novelraw Chapter 818: You Can Repent, But You Can't Go Back
Chapter 818: You Can Repent, But You Can't Go Back
The villagers worshipped the Poison of Knowledge.
Their faith was a one-sided, naive affair. The Poison of Knowledge possessed no true consciousness and cared nothing for their worship.
While it never killed the villagers and even seemed to protect them, the reason was simple: these villagers possessed no "knowledge."
The Poison of Knowledge turned knowledge into a pulpy brain mass for it to absorb, and until that happened, it would simply wait nearby.
As they carried him away, Lu Li, feigning unconsciousness, noted that the village had been established for over a decade.
The unthinking Poison of Knowledge was clearly very patient.
And it possessed the "principles" typical of an evil spirit.
To survive, the villagers passed down a single dogma: "possess no knowledge." They preserved—or rather, were left with—only the most primitive of instincts: the worship of a powerful entity.
As the villagers with knowledge died off and the corruption suppressed rational thought, recognizing the truth became nearly impossible. And if a rare few did begin to think differently, the Poison of Knowledge roaming the area would simply view them as a delicious morsel.
This led to a grotesque symbiosis: the villagers renounced knowledge to survive, and the evil spirit, prowling for its next meal, inadvertently protected them by driving off other anomalies with its powerful aura.Ironically, becoming a devout believer inevitably increased one's "knowledge," leading to death by the evil spirit's ritual. Yet, the villagers saw this as a divine blessing—
At that point, the ignorant villagers and the Poison of Knowledge had reached a perverse, logical harmony.
This was why the villagers Lu Li and the others had encountered were so slow and simple-minded, their speech having deteriorated.
This was the price they paid for abandoning knowledge.
After hearing the explanation, the group fell silent.
Without gods to protect them, the scattered human settlements across the land had to find their own ways to survive.
The silence had nothing to do with sympathy. The reason the villagers had captured them was painfully clear: to offer the outsiders as sacrifices to their god.
Lu Li finally cut the ropes on the Merchant. He wasn't unconscious, but he hadn't resisted either.
The Merchant rarely showed initiative in anything outside of a transaction.
"It's a good thing you stayed conscious," Katerina remarked warily.
"Even if I had passed out, it would have been fine. Elder Sister is here," Lu Li replied.
In response, Elder Sister's button eyes peeked out from his hood.
"Give me back my dagger." Katerina demanded her dagger back—the one her mother had left her. She glanced at Prusius, who was trembling from head to toe like a newborn lamb.
"Are you okay?"
Just then, they heard footsteps approaching from outside.
A single set.
After a quick, unspoken exchange, those who had been freed returned to the posts, hiding their hands behind their backs.
Prusius couldn't be retied to the post, so he had no choice but to stand stiffly, feigning that he was still bound.
The villagers were too simple-minded to notice the subtle shift in his position.
Creak!
The guard who had stepped out for a moment returned to the cell.
He found them awake but remained indifferent, standing guard lifelessly.
"Have you heard about the resurrection of the dead?" Katerina asked suddenly.
The guard's shifting eyes indicated he was still capable of thought. After a minute of waiting, the guard answered dully:
"I don't know..."
"If you tell us, we'll offer ourselves as sacrifices willingly. Your god will be more pleased."
After a long wait, the guard haltingly told them everything he knew.
The guard's broken speech and poor storytelling made his account resemble a puzzle with missing pieces, but they could just barely piece together the general shape of it.
The moment he finished, Katerina stepped forward. Her dagger was a blur as it plunged into his chest.
Killing the unresisting guard was as easy as striking a training dummy.
"If you had 'knowledge,' you would have been able to see through my lie."
As she watched the body fall in a pool of blood, Katerina whispered with a sliver of pity, wiped her dagger clean, and averted her gaze.
"We have the clues we need. Time to leave."
"It's too late!"
The Fallen's trembling cry suddenly rang out nearby.
"The evil spirit is here!!!"
The smile from her little victory vanished from Katerina's face.
"I'll try to hold it off. Run, as far as you can."
"Can you stop it?" Katerina asked hurriedly.
"No."
The Fallen's reply was curt. He swore, shooing away those who still lingered:
"...Get out!"
Outside the cell, the sky was already beginning to darken.
Night was approaching.
Chaotic screams echoed from down the street—the direction the evil spirit was coming from.
But the situation was different from what they had expected.
A bloated, corpulent silhouette covered in hundreds of eyeballs writhed down the street. Villagers with makeshift weapons resisted its advance, but their wooden clubs and rusty tools were useless against it.
With every violent tear of its flesh, it swallowed another attacking villager.
"It's the Swarm of Sufferings."
"The Swarm of Sufferings."
Lu Li and the Fallen said it at the same time.
"Let's get out of here before it spots us," Katerina whispered.
She turned to leave, but her body suddenly froze.
A thin, serpentine black shadow appeared at the far end of the street, gliding toward them as if swimming through water.
The evil spirit, the Poison of Knowledge.
Two evil spirits had appeared at the same time.
Although, for the villagers, one of them was a "god."
"Attack the Swarm of Sufferings."
Lu Li's whisper cut through their stunned silence.
Katerina and the others snapped out of it and followed Lu Li, charging toward the villagers and the Swarm of Sufferings.
Following Lu Li's lead, they scooped up stones from the ground and hurled them at the Swarm of Sufferings before the other evil spirit could get any closer.
"And what now?"
Her skin crawling, Katerina barely suppressed the urge to draw her Black Thorn.
"Do nothing."
Lu Li's calm voice fell silent, and nothing happened.
The Poison of Knowledge hovered about ten meters away, receiving the villagers' worship. It drew no closer, and their heads did not liquefy into brain matter.
A strange, temporary standoff arose between the two evil spirits.
Realizing they wouldn't be devoured as long as they didn't attack the Swarm of Sufferings, the villagers halted their assault and fell back to the Poison of Knowledge, gathering around it.
"God... watching us... sacrifice..." an old man whispered indistinctly.
The old, the young, the children. Dozens of villagers, armed with torches and crude weapons, closed in on the "sacrifices."
To make matters worse, the feeling of weakness that had faded began to creep back into their bodies.
"Whatever you're planning to do, hurry up. I don't want to pass out again at a time like this."
Katerina whispered through gritted teeth.
Lu Li, ever the rational one, suddenly began to speak:
"The ritual of the Poison of Knowledge... it makes knowledge take on physical weight..."
The villagers listened blankly to Lu Li's words. Then, one by one, they began to clutch their heads in agony.
"What are you doing...? Stop... Stop!!!"
The torchlight played across Lu Li's face, giving him an aura of unnerving calm and mystery.
Lu Li did not stop:
"And the ritual of the Swarm of Sufferings... is to strike back at anyone who harms it..."
The words were knowledge, and knowledge was death. The villagers collapsed, their bodies contorting, and never rose again.
The middle-aged man who had declared them sacrifices stumbled toward them and collapsed. His weapon had fallen from his grasp long ago; only a laughable faith had kept him moving forward.
A moment later, a viscous, murky fluid—his own brain matter—gushed from his nose. The wretched man pitched forward, silenced forever.
The burning torches on the ground illuminated the gloom-shrouded street.
There was no cleansing fire, only the jubilant Poison of Knowledge, stooped over the villagers' heads, drinking its fill with relish.
It was a bountiful feast for the Poison of Knowledge.
This was knowledge's revenge.