Chapter 203
The twitching, shivering mass of stone looked at them, and Alice shivered as a strange sense of disquiet settled in the pit of her stomach. It was like no living thing she had ever seen before. The bits of chaotic rainbow mana it emanated were unsettling. It looked like someone had tried and failed to create some sort of… half-baked System mana. However, dozens of parts were missing, and the structure was completely wrong.
If Alice compared it to a painting, it was as if someone had heard about the Mona Lisa, and then, without ever seeing the painting, had tried to replicate it using a completely different color palette. Then, halfway through the painting process, they had accidentally dumped several buckets of paint onto the canvas, decided it looked better that way, and called it a day. The strange statue was both familiar and unfamiliar in a deeply unsettling way.
However, there was a strange beauty to it, hiding underneath the nightmarish, twisted surface of the strange System mana. Alice was reminded of her own first attempts at creating System mana. Her current attempts to replicate the System were also bizarre, twisted mockeries of the original System - even after all this time, she hadn’t figured out how to perfectly replicate the System, even if she was able to ‘replace’ most of it with semi-effective solutions.
Alice saw a pair of rainbow chunks of mana snap around their group, isolating the [Mercenaries] from the rest of the group. Then, Allira and Ethan glared at the statue, as if it owed them money and refused to return it.
“What the hell is this?” asked Allira, finally breaking Alice out of her stupor. “This… I don’t even know what I’m looking at.” Allira’s eyes were locked on the twitching, writhing mass of stone. Even though Allira couldn’t see mana as far as Alice knew, the woman still seemed disturbed by the bizarre image.
“It looks like a cult,” said Ethan, softly. “They’re very rare, since the church of the System is dominant on the southern continent and most of the central continent. Even those that spurn the Church of the System usually turn to the Church of Mana instead. However, occasionally, a few people stop worshipping either the System or mana, and worship something… else. Usually an exceptionally powerful monster. I’ve heard it’s particularly common in societies that get isolated for long periods of time but manage to survive - though there are only a few cases that I know of. Most ‘cults’ appeared before the colonization of the southern continent, and disappeared on their own. Not much future in worshipping a monster, after all.” Ethan grimaced. “I have no idea why a ‘cult’ would appear in the Society, though. As far as I know, they don’t worship anything. They just want power and don’t care how they get it.”
“What are the people here even worshipping?” asked Jonathan, as he also gazed at the twisted, messy chunks of mana and stone, as well as the half-dead worshippers. “It looks almost like they offered their own bodies to their ‘god’ as sustenance or something. Are you sure this stone thing isn’t a monster? Or a manaborn or something?”
Alice shook her head. “The stone looks like it was carved,” said Alice. “I think this is sort of like a manaborn, but not quite the same. It seems like it was artificially made.” Alice took a single, hesitant step forward, and squinted at the statue. “I think the Society was trying to recreate the System, but in a completely different way from what I’ve been trying.” At first, her voice was unsteady. However, the more she spoke, the more confident Alice became.
“That’s…” Cecilia’s eyes widened, as she looked at the space in front of them. “Did they try what I think they tried? That’s… insane. But also kind of brilliant.”