Erebus

Erebus felt like fate had utterly betrayed him.

This was not a momentary streak of bad luck, but a misfortune like maggots clinging to bone, haunting him for his entire life. Ever since he could remember, every day of survival had been a bloody challenge. In Colchis's freezing streets and garbage heaps, an orphan like him had to be as vicious as a hyena and as cunning as a viper if he wanted to live—if he did not want to freeze to death, starve to death, or be beaten to death by stronger street children.

Move, and there might be life. Stop, and death was certain.

Climbing upward, toward the place with warmth, food, and power, was an instinct carved into his bones—the only meaning of his survival. For that, he could pay any price.

He even remembered that night, a night beneath pale moonlight. The only boy from his childhood he could call a friend, a pious lad named Erebus who was just as skinny but had clear, pure eyes, had excitedly told him that a passing priest admired his devotion and was willing to recommend him to the local Covenant Church school.

At that moment, as Erebus looked at the yearning for the future in his friend's eyes and felt the blazing hunger in his stomach and the icy filth beneath his feet, a cold and resolute thought was born.

With a sharp-edged stone, he smashed in the back of the real Erebus's head from behind. It was clean and efficient; his friend barely felt any pain. He stripped off the other boy's worn but relatively clean clothes, exchanged them for his own rags, then dragged the corpse into a filthy drainage ditch and covered it with garbage.

From that day onward, he was Erebus. Bearing that stolen name and stolen, barely respectable identity, he entered the lower ranks of the Covenant Church. He learned to imitate the real Erebus's pious, timid manner, bowing and scraping before every superior while hiding all his viciousness and scheming beneath a humble smile. He seized every opportunity to distinguish himself and desperately studied those tedious doctrines, because he knew this was the only rope he could grasp to climb upward.

More than ten years! He had spent more than a decade treading carefully like a rat in a gutter, walking on thin ice, before finally working his way up to the position of a mid-ranking regional priest. He was still far from the center of power, but at least he had a stable source of food, a place to live where he did not have to worry about dying at any moment, and even a few low-ranking deacons he could command.

He had thought he had finally endured enough. He thought the gears of fate had begun to turn in his favor.

Until that night.

He had a dream that was incomparably vivid, incomparably real. In the dream, he stood before a cracked mirror. The face in the mirror suddenly shattered, split evenly into four pieces, each twisted into a different expression of pain and ecstasy. Then the sky split open—not in any physical sense, but torn apart by four indescribable lights representing extreme concepts. Four enormous, chaotic shadows overflowing with endless power and will enveloped him. They whispered, roared, and chanted.

They told him that the Son of God would soon descend. Wait for an opportunity. Wait for a fellow believer named Korfalon. Then he would fulfill his true destiny and become... one above all others.

After waking, Erebus was drenched in cold sweat, but an unprecedented fervor and certainty filled his heart. He had known it! Erebus was born extraordinary! All the suffering he had endured, all the filth, had been paving the way for this moment! He was the chosen one! Those four beings, unheard of before and far more powerful than the Father God described by the Covenant Church, were the true gods! And he, as their chosen, would assist the Son of God and ascend to the summit!

What Covenant Church? What bullshit doctrines? They would all become stepping stones!

He waited eagerly, secretly gathering information about the Son of God and Korfalon. At last, he felt that his life had gained a clear, radiant direction.

But what followed was like an out-of-control truck hurtling in a direction he could not understand, before running him over head-on.

First, Korfalon died. When the news arrived, Erebus nearly crushed the holy emblem in his hand. Dead? That important fellow believer mentioned by the true gods in his dream had been killed in some godforsaken backwater by an obscure, down-and-out priest named Zhou Beichen? He had died so abruptly, so... meaninglessly?

This was nothing like what he had imagined! That was not how the script was supposed to go!

Then even more absurd things happened one after another. Zhou Beichen and that so-called "Son of God," Lorgar, not only failed to fade into obscurity after Korfalon's death, but rose to prominence at a startling pace. They established something called Earthly Heaven, created a "work point system," invented cheap paper and glass, and even... they defeated Archbishop Gregory's punitive army head-on, then used some inconceivable financial method to bring Gregory's power base crashing down!

As Erebus hid in the relatively safe north and pieced together this information from scattered reports, he felt his entire worldview collapsing. What the hell was this supposed to be? Was this how one preached and developed believers? Why did it feel more like they were running some massive merchant guild?

The Covenant Church's forces suffered defeat after defeat before them. That idiot Bishop Lot had even summoned genuine "divine grace." Erebus could sense that power, which shared the same origin as the force from his dreams but was even more violent—yet the Son of God, Lorgar, had personally purified it!

Erebus felt a chill of terror. That Lorgar—the golden flames he wielded made Erebus tremble and recoil from the depths of his soul. That power seemed to have been born specifically to restrain the true gods he worshipped!

He no longer dared to show himself carelessly. Following the revelation of the whispers in his dream, he cautiously formed secret societies within his diocese, spreading faith in the four true gods and recruiting believers dissatisfied with reality and hungry for power. He did everything with extreme secrecy, never appearing in person. Every order passed through layer after layer of intermediaries.

He hoped that the power he was cultivating in secret could prove useful at some critical moment in the future and aid the Son of God. For a time, he had believed Lorgar was the Son of God from the prophecy—until Lorgar revealed that damned Purifying Flame... Or perhaps it could help Erebus himself.

But then misfortune descended again.

The secret societies he had painstakingly built were struck by devastating blows before they could grow strong. Earthly Heaven's newly established Faith and Order Defense Bureau had noses like bloodhounds, accurately locating several of his gathering places. Some members died, while others were captured. He suffered catastrophic losses, yet he did not even know how the enemy had discovered them.

Just as he was still reeling from the shock and trying to relocate and hide himself more deeply, news like a bolt from the blue swept through every region within his reach, accompanied by rough but clear Colchis paper flyers.

A wanted notice.

A highest-level wanted notice personally issued by Zhou Beichen, supreme leader of Earthly Heaven.

Wanted: Erebus.

Crimes: Blasphemy, murder, heresy.

Identifying features: Bald, with ancient Covenant Church inscriptions tattooed across his entire body.

The reward was dizzyingly high.

When Erebus saw that wanted notice in some dark corner, his hands trembling, he felt all the blood in his body freeze.

Bald... inscriptions all over his body...

Those two features were like poisoned daggers, stabbing straight into his deepest, darkest secret!

To disguise his piety, to conceal the contempt and exploitation he held for the Covenant Church in the depths of his heart, and out of some warped impulse of self-punishment and display, he had indeed hired someone to use special pigments and needles to tattoo ancient, obscure Covenant Church inscriptions onto every inch of his skin! This was his greatest secret. Other than the tattooist, who had long since died, there should never have been a third person who knew!

That Zhou Beichen! How did he know?! How could he know in such detail?!!

Erebus curled up in a mildew-stinking hideout, clutching his head as his teeth chattered. Fear wrapped around his heart like icy vines, nearly suffocating him.

Could he really possess the power of foresight...? A desperate thought spun wildly through his mind. If it was not foresight, how else could any of this be explained? Korfalon's death, Earthly Heaven's rise, Lorgar's bizarre Purifying Flame, the precise strikes against his secret societies, and this... this wanted notice aimed directly at his most vital secret!

He felt like a mouse being toyed with in the palm of an invisible hand, all his struggles and concealment laughable and futile.

The wanted notice took effect immediately. He could no longer trust anyone. The lower-ranking people who had once been meek and obedient before him now looked at him with shifting eyes. One hideout after another was exposed. Several times, he escaped only by relying on his familiarity with the terrain and ruthless methods, but there were fewer and fewer people at his side, and the area in which he could move grew smaller and smaller.

Like a stray dog, he fled miserably within an ever-shrinking encirclement. Food was scarce, his nerves were stretched to the breaking point, and the fervent faith he once held in the true gods was gradually replaced, amid repeated pursuits and despair, by a bone-deep terror of the man named Zhou Beichen.

In the end, on a cold night of drifting rain, the entrance to an abandoned mine where he was hiding was silently surrounded.

When torchlight illuminated his face, twisted by hunger and fear, and soldiers in Earthly Heaven uniforms with icy eyes appeared like ghosts, Erebus did not resist.

He collapsed onto the cold mine slag, staring at the skin exposed beneath his robe, worn through from fleeing and covered in dark inscriptions. He let out a hoarse sound of unclear meaning, half weeping and half cold laughter.

He was finished.

He had struggled to survive his entire life, murdered his friend and stolen his name, endured and lurked in hiding. He had thought he had received divine revelation and was about to climb to the peak... Yet in the end, he had been dragged out so easily and so pathetically, like a cockroach.

This damned fate that had utterly betrayed him.