The Plot Thickens-Come See!

"Finished!" Jacques covered the goods on the carriage. He had already carved the Divine Secret Language onto them.

It was neither conspicuous nor hidden away. As long as the inspection at the city gate proceeded normally, they would definitely be discovered.

"You shouldn't be here." A voice startled Jacques awake.

Turning around, Jacques saw the Old Priest.

Countless thoughts raced through his mind, and Jacques's quick wits were forced out at that moment.

"It's you." Jacques swiftly pretended to relax, then said unwillingly, "Nigel must have been involved with the Whale Skin Mine. I have to uncover his violations."

"That's why I came here to inspect the caravan."

"Old Priest, just pretend you didn't see me. I'll leave once I'm done inspecting." Jacques pleaded, his tone and manner exactly the same as before.

He needed to hide the fact that he had contacted Isabella and pretend he still knew nothing about the Old Priest.

That way, he could muddle through and make the Old Priest lower his guard against him.

"You're a good child." The Old Priest smiled gently. "Though you can be rather impulsive at times, that is only because you have experienced too little."

"If you experienced more, you would become a qualified Paladin."

"I..." Jacques was about to say something when the Old Priest interrupted him.

"I'm sorry, Jacques."

"Everything is like God's will. Everything is moving toward the outcome I least wanted." As the Old Priest spoke, a tremendous bang suddenly sounded in the distance.

With his perception, he quickly determined that the sound had come from the church.

"Someone must have discovered my failed products beneath the church."

"Was it Nigel? Or Isabella?" The Old Priest was not alarmed. Instead, he seemed to feel a sense of liberated ease.

His attitude toward the experiment had always been deeply conflicted.

Ever since his failure all those years ago, he had lost far too much because of the experiment.

He could not let it go. He believed he should repent and atone for it.

Yet he also believed he should not let the matter end in failure. If it did, then his sins could never be fully redeemed.

So, without realizing it, he restarted the experiment.

Reason told him that he should stop the experiment and end all of this, but everything kept offering him assistance.

When he truly saw the experiment nearing success, and every element connected to it fell into place one after another, he could no longer restrain himself.

Now, his last path of retreat had been cut off. He no longer had the option of wavering, and his heart finally settled.

What greeted the Old Priest was Jacques's sword.

The instant he swung, Jacques used all his strength.

He activated both the power of the Holy Bone and the Path of the Saint, the Dartmenly Family's secret inheritance.

His full-force strike swung straight at the Old Priest.

The blade landed on the Old Priest's body. Blood sprayed everywhere, and the Old Priest was split into two corpses.

Yet Jacques's expression changed drastically.

"The feeling is wrong!" Jacques had participated in hunts and killed animals with a sword. He knew what it felt like when a blade cut into flesh and severed bone.

Sure enough, the surrounding environment instantly dimmed.

Just as Jacques became vigilant, a beam of light from nowhere descended and enveloped him.

Like the protagonist of a stage play, he became the center of the entire world.

Jacques had no idea what the Old Priest was doing or what was happening, but he could only hold his sword and remain on guard.

Then he saw another beam of light appear in the distance.

The person enveloped by that light was all too familiar—it was the Nigel he hated.

However, Nigel looked very young then, about the same age Jacques was now, as though he had only just reached adulthood.

He was running through a corridor.

Wearing armor and holding a sword, he cleaved open the door at the end of the corridor and charged into a courtyard, where several servants were carrying things.

"That's... Dartmenly's secondary estate?" Jacques immediately recognized where Nigel was. It was a residence beside Dartmenly where many of the family's servants worked, responsible for preparing food for the elite members of the family.

Because many precious medicines were used there, and because they feared the family's elites might be poisoned, outsiders were generally forbidden from entering.

Then he saw Nigel seize a servant, his eyes red as he demanded, "Where is it?"

After getting his answer with the sword in his hand, Nigel rushed into a certain place. He swung his sword madly, forcing aside the guards outside, then pushed open the door.

The instant he saw what was inside, Nigel seemed to lose all strength. He collapsed on the threshold, staring fixedly at the things within before beginning to retch violently.

Jacques had a terrible premonition. Step by step, he approached the place, terrified yet unable to stop himself from looking inside.

Then he saw a sight he would never forget for the rest of his life.

The room was enormous, with more than a dozen racks. A person hung from each one.

Their bodies were filled with tubes. Some tubes were draining blood, while others pumped in food or medicine.

Their bodies were skeletal, covered in scars. Some were missing limbs, and the mutilated areas still showed red flesh, crisscrossed with countless blade marks.

Jacques could even imagine how the flesh on their bodies had been sliced off piece by piece.

"Urgh..." Jacques could not stop himself from retching. His entire body trembled.

What drove him even further toward madness was that each of the dozen or so racks bore an identification tag.

Among them, he saw his parents' names.

The two people on the racks marked with his parents' names had almost entirely lost human form, yet they had been staring at him from the moment he entered.

How could those two pairs of eyes possibly be described?

For a moment, Jacques felt the world spin around him.

He could no longer stand and collapsed to the ground.

He had always believed his parents had died while crusading against evil.

He had never imagined they had survived until now in such a miserable state?!

"Aaaaahhh!!!" Jacques let out a furious roar.

He was furious at his own ignorance, and furious that the Dartmenly Family had treated him and his parents this way.

More than anything, he was furious at Nigel.

Nigel had discovered this back then. Why had he not exposed everything completely? Why had he not made The Church destroy the Dartmenly Family? Why had he not killed Jacques back then?!

What had he been doing all these years?

Proud of the Dartmenly Family like some pathetic fool, fighting time and again for this so-called family?

He was like a clown who had been deceived, yet still had to entertain others.

Everything was driving him mad.

At that very moment, the restraints on those racks snapped.

Those barely human figures crawled toward him, intending to kill him.

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