Chapter 247: Restart of Destiny

"I need you to send me to the East District."

The strikingly beautiful lady murmured in a low voice.

Mr. A, clad in a hooded robe, nodded gently. A transparent, blurred book swiftly materialized before him, accompanied by a distant, ethereal chant:

"I come, I see, I record."

The pages flipped rapidly, quickly settling on one page, then radiating a pale blue, illusory light.

The light instantly pierced through the lady's figure, making her rapidly blur, then fade into nothingness, and disappear from the hall.

Having done all this, Mr. A knelt before the altar, closed his eyes, and prayed:

"Lord who created all, Sovereign behind the veil of shadows, the fallen nature of all living beings."

"Your devout believer prays to You."

"Praying for Your descent."

In the concealed space, Beiernadai looked toward where Lady Despair had departed, her slightly furrowed brow visible, and spoke in a voice betraying neither joy nor anger:

"The Witch of Despair. She is going to the East District to unleash a large-scale disaster."

Reckon nodded gently and said:

"They want to use this to cover up certain matters and carry out a certain scheme, and in doing so, they happen to fulfill the conditions for offering a sacrifice to the evil god."

"The Aurora Order has become the best pawn for this. Even knowing they are being used, for the descent of the True Creator, they will not refuse."

Beiernadai turned to look at Reckon, her gaze lingering briefly. After a moment of silence, she spoke:

"Are you trying to tell me that even without this True Creator descent event orchestrated by the Aurora Order, the disaster that should happen would still descend — is that it?"

"Are you saying this to put me at ease, or to put yourself at ease?"

"Don't you feel a kind of fragmentation within yourself? A fragmentation akin to that between emotion and reason."

Reckon frowned slightly and let out a long sigh:

"Perhaps the White Tower pathway is inherently adept at thinking in a rational manner."

A clumsy excuse, one I cannot even fool myself with. Perhaps my divinity has long since begun to crush my humanity, only the divine me is still me, so I have adapted so naturally.

Beiernadai turned her gaze away and offered no opinion on the matter.

East District, a quiet, deserted corner of an alley.

Lady Despair's figure swiftly materialized.

She stepped out of the alley and looked up at the sky. The afternoon sun was obscured by thick clouds and fog, turning pale and dim.

There was also a faint, not-yet-dense yellowish fog, drifting and settling throughout every part of Backlund, carrying a slightly acrid scent, cold and damp.

A pity — it had not yet reached the time when the smog would be at its worst. With a faint sigh in her heart, she stepped forward very slowly, as if wandering through an ocean of fog.

Wherever she passed, the fog imperceptibly thickened, even taking on a hint of iron-black.

"Let despair spread through this city. Such opportunities are rare. Perhaps it can fully digest the remaining potion within me."

She murmured softly as she walked down a street.

Behind her, someone began to cough violently — coughing endlessly, coughing with incomparable ferocity, coughing until they collapsed onto the ground.

The paupers nearby began to panic, trying to retreat and distance themselves from the area, but the next moment, they too clutched their throats and began coughing uncontrollably, coughing until they could not catch their breath.

The smog, interwoven with iron-black and pale yellow, descended upon the entire East District, the dock district, and the factory district, and began continuously spreading throughout all of Backlund.

"Hugh, I have a very uneasy feeling."

In their rented room, Fors looked with some unease at her good friend Hugh beside her.

Hugh frowned and looked out the window, speaking with confusion:

"Fors, has the smog outside the window gotten worse? And the color is somewhat strange."

Fors turned to look. What met her eyes was fog so thick that vision blurred just over ten meters away, also tinged with eerie pale yellow and iron-black hues.

A spiritual warning arose without warning. Fors subconsciously shut the window in front of her.

She then turned to look elsewhere and quickly walked over, closing every door and window one by one.

Only after doing all this did she speak in a low voice:

"This fog gives me a very bad premonition."

Mr. A was in the hall where he was summoning the True Creator's descent.

Reckon tilted his head slightly, then raised his hand and, following the guidance of his spiritual intuition, opened a door in midair, from which he grasped something resembling an infant's umbilical cord.

It was saturated with an aura of corruption and filth, along with an intense, unwilling resentment.

Merely holding it in his hand, Reckon heard the cries of infants echoing in his ears, piercing his nerves and polluting his mind.

"This is? Something belonging to the True Creator?"

Beiernadai frowned slightly. The bizarre umbilical cord in his hand was too malevolent — her intuition was even preventing her from using the Eye of Mystery to examine it.

"The umbilical cord from when the True Creator descended as an offspring, back in Tingen."

"Under the interference of 0-08, Zins Zangwill lost it — and I, as it happened, accidentally picked up this thing."

Reckon explained softly, then tossed the malevolent infant's umbilical cord from his hand toward the altar before them.

The concealed barrier seemed not to exist before it; the cord passed through effortlessly and fell straight onto the altar.

Bzzz!

A sharp buzzing sound suddenly rang out, like a ladle of cold water splashed into boiling hot oil. The True Creator's aura within the altar fluctuated violently, with layer upon layer of radiance swirling around it.

"Offer your lives for the Lord's descent."

Mr. A's voice suddenly rang out.

Then came the sound of bodies hitting the ground. The stench of rotting flesh spread through the hall — Mr. A had sacrificed the several attendants left there.

Their skin rapidly withered and shriveled, clinging tightly to their bones like weathered corpses.

Mr. A's tall, thin figure stood before the altar. He removed his hood, revealing a face so beautiful it was unearthly.

Then his chest, abdomen, shoulders, and thighs all had flesh and blood writhing, appearing viscous and nauseating.

Within the radiance surrounding him, transparent illusory figures filled the space, overflowing with numbness, despair, pain, and oppression.

The changes here seemed to resonate with the True Creator in a distant unknown land; a terrifying, magnificent power reeking of corruption, carrying an unstoppable will, tore through layer after layer of barriers to descend upon this place.

Above the entire hall, streaks of brilliance pierced through the void, speeding along the stone pillars, floor, and air covered in symbolic markings and magical sigils, and plunging into the altar.

The next moment, a figure in a black double-breasted tailcoat passed through the wall and burst into the hall.

Klein was stunned for two seconds; having just escaped from Ince Zangwill with Mr. Azik's help, he had been brought by the Universal Key to this clearly evil ritual site.

Mr. A's pupils were stained blood-red, and his cold eyes, harboring extreme madness, swept over Klein.

The bizarre surroundings, Mr. A's displayed madness, and the terrifying ritual underway all stimulated Klein's nerves.

The intense sense of crisis left him no time for excessive thought; following his intuition, he drew the revolver from his waist and fired repeatedly.

In his panic, he also flung out a brass-colored key of ancient design.

"No problem," Beiernadai murmured with a hint of puzzlement.

She meant that Klein's sudden intrusion and his instinctive act of sabotage had encountered no interference from unexpected factors throughout the entire process.

Leighton did not listen carefully to Beiernadai's words; that Universal Key harboring Mr. Door's curse could not be allowed to be thrown into the altar.

His figure instantly turned transparent, as if transformed into a statue formed from countless points of starlight.

The statue shattered at once, and brilliant starlight surged forward, breaking out of the concealed isolated space, intercepting that ancient-looking Universal Key in midair.

The scattered points of starlight in the air began to reassemble, but before Leighton's figure could manifest, an unexpected coincidence occurred.

a bullet bearing a brass-colored trail, tipped with a demon-breaking round, happened to strike the Universal Key caught in the starlight.

Carried by the bullet, the Universal Key broke free of the starlight's interception and fell toward the layered radiance upon the altar.

Before Mr. A, a transparent illusory book appeared, and a chanting-like voice transmitted into the mind of everyone present:

"I arrive, I see, I record."

The surrounding time seemed to freeze for an instant, as a massive illusory scaleless serpent, formed from one after another of complex mercury-colored symbols linking together, appeared illusorily high in the air.

The giant serpent's body was covered in dense patterns and symbols, forming one interconnected wheel after another, with different sigils surrounding each wheel.

Its eyes were bright red and cold, gazing down indifferently at everything below.

The next moment, it moved its head, opened its scarlet maw, and gently bit down on its own tail.

At the instant head met tail, it was as if countless illusory rivers converged around them, evolving into a blurry, not-quite-real, slowly turning giant wheel.

Everything around them rewound as if played backward, returning to the moment before the demon-breaking bullet struck the Universal Key.

The next instant, an invisible giant hand intercepted all the bullets in the air, kneading them into a ball of iron fragments, which then dropped straight to the ground.

Leighton's figure reformed from within the scattered starlight, holding that ancient-looking Universal Key in hand, and murmured as if to himself:

"The Recorder can even record the restart of the Mercury Serpent? Is he really Mr. A?"

"This is not from a recorded Beyonder ability, but a restart personally cast by Uroborus—Mr. A is merely a medium."

Beiernadai also stepped out of the concealed isolated space, her gaze cool as she looked at Klein, seemingly guarding against any further unexpected actions from him.

"Uh... I can explain, that just now was an accident... really!"

Klein put away his revolver and spoke in an embarrassed tone.

(End of this chapter)