EP.129 The Slanted Ceiling and the Mountain of Laughing Corpses - 1
There is water at the bottom of the Bottomless Abyss. Water that sloshes up to the ankles, with a slightly sticky texture.
I know this from personal experience. If you want to dispute it, go step on the bottom of the Bottomless Abyss yourself.
Even after making such a great discovery of the century, people are still more important than facts. I decided to check on everyone first.
I shouted into the pitch-black darkness.
"Is everyone safe! Number! One!"
"Two!"
Callis, who was highly tense, answered first. As expected of a soldier. Still hasn't shed that military habit.
"Three!"
Next was the Immortal, who played along well with the situation. After that, silence fell.
A bit later, the Returnee's voice was heard.
"...I'm fine. Azi, Nabi, and Tir too."
No, seriously.
"Wow, you're not calling out numbers here? You really have no sense, seriously! Can't you read the atmosphere?"
"There's no need to say numbers! Isn't it enough to just know everyone's fine!"
Even if you argue like that, I can read people with telepathy anyway, so there's no need to confirm!
As for the beasts.
"Woof..."
"Nyaha..."
They're alive, so that's fine. Right. The King of Beasts wouldn't fall so easily.
I scolded the Returnee.
"We're checking to reassure each other because we can't see each other. Seriously, really. Do you think we use numbers because we're idiots?"
"Wait. Let me check... Seven-colored Eye Five Colors, Blue Eye Opening."
In an instant, a blue light swirled in the Returnee's eyes. I looked with displeasure at the Returnee who secured his vision alone with a solo trick.
"Do you really have to say 'Seven-colored Eye Opening' out loud? Isn't that too childish?"
"It's to focus my mind! What's wrong with saying it out loud!"
"No, you can't even say 'four' but you have no problem saying embarrassing things like 'Seven-colored Eye Five Colors.' Is that the disease that supposedly afflicts second-year middle schoolers? Though you didn't even go to middle school."
"Hey! I need to look around, so be quiet!"
The flustered Returnee snapped and looked around with the eye that sees depth. Alright, let me steal your perspective again. Show me what you see.
I read the scene the Returnee was seeing now.
The first thing that came into view was Tantalos, overturned and tilted at an angle. The prison building was smashed at the bottom of the slope, and we, hanging from ropes, somehow ended up standing upside down, stepping on the damp ground.
The ground that had been beneath our feet until a moment ago had become the ceiling—literally heaven and earth turned upside down—looked so unreal that it seemed as if we had stepped into an abstract painting.
Seeing only this, one might think Tantalos had tilted and hit the bottom, but if that were the case, the vast emptiness we had seen below until a moment ago couldn't be explained.
If there had been a bottom in the first place, it wouldn't have flipped over and would have stopped at tilting. Clearly, something inexplicable by common sense had happened the moment the ground flipped. Perhaps the reason the Bottomless Abyss had no bottom was because it was a space that could only be reached by being flipped.
When the Returnee, having surveyed the easily identifiable ceiling, cast his gaze toward the bottom.
"...Huh?"
There was something.
Seen from a distance, it looked like a large mountain. It formed a gentler slope than the tilted Tantalos, but it was definitely a mountain with a peak and a ridge.
A gentle mountain existing beneath this Bottomless Abyss. The sloshing water.
...And the strange texture touching the feet.
The eye that sees depth, the Blue Eye, couldn't distinguish fine textures well... but the components forming that mountain were something alien even when seen with the Blue Eye.
Why did every visible rock have... five protrusions that looked like fingers and toes?
Oh, no. Those aren't rocks. Those protrusions aren't fingers.
This is.
"Awoooo!"
Azi howled. Leaping from the ground, it dug its claws into the overturned Tantalos like a bat and clung to it. It barked fiercely as if it didn't want to get close to the ground, urgently grabbing the support where the people were tied.
But no one could respond to that howl.
Because they were overwhelmed by what filled this ground.
"...Blood, huh. All of this...."
Even without an expert's evaluation, I realized it. My nose was already filled with the scent of blood that had been wafting in without my noticing.
Should I call this blood? Or.
"Callis. Stay still. Something is strange."
Even the Immortal felt a sense of foreboding and muttered.
When the night lights came on instead of the disappeared day lights.
The prison, smashed and dug into the ground far away, glowed faintly. It was the dim light of night lights turned on throughout the building. At the same time, the searchlights attached to the prison walls to hunt down escapees began to move.
The bright yellow searchlights swung back and forth, faithfully chasing human figures far from the prison, unaware that the earth had flipped...
The round light trembled madly.
Madly.
"Ah..."
Someone gasped.
The bright yellow light illuminating the darkness in a circle looked like the trembling pupils of a person seized by fear. The light swayed in zigzags as if wanting to survey the entire mountain. The round light wandered aimlessly.
In every area the light illuminated. Without exception.
There were human figures.
"The slaughter of 300,000, the achievement of the Defeated King... A mountain of corpses and a sea of blood."
It was a tragedy that could only be reached with such enormous numbers.
300,000. 300,000 living humans were thrown into a pit. The people who hit the ground first would have died instantly. Probably the second and third too would have died if they experienced such a fall. Perhaps up to 10,000 died that way.
After enough people had piled up, the height difference decreased, and when the bottom became soft with a mound of the living...
No one knows when that was. Probably no one ever will. Even the Defeated King who pushed those people into the pit probably didn't care. They were lives whose survival after being dropped didn't matter.
Anyway. At that time.
Some would have rolled alive over the mountain of corpses, and some would have been buried under the corpses pouring from above before they could escape. Limbs would have been broken and bent. They would have suffered from cracked skulls and twisted limbs. During the throwing of 300,000, some might have become unimaginably gruesome.
Cries and screams, despair and terror. Hostility and anger, curses and pleas toward those falling or those dropping them.
Like that, one, one, one, one. Dead people or dying people piled up.
Thus, 300,000 piled up. The mountain of corpses became more than simply piled corpses.
On the outside, it was a mountain of corpses, but that was only the view from the outside.
The piled corpses created pressure proportionate to their height. Unlike the outside, the corpses buried inside were crushed beyond recognition. The blood squeezed through the gaps in their skin and clothes created a new water source. Fluid closer to body fluid than blood flowed from the mangled flesh, forming a shallow sea.
I guess that's why it sounded clearer than blood.
The death of 300,000—only a slaughter of that scale could create such a desecration of humanity.
"So that's what it was..."
At that moment, the wandering searchlight that was running in zigzags discovered something and stopped. Immediately after, all the searchlights rushed in unison as they found the most "human-like" figure.
At the summit of this gruesome mountain of corpses. Five lights illuminated its peak.
No insects, no mold in the Bottomless Abyss.
In a space isolated from the entire world, neither rotting nor crumbling.
Atop the mountain of corpses and sea of blood that had continued for 1,300 years.
A woman was kneeling at that summit.
As if repenting this atrocious sin, as if mourning all the corpses that had died. With her palms spread and resting on her knees, she had her head bowed.
In a posture that a Burier of the Earth Mother God would take, wearing a loose priestly robe similar to Ji-seon's clothes. Six rings were on her right wrist. Her pitch-black hair was let down long, and perhaps because there was no wind, it wasn't disheveled and even had a faint gloss.
On the palm of that corpse, a pitch-black staff was laid horizontally—she looked like a Taoist of the Earth Mother God to anyone who saw—
—Except for the cross stake piercing through her abdomen.
"A cross? Why is the symbol of the Holy Imperial Court there...?"
Tir reflexively furrowed his brow upon discovering the symbol of their mortal enemy.
Why is there a cross in the Bottomless Abyss, which is the hell of the Earth Mother God. Why that cross is pierced through a woman's abdomen at the extreme point of the grave.
The answer came from Ji-seon.
"Long ago, our Church of the Earth Mother God had a Grand Master. The first to use the Earth Arts, the Grand Master of all Earth Mother believers."
Squelch, squelch.
In the pitch-black darkness where everyone had stopped, Ji-seon walked alone. The squelching sound of blood remained as her footsteps.
"When the Defeated King called together Buriers to bury the 300,000 corpses, most of the Buriers who headed there were scum seeking quick fortune and seeking to defile the name of the Earth Mother God. They were cowardly and despicable ones like corpse flies hovering over corpses... with some exceptions, that is. To prevent the fake Buriers from insulting the Earth Mother God, the Grand Master went there herself along with her companions."
Thanks to some devout Earth Mother believers, the misconduct of the unqualified majority was concealed. This was true not only now but also in those days.
The period when the Victorious King and the Defeated King fought each other was when the Church of the Earth Mother God flourished the most. There were many scum, but also many true Buriers, and they worked more diligently than the unqualified ones to comfort the people who had experienced the ravages of war.
That was how the Earth Mother faith was maintained in those times.
And the Defeated King loathed the Earth Mother faith that demanded rites for corpses. To the extent that he wanted to root out the Earth Mother faith.
"This humble one visited the Earth Mother God's sanctuary, the cave halfway up the highest mountain, and discovered that fact. That the Grand Master's traces completely disappeared after that."
If the Defeated King had gathered the unqualified ones to denounce their immorality, he shouldn't have killed those Buriers.
Only by showing the whole world the sight of them wearing burial goods and profiting from others' deaths could the anger over the slaughter be shifted to the Church of the Earth Mother God.
But the Defeated King didn't do that and killed all the Buriers. It's not wrong to say he was a tyrant who couldn't control his temper. But it would be more rational to think there was another reason.
For example, that someone who buried the prisoners refused burial goods. Or showed such a sublime appearance that it was hard for anyone to criticize.
"However, that those corpse fly scum could dig a massive pit to bury 300,000 in three days was impossible. This humble one knows that better than anyone else."
Compared to the scale of the construction, the number of gathered Buriers was small and the deadline was too tight. So people merely speculated that the Defeated King must have used his soldiers.
But what if that wasn't the case?
"Because the Grand Master interfered. Before the corpse flies who smelled the corpses, with her power, she created graves for those who would die. Because the Grand Master buried all the corpses alone. The Defeated King received his karma as it was.
Thus, the Defeated King who failed to achieve his goal... brutally murdered the Grand Master and the other Buriers. For him who couldn't shift the responsibility, the Buriers who would wander the world were nothing less than messengers who would sing of his ugliness."
That was the untold history of the Bottomless Abyss that Ji-seon had uncovered.
Until now, Ji-seon had never doubted that fact. Because there were few people in this world as deeply involved with the Earth Mother faith as her.
"But, it was not so. The Defeated King did not kill the Grand Master."
But at this moment, the Grand Master who appeared in the Bottomless Abyss. With a cross piercing her back, no less.
Considering that the Church of the Heavenly God at that time was a trivial faith not worth sowing discord over, the scene before our eyes meant only one thing.
"The ones who killed her and made all history forgotten were the pawns of the Heavenly God. The cowardly prophets who peeked into the future. The ones who stood on the side of the Victorious King and spurred the Defeated King's downfall. It was them... The ones who brought us down, killed the Grand Master, and disgraced this place."
That mountain of corpses might be the Defeated King's work.
But that the Grand Master was killed nailed to a cross atop the mountain of corpses, along with this Bottomless Abyss—was the work of none other than the Holy Imperial Court.