Only God

Seeing that his Night Watchman companion was not seriously injured, Eden slowly approached the tent on the hill.

After waiting a while and seeing no more strange occurrences, Eden breathed a slight sigh of relief, lifted the tent flap, and looked inside.

"This is..."

At a glance, this tent was markedly different from the others.

What first caught his eye was a long row of bookshelves and piles of scrolls, looking like a miniature library.

"These are all clues," Eden said to himself, his eyes lighting up.

With the books here and the handwriting in them, perhaps he could deduce the identities of the assassins.

Entering the tent, Eden carefully looked towards the desk, strewn with paper and pens, and an inkwell whose ink had not yet dried. He closely inspected it and noticed a crumpled piece of paper under the desk.

He unfolded the paper, revealing an unfinished letter.

"This looks like... Logos language? But there are some differences... could it be... the language of the Zor Elves?" Eden exclaimed in surprise.

Every literate Priest would generally be fluent in both Logos and Danschel, as three parts of the Holy Scripture were written in Logos and one part in Danschel.

The script on this letter looked like Logos, but with grammatical and certain word differences from traditional Logos, leading Eden to suspect it was the language of the Zor Elves.

Eden hastily deciphered the content of the letter, which roughly mentioned that the assassination had failed and they had not fulfilled that sacred mission, could not respond to the great revelation, and the owner of the letter was willing to take all the blame before the Elders of their sect.

The letter was unfinished, resembling a draft.

"Sacred mission... great revelation, Elders of the sect? Could it be the sect that converted the Ausenco Royal Family?"

Besides that sect, Eden could think of no other that had ties with the Zor Elves.

"If it really is that sect, aren't they supposed to be aligned with the Royal Family? Why would they attempt to assassinate Arsia?

However, it's possible the Ausenco Royal Family is not aware, and the sect acted on its own," Eden pondered as he searched for more clues.

His hand reached out to the bookshelf, carefully extracting one scroll after another, just as he was about to inspect their contents, his fingers suddenly touched something raised like a button.

Click.

Eden pressed it.

The entire bookshelf quivered slightly as if something had changed.

Looking left and right, Eden eventually pushed the whole bookshelf over, discovering a hidden compartment at the bottom.

"What's this?" he asked, pulling open the compartment, "A necklace?"

In the compartment lay a blue cord strung with a small fragment of stone, bearing incomplete and dense text, as if it had been chipped off from some ancient tablet.

"What on earth is..." Eden murmured as he uncontrollably reached out his hand.

His fingers moved forward slowly, an instinctive motion. If he had been more cautious, Eden would have examined it before reaching out, but for some reason, at this moment, he seemed to have lost his usual caution.

Or perhaps, this stone fragment possessed a different kind of Magic Power.

At the moment his fingers touched the stone, a dazzling and brilliant white light burst forth, engulfing Eden's vision, making everything appear a sheer white expanse.

After the white light came infinite darkness; the world seemed to abruptly fall silent at that moment, with no sounds, only boundless tranquility.

Amidst the darkness, the sky and earth spun around.

Eden felt, at some point, the space around him began to spin and change rapidly, causing waves of discomfort and a physical sensation of nausea to arise.

After an indeterminate amount of time, the space around him seemed to stabilize from chaos and slowly return to calm, giving Eden the sensation of being tugged at by gravity.

Eden felt a tightness in his chest, a warm sensation at his breast. Reaching with his hand, he discovered that the stone pendant necklace had somehow come to hang around his neck.

As the dizziness in his head gradually subsided, Eden finally came back to his senses, drew deep breaths, opened his eyes, and the infinite darkness that had been there was gone.

A bustling small town appeared before him.

This, what is this?!

I...

Where exactly am I?!

Low, wooden house clusters, a muddy town square with a curfew bell, and a castle standing not far away. From here, one could vaguely see the semi-closed prison below the castle.

A small river streamed by the side of the town, with groups of women crowded together, scrubbing their laundered clothes, and a group of men resembling Priests standing on a distant slope, kneeling and praying toward a building that looked like a Temple higher up.

Eden lowered his head and looked down, realizing that he was still on a hill.

"This should... be the hill I was on," he said with a puzzled face. He carefully observed that this hill looked almost exactly like where he had been before.

Yet as he looked up and surveyed around, the forest was still the forest, meadows still meadows, and mountain ranges still mountain ranges; the scenes were so familiar. The only difference lied in the vicinity—where the tents once stood was now replaced by a bustling small town.

Eden staggered down the hill.

What's going on, how did I end up here?

Touching the pendant on his chest, Eden frowned.