The Ascension Ritual was the most important ritual within the church.
The Holy Lord Church's most important observance was the weekly mass, and its most important ritual was the Ascension Ritual. Well, there was no contradiction there.
Norton sat on the bed and opened the two books in his hands.
One was called "Ascension," and the other was "Revival."
The covers were still made of that slightly greasy, human-skin-like material, but he had never seen the contents before, and that piqued Norton's curiosity.
He wasn't curious about what the books contained, but about how many books the church actually had on its doctrines or God. Why didn't it just release them all at once instead of handing them out one by one?
There weren't many secrets in them. Even the Garden of Eden contained descriptions of vampires, so releasing these books wouldn't have amounted to revealing any secrets.
Norton thought there was definitely something wrong with the people at the top. Based on his earlier speculations, they probably hadn't been driven stupid by confinement themselves. More likely, constant contact with people who had been driven stupid by confinement had made them a little brain-dead too.
Norton opened "Ascension." As expected, it contained another story about God, Caesar, and like the Holy Covenant, it showed some of his less flattering side.
"Ascension": Kuba was banished. He drank the blood of living creatures, his teeth sharp and his eyes red, withered and unclean. To escape death, he grew a pair of wings upon his back to shield him from the sun, and his temperament grew ever more violent.
God walked in the Garden of Eden and lay with a lamb until deep into the night. The scent of blood drew Kuba from his cave. He traveled countless miles through the night and slew God high in the sky. God's blood soaked into the earth, bringing forth the vitality of all living things.
Shenyin, enraged, severed Kuba's head and scattered his dismembered body in four directions. He then hung God's body upon a wooden cross and exposed it to the blazing sun, calling it Ascension.
"Ascension" ended abruptly. Yet those few short lines left Norton positively animated.
Good grief. If a missionary hadn't delivered it, and it hadn't been a genuine church book, he would have thought some heretic had written it!
Just look at what it said. God was mating with a sheep and got so caught up in it that his younger son ambushed and killed him.
Then his elder son tied him to a cross and left him under the blazing sun, calling it Ascension to make it sound nice.
Those few short lines were enough to fry Norton's CPU.
Although the earlier book had mentioned God crossbreeding, those passages had all contained the great divinity of creation. This book alone was a description of God's filth from beginning to end.
That was right, filth. In this book, God seemed to have shed his divinity and acquired human desires.
That was highly abnormal.
Theological books generally shared one common point: gods possessed only divinity. And divinity was generally expressed through creation, universal love, and destruction. For example, God thought humanity too greedy and unleashed a world-destroying flood. Or God said, "Let there be light," and the sun appeared. Such expressions of divinity generally weren't mixed with much human thought or desire. Humanity, on the other hand, was often expressed through depictions of sex and desire.
But the God depicted in this book had a human desire: the desire to mate.
The Holy Covenant also depicted God mating, but it was mixed with references to creation, giving it a certain expression of divinity. For example, God mated with animals and produced all kinds of species. That described the birth of those species, not God's desires.
In "Ascension," however, God and the lamb were purely giving vent to his inner desires, with no creation or expression of divinity whatsoever.
If the Holy Covenant, with its theme of creation, could still be considered a legitimate church book, then "Ascension" was an outright heretical product that obliterated God's divinity and highlighted his humanity.
A banned book like this was almost impossible to find in a church founded on faith.
That was what had Norton's CPU frying.
In short, the church had written a book that exposed its own foundations. It was as absurd as a capitalist country in Europe or America having communism as its national platform.
But that was only one part of it.
What he understood least was what Shenyin did afterward.
Nailing God's corpse to a cross and leaving it under the blazing sun? What kind of heaven-defying move was that?
Was he sure this wasn't an MVP results screen?
The Holy Covenant said that God created death and hung it high in the sky. The sun was a symbol of death.
And now God's corpse was exposed to the blazing sun. That didn't look like an attempt to revive him. It looked more like death was being used to suppress God's revival.
A humanlike God was killed by his own son, then hung on a cross and exposed to the blazing sun. If that wasn't a banned book, what was? Could this really be a legitimate church book?
Norton felt he understood this so-called church less and less.
Its actions all looked brainless, but the more he thought about them, the more terrifying they became. This place was a collection of contradictions.
Looks like I'd better find a chance to run, and fast! Norton felt he really had to get away.
This place was a little too strange.
Norton put "Ascension" on the table, then picked up "Revival" from beside him.
"Revival": Death separated the divine body, but the divine spirit never perishes. The divine corpse hung high upon the wooden cross, and the divine consciousness revived in Heaven.
The messengers brought extinction to the earth, and Jonah was imprisoned in the sun. Shenyin hung the divine corpse high, and the Garden of Eden cut Heaven off.
There was pitifully little content in "Revival," just those few short lines, totaling three and a half pages of large, vertically arranged text.
But the information in them was frighteningly plentiful.
First, Heaven had appeared. Second, God wasn't dead; his divine consciousness had revived in Heaven. Third, Jonah, the primordial god of death, made his first appearance, only to be imprisoned in the sun by God's messengers, who could also be called angels. Fourth, Shenyin had used God's corpse to cut Heaven off from the Garden of Eden.
If Norton hadn't misunderstood it, those were roughly the points the book made.
Norton frowned deeply, feeling completely lost.
The church believed in God, so it was definitely on his side. Shenyin was God's elder son, yet he had nailed God's corpse to a cross and exposed it to the blazing sun, calling it resurrection. So Shenyin should actually have been on God's side too.
But afterward, God's messengers in Heaven sealed Jonah in the sun, letting death wear him down for eternity. Yet Shenyin used God's corpse to cut Heaven off from Earth. What did that mean?
Norton felt he could no longer make sense of the relationships between them.
But that wasn't important. What mattered was that neither book said anything about the steps of the Ascension Ritual the day after tomorrow!
Even after reading them, he still didn't know what he was supposed to do that day. What if he stood there like a fool and broke the church's laws?
He didn't want to be cut down by a church knight's greatsword!
No, he had to ask the church knight at the door.
Norton put the book on the table, rose from the bed, and walked to the door. With some trepidation, he pulled it open.
If his life hadn't been at stake, he wouldn't have dared speak to any of those church knights.