It was like switching from theft to outright robbery after being caught, or resorting to kidnapping when an attempt at luring someone away failed.
Now, committing its crimes in open defiance, Corruption no longer bothered to conceal its actions. It had dropped the act entirely. If it couldn't pry a door open, it would smash it down.
Even a melon forcibly picked could be eaten. Sprinkle on some chili powder, and it would taste even sweeter!
A series of piercing booms erupted—the alarms raised as the gate to the Rift World was forcibly breached.
Under the bombardment of thunderstorms and flames that filled the sky, the eerie labyrinth shuddered incessantly, flickering in and out of sight. It seemed on the verge of collapse, only to swiftly restore itself completely.
Reality had been distorted.
The labyrinth seemed to reel beneath the relentless bombardment, but in truth, every approaching thunderbolt had its trajectory warped. Like the spectacular Itano circuses so beloved in animation, they traced dazzling flight paths before plunging into the darkness at the labyrinth's far end and vanishing! Stripped of all its disguises, it finally revealed its true nature.
"So that's it..."
Tong Ting understood. "Not an orthodox doctrine like Keter Labyrinth, but a warped heresy like Pan?"
[Pilgrim's Path]
Once, labyrinths like this had been built in front of many churches.
Worshippers would follow a winding route without any branching paths through the entire labyrinth, eventually arriving at the Sanctuary at its end. It was a ritual symbolizing transcendence from the mortal world after enduring countless hardships, and ultimate entry into the realm of the divine.
That was the core of this urban-legend labyrinth.
Taking the myth of the half-man, half-goat pastoral god as its origin, it incorporated countless rituals of Evil Folly worship, then cast vast numbers of