Chapter 32: The Prison of Stone
Alina slowly opened her eyes.
The impact of the blinding light had left her dizzy, and she instinctively reached out to steady herself. Her surroundings were pitch black. She couldn't see a thing, but judging by the heavy, suffocating air, she was trapped inside a enclosed room. She couldn't sense anyone else nearby.
She was completely alone.
Damn it. Where was she? What if the others had been hurt? And Lucien... despite everything, he was still just a civilian. She had to find him before something happened.
Carefully, she stepped forward, her footsteps echoing softly in the dark until her hands brushed against a cold stone wall. Relieved, she began tracing it, searching for a door.
In that moment, she genuinely missed Nuri’s magic. But after following the wall all the way back to where she started, she found nothing. No door, no seam, no exit. Thinking she might have overlooked a mechanism, she tried again.
Still nothing.
Sweat began trickling down her spine. She dropped to her knees and searched the floor instead, feeling around blindly.
Nothing.
Where the hell am I?
The man had teleported them, but he hadn't looked skilled enough to send each person to a precise location. So where had she ended up?
"Shit..."
There had to be another way out. She considered breaking through the wall with brute force, but quickly dismissed it. She had no idea what was waiting on the other side. Acting recklessly could make things far worse.
Could she use her blessing with enough control to avoid bringing the whole place down? If she reduced its output... maybe.
The problem was that she wasn't skilled with fine magic like Nuri. She only knew how to summon a spear and hit things hard. Nuri had once explained that every blessing holder could condense their power into a small sphere of magic energy, a pure reflection of their blessing's nature.
She really should have paid attention to his explanations. She made a silent promise never to ignore one of his "boring" lessons again.
Closing her eyes, Alina took a slow, steady breath. Since she didn't understand the theory, she had to rely on the one thing she was actually good at: imagination.
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Silence enveloped the dark room. Her hair fluttered in a wind that didn't exist as her breathing slowed.
Above her open palms, a tiny sphere began to form. It glowed with a gentle emerald light, swaying slightly, dense with compressed power. For a single heartbeat, doubt crept in. The sphere trembled, flickering on the verge of collapsing, before finally stabilizing into a calm pulse.
Instinctively, Alina raised her hands, letting the magic guide itself. The sphere drifted toward the stone wall opposite her. The moment emerald light touched the stone
CRACK.
A clean, precise opening appeared. No explosion. No collapse. Just a smooth hole wide enough for her to pass through.
Alina blinked in surprise. It actually worked.
Light poured into the dark room. She narrowed her eyes, cautiously peeking out.
A long corridor of ancient, heavy stone stretched before her, dark gray and lifeless. It felt less like a church and more like a prison. Stepping through the breach, she caught sight of a high window. The village rested far below, she was right in the center of it, near the exact location they had been trying to reach.
That's... surprisingly lucky.
As she moved down the silent hall, memories of the festival day rushed back. She realized she had never actually processed everything that had happened; one disaster after another had forced her to keep moving. But now, it felt as though invisible threads were weaving together, pulling something dark to the surface.
No, this wasn't the time. She needed to find the others.
She checked every room along the corridor. Each one was completely bare, not just abandoned, but deliberately cleared out. Finding everyone in a building this massive was going to be almost impossible.
Tap. Tap.
Footsteps.
Alina immediately slipped into a narrow recess beside the wall, holding her breath as two figures walked right past her hiding spot.
"Rowen really is pushing it," a woman sighed, her voice trailing down the hall. "Does he even hear himself? Just how much soul energy has he gathered at this point?"
"I honestly don't know," a man replied. "Sometimes I look at him and wonder if we made the right choice."
Rowen. So that was the hooded man's name.
Alina kept her distance, tailing them quietly. If Rowen was gathering soul energy, was that why he’d abducted people during the festival? Those victims were still alive, he had taken their blood, but he hadn't turned them into hollow shells like the villagers.
Why? What made them different? Was he experimenting, or had the villagers just been failed attempts?
The pair turned a corner and stepped into a massive chamber unlike anything else in the building. Brilliant stained-glass windows towered along the walls, bathing the room in crimson, gold, and emerald light.
At the center stood an enormous statue: The God of Sacrifice.
Beneath it rested the Soul Stone, surrounded by various arcane objects. The two figures tossed their fresh offerings onto the growing pile.
Massive, ancient characters were carved directly into the floor, forming an intricate circle around the statue. Simply looking at the symbols sent a cold chill crawling down Alina's spine.
Then she saw it.
Thin, glowing streams of soul energy were flowing out from the Soul Stones. They weren't flowing into the cultists, nor were they dispersing into the air.
They were flowing directly into the statue itself.
Alina's breath caught in her throat. How is that even possible?
The God...
At that exact moment, a question Nuri had asked her weeks ago echoed vividly in her mind.