Holy Papal Court—Main Cathedral.
Light, here, was endowed with a sacred weight. This was the heart of faith, a sanctuary where billions of Souls looked up.
At this moment, however, this sanctity was being torn apart.
The old Pope, Elis Ende, clad in pure white robes symbolizing supreme Authority, stood beneath the magnificent holy icon.
The golden scepter in his hand tapped the ground lightly as he said indifferently, "Charles Xu Huo, do you realize you have committed a grave error?"
Not far in front of him, a figure knelt on one knee, arms propped on the ground, trembling slightly.
Lowering his head, he gripped the bone staff in his left hand and struggled to stand up.
"Heh~" A low sneer sounded.
Charles Xu Huo slowly raised his head, revealing a young face covered in scrapes and bruises.
He spat the remaining blood from his mouth onto the mirror-polished marble floor of the cathedral and said in a hoarse voice:
"I only wanted to let ordinary people truly become 'human,' not the captive lambs who only know how to pray that you keep. What did I do wrong?"
Pope Elis's brow furrowed slightly: "Ridiculous! Did I hear that right? A Necromancer who toys with the Souls of the dead and desecrates the order of life! Hypocritically pleading for the people? Your very existence is the greatest blasphemy against God!"
"Blasphemy? Heh, a bunch of hypocrites draped in the mantle of Holy Light! If the God you speak of only looks down on human suffering from on high, only binds struggling Souls with cold dogmas, and only protects you parasites who suck the blood of faith, then what use is He?!"
As Xu Huo's last word fell, he began chanting a tongue-twisting incantation, pointing the bone staff in his left hand directly at the Pope.
Chii—!
A piercing, sharp sound of grinding bones tore through the silence of the cathedral.
Countless distorted, eerie runes, seemingly written in blood, coalesced from the tip of Xu Huo's bone staff like living things.
The next moment, thick bone chains entwined with pitch-black flames violently burst through the incredibly hard marble tiles beneath his feet, sending rubble and dust exploding upward.
"Presumptuous!" Holy Light surged in Pope Elis's eyes, and the golden scepter in his hand erupted with ten thousand rays of light!
A highly condensed Holy Light barrier instantly expanded, enveloping the Pope and the holy icon behind him.
But this was only the beginning.
Behind Pope Elis, space distorted violently, and six pairs of massive, magnificent wings condensed from pure Holy Light burst forth like a deity emerging from a cocoon.
The Holy Light wings flapped gently, stirring up a sacred storm. He floated up, half a foot off the ground, like a seraph descending to the Mortal world.
At the same time, twelve dazzling and massive golden sword shadows appeared out of thin air above the Pope's head, suspended in mid-air.
"In the name of God, Purify!" Pope Elis's voice was like a great bell. The twelve golden sword shadows hummed and vibrated, instantly turning into twelve brilliant golden rainbows that tore through space, slashing down toward Xu Huo and the bone chains he had summoned!
Almost simultaneously, a fierce glint flashed in Xu Huo's eyes as he resolutely met the golden sword light representing the supreme divine power!
The blood-colored runes on the bone chains he summoned flickered wildly. The pitch-black flames seemed capable of swallowing light; wherever they passed, even the holy air made a sizzling sound as it was corroded.
Suddenly, time seemed to be gripped by an invisible giant hand, abruptly freezing.
Xu Huo clearly saw that on Pope Elis's usually calm face under the light wings, for the first time, there was an unmistakable panic!
Then came a sigh filled with endless, complex meaning.
Subsequently, Xu Huo felt the vast, abyss-like magical power within him—which supported this blasphemous strike—being instantly and completely drained away in a manner he could neither understand nor resist, like a receding tide.
The bone chains entwined with black flames, just a moment before touching the golden sword rainbows, suddenly dimmed like a punctured illusion and vanished into nothingness.
There was no earth-shattering collision, no world-destroying explosion.
His last-ditch effort, into which he had poured all his strength, was snuffed out just like that, silently.
The blasphemous Necromancer, in the end, failed to shake this thousand-year-old barrier of divine power.
His consciousness, like a candle in a storm, fell toward eternal nothingness amidst endless darkness and tearing pain... Xu Huo blinked his eyes, looking at the flat land before him. It wasn't the neatly arranged fields maintained by magic stasis spells from his memory of the Loren Dynasty, but rather a slightly rough, yellowish-brown land with natural undulations.
In the distance were several crooked earthen houses, with straight wisps of blue smoke rising from the chimneys.
Closer by was a large expanse of barren farmland, where crops were sparse, their leaves drooping limply and swaying slightly in the evening breeze.
This was already his fifth day in this body.
Five days was enough for an experienced Transmigration traveler to initially adapt to this strange shell, suppress the sharp pain deep in his Soul caused by that "failure," and carefully sort through the remaining memory fragments of this body.
"Have I transmigrated again? For the second time?" A thought circled silently in his heart, carrying a sense of absurd familiarity and deeper confusion.
"In the end... I should have won. That panicked face, that sigh..."
Why "again"? Because he was originally a "triple-transmigrator."
In his first life, on Blue Star, his name was Xu Huo. He spent twenty-three unremarkable years until a rare moment of hot-headedness led him to save a child being swept away by a wave on a beach.
The child was saved, but he himself was ruthlessly swallowed by a larger backwash.
Salty seawater filled his mouth and nose, and his consciousness sank into the cold... Then, when he opened his eyes again, he had become Charles Xu Huo, a Necromancer apprentice in some dark corner of the Azeril Continent.
In his second life, as Charles Xu Huo, leveraging the advantages of a transmigrator along with a tiny bit of help from his Golden Finger, he struggled to survive, climbing through bones and conspiracies, and eventually ascended step by step to the throne of the legendary Necromancer, "The Bone Speaker."
Power, knowledge, control over the boundary between life and death... He possessed everything he could never have imagined in his previous life.
But deep down, did a shadow of that hot-blooded youth from Blue Star still remain? Or perhaps, had he seen enough of the desperate struggle of the lower-class people under the dual oppression of the nobility and divine power?
One is not truly young without being hot-blooded. Just like all the "Seniors" in Chinese Transmigration novels, in a moment of passion—or rather, because he ultimately couldn't find peace—he began leading those who could no longer survive to... rebel!
Resisting the decayed Loren Dynasty, challenging the high and mighty Holy Papal Court! Until... in that final battle of the sanctuary, he fell short of success, his magic power mysteriously drained, and his consciousness sank... A dull ache, not originating from his physical body, came from his chest.
Xu Huo subconsciously raised his hand and pressed it against his heart through his coarse hemp clothes. The rough fabric rubbed against his skin, bringing a sense of reality.
I wonder about those companions... those companions who followed his faint spark in the darkness... Can they... win? After losing him, their "highest combat power"?
As the thought arose, a dull pain mixed with worry, resentment, and deep powerlessness spread through him.
He forced himself to shift his thoughts and pull his attention back to this strange world before him.
His current identity was a youth named "Dog Leftover" in a remote small village called "Black Stone Village."
Both parents dead, living under someone else's roof, taciturn—he was a nearly transparent existence in the eyes of the villagers.
Most importantly, the magic power here was far too thin. Even after secretly meditating for five days, there was still only a sliver of magic power. Coupled with his currently weak body, this sliver of magic power couldn't achieve any lethality at all.
As a "veteran" transmigrator, Xu Huo knew that keeping a low profile was the way to go.
For these five days, he had perfectly played the role of "Dog Leftover." He followed his Second Uncle to the fields at the crack of dawn, clumsily learning to weed; at noon, he gnawed on multigrain pancakes that could break teeth; in the evening, he dragged his leaden legs back, squatting in the corner of the yard to silently shovel food into his mouth, enduring his Second Aunt's nagging and his cousin Li Big Strong's ridicule.
"Hey! Dog Leftover! Have you finished cutting the pig grass, or are you just squatting here playing dead?!" A voice filled with undisguised malice rang out.
Li Big Strong, his thick-waisted cousin, stood before him with hands on his hips. He raised his foot and kicked over the broken ceramic bowl at Xu Huo's feet. "You useless piece of trash! You can't even do this little bit of work properly. Are we keeping you just to eat for free? Get lost to the back mountain! Don't even think about coming back for dinner until you've filled a basket!"
Xu Huo lowered his head, and a violent killing intent originating from the depths of his Soul suddenly surged up like a poisonous snake!
As "The Bone Speaker" who once summoned undead armies with a wave of his hand, crushing such an ant-like Mortal wouldn't even require moving a finger.
But where was the bone staff? Where was the magic power? That power sufficient to level mountains... was completely gone!
Now, there was only the intermittent hunger-induced dizziness and muscle soreness coming from this thin and weak shell.
He forced himself to unclench his fists, took a deep breath to suppress his surging anger, and said in a nearly numb tone of obedience, "...Got it, brother."
He stood up silently, picked up the broken basket and the rusty wood-chopping knife in the corner, and walked out of the yard with his head down amidst Li Big Strong's triumphant sneer.
The evening wind blew with a chill. Xu Huo walked toward the small hillside behind the village, his eyes habitually scanning the surroundings.
Barren, backward, primitive... The elemental activity in this world was appallingly low, a world apart from Azeril, which was brimming with the magic weave.
The farming methods, the earthen houses, the villagers' hemp clothes... these were somewhat similar to the ancient agricultural civilizations of Blue Star.
He looked up at the sky, which was gradually being stained by the deep twilight. A few early stars were already twinkling in the dark blue canopy, cold and unfamiliar.
"The star chart... is also completely different." He narrowed his eyes slightly, mobilizing Charles's vast astrological knowledge and Xu Huo's shallow hobby of astronomy, finally confirming this point. The positions, brightness, and even the combinations of those stars were distinct from the two worlds in his memory.
"It seems this is truly a third world." He sighed, stood up, and shouldered the broken basket.
He weighed the light wood-chopping knife in his hand and felt the hunger rumbling in his stomach. "For now, I still have to find a way—at least to solve the problem of food and warmth. I can't keep going without enough to eat every meal."