"Lu Li..."
The call ca from far away.
Lu Li surfaced from his delirium, pulled back into the cold of reality.
Anna was watching him with a gentle, worried gaze.
"I'm not..."
The explanation died in his throat. It was Ophelia.
"You... don't look... well..." Ophelia said. Lu Li had just been in a stupor.
Lu Li ignored Ophelia and addressed the rchant, Antoni:
"Contact Vinnelag. Ask them if they have any way of dealing with the fog tide and the Eternal Night... any way at all."
While awaiting a response from Vinnelag, they retreated to the cellar.
The wait yielded no new clues. Before a reply arrived, the rchant, Antoni, brought dreadful news.
Katerina had vanished.
This morning. She had disappeared from her recovery room at the sanatorium, leaving behind large patches of silt and seaweed, as if dredged up from the bottom of the sea.
The ship, Andrea, was also missing from the shipyard.
The Inquisition had launched an investigation, but it remained unclear whether they had been abducted by so creature or had left intentionally to find Lu Li.
Perhaps it was both.
One piece of bad news followed another.
Hiding in the cellar, Lu Li caught the stench of fish, rank and dead.
The sll wasn't coming from the cellar, but from the ice-crusted ground outside, where the cold should have frozen any scent—
The heretics, whose faith was a blight upon Himmfast, had followed their trail.
Ophelia couldn't sll the fish, but she sensed an aura even more sinister than the one in Himmfast.
A scorched hand reached out, extinguishing the two oil lamps. In the deepening gloom, it covered Lu Li's mouth.
Lu Li twisted his head, leaning forward as he prepared to wrench himself free.
But in the dim light, where only a piece of fluorite cast a faint glow, he saw the elegant face that haunted his dreams.
Of course, Lu Li knew it was only the delirium.
The soft palm over his lips gradually grew coarse and hard, and the fresh fragrance gave way to the sll of sothing burnt.
Only the faint fishy odor remained, growing ever stronger.
The blizzard hadn't let up since they arrived, which should have hidden their tracks.
Except for the tracks leading to Gades's house and in the alley.
But those tracks, along with Prusius's aura, had abruptly vanished. Even if the heretics found them, they would have a hard ti following the trail any further.
He could only wonder if they would discover the gates to Hell hidden in the volcanic rock, and if they might even pass through them.
The only small comfort was that these grotesque creatures, which seed to have crawled from the depths of the sea, were entirely unsuited for the searing heat of Hell.
It was just as Lu Li had thought. The fishy stench waxed and waned several tis. The group of heretics lingered in the Sentry Post for a long ti before finally, reluctantly, departing.
Once the aura had faded, Lu Li removed Ophelia's hand from his mouth.
"There's news from Vinnelag," the rchant announced, breaking the silence.
"Midnight has proposed a solution, but it cos at a price."
"What kind of solution?"
The thod Midnight proposed was one Lu Li and his companions had already encountered in the Old Sewer: worms.
They could tunnel through solid rock as if it were butter, and their bodies stretched for hundreds of ters, sotis even for kiloters.
More importantly, no anomaly could stand them.
The worms tasted coarse, like sand. They possessed neither nutritional value nor any trace of Humanity, and they secreted a foul bodily fluid that anomalies despised. A starving anomaly would sooner devour itself than take a single bite of such a creature.
As a result, these creatures that parasitized the Eye-Worm were not only spared by the colossal monster circling the World's Spine mountains, but had even beco its attendants, coexisting with it.
They were Lu Li's fastest way through the Severe Winter, the fog tide, and the Eternal Night.
However, Lu Li would have to pay the price for summoning them: the worms would be released here.
For the Main Continent, and even the Allen Peninsula, this was tantamount to a biological invasion. No one knew what dreadful changes the worms might undergo upon reaching this new land. Due to the laws of Vinnelag, the creatures had never before set foot on the Main Continent.
But Mayor Matteus had relayed Midnight's ssage to the rchant regardless.
If Lu Li agreed, Midnight would deliver a number of the worms as quickly as possible.
Lu Li decided to accept the price.
It was unclear what thods Midnight employed, but within hours, a dozen worms capable of taking Lu Li straight to Himmfast were loaded onto cargo ships and dispatched to Vinnelag.
The arrival of a dozen cargo ships in the port reportedly drew the attention of many of the city's residents.
To avoid a panic, Mayor Matteus forbade the cargo ships from docking. Instead, he instructed the rchant, Antoni, to secretly board the vessels, retrieve the worms, and then release them at the other end.
The cellar was clearly not the right place for it.
They climbed back to the surface, and once they were certain the heretics had gone, the rchant, Antoni, released the worms.
The rchant, Antoni, stepped into the darkness. After a brief wait, the ground began to tremble violently.
Lu Li raised his oil lamp, but its flickering light was not enough to reveal the full shape of the churning forms in the dark.
The frozen earth crumbled as easily as beach sand, cracks spreading across its surface. Ophelia reached out to steady the faltering Lu Li, but he dodged.
He was deliberately keeping his distance from Ophelia, lest a stronger delirium consu his mind.
The violent churning should have been impossible to miss, yet the fog tide and the creatures in the dark seed to take no interest in the location. The ground eventually stopped shaking, the rumbling faded into the distance, and all fell quiet. Nothing happened.
Holding his oil lamp, Lu Li approached the frozen ground. It now resembled a plowed field, and in its center was a writhing tunnel.
The rchant, Antoni, took out a flask of yellow plum fluid and distributed it to Lu Li, Ophelia, and himself.
Elder Sister flailed her arms and legs in protest, only reluctantly allowing Lu Li to coat her body with the fluid.
Once inside the tunnel, fleshy walls constricted around them, pushing them forward. The worms weren't a single, continuous entity; their bodies were separated by stone cavities several ters long.
These stone pockets allowed them to stop briefly to reapply the yellow plum fluid and drink so water.
The worms' corrosive power was more terrifying than expected. Aside from the yellow plum fluid, almost everything was on their nu—including the rock and soil they tunneled through.
The oil lamp in his hand was corroded and digested as the worm moved through its tunnel, because he had forgotten to coat it with the protective fluid.
Notably, the rchant's thick clothes and his backpack were already coated in a layer of the fluid.
The backpack was part of the rchant's body.
As were the scarf and coat.
...
The stone-hard, frozen ground began to swell upwards.
Mud burst through the snow, and a massive, house-sized section of writhing tunnel erupted from the earth.
Several damp, sli-covered figures emitting a firefly-like glow were squeezed out from the fleshy walls, landing on the snow and ice.
Ophelia radiated warmth, evaporating the sli from her body and providing a source of heat, while Lu Li wrapped himself in a blanket and wiped himself down to ward off frostbite.
"The defilent... is just ahead."
Ophelia sensed a cloying malice in the darkness.
They had reached their destination. The tainted city of Himmfast lay just ahead.
All that remained was to find the sanctuary of the Church of Shadows, located sowhere in the outskirts of Himmfast.
The fog tide, the Severe Winter, the Eternal Night—each of these phenona made searching for the hidden Church of Shadows an arduous task, but Lu Li had to do it.
Anna might be there.
The elegant woman stepped into the darkness, gradually vanishing from sight.
Lu Li felt that he was close to an answer.
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