Chapter 2410: Despair, Hope, and Light

"Grandpa Augustus, Grandpa Augustus!"

I don't know how much time had passed, but amidst the stuffy air and the severe pain throughout his body, a soft call woke Priest Augustus from the darkness.

When the old priest opened his eyes again, he only felt a piercing pain in the back of his head, and his entire left arm had lost all sensation.

His vision was completely dark, and the air was so turbid that his lungs were twitching, but fortunately, the breathing of the three children he had protected beneath him was still steady. Two of the short boys didn't know if they were injured or had fainted from fright; only the little girl with braids, Marianne, who was holding a princess doll, was still awake. It was she who had just woken the old priest.

"There was an earthquake, this building..."

After waking up, Priest Augustus made a judgment immediately, then tried to move his hands and feet in the ruins, only to find that the four of them were fixed in the gaps of the building's wreckage. With his current Second-Tier power, it was not enough to climb out from the deepest part of the ruins of the collapsed three-story building.

"Grandpa Augustus, are we going to die? Just like Mom and Dad?"

Marianne, who was being protected, asked. Her voice was already a bit weak. The severely injured old priest tried to make his tone more lively:

"No, of course we won't die, someone will come to save us soon."

So little Marianne stopped talking. The priest realized that she had finally been unable to hold on and had fainted.

Blood was flowing down the old priest's cheek; it was his own blood. He guessed that besides the back of his head, there must be other wounds on the top of his head.

But the pain throughout his body had made him unable to carefully sense his own body. After most of his own power was used to imprison the shoulder blade contaminated by the peculiar light, he had no ability to recover immediately, nor did he have the ability to take the children and escape here immediately.

Although he had just comforted the little girl that someone would come to rescue them, Rat Augustus knew very well that with Moon Bay's current situation and the intensity of the sudden major earthquake just now, by the time people came to dig them out, it was likely that except for himself, the three children would not survive.

The air filled with smoke and dust suffocated him, and the dark environment made his mood increasingly depressed. He tried to mobilize the spirit in his body, stretched his only free right hand upward, and used his hardened fingers to forcefully claw a mark out of the stone above his head.

He could actually release the suppression of that bone at any time, but this would also lead to the leakage of death aura, directly turning the three children he was protecting into undead.

The old priest, who held no hope for the future and did not believe that luck would befall him, dug a crack out of the stone above his head with his fingers again amidst the severe pain. Looking at the world pessimistically, looking at everything pessimistically, he never feared his own death, but he absolutely could not let the children die here with him.

"Up! Up!"

Stone chips peeled off, hitting his brow and cheeks. Even though he had added "Hardening Technique" to his fingers, blood had already soaked his sleeves along his arms.

The thinness of the air and the despair in his heart almost made the elderly man dig upward mechanically, and the memories of this life were also playing in reverse order at this moment.

Together with the doctor and the detective, he had experienced adventures more exciting than the last, and the angel's bones were recovered and fused at an unimaginable speed:

"If they knew I was pressed here..."

Last summer, he first met Xia De at the psychological clinic. At that time, he hadn't realized what this shy but inexplicably mature young man could accomplish:

"I haven't paid back the favor I owe him..."

Two years ago, during that accident, an unknowable-level relic that reversed time caused him to fall into cycles again and again, but this almost invincible relic was still solved and contained by him and the mysterious diviner in the same group:

"If time could flow backward at this moment..."

Four years ago, he accidentally heard a strange sound in his ear. The talent he had pursued all his life but couldn't obtain was actually awakened in his old age. He couldn't forget the astonishment and loss of that moment:

"If only you could have come earlier..."

The secret he had kept for almost his entire life since his youth, the incomplete angel he had seen in his dreams almost every night for thirty years, this was both a responsibility and a mission, but he had failed to wait for the opportunity to discover the secret by his own strength.

"Why, why did you choose me..."

Thirty years ago that night, the angel that stood quietly under the night sky, bringing death to anyone who gazed at it, seemed to appear before his eyes again at this moment. Many people died, only he survived. He didn't know why this was.

"Just a coincidence, or because I was shot by a robber at the time, and I had already touched death..."

His schooling in his youth, the adventures of his young adulthood, the awakening he waited thirty years for, until he met Dr. Schneider, the writer Louisa, the diviner Luweiya, and the detective Xia De.

His long life flashed before his eyes in the process of mechanically digging upward.

The usually kind and amiable old priest had complex and contradictory emotions hidden in his heart, regrets and disappointments about this life that he would never tell anyone.

At this moment, the death that entered his dreams every night seemed to have truly come to his side. The pain gradually became numb, and in a trance, he felt as if he had returned to last autumn, returned to that tranquil water in the midst of death.

Only, this time there was no longer that young man who brought light to everyone in the darkness of death. This time, he was truly left alone.

*Click—* A sound like a bone breaking, but he still didn't stop the action of digging upward. After an unknown amount of time, his hardened right hand had forcefully dug a hole in the main beam of the house that was barely enough for his body to move.

So the priest Augustus first confirmed the situation of the three children, then endured the severe pain and forcefully pulled his numb left arm out from under the boulder.

He changed his posture to kneeling on one knee, giving the children more space, and then looked diagonally upward in this posture, his right hand starting to dig again.

"But why?"

Rat Augustus asked himself:

"Why is my life so unlucky?"

The voice in his heart overlapped with the voice of "another me," and that cold voice was clearly the Angel of Death.

In his youth, he helped others with enthusiasm, but was shot in an alley;

He survived because of an adventure, but not only did he have to be suspected by the church, he also had to endure the aura that had been imprinted in his soul after looking at the angel's shadow;

In his middle age, he longed for the supernatural, longed to collect the angel's bones to find answers, but waited in vain for an opportunity;

In his old age, he was in despair, but it was at this time that he received a response, when he had already accepted his fate.

No one had ever seen Rat Augustus cry, but at this moment, tears mixed with blood were flowing down his cheeks. The void in his heart expanded by death became even larger at this moment:

"There will be no rescue."

This thought appeared in his heart, and the hand digging diagonally upward slowed down involuntarily.

"In my life, fate is always fooling me. What am I expecting?"

Gravel fell with a patter, the ground shook slightly again, and the aftershocks of the major earthquake had not yet passed.

"In this world, things are always developing in the worst direction. Isn't this the way I have always thought?"

His hand had stopped completely. The crying old man knelt blankly in the turbid darkness without saying a word, and the gray aura at his shoulder blade appeared imperceptibly. Clearly, there was nothing around him, but the sound of wings flapping appeared behind him.

The gray representing decay and death appeared in his turbid eyes, and on the brown coat stained with blood and mud, some unspeakable patterns were slowly taking shape; they were clearly the patterns on the double-opening 【Gate of Death】 that Xia De had seen in the underground of Mibao.

And at this moment, a faint call came from the darkness:

"Grandpa Augustus..."

The distracted Priest Augustus lowered his head abruptly and saw in the darkness the little girl Marianne, who was holding a princess doll, tightly grabbing his hem while in a coma:

"I think, I saw Mom and Dad..."

At that moment, his cold heart seemed to be pierced by the sharpest arrow, and a ray of fire appeared in the void eroded by death in his heart;

"But I cannot let you die here!"

His right hand slammed into the building wreckage diagonally above, and the bricks and stones were shattered by a punch:

"No matter what my future is, they still have a future!"

Changing from a kneeling posture to trying to stand up, he wanted to hold up this sky for them with his aged spine:

"We will be saved, we will definitely be saved!"

The hoarse and aged voice sounded in this small space. The old priest, whose heart had ignited with fire, kept punching upward. Gravel fell one after another, but it was far from enough, far from enough.

He took a deep breath and tried to stand up. The shaking ground and the severe pain throughout his body almost made him lose consciousness again.

"Even if I die here, I cannot let them die here."

The old man, who had forgotten how long it had been since he craved luck and craved the mercy of fate, prayed and yearned amidst the surging despair again. Tears, sweat, and blood had soaked most of his jacket. The loss of strength and physical energy finally caused him to collapse to the ground after breaking off a small piece of gravel with his fingers for the last time.

His fingers trembled slightly, and his turbid eyes looked upward in despair. The consumption of oxygen made his breathing gradually become heavy, and the narrow environment made his consciousness even more blurred under the state of approaching mental breakdown.

The three children lay quietly there, and death was descending upon them.

Rat Augustus prayed to God, prayed to fate, and even prayed to himself, but nothing happened. He lay there motionless, his life story was nearing its end, and in the end, he still walked toward the worst ending, just as he had thought.

Using his last strength, Priest Augustus cushioned his numb left arm, looked up at the large hole dug out above, and his right hand, covered in blood and mud, stretched upward tremblingly:

"If only you could give me a ray of light, even if it's just one..."

And so, a hand covered in mud passed through the thick stone from above and grabbed Priest Augustus's right hand. At the same time that the old man thought this was an illusion, the moonlight that lit up on that hand slowly restored his spirit and physical strength.

The hand above retracted, and from the large hole pierced by the arm, a thick beam of sunlight shone diagonally into the narrow space under the ruins. Floating dust danced up and down around the beam of sunlight, and the sunlight illuminated Priest Augustus's tear-stained face. **CHAPTER 2411**