Theus's pen tip rested on the page, motionless for a long while.
Chloe's slightly messy handwriting continued to appear.
[I summoned an evil god, then detonated the airship. Forget defeating the monster—I couldn't even hold out for an instant. There is only one possibility—the monster is already close to succeeding.]
After thinking for a moment, Theus wrote in his own blood, [What is it?]
The Pirate King.]
"At the instant before my death, I touched the monster's true body. Although I was immediately completely corrupted, I still managed to use my ability before dying. I can see inside its body.>
[It altered the will of the Sea God Church's believers, shifting the worshippers' sacrificial offerings onto itself. Oh, right. You may find this hard to believe, but the Sea God Church actually intended to resurrect an ancient existence, and they had been offering sacrifices for an entire thousand years...>
[The Sea God, right?]
This time, Chloe's handwriting hesitated. She tried to spell out the words [Sea God], but gave up halfway through, as though some inexplicable force were stopping her.
[In any case, the Pirate King had been accepting the sacrifices of those cultists all along through this method. If he had simply kept it up, he might really have been able to control the entire Storm Ocean. But something seems to have happened recently, making him urgently begin forcibly absorbing the pollution in the sea.]
[That works too?] Theus was somewhat surprised. [Isn't pollution deadly poison to Transcendents?]
Of course not. But the Pirate King really is a genius. He came up with an extremely ingenious method—having the cultists making sacrifices to him share the harm caused by the pollution together.]
[The harm from pollution can be shared?]
Normally, it couldn't. But the cultists' sacrifices to him gave them