A Group of Prisoners

Jerusalem.

If anyone from the outside were to see the situation here now, they would be shocked to discover that this holy site, once considered the most prestigious in the eyes of believers worldwide, had devolved into Hell.

Thick, dark clouds blanketed the sky, not only blocking the prying eyes of satellites but also obscuring all sunlight, reducing visibility to near-night levels.

The entire city had transformed into a bloody slaughterhouse. Countless mangled corpses piled up from the Temple Mount, spreading out in layer upon layer to cover the ground within the city.

To describe this scene as a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood would be the most fitting description; it was not an exaggeration in the slightest.

At least three million believers had died here. Their bodies were stacked into mountains, and their blood transformed into countless tiny streams that flew toward the sky, surging into the body of the Pestilence Knight, Plate.

Because there was so much blood, it looked as if the entire city was experiencing a torrential rain of blood, though this rain defied gravity, flying upward into the sky.

Plate did not hoard the immense power brought about by this slaughter; he channeled it all into the Heavenly Gate in the sky.

Perhaps due to the sheer volume of blood, the originally magnificent and golden Heavenly Gate had taken on a faint, blood-red hue.

The Heavenly Gate could no longer be considered merely cracked open; the opening was at least two palms wide, large enough for a child to crawl through.

Behind the gate lay the dark, boundless starry sky. The power sacrificed through slaughter kept the gate continuously open, and the wider it opened, the more power from the Evil God seeped through from within.

The Evil God's power spread in