Chapter 406: Location awareness is also a crucial skill to have
Ah, I said it playfully, but this was actually a serious matter.
Perhaps because I now held the ’Judgment’, I could feel the lingering thoughts buried in this land better. That bitter, sad feeling seeped into my core and crawled into my ear to scream for help. It created a suffocating feeling that was different from polluted mana. I wondered if this was what people felt when strolling into a haunted house or an abandoned hospital.
It wasn’t a ghost or anything. What was left behind was the negative thought; the scream of a son calling for his mother as he was dying, the curse people hurled as they were stabbed and blasted, the cry of a father thinking about his family...
Bitter emotions poured into a place that was once a battlefield and a cemetery for countless people. It might not be ’spirit’ exactly, but these thoughts were still the fragments of people’s souls; leftover regrets, anger, and hatred that prevented those souls from resting fully. And these thoughts, instead of being digested by the world, were trapped in a quagmire of polluted mana.
In the end, they helped each other to grow even bitter, even darker, even more poisonous, like revenge that those souls could not experience.
I let out a long, heavy sigh at the sorrow of the drying land. For the first time, I called forth the priest inside of me, tapping into the power of the Goddess left behind inside my core.
"The world shall judge your soul free," I muttered softly as the unfamiliar power flew to the Scepter and seeped into the land again.
The world screamed and cried; the shadow wriggled. Slowly, I closed my eyes and waited and waited until the sorrow, anger, and hatred that crawled over my skin dissipated bit by bit by bit, evaporating into the vast, autumn sky.
"It’s done," Ignis told me, with a voice that was softer than usual.
Immediately after, I turned the Scepter so the green stone, which had become so deep in color from all the purified mana I saved there, was visible to me. "Go on," I told Alveitya. "Release it."
A bright light, and then a soft breeze. I closed my eyes from the sudden wind and felt a refreshing air wash over me. Ahh...I realized how much I missed this feeling now. The air I always tasted in the Lair, which I took for granted. The scent of stubborn grass and tough wildflowers. The inaudible sound of water sloshing between the cracks of soil. Ah, the bulbs that were taken root, the life that persisted within death.