Legacy of Hatred

Chapter 320: Altars

Liam should have grown accustomed to teleports by then, except that the crossing of the darkness was odd in quite a debilitating manner.

For once, the shift in environments wasn’t immediate nor complete. Emptiness never hit Liam’s perception. He was assaulted by a constant stream of incongruent and chaotic sensations, and his sharp senses only worsened the experience.

The world was thoroughly broken inside that darkness. Smells that no single source could produce reached Liam’s nostrils and mouth in a joint shape. Mismatched noises resounded in his ears, following no trend that could be defined as natural.

Distant, nearby, loud, faint, deep, and high-pitched noises resounded in quick succession with no regard for the chronology they should feature.

At times, Liam heard what should be incoming steps, only for them to grow distant. Loud but unclear voices that seemed to resound right next to him were instead far away, starting from their fading echoes before reverting to the more distinct but fainter sources.

The darkness seemed to be the only stable detail, but that emptiness was also wrong. It wasn’t empty at all. Liam felt it pressing on him, as if it were a dense gas or a thin liquid, constant but ever-changing. free𝑤ebnovel.com

Moreover, as the seconds passed, Liam realized that nothing revolutionary was happening. He wasn’t being thrown into a different world. He could also move, hinting that no teleportation was happening.

The darkness was a passage that had to be crossed.

It was with no little difficulty and hesitation that Liam started to advance. The invisible surface he was stepping on was stable and straight. Still, everything he perceived told him otherwise, creating a debilitating dichotomy between reality and what he believed that shattered world to be.

The experience was no different than trying to walk straight while your head was spinning. Except that the world was the one doing the spinning now, while Liam was the only stable element.

Liam basically wasn’t following that broken world’s rules, so he risked stumbling with every step he took. He wasn’t even sure he was going straight at all, but the crossing did him the mercy of being brief.

A vertical crack of white light had appeared several meters ahead of Liam among the darkness, only for his next step to bring his body halfway through it.

The world regained a modicum of stability as soon as Liam’s head peeked into the light, losing most of its chaotic traits once he left the darkness entirely, his perception updating him on the environment he had reached.

An immense hall made of white tiles and walls painted with the same color expanded in Liam’s view, reminding him of the Churches he had explored along the way.

However, there were no seats or empty spaces. Instead, altars of different sizes littered the place, neatly arranged in a way that Liam found familiar until something clicked in his mind.

Liam had seen that exact arrangement, just on a far bigger scale. That was a replica of the city of Churches, and some altars even radiated a faint glow, as if marking the unclaimed ones.

The realization snapped Liam’s gaze at the area’s center, where the remaining traces of distorted Qi stood, as well as the main problem.

A taller, bigger altar rose from the hall’s center, representing the city’s Cathedral. It was a huge column with a human-sized coffin on top, but both were under attack.

Darkness that seemed to have a physical shape had overtaken the central altar, covering it with a dense membrane that tainted its very fabric.

The only white item left was the coffin made of painted wood, but blackness was invading it even before the solid darkness covered it. A conflict of different energies was happening, and the whiteness was losing.

Actually, by the look of it, the whiteness had already lost and was only delaying the inevitable.

As for where the darkness stemmed from, two dozen rooting experts sat on the floor around the central altar, metal tokens no different from the one in Liam’s possession lying before their crossed legs.

The rooting experts all wore white and had their eyes shut, fully immersed in pouring Qi into their respective tokens, which generated tendrils of blackness that gave birth to intricate symbols.

The symbols were all connected, painting three concentric circles around the altar, the smallest one being the source of the dark membrane that had taken over the tiles, altar, and was moving to the coffin next.

And Liam had seen those concentric symbols. They were different but also similar to the ones he had found in the Mutated Battlefield’s collapsed Church, the ones that had opened the path to the secret laboratory.

Liam’s arrival went unnoticed. Whatever process the rooting experts were immersed in, it demanded their entire attention. Liam was free to act, and the scene shed light on a truth of the cultivation world that he was aware of but had never experienced.

For the first time in Liam’s life, he felt the urge to destroy something rather than letting others take it. He already considered himself an enemy of the Church after all. That had been his mindset ever since the Mutated Battlefield, so he couldn’t allow it to get stronger.

Liam didn’t even think. His bloodstained hands itched as he drew the Black Bow and pulled on its string, increasing its weight and pouring as much Qi as the magical item allowed. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com

Those concentric, intricate circles were probably inscriptions, which Liam knew close to nothing about. He had even just fought someone whose magical items acted on their own despite his indisposed condition.

Killing those unaware rooting experts might not affect the coffin’s overtaking, so Liam stuck to the most basic approach. He would just inflict as much damage as possible.

Destruction didn’t care for strategies, centuries-old schemes, or greatness. It was the easiest and most reliable method in the world to solve problems.

So, Liam fired the ethereal arrow he had created, hitting a token in a crowded area, engulfing more of those items and the cultivators sitting behind them in a wild, extensive explosion.