Chapter 280 : Chapter 280
Chapter 280. The Denunciation
The moment those words were spoken, Aurora’s hands, which were holding the tray, trembled almost imperceptibly.
A violent ripple spread across the calming tea in the cup, and several drops of scalding tea splashed onto the back of her hand. Yet she felt no heat at all.
Deep inside her heart, towering waves had already been stirred up.
Someone had placed a mental suggestion on a peak seventh-tier divine spellcaster? And the current Pope, no less?
The most terrifying part was that this process had continued for such a long time, yet the Pope had only barely noticed it while reviewing events after suffering a setback tonight.
What kind of world-shaking strength would that require? Or had someone used some forbidden divine object that was not even recorded in the Holy Church’s top-secret tomes?
Aurora felt a chill shoot up from her tailbone straight to the back of her head.
“That suggestion did not directly control me.”
The Pope closed his eyes. Under the wavering candlelight, the wrinkles on his face looked as deep as ravines carved by knives. He did his utmost to suppress the killing intent boiling within him, and his chest heaved violently.
“It was extremely sinister. Like gangrene attached to the bone, it subtly and imperceptibly magnified this old man’s determination to eradicate heresy completely. It also magnified my arrogance, making me believe that a single thunderous strike would certainly succeed.”
The Pope abruptly opened his eyes. They were filled with terrifying bloodshot veins.
“The knife being handed to me was real. The manipulation was real. Treating the mighty Holy Church as a puppet to be kneaded at will was even more real! No matter what means that person used behind the scenes, this old man swears that I will drag him out of the gutter, tie him to a heretic’s stake, and burn him to ash!”
The study fell into a long, deathly silence. Only the lone white candle remained, its flame swaying violently under the Pope’s turbulent aura and casting a shadow with claws and fangs upon the wall.
After a long while, the Pope drew a deep breath and drew the leaking divine power and fury back into his body, once again returning to that unfathomable appearance.
Aurora suppressed the shock in her heart and folded both hands before her. Seeing that the time was ripe, she calmly changed the subject, as though that terrifying secret had never been mentioned.
“Your Holiness. Since the waters behind the Royal Capital are deeper than imagined, there is one point I have never understood.”
“Speak.”
“Logaris acts perversely, and the Northern Territory is overbearing. None of that is false. But in the end, he is only a twenty-two-year-old Magister.” Aurora’s gaze was clear, and she revealed a trace of confusion at exactly the right moment.
“The Holy Church is a colossal entity spanning multiple kingdoms. Why does it hold such a deep obsession and hatred toward him alone? So deep that the mastermind behind the scenes could use this as bait and be certain that you would bite? Is it merely because of those academic differences?”
The moment those words fell into the room, the air abruptly froze.
The Pope’s facial muscles, which had only just relaxed, instantly tightened again, and his face flushed red. He slammed his palm heavily onto the desk.
Slap.
The solid wooden desk shook violently, and more than half the tea spilled out.
“Academic differences? Only a Magister?” The Pope’s voice abruptly rose, and his gray-white beard trembled violently from his surging emotions.
He pointed at the scattered files on the desk, his chest rising and falling.
“That is the most utterly deranged bastard this old man has ever seen in his life!”
The Pope abruptly stood, kicked the chair aside, and paced back and forth behind the large desk. His leather boots made dull sounds against the carpet.
“Eighteen! When that little bastard was eighteen, he held a public lecture in Saint Arcadia’s Grand Assembly Hall!”
“In front of three thousand teachers and students from the whole academy, and in front of the delegation of bishops we had specifically sent to observe the ceremony, he stood on stage and spouted outrageous nonsense!”
“He said, ‘The gods are dead’! He said, ‘Before Aether, all are equal, and anyone who grasps the laws can become a god’! The bishops present were so furious they nearly fought him on the spot!”
Aurora’s eye twitched. She had heard of this incident before. At the time, the Holy Church had directly activated a Level-One Heresy Contingency Plan and dispatched the Knights of Judgment to cross regional boundaries and arrest him. It had only been suppressed by Dean Barnabas.
The more the Pope spoke, the angrier he became, spittle flying from his mouth. He had completely forgotten that the person standing opposite him was the Holy Church’s Saintess.
“And that was not even the end of it!”
“That scoundrel took advantage of an academic exchange trip to the Southern Territory. No one knows what means he used, but he hacked into the voice-transmission core arrays of the Southern Territory’s three great cathedrals!”
The Pope stopped pacing, both hands gripping his own hair tightly, his voice trembling.
“That was Sunday morning!”
“Tens of thousands of devout believers were kneeling before the statue of the God of Light. They had just closed their eyes and were preparing to recite the prayer. And then what happened?”
“What came out of the array?! It was the noisiest heavy metal rock music from the underground black streets of the Meriga Confederation!”
Aurora lowered her head. She dug her fingernails hard into her palm.
She could not laugh. She absolutely could not laugh.
Such an extremely wicked, utterly reckless act truly did seem like something only that man with rimless glasses, who looked like a refined scoundrel, could do.
The Pope’s denunciation continued, his voice already on the verge of cracking.
“He did not only tamper with hymns! He also used fixed-point spatial translocation to throw the foulest rotting slimes from the sewers directly into the monastery’s holy water pool! The next day, when the nuns went to draw water, they scooped up a bucket of green, bubbling mucus!”
The Pope’s eyes were red with fury. He swung both fists and hammered the desk fiercely.
Crack. The tabletop let out an overburdened groan.
“And that was still not the most unforgivable part.”
The Pope raised his head. His eyes revealed a deep, painful mixture of despair and anger.
“The most deranged part was that he actually used his own private research funds to hire a group of down-and-out third-rate writers from the black market!”
“He paid them! He made them write novels!”
“Vulgar, obscene novels with the God of Light as the protagonist!”
The Pope’s voice already carried a hint of tears. “He even used a false name to establish some accursed Elysium Press! He printed them in large quantities and directly released them onto every major black market for sale!”
“Not only did they sell out, but he used the money he earned to hire artists and release a damned deluxe illustrated edition! The illustrations inside were simply indecent! Unreasonable! Gods above, this old man lost ten years of his life just by looking at them!”
At this point, Aurora finally broke.
She hurriedly raised a hand and pretended to tidy the hair at her forehead, which was not messy at all. Using the cover of her wide sleeve, she firmly blocked the lower half of her face, which was about to twist beyond control.
She had seen Logaris’s refined, rigorous, cold demeanor, with his buttons always fastened all the way to the top. Compared with these utterly bottomless rotten deeds from the Pope’s mouth, the contrast was so enormous that it left her dizzy.
The Pope’s obsession with killing him was plainly a personal grudge. It was a blood feud born from having the Holy Church’s dignity stomped into the ground and ground beneath someone’s heel.
Back then, Logaris had been a living menace to society.
After that storm-like torrent of complaints, the Pope’s strength was badly depleted, and he fell heavily back into the high-backed chair. He gasped for breath, and the rise and fall of his chest gradually slowed.
The study returned to deathly silence. Only the crackling rain outside the window remained.
After venting the anger that had been stifled in his heart for many years, the Pope’s complexion instead showed a gray and defeated pallor. He looked at the cup of cooling calming tea on the desk and remained silent for a long time.