Chapter 1739: Holy artifact
"You’re finally awake," said Kaemon, though he too lay on the ground like a corpse. His eyes were closed and his body limp, though the sound of Lex’s groan alerted him to his partner’s situation.
"What the hell happened?" Lex asked, trying to recall his last vision, yet all he could recall was darkness. A killer migraine was bashing at his nerves, distracting him and keeping him from thinking straight. He tried to use his spiritual energy to recover, and discovered that it worked just fine. That was a surprise. Considering how crappy he felt, he almost would have thought he was critically injured. But no, he was perfectly fine.
"I don’t know about you, but I saw the moment the Chalice of the Abandoned was created. That sight... it’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life," Kaemon said weakly.
"Don’t be so pessimistic," Lex said, trying to improve his mood. "You could die in a few hours. In that case, you won’t need to be haunted for so long."
"Ha ha," Kaemon fake laughed, and said nothing else. Silence resumed between the two as they tried to recover from their states.
"So what did you see?" Lex asked eventually, once he managed to suppress his migraine somewhat.
"A sacrificial ritual that consisted of trillions, no, hundreds of trillions of souls, all of them Immortals," Kaemon whispered slowly. "Yet all of them seemed almost... possessed... or enthralled. There was definitely something wrong with them. It almost felt like killing them all was sparing the universe from some great disease or disaster.
"Their anguished souls were ignited, providing the energy for the creation of the chalice. The chalice... oh the chalice. What can I say about it?"
Kaemon became silent, as if he had been mesmerised by his own memory of what he saw, and Lex did not rush him either. He himself was trying to recall what he had seen, but the memory seemed not to exist at all. For some reason, though, Lex was sure that he had seen a vision. The weight of the knowledge, after all, was still present on his soul despite him not remembering anything.
"Lex, I cannot imagine anything as holy or as pure as the chalice the moment it was created," Kaemon said, his voice a whisper, as if he was afraid of speaking the words. "It doesn’t make sense. Anything born of ritual sacrifice is destined to be tainted, to be corrupt, to be cursed with the most disgusting karma, and yet none of that was the case. The chalice, at the moment of its creation, was nothing less than a holy artifact of the highest proportions."