The ancients have long since ridden the yellow crane away, leaving only the Yellow Crane Tower behind...
Norton stared blankly at Karl's body lying on the ground, and for the first time, the strings of emotion in his heart, which had not been stirred for a century, resonated deeply.
In that instant, he suddenly realized that over the past few hundred years, he seemed to have been subtly transformed into the kind of person he once feared and hated the most!
For the past century, Norton has frequently launched military campaigns southward, incurring heavy losses and suffering. With a wave of his hand, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives, and with each act of capriciousness, countless families have been torn apart and destroyed...
A massive holy war reduced the population of the Southern Continent by half.
A casual command led to the slaughter of countless Vampire...
Cruel, tyrannical, incompetent, heartless, and a scourge to the nation, Norton has become someone else entirely!
To this day, Norton can still remember the mother and child he met at Mass in the Holy Lord City for the first time; to this day, he can still remember the coldness and fear brought by the greatsword swinging behind him; to this day, he can still remember the helplessness he felt when the greatsword pierced his body after punching that priest...
Norton stared blankly at Karl, who had fallen to the ground, and felt as if a tide was rising on the Qiantang River. He realized today that he had been deluding himself.
His thoughts, clouded by fear and repression, suddenly seemed to clear up like the sun breaking through the clouds, and he was suddenly enlightened!
"So... I've become this bad?"
Norton muttered to himself, suddenly feeling utterly powerless.
What he has always been pursuing is so-called transcendence; what he has always sought is ultimate freedom... But to what extent must one be free to qualify as ultimate transcendence?
Is what he is pursuing just another new shackle for him?
Norton, like a deer, fell into a sudden, Buddha-like state of enlightenment because of Karl's death.
In reality, once his state of enlightenment passes, he will fall back into it.
However, time no longer allows him to remain so pure.
Norton shifted his gaze from Karl's corpse to the pristine white body still nailed to the cross.
Karl had just splashed some of his blood on his body, but now the blood had completely disappeared, and his skin had returned to its pure white state.
If Norton's prediction is correct, Karl's blood should have been absorbed by the skin of this divine corpse... just as Norton's skin also absorbs blood.
Back then, Norton spontaneously expelled the wooden stake driven into its heart because it absorbed the blood of the Church knights. Would this divine corpse do the same...?
Norton's sanctity had barely faded when his face turned green.
Because in his line of sight, the pure white bone nail firmly embedded in the chest of the pale corpse was actually swaying slightly!
"Damn it!" Norton turned and left, regret already welling up inside him.
"I should have killed Karl back then!"
What do we do?
Norton couldn't even get close. If such a terrifying thing were to truly revive, then Norton would be like a chicken or duck, completely at the mercy of others!
"Useless! Idiot! Moron!" Norton's earlier exclamations had completely vanished, replaced by a mind full of criticism of Karl's betrayal.
"No, I can't stay in this Southern Continent anymore. I can fly! I'm going to cross the Gobi Desert and fly to another continent!"
With things having come to this point, the idea of running away once again took hold of Norton's mind.
This time, however, he probably can't escape!
"Boom boom boom..." Before he could take two steps under the increasingly powerful Pressure, faint rumbling sounds rang out outside the cave, and even the ground shook slightly.
Norton's expression changed drastically, and his gasp became an octave higher.
" Holy Knight!"
That's right, the Holy Knight, the Vampire nemesis whom he had just dismissed and who could kill several with a single blow, has finally arrived from the palace!
And it conveniently blocked Norton's path!
"Boom!!!"
Accompanied by a series of deafening crashes, like steel behemoths slamming into a cave, Norton watched in despair.
One after another Holy Knight clad in golden armor and wearing helmets with two small golden wings carved around their eyes charged into the cave with overwhelming force, crashing head-on into Norton's body, which was unable to dodge in time under the Pressure.
"Thud!" The golden greatsword pierced Norton's chest and emerged from his decaying back.
The leading Holy Knight charged like a bull, piercing Norton 'Norton body with his golden greatsword and relentlessly pushing forward.
Behind him followed a dense array of golden Holy Knight!
"Boom!" The massive wave of Holy Knight, like migrating wildebeests, carried Norton deep into the cave. The sheer scale of the wave caused many Holy Knight to charge towards the white cross and the hanging corpse of the god!
"Boom!" With a loud crash as Norton was shoved against the cave wall at the end by the Holy Knight, the Holy Knight, like migrating wildebeest, also knocked down the already swaying white cross and the god's corpse nailed to it, right before Norton's despairing eyes!
The white bone nail detached from the gap in the cross, finally rendering it powerless to resist the rejection of flesh and blood.
With a crisp sound, a pure white bone nail fell to the ground from the pale corpse that had been knocked off the cross but was still suspended in the air.
Under Norton's gaze, which was filled with despair and almost to the point of wetting himself, the pale and slender divine body suspended in mid-air slowly opened a pair of eyes as black as ink.
"Buzz..."
The moment it opened its eyes, the whole world seemed to fall into an eerie silence!
All the Holy Knight instantly stopped moving.
Then, in Norton's eyes, which were filled with despair and even distorted by the pressure, a white beam of light was instantly projected from the sun in the sky, completely enveloping the divine corpse floating in mid-air!
(Yesterday, forty people read it quickly, and one chapter was directly connected to the previous one.)