The Foreigner on the Periphery

The acting pope of the Elahu-Praga Church returned to his residence utterly exhausted.

The Elahu-Praga Church Headquarters was a massive complex of high-rises connected both above and below ground, and his quarters occupied the top floor of its central 150-story tower.

Their doctrine did not prize frugality, so the residence, which spanned an entire floor, was sprawling and luxurious. It was the result of centuries of doctrinal interpretation: since all things, including physical objects and sensations, would eventually return to nothingness, one should indulge in boundless pleasure and feel the breath of god in intoxication before they vanished.

He downed the strong liquor in a clear crystal glass. He wasn't sure about god's breath, but the taste carried at least a trace of a divine presence. The pleasure flashing through his mind, however, was fleeting.

The acting pope sank back into worry.

‘The skeptics, led by Felix, are too loud.’

The heated debate had dragged on for days. When dawn broke, the agreed-upon three-day deadline would be reached. The time to give the avatar the order's official answer was fast approaching.

‘But it isn't completely hopeless.’

The moderates, who could neither confirm nor deny that Minjun was the avatar, were gradually swaying to his side. He had failed to persuade the opposition, but he had successfully won over the undecided.

However, that time-honored method of resolving disputes would leave side effects. Forcing a decision without actually persuading the opposition meant the rift between the two factions would not easily heal.

The acting pope dreaded what Felix and the other skeptics might do in the aftermath.

‘I don't understand. Why is Bishop Felix so violently opposed to believing in the avatar?’

The acting pope felt a surge of fury as he remembered Felix treating Minjun—who was unquestionably the avatar—like a common swindler. It felt like a direct insult to his faith.

His breathing grew ragged. His face flushed red. At this rate, he wouldn't be able to sleep at all. Needing to calm himself, he forced his mind to recite a verse from scripture.

"The Prophet decreed: 'Your people possess the gift to reach true happiness and ecstasy on your own, without aid. To attain perfect bliss, you shall need neither a handful of pills nor insects bred in blood.'"

Instantly, his brain flooded with pleasure-inducing hormones.

As soon as his stress and anger faded to a manageable level, the acting pope stopped his prayer. If he immersed himself any deeper, he would fall into a state of absolute ecstasy and collapse, coughing up blood. Quelling his outrage was enough.

It was then.

Flick!

"What?"

The room suddenly plunged into darkness.

‘A power outage?’

It was bizarre. The inhabitants of this planet had drastically increased their fossil fuel mining after their supply of Mana Crystals was cut off. They mined so aggressively that internal analysts warned their remaining reserves wouldn't last five years. That data was never released to the public. It was meaningless information anyway, considering the entire universe would shatter and vanish into Dreamland in less than a year.

Regardless, because they burned through their fuel so recklessly, there had never been a single disruption to the power supply.

‘Is it a technical failure?’

Still puzzled, the acting pope quickly noticed something far more suspicious.

‘Isn't it far too dark for a simple blackout?’

The acting pope froze as he looked toward the window.

The entire Elahu-Praga Church Headquarters in his line of sight was submerged in darkness. This massive complex, functioning as an independent municipality within the greater metropolis, had completely lost power.

It was impossible.

He urgently snatched up his Communicator. Even though the device ran on its own internal power, it was completely dead.

Strange. Power and communications knocked out at the exact same time?

This felt like...

Crash!

The automatic doors shattered, and a squad of priests expertly swarmed into the dark room. Every single one of them was wearing night-vision goggles. The acting pope had completely forgotten the order even kept such equipment in stock.

The intruders surrounded him in an instant. The acting head of the order blinked a few times, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Once he recognized their faces, he roared, his voice trembling with rage.

"How dare you!"

Several of the figures were Grand Patriarchs—men who held the highest ranks in the order right beneath the acting pope.

Every last one of them had opposed granting Minjun the Avatar Rank.

The moment he saw the face of the man standing at their center, the acting pope felt a surge of instinctive revulsion. The man looked intoxicated, deeply moved by the realization of his own justice.

"Bishop Felix!"

The Grand Patriarch, Felix, spoke.

"Resistance is futile. Come quietly with us."

"What is the meaning of this?"

He looked around at the assembled bishops and spoke.

"After long debate and painful deliberation, we have decided to declare you and the Grand Patriarchs who follow you as heretics."

The acting pope was so dumbfounded that he briefly lost his voice.

A moment later, with a twisted expression, he roared.

"How dare you brand nearly half the Grand Patriarchs as heretics without my permission!"

The other man replied shamelessly.

"I confess it was a painful decision. With the Day of Revelation imminent, we could not simply stand by and watch our brethren, their minds clouded by heretical whispers, ruin everything. We could not hand over the Divine Blood our ancestors guarded for generations to some rootless prisoner."

"He is the proof of god—!"

"No, that is impossible. An avatar could never borrow such a body. A two-eyed creature? We are the chosen race. The race god loves above all others must be ours. If god descends in the form of a mortal, it must come in our form, the form of a lepatam."

It was the logic repeated several times during their doctrinal debates in the council chambers.

The acting pope felt a sense of despair. Felix had never intended to listen to the opposition from the very beginning.

Rather, when the situation turned against him, he was trying to push his agenda through in an unexpected way.

"Form does not inevitably determine essence!"

"Form symbolizes essence. It symbolizes god's love. There is a limit to the forms and otherness we can embrace. Forcing us to recklessly expand our tolerance is also violence. You are trying to destroy the traditional values we have protected for so long."

"What?!"

"If we recognize a two-eyed being as an avatar, will you also recognize a disgusting green-skinned alien if one shows up in a few days with a plausible story? Will you believe a low-intelligence goblin if it comes later and makes the same claim? If we continue to expand the scope of our tolerance like that, will we eventually recognize a leech or an earthworm that isn't even a sentient being as an avatar? We do not even have the time for such worries. The Day of Revelation is right before us. We must finish what we have prepared for so long. In the traditional and proper way that we know. We cannot hand over what amounts to the entirety of the order to some rootless two-eyed being."

The priests surrounded him.

More than his own future, the acting pope was terrified of what they would do to the avatar.

"What do you intend to do to the avatar?"

Felix spoke calmly.

"The sin of deceiving the order with lies and impersonating a god is deep and heavy. Even so, we cannot hand him over to the Committee, so we must give him an opportunity to atone in our own way. We will punish him."

"What does that mean?!"

"Yumtus has already confessed. I do not know what kind of dark arts he used, but a considerable amount of Divine Blood is believed to have already been absorbed into his soul."

The acting pope felt his heart freeze.

Could he possibly mean...?

"Yes. We will extract the Divine Blood harbored by that false god with our own hands. And we will add it to the treasures the order has gathered thus far."

The acting pope faced anger and fear at the same time.

"Are you not afraid of the aftermath?"

Felix showed a smile full of conviction.

"In the face of strong and bold faith, there is no such thing as fear."

   *

Elahu-Praga Church Headquarters.

Strangers were walking through the pitch-black darkness.

They were a man and a woman who looked like humans, and one young dragon.

After hearing the situation from Ha Eun-seong, Minjun instructed him to follow in his dragon body. Their destination was the altar where the Talent was stored. They knew the location of the building called the Cathedral of Resurrection through Yumtus.

"Aaaaargh!"

"Bishop! What is the meaning of this!"

"S-save me!"

Screams, shouts, and other horrifying noises echoed around every corner.

According to what Ha Eun-seong had seen, the current situation favored Felix's side. The side being attacked looked as though they had completely failed to anticipate the other party acting in this way.

The clash between the two sides continued in the spiritual realm as well as the material world. When communications were paralyzed, those following the acting pope tried to alert the outside to the situation. Some of them underwent astral projection, abandoning their physical bodies and taking flight in a soul state. Their destination was not the dimension where their god slept, but the residential area outside the headquarters.

But Felix's group did not tolerate it. The Supernatural Abilities used by clerics to exorcise specters and ghosts were unleashed. Brilliant light flashed everywhere, and the living spirits writhed in pain or were forcefully sucked back into their bodies.

"By the way."

Terrified after watching the spiritual bodies being cruelly captured in the night sky, Ha Eun-seong barely managed to roll his eyes to look and ask.

He was worried about the Talent Minjun had to recover.

"Do we really need to walk this slowly? It might be dark all around, but if we keep walking down such a major road, someone is bound to spot us eventually. What if they figure out where we are going and touch the altar first?"

His concern about witnesses soon became a reality.

A single priest came running through the darkness.

"A-aaaaah! Heup me!"

The priest's pronunciation was highly indistinct, and the reason was revealed the moment he drew closer.

The fleeing man's face was distorted, covered in swollen boils. A fist-sized boil had swollen up inside his mouth, making even breathing look difficult. In addition to his face, large lumps of flesh had also ballooned on his left thigh and back. It was a marvel he had managed to run this far.

He appeared to belong to the side following the acting pope. Upon seeing Minjun, his two eyes widened.

"A... Ava-aw...!"

Flash!

A light flashed from behind him and directly struck the back of the fleeing man's head. Another sizable tumor swelled up on the back of his head, and as blood rapidly rushed to the spot, dizziness swept over him.

The priest collapsed and fainted.

A moment later, the person responsible for his condition also revealed himself. Naturally, it was a priest following Felix. He wore a triumphant expression until he belatedly spotted Minjun's group and froze.

"That swindler!"

The dragon growled and prepared to spew fire, but Minjun stopped him. Dell, who was following behind, was also quiet, as if guessing his intent.

In the meantime, the priest infused his voice with Divine Power and shot it out. Even if it could not reach outside the headquarters, the voice was loud enough to reach his colleagues at a close distance.

He could easily have stopped him if he wanted to, but Minjun did not.

"This is 28th Avenue! False avatar spotted at the connection point between the Guesthouse and the Cathedral of Resurrection! Requesting urgent backup! Requesh urgen back..."

The priest's last words slurred together.

Much like the voice the priest of the acting pope's faction had spat out when begging Minjun for help.

"Uh... guhhh... wha ith a-ppe-ning..."

He sensed his tongue enlarging like a bad joke until it filled his entire oral cavity. At the same time, he felt a needle-like pain and the fishy, salty taste of pus.

Large and small blisters had begun to bubble up on his tongue.

"Guhhk!"

Minjun knew that disbelief and disobedience had been finalized at the tip of his tongue.

That was why the curse had struck the tongue first.

"Guaaaaagh!"

The blisters inside his mouth swelled up, burst to spill fluid, and then repeated the cycle of swelling and bursting.

Soon, a similar process followed along his cheeks, neck, chest, and stomach. It looked as if air bubbles were boiling beneath his skin.

Pop! Pop! Poppopop! Countless blisters covered the pursuer's entire body before being crushed once again. He was soon covered in dark pink pus and blood. His continuously bubbling epidermis looked like liquid boiling in a kettle.

Thrashing wildly, he emitted Divine Power. A golden light exploded.

Flash!

He frantically struggled to heal himself, but the speed at which the blisters erupted and tore open was faster than the speed of recovery.

Bursting like flower buds, the blisters did not cease their bloom. He had already gone blind. Blisters had welled up on his corneas and popped, and eventually even his lenses condensed into blister shapes and burst—a process that repeated dozens of times a second.

No intact outer skin remained on any other part of his body. Then, as his skin peeled and tore, even the exposed pink inner layer swelled up to form red blisters that popped. The priest's skin soon became like shredded rags. After the basal layer beneath his epidermis wore away, the subcutaneous fat layer followed; once that too was completely abraded, blisters began to form on his muscles.

"—!"

He screamed like a beast.

He could have escaped the pain by voluntarily secreting pleasure-inducing hormones from his brain, but he instinctively did not. He knew that the moment he stopped resisting the pain, he would die on the spot.

Ironically, due to his instinct to survive, he suffered through horrific agony for a long time.

The first places where his bones showed were his fingers, cheekbones, and forehead—areas where the skin and bone practically met. The priest did not die even with all his muscles and nerves exposed. It was only after the fibrous sheaths protecting his arteries burst that he finally let out his death scream.

"..."

The priest stopped breathing.

The dragon had been vomiting for a while now.

When Ha Eun-seong turned his gaze away, he saw the priest who was barely breathing while covered in several large boils lying side by side with the dead priest, whose entire body was covered in ruptured or bursting blisters. Even when he closed his eyes, the scene he had just witnessed remained burned into his mind like a scar.

If Ha Eun-seong were to express the phenomenon in words he knew, it was as if the dead priest had reaped tenfold what he had sown.

Minjun did not wait long for Ha Eun-seong. According to their beliefs, the dragon was also one of their important symbols.

"Let's go."

With tears welling in his eyes from vomiting, the dragon looked at Minjun. Only now did he understand his intention as well.

Sin inevitably entails punishment.

His creditor was intending to punish those who did not believe in him.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!