Chapter 203: Truth Behind it all (II)

Ishiki’s eyes traced the carved images on the wall with meticulous care, the purple flames of Sorrow’s Edge casting dancing shadows that made the ancient figures seem almost alive.

His newly acquired skill—Universal Translate—worked seamlessly, deciphering the ancient language as though it were his native tongue.

The revelations carved into stone were gradually reshaping everything he thought he understood about Aethelburg’s history.

He moved along the wall, following the chronological sequence of images that the Demigod had painstakingly preserved.

The next carving showed a sprawling landscape. Mountains, rivers, forests—and in the center, a single massive tree that dwarfed everything around it. Its roots stretched across continents, burrowing deep beneath the earth’s surface.

Its branches reached toward the heavens, as if trying catch the moon itself.

Beneath this image, scratched in smaller text that Ishiki had to lean closer to read, were the words:

“The World Tree.”

Ishiki’s blood ran cold as understanding began to crystallize in his mind.

The World Tree wasn’t just some mythological name—it was real. And according to this account and the description of the Divine Blood relic, it was the source of the corruption that had consumed the gods themselves.

He continued moving, his heart pounding with each new revelation.

His gaze shifted to the next carving, and what he saw there made his breath catch in his throat.

It was completely different from the older ones and stated a completely different story.

Two human figures stood before what was unmistakably a throne room. If Ishiki hadn’t personally walked through the Inner Ring’s castle and seen that very throne room with his own eyes, he might not have recognized it.

But the details were too precise to mistake.

The throne room was depicted with remarkable accuracy. There were six seats arranged in a specific pattern, three on each side of the central throne.

The architecture, the proportions, even the placement of windows… all of it matched what Ishiki had witnessed.

The two human figures stood at the center of the room, facing something that floated between them at chest height.

A circular object that gleamed with divine radiance.

Ishiki’s enhanced perception, heightened by Sorrow’s Edge, caught every minute detail.

Seeing it, a single word formed in Ishiki’s mind.

“One of the Orb’s.” Ishiki whispered, his voice barely audible even in the chamber’s oppressive silence. “The Eye of the Great Old One!”

But it was the figure seated on the throne that truly seized Ishiki’s attention and held it with an iron grip.

The figure was slumped forward. A sword protruded from the center of the figure’s chest—the blade visible both entering through the front and emerging from the back, having pierced completely through the torso.

But the sword didn’t stop at the body.

It continued through, embedding itself deep into the throne itself, pinning the figure in place. The position was grotesque… leaning forward at an unnatural angle, held up only by the sword that had killed them.

Beneath this horrific scene was a lines of text.

Ishiki read it with mounting horror.

“The Assassination of the Emperor”

Ishiki stood frozen, his mind racing to process the implications.

He quickly looked at the next image not too far away.

It depicted the same throne room. But this time there were two figures… there was a figure sitting on the throne and another one sitting below the throne.

There were names written besides both the figures. The one who sat on the throne was the god of reality himself… Mandecium and the figure sitting near his feet was named – Galvador.”

A shiver ran through Ishiki’s whole body.

“So the Emperor was never the Emperor to begin with,” he said slowly, speaking his thoughts aloud to crystallize them into coherent understanding. “He never actually sat on the throne. The actual ruler and the one who controlled everything—was always Mandecium.”

It made a terrible kind of sense.

The records had always referred to the Emperor’s reign with strange inconsistencies. The timeline of his rule stretched impossibly long for a mortal human.

Because it hadn’t been a human emperor at all.

It had been a god playing at mortality, ruling through the facade of an adopted human son while pulling the strings from a throne that should have belonged to mortals.

And that human son—Galvador— had played right into Mandecium’s hands.

Ishiki’s hands trembled as he moved to the next image, desperate to understand more despite the growing dread that accompanied each new revelation.

The image was larger than the others, carved with more detail, more care. As if the Demigod had spent considerably more time ensuring this particular scene was preserved with absolute accuracy.

It depicted two figures—a man and a woman.

They were shown in an intimate embrace, their bodies intertwined in the unmistakable act of making love. The carving was not explicit in any crude sense, but rather artistic, almost reverent in its portrayal of physical union.

But what made Ishiki’s stomach turn was not the image itself—it was the text carved above it.

“My Father and My Mother.”

His gaze dropped to the next image in the sequence.

The woman lay on a bed, her body still. She was not sleeping… rather it was a permanent stillness that meant death.

Beside her lay two newborns.

One had wings sprouting from its tiny back and the other appeared mostly human, though even in the crude carving, there was something about the proportions that marked him above mortals.

Ishiki’s breath came in short, shallow gasps as he read the paragraph of text carved below this tragic scene. The words were cramped together, as if the Demigod had needed to fit too much information into too small a space and refused to leave any of it out.

“My mother was a mortal woman—as beautiful as any human could ever hope to be. But she died after giving birth to me and my brother. After all, how could any mortal body withstand conceiving the children of a god?”

“It turns out my father never truly loved her. He merely wanted to remove a part of his divine soul—the part that represented the Sin of Greed. So he needed a vessel and he choose a beautiful looking mortal woman for his purpose.”

“I was born half-human, gifted with some divine powers but cursed with mortal limitations. My brother, on the other hand, was born as a manifestation of the sin itself. Pure Greed given flesh and consciousness.”

“My brother was named the Angel of Greed and was sealed away by our father when he was still young. He was too dangerous to be allowed freedom and too valuable to be destroyed.”

“As I grew older and accumulated merit through conquest and charity, the people began calling me the Demigod of Charity—a deliberate contrast to my sealed brother. They needed a hero to believe in, and I was happy to provide that symbol.”

“I didn’t understand then that I was merely playing a role in my father’s grand design. That man only looked at other as mere tools, not a son.”

Ishiki stood there for what felt like an eternity, simply staring at the words.

The implications were staggering.

Mandecium had deliberately impregnated a mortal woman… knowing it would kill her—solely to create two beings that could house aspects of his divine nature.

He’d created one son to embody Greed—the sin he needed to excise.

And another son to embody Charity—the virtue he needed to maintain.

One sealed away in darkness.

One paraded before the masses as a hero.

Both of them nothing more than containers for aspects of their father’s soul that he couldn’t risk keeping within himself.

“You weren’t a hero,” Ishiki whispered to the empty chamber, addressing the long-dissolved Demigod whose soul now resided in his Soul Archive. “You were a sacrifice from the moment you were born. A piece of your father carved off and given flesh so he could remain uncorrupted.”

And the Angel was not the Angel of Charity as the people of Aethelburg thought. But the Angel of Greed.

Then there was something wrong with the explanation that the Angel killed his father to protect Aethelburg. No… such a being could never think of that.

There must have been other reason.

’Greed and Charity.’

Everything that they knew about this place was coming out to be nothing but a facade.

He forced himself to breathe and calm down, to continue reading.

There were still more images. More revelations and more truth carved into stone by fingertips worn down to bone over countless centuries of desperate scratching.

The next section of wall showed a sequence of smaller images—a timeline of sorts, depicting events in chronological order.

There were a lot of texts too and Ishiki felt that after reading them he would be one step closer to being able to understand this whole scenario.

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