Church, Holy Mountain, an unnamed temple.
Several ascetics in plain, ragged clothes sat cross-legged beneath a cliff outside the temple, silently watching the cliff only a stone's throw away. Mottled moss had grown over their bodies, and birds had built nests atop their heads. No one knew how long they had been sitting there.
Beneath every ascetic's skin, thick golden fluid, viscous as magma, slowly churned. They were like blazing molten gold wrapped in a layer of human skin; tear even the smallest opening in that skin, and immense power would erupt.
Following the steep steps behind those ascetics upward, one would reach the entrance of the unnamed temple in only a few paces.
An ancient knight clad in black armor lounged lazily against the temple gates, taking occasional swigs from a jar of pungent liquor. The wine poured from the jar was a strange dark red—blood wine brewed from the blood of some unknown creature. Whenever a drop or two splashed onto the ground, it immediately corroded fist-sized pits into the granite floor.
Yet the old knight drank the highly poisonous strong liquor mouthful by mouthful, without showing the slightest discomfort.
Inside the dim little hall, dense rows of honeycomb-like doorways lined both sides of the corridor. Some stood open, revealing cramped spaces within; others were tightly shut, with deep howls faintly drifting from behind them.
At the very end of the hall stood a hemispherical chamber. Countless statues of gods were carved into the walls of this chamber, which was roughly twenty meters across. They depicted the battles between the gods worshipped by the Church of the Western Continent and other deities, including many harrowing scenes of gods falling.
Among those carvings, even the Dawn God worshipped by the Dawn Temple, now the Church's most powerful faction, bore