The Evil God's Fanatics

The Moon God's awakening seemed to be a signal. The Sun God and the Star God awoke one after another.

One god after another descended upon the world once more.

And the believers who had fallen silent when their gods went to sleep began popping up like wild grass in spring.

Yet the ones with the greatest momentum, the most active of all lately,

were the Evil God's fanatics.

For the Evil God had recently awakened as well.

That evil god, whose authorities were calamity, fear, and chaos.

Unlike the other gods, he did not awaken amid blessings.

Instead, he returned to the world wreathed in a chill that seeped into the marrow.

And the fanatics under his command

had always been deranged people who committed every manner of evil, brutal and vicious people who had crawled in the dark for far too long.

They were beside themselves with joy.

These fanatics desperately wanted an answer from their god, wanted the Evil God's favor and blessings.

To that end, they spared no expense in holding the grandest, most solemn sacrificial ceremonies.

The Evil God was counted among the evil gods.

On his side were the God of Lies, the God of Calamity, the God of Nightmares, the God of Destruction... the God of Plagues.

He was no benevolent god, and his believers were naturally no good people either.

The sacrificial ceremonies these people offered were filled with appalling bloodshed and violence. The blood that flowed over their altars belonged to innocents, the bodies burned in their flames were living people, and the wails and screams were their hymns to their god.

They believed such ceremonies would please that god most.

Yet no matter how many sacrifices they offered, no matter how grand or wicked the ceremony,

their god

—didn't give a damn about them.

There was not the slightest response. He couldn't even be bothered to cast them a disdainful glance.

The flames on the altars burned and died out, only to be lit again.

The fanatics knelt on the cold stone floor until their kneecaps shattered, yet they couldn't get a single word of divine instruction.

They were confused and afraid.

Then they began a frantic search for answers.

They searched through every official ancient text passed down from the Age of the Gods, even poring over the weighty tomes recording the gods' rituals and commandments, page by page and word by word. To make sure they missed nothing, they even looked through some of the other material.

Anyone who didn't know better might have taken them for fanatics of a Righteous God.

And yet—

—nothing. There was nothing at all.

Not a single ancient text recorded any sacrificial rituals related to the Evil God.

It was as though this god had no need for offerings from his believers at all.

By the time they turned their attention to disreputable unofficial histories denounced as heresy, the fanatics had gone glassy-eyed from searching through a vast sea of material, their Psychic Power exhausted.

But what they never expected was that the thing that truly broke them

was not the anxiety of finding no information,

but the unofficial histories themselves.

One wildly unofficial history "tormented" them half to death.

Not physically,

but by a slow, agonizing flaying of the mind.

In extravagant prose and meticulous detail, the book chronicled the tangled love and hatred between the Goddess of Beauty and the Love God.

From their initial clashes to the love and hate that followed,

from a misunderstanding that sparked a three-thousand-year cold war to a certain god kneeling in a downpour for seven days and nights...

All in all, the melodrama, the bizarre twists, and the tangled emotions were a hundred times more outrageous than the prime-time family dramas promoted on the Star Network's front page.

The thing was, ridiculous as the plot was, they really couldn't help reading on.

And so this group of fanatics, who in other people's eyes killed without batting an eye, crouched around it in a gloomy underground chamber.

They could hardly tear themselves away.

"Ah, my eyes," one fanatic said expressionlessly.

Then his hand obediently turned to the next page.

After making it through the suffocatingly tumultuous tale of tortured love between the Goddess of Beauty and the Love God,

they came to the chapters about the Goddess of Beauty's entanglements with the other gods.

The God of War had launched a campaign for a single smile from the Goddess of Beauty. The God of Wisdom had made an exception and taken on a disciple to teach for the Goddess of Beauty. Even a certain god renowned for being cold and ruthless [classified] had once spent an entire drunken night staring at a portrait of the Goddess of Beauty...

The fanatics went from scoffing at it at first

to half believing it, then finally being left utterly speechless, in just three short days.

So much so that

by the time they finally came across a record concerning the Evil God, they were already close to seeing the Goddess of Beauty in a different light.

Granted, this Goddess of Beauty looked rather useless.

—No command over armies, no authority over warfare, no say in the workings of heaven and earth...

—But that face really did have tremendous destructive power.

Enough to make the gods lose their minds and leave behind three whole volumes of "the history of the gods' entanglements with the Goddess of Beauty" in the unofficial histories.

But so what?

The Goddess of Beauty had indeed seduced quite a few gods.

And although, for some reason, most of them were evil gods, could the Goddess of Beauty really bewitch their great Lord Evil God too?

Their god was the supreme ruler who held sway over all the calamity and fear in the world.

He was famous for being cold-blooded, ruthless, and hard-hearted.

A Goddess of Beauty who lived off a pretty face would probably be crushed to powder by the god's baleful aura before even getting close.

Besides, what use was a face, no matter how beautiful?

Sustained by this firm conviction, the fanatics kept searching, and finally found a record directly concerning their god amid a pile of absurd accounts.

The record was only a single short line, but it nearly made all their eyes pop out of their sockets.

—It was said that the Evil God liked pretty boys.

After a deathly silence, they all exploded.

This reaction was also known as breaking down.

"My god isn't the Goddess of Beauty! How could he be some frivolous fool who fancies good looks?!"

One fanatic slammed the table and sprang to his feet, shaking with rage.

"This is blasphemy against my god! Blasphemy!"

"Slander! It's absolute slander!"

The Evil God's fanatics were furious and refused to accept it.

They cursed in the chamber for a whole day and night, using every foul word they could think of.

But as everyone knew,

a person's bottom line never gave way all at once.

It loosened gradually and retreated quietly, sinking lower and lower before one even noticed.

After they had exhausted every method they could think of—

bloody sacrifices, agonized wailing, self-mutilation to prove their devotion...

and still failed to get even the slightest response from the Evil God, the fanatics whose curses had just shaken the heavens fell silent one by one and looked at each other.

The same struggle and wavering were reflected in all their eyes.

In the end, they had no choice but to turn their attention to the method they considered the most unlikely, the most absurd of all.