Laura Croft spent several months figuring out the true nature of the Brotherhood of the Shield.
It was a cult devoted to saving the world. Its members included sages from every era and every nation, from the famed astronomer Zhang Heng to the greatest modern scholar, Newton. All of them had signed the Euphrates Blood Pact. Its fields ranged from science and theology to art—every discipline the Brotherhood of the Shield believed humanity would need in the future. It intended to control everything from reason to emotion.
Laura Croft believed it was fortunate that such an organization had been destroyed. Otherwise, it would sooner or later have become something like The Trinity, colluding with the powerful and reeking of elitism, money, and arrogance.
However, as an ancient organization, the Brotherhood of the Shield provided her with plenty of research material. The most important of it was the so-called dragon. Yet even after combing through every book illustrated by scribes with armored rabbits and human-faced snails, every stele buried beneath the soil, and every papyrus so fragile a breath could destroy it, she still could not find an answer about the dragon. As the core that held the Brotherhood of the Shield together, the Euphrates Blood Pact recorded humanity's first salvation and described its enemy, yet it never explained what kind of monstrous beast the Brotherhood's founders had killed.
Later, the Brotherhood of the Shield absorbed many members. Its theologians merely forced a connection between that beast from the Seabed, which had destroyed human civilization, and the seven-headed, ten-horned red dragon in the Bible. To the Roman Church, the Brotherhood's texts were undoubtedly pagan worship. Yet to the theologians absorbed into the Brotherhood, those texts allowed them to realize earlier that the sacred texts of Judaism had originated from even older