gazes that seem to come from the abyss, intently watching your every move, waiting for the slightest wavering in your resolve.

And at that moment, he heard her voice again.

Mira, a siren, glimpses the shadows of fate.

His right lens rippled slightly like mercury, and a blurry image appeared before his eyes:

He saw a shrine, and on the shrine, there were no longer statues of gods, but the four priests who had been "sacrificed."

Their eyes were empty, and blood was still wet at the corners of their mouths, yet they were silently chanting prayers.

"God, grant me holiness..."

"God, why have you forsaken me?"

The image flashed by, and Rex's eye twitched almost imperceptibly.

He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and continued forward.

"They are still alive, in the stagnant waters of the river of fate."

He uttered the words in a low voice as if chanting a spell, and then his expression returned to calm.

As a pastor, he was used to giving speeches in front of people; as a defector, he also had to learn to maintain a smile amidst a horde of demons.

But a seed is quietly being planted in his heart.

It was not a seed of faith, but a seed of doubt.

Those questions will seep into the entire church along the cracks in the ground, and eventually... shatter this theater of terror built in the name of God.

After midnight, the bells of St. Catherine's Abbey rang out three times, heavy and deep.

In the confessional at the end of the corridor, a white candle was still burning.

Rex sat on a dark bench, a young priest kneeling before him, his face streaked with tears, his voice trembling:
"...They said I wasn't devout enough, simply because I had prayed for a common woman whose husband had been burned at the stake, just because she had hidden two old holy books..."

Rex did not respond immediately. He closed his eyes and listened to the priest's lament as if listening to a heart-wrenching elegy.

He waited until the other person finished speaking before speaking in a low voice, his tone as soft as the echo of a church bell:

"Faith should not be chains."

The priest looked up abruptly, staring at Rex's face.

His eyes held a mixture of despair, pain, longing, and a vague, uneasy hope.

“But what can we still believe in? Father Rex…the will of the Virgin Mary, or the Queen’s command? They…are no longer the same being.”

Rex slowly opened his right eye, and a silvery-white light flowed through the lens.

He didn't answer the priest's question, but instead asked in return:

"If your conscience cannot accept God's judgment, are you willing to believe in the judgment of fate?"

The priest did not respond immediately. But a burning light began to appear in his eyes.

“Some of us will eventually speak out first,” Rex whispered. “And I am willing to be the first spark.”

After he finished speaking, he stood up and draped an old gray-blue cloak over the priest, the kind worn by wandering monks. It looked extremely simple, but it was a symbol of some kind of oath.

“This is not betrayal,” Rex leaned down and said softly. “It’s simply returning faith to God, not offering it to the devil.”

He then walked out of the confessional, pushed open the door, and left, his footsteps echoing on the silent stone slabs.

Moonlight spilled onto the corridor floor tiles, and Rex gazed at the yellowish light, as if he could see a golden robe billowing in the wind.

"The King in Yellow only needs three lies to turn the truth to ashes in the fire."

Rex murmured softly.

He knew this was not an exaggerated metaphor—it was a real, brewing calamity. The God of Fate had sown the seed of the Yellow Robe, and he, Rex, would plant another seed in the heart of the Church: a variant of truth, called rebellion.

A secret letter, hidden within a doctrinal scripture, was delivered by a taciturn nun from the seminary to the prayer mat of an elderly bishop. The letter contained only one sentence:

"The blood of the four priests is quietly flowing into your Holy Grail—will you continue to drink it?"

Meanwhile, the pattern on the church's stained glass window—the right hand of the Virgin Mary blessing—was replaced with a new stained glass by someone.

Under the holy light, the hand slowly cracked open, stained with blood.

No one knows who did it, but from that day on, a rumor spread throughout the church that the Virgin Mary was angry with the church.

Rex knew it was nothing more than a little red dye and a lamp he had arranged.

But a lie doesn't need to be complicated—it only needs to be seen once in fear to take root and sprout.

And the church's unwavering holy pillar is now trembling slightly.

Inside the main chapel of St. Lucia Theological Seminary, before the evening prayer bells had even finished ringing, crows had already taken flight from beneath the bell tower.

The stained glass windows on the cardinal's tablet glowed with an ominous blood-red light in the fiery sunset, projecting onto the high wall to form a huge projection of the Virgin Mary.

The face was compassionate, yet the expression was indistinct, with only a pale smile line that was almost eerily clear.

Some priests privately refer to it as the "second icon"—it is not the image of the Virgin Mary as defined in doctrine, but rather…another version that has been silently accepted:
The Virgin Mary has descended to earth and become the Queen.

The Queen is the Holy Mother, and her commands are revelations.

In modern prayers, the ancient opening line, "May God be gracious to us," has long been quietly replaced with:

"May Her Majesty shine upon all people with Her Majesty's majesty."

No one objected.

Because they could no longer distinguish whether they were bowing to their faith or surrendering to the throne.

—They don't even care anymore.

Rex sat quietly beside the gray stone pillar behind the altar, watching the congregation in front of him, where an elderly bishop was softly proclaiming "the decree of Our Lady":
"Heretics are like maggots, hiding in the skin of faith. Only fire and blood can cleanse their unclean names."

Rex's eyelids twitched slightly.

It's not because of the cruelty of these words, but because this "preaching" came from internal church documents and was never publicly released.

He recognized the passage because it was one of the secret documents he had transcribed for the cardinal.

The fact that this secret document has now been openly read aloud signifies that taboos within the church have been abandoned under a tacitly approved directive.

“She’s accelerating,” Rex whispered.

The "she" he was referring to was not the Virgin Mary, but Medici—the woman who placed the crown under the statue of a goddess.

The mural of "The Scene of the Blessing of Mary" on the ceiling of the chapel has now been quietly replaced with a new version.

Rex looked up and saw that in the mural, the Virgin Mary was no longer raising her hand to bless, but instead looking down with her eyes downcast, holding a scepter in one hand and a flame in the other.

Blessings turned into judgment. Grace turned into burning.

"You came."

A faint voice came from behind Rex. He turned around and saw a figure standing on the other side of the gray stone pillar.

He was an old monk with a thin face, wearing old monastic robes.

He wore a pair of glasses with cracked frames and walked with a slight limp, but his eyes became exceptionally sharp as he approached Rex.

“Father Rex, you illuminate others with light, but you also conceal yourself with lies,” the old monk said.

Rex remained silent, only nodding.

He knew who the person in front of him was—Bishop Ando, ​​the former secretary of the Archbishop of Finance, who had remained silent for half a month after losing his master in the sacrificial incident involving the four priests.

Then he began to pray alone, but no one paid any attention to him, and he was even thought to have gone mad.

"Your bishop turned to dust on the high altar," Rex whispered. "Don't you hate him?"

"I hate it." Andoshu's throat trembled, the voice seeming to be forced from the depths of his lungs.

"But I'm more afraid of not hating. If I lose even the will to hate, I'm no longer human."

He turned and left, but left with a single sentence:

"That new image of the Virgin Mary was just changed yesterday."

Who is the artist?

“Nobody knows,” Ando said, “but a priest said he saw an eye in the painting, staring at him and laughing.”

Rex remained silent, only gazing down at the enormous shadow of the Virgin Mary, draped in royal robes, her smile gentle.
For some reason, he saw a familiar ruthlessness in that smile.

That was the kind of smile he had seen on the guillotine.

Before the midnight bells rang, the stained-glass windows of St. Lucia's Cathedral began to sway.

It wasn't wind, nor rain, but a kind of... oppressive feeling that Rex had never experienced here before.

It was as if the air was being twisted and stretched by something invisible, and even the light began to slow down.

He sat in the quiet confessional, his fingers gently stroking the ancient monocle—the siren who glimpsed fate.

The lenses were cold, yet my fingertips felt a slight burning sensation.

"here we go again."

The projection in the mirror slowly emerged, and a blurry image gradually came into view—

In the Cardinal's Chamber, under the interlaced candlelight, a bishop is raising a cup in blessing.

The light shone through the holy water, illuminating the smile on his face—a familiar, forced smile.

Behind him, a strange figure of light and shadow stood.

It has no face and no voice, but in the image in the mirror, it is... draped in a light gold robe, its body enveloped in echoes that sound like paper being torn apart.

"...in yellow."

Rex closed his glasses almost instantly.

He knew in his heart that this was not the siren's mysterious and normal response, but rather the aftereffects of "another theater" affecting this place.

“Siming, you’ve already spread the fog to the church,” he whispered. “Are you really… insane?”

No, he actually understood that Si Ming wasn't crazy; rather, he was using his own methods to bring Alleston to an early end.

Rex, on the other hand, had no choice but to continue acting.

He pushed open the small door of the confessional, walked through the long corridor, and his footsteps echoed like drumbeats in the aisle.

As soon as he turned the corner, an anonymous letter appeared at his feet.

The envelope was unsigned and unmarked, except for the mark of a white mask.

He opened the letter.

It consists of only one sentence, written in the most profound ancient Allestonian language—the oldest "theatrical text" in arcane magic:
"On the night of the Holy Scriptures, please return to the throne of God, where the performance truly begins."

Rex gripped the letter tightly and whispered:

"It's time to weave my own script."

He never looked back.

"The ashes on the stake have not yet cooled; the theater beneath the altar has not yet closed."

"They thought the holy light was salvation, but little did they know that it was just a spotlight under the curtain of fate."

—From "Elegy of the Foggy City: A Sharp Blade in the Depths of Holy Light"

(End of this chapter)