It's all about greed.
The wounds on your hands are the sins of the past.
Neither has to hide anymore, the broken mask, the submerged self.
"ROAR!!!"
The light of humanity, away from the opening.
As it is, no further mending is needed.
With the same stature as always.
Cut off all the humble dreams.
Even filth can be considered heroic proof...
By the time Fina returns to Silverpine Village again, Witcher is slowly pulling his blade from the last corpse.
Beneath his feet, floating corpses littered the landscape, blood stained the entire village, and pools of blood churned up, reddening the sky.
...
"Love that you walk alone in the darkness, love your unyielding look, love that you've confronted despair ~ refused to cry a single tear, love that you come from the darkness but dare to bet on destiny's tenacity, love that you're so much like me, gaping all the same ~ go on? Go on, go on, all your life, don't believe in destiny's light, battle on! Go on, put the most humble dream, to that whimper and roar in the darkness ~"
Sitting in front of a wooden tub, Evelea cheerfully brushes the dishes left over from last night.
The cook who was cutting the meat gave her a silent look.
"The night will be your first action with us, and I hope you'll be as motivated then as you are now."
"I heard that from Doo~"
Evelea looked up curiously, "It's to steal from a rich man's mansion is it?"
The cook's face flushed a little.
"It's recycling things that they don't understand!"
"You wouldn't be unaware of how much Transcendent items affect ordinary people, over in Loran, those rich people still have to pay us to clean them up, but the Acolytes here in Celine, it's really hard to tell, I don't even know what they're thinking, Transcendence has become a legend, and there are a lot of dangers that ordinary people don't even know about..."
After half an hour of explaining the situation and watching the man remain clueless, the cook disheveled.
"Well, actually, we're just going to steal something ..."
Evelea, who had finished washing the dishes, mused.
"Well ..."
...
...
Eleazar, standing at the edge of a pond in the village of Silver Pine, cuts open the palm of his hand and bleeds into the water.
The hideous-looking piranhas all came up at once like hungry ghosts.
Fina stood beside him curiously.
"Those people are the ones who ate those fish and were contaminated by the flesh and blood of such transcendent creatures, and that's what turned them into that inferior species of ogre."
Eleazar looks silently at the evil school of fish at his feet.
Fina picks up a broken arm and catches a couple piranhas to look at.
"Doesn't look like an ancient species with signs of having metamorphosed."
Eleazar said quietly, "It doesn't make sense to be in a place like this, it was put there on purpose."
"It could be some kind of evil experiment, or it could be jealousy..."
Fina stood up and twisted her head to look at him.
"Are you going to pursue this any further?"
"Forget it, I hate to explore the complexities of the human heart, leave that to the church."
Destroying the trampled path at the entrance to the village before the beasts could come in and devour the tainted corpses, the two slowly left the ogre village.
[Potions residue: 458...]
"Where are we going?"
Eleazar glanced at the classical gown she was wearing and thought back.
"Let's go to a nearby town first."
"Buy you a pair of bottoms..."
Fina blushed, then went after him.
...
Three days later, the traders again delivered supplies to Silver Pine Village.
Looking back at a couple of vans, he sighs a little more.
None of them have had much luck in recent times, only cargo, none of them pulling in tourists.
The money made from transporting goods is nowhere near as lucrative as the capitation fees for transporting tourists, which makes him skeptical of his business.
"It's still that Silver Pine village that's good, just stay at home, outsiders will keep sending them money, hell, the scenery in our village is pretty good too, why doesn't anyone come to visit!"
Complaining all the way, he was about to arrive at the village that was the envy of countless neighboring villages.
"Huh, is this the feces of a wild animal?"
"That much?"
The woods on either side of the road were lined with the remnants of a large number of beasts lingering in the woods, making the traders secretly wary.
"Well, what's that smell, it stinks..."
"Vomit! Damn, it really stinks!"
Forcing himself to endure the stench, he struggled to get to the entrance of the village.
"Buzz ..."
Immediately following the stench came the sound of countless flies vibrating their wings.
Walking out of the woods, the sight ahead opens up, and the village of Silver Pine, where the tramway breaks down in front of you, is already in shambles.
Corpses were strewn everywhere, unbelievably shocking, severed limbs and wreckage were scattered in every corner, a tragic dark red coloring all of the once beautiful village, and flies were flying all over the sky.
The vendor turned pale and couldn't help but bend down and vomit for a long time.
This is a slaughtered village!
He quickly turned his horse around and made a frantic withdrawal with no regard for anything.
The news of the massacre of Silver Pine Village shocked the entire South.
Later that afternoon, several acolytes in white robes slowly arrived at the miserable village.
"It's been confirmed as a transcendental event..."
The investigator who arrived first, reported back to them.
"These villagers, technically speaking, can no longer be considered human."
"The heart, the teeth, the fingers, all of them have mutated, if the speculation is not wrong, it should be an ogre..."
"And the pathogen that induced their mutation was this!"
The cleric frowned at the piranha with its mouth full of sharp, fine teeth.
"The villagers contracted blood-feeding after accidentally eating a piranha?"
"Uh-huh!"
The investigator continued to report, "This symptom, which will make them increasingly resistant to eating cooked food, will not be able to tolerate the excitement of blood, and in the initial symptoms, such people will lose weight violently for a period of time and become bone-thin, until they adapt to this symptom to regain their size."
The cleric looked at the row of ogre corpses on the ground that still had their bodies intact.
"It looks like they managed to carry through the acclimatization period."
"Yes."
The investigator flipped through the report in his hand, "That's why in the last two years, this village has had so many vicious cases, wild animal attacks, firework accidents, tourists disappearing, it's a matter of them being very careful in hunting for food and not noticing the real hidden agenda in these incidents, there is a serious suspicion of negligence in the local area."
"Until this time, they encountered tourists disguised by transcendentalists, with the predictable result of being slaughtered by someone else who killed them in return."
"And, uh... The other party didn't act in a destructive manner, they just destroyed the wooden bridge to stop the beasts from breaking in, like they're waiting for us to investigate, guessing that it might be the work of some order-keeping transcendent who doesn't want to be monitored..."
The cleric looked around silently. "Consumed the flesh and blood of transcendental creatures, mutated into ogres, and were eventually slaughtered by the Transcendents."
"And find out why they have this fish here?"
The investigator lowered his gaze, "It's been determined that it was the work of someone from a neighboring village who was jealous of the prosperity of this place, and the fish species, bought from the port over in Renaud City, at first he was just trying to disrupt the water ecology of this place a little bit with an exotic species, and as it turned out, he didn't expect it to be something like this at all."
"Just like that Emerald Town a while back..."
"Cursing each other, as a result, one side bought the real thing..."