In the upper level of Azura's Liwan District, Yaxiu and Vichy returned to the Funeral Parlor on the Inverted 51st Sublevel.
In the battle of Senluo half a month ago, although the four God-Leaders had returned to heaven, Yaxiu had fallen unconscious from severe injuries and depleted origin power. After Sonia and the others secured the world secret realm, their most pressing emergency was to leave Senluo.
The four God-Leaders dispatching angels to descend upon Senluo could never be hidden from the Starry faction. At best, they could exploit a brief window of time; Star Law and Sword Law might already have been en route to the country of Senluo.
Although the group had long decided that their next stop would be the Gospel Country, they had reached no consensus on where specifically to go. Diya wanted to head straight for the imperial palace to take command of the Gospel Country with the supreme authority of the Yisu Empress, mobilizing the strength of an entire nation to provide for them. However, Sonia, Weise, and Vichy all disagreed.
Although the Starry Kingdom had not issued a wanted notice for Lisidiya to this day, assuming the Starry faction had failed to recognize the Witch would be sheer foolishness. Yet the Witch was not merely an empress; the Gospel God in her grasp was the foundational system upon which the Gospel Country depended for survival. If a bounty were issued for her, it would not be a welcomed spectacle to the Gospel people like "the Yisu royal family is getting strung up on lampposts," but a Great Depression and total collapse on an apocalyptic scale.
Lest anyone forget, just a year ago during the Weaving Grand Ceremony, the Gospel Board had already shown what kind of catastrophe the country would plunge into if it lost the Gospel system. The conspirator Rust Crow had duped the various factions into sacrificing citizens; the Necromancer Monarch had refined living people to establish the ten great necromancer families; demons ran rampant, and calamities struck without end. It was truly a demonic spectacle of monsters and ghosts, leaving behind a clean, vast expanse of white desolation. Thus, every Gospel citizen understood that the Gospel Country could no more do without the Gospel system than XX could do without XX.
If Starry placed Lisidiya on a wanted poster today, gospel sorcerers would be plotting their escape by tomorrow. As long as Starry wished to preserve the Gospel Country, the only proper approach was to maintain an appearance of normalcy on the surface while secretly finding a way to capture Lisidiya and seize the Gospel God. If seizing it proved impossible, they would rather let Lisidiya live than risk damaging the Gospel God.
For the Witch's situation concerned not only Gospel, but the stability of all Five Countries.
The Five Countries were distinct civilizations that had been isolated from one another for over a thousand years. Aside from sharing a common tongue, everything from their social customs to their political structures was entirely different, and even their fundamental values were worlds apart.
The Blood Moon Country's Consanguinity Prohibition Act seemed like a tyrannical policy to the other four nations, but the Abyss Country's Hybrid Marriage was arguably no less outrageous. The Abyss possessed a unique sorcery school that no other nation could touch: Parasitism. Parasite sorcerers fused with Void Realm creatures, enabling partial dragonification, full dragonification, and dragonified spellcasting, granting them monstrous regenerative abilities and defensive power; it remained a dominant school of sorcery from silver all the way to legendary rank.
Yet the reason Abyss sorcerers could cultivate the parasite school while those of other nations could not lay in the Abyss Country's promotion of intermarriage between Void Realm creatures and sapient races: the Hybrid Marriage. This was an exceedingly bizarre marital system. Put simply, each person could marry twice: once to someone of their own race, and once to a Void Realm creature. Thus, in a normal married household, there were at least four members: the husband, the husband's Void Realm creature, the wife, and the wife's Void Realm creature.
This was not mandatory, but it was encouraged through tax breaks and other social welfare benefits. More importantly, after a millennium of cultural immersion, every person of the Abyss could comfortably view Void Realm creatures as mating partners. The prerequisite for an Abyss sorcerer to cultivate the parasite school was having a Void Realm creature of absolute loyalty—which could be their own partner, a partner belonging to their parents, or even an heirloom partner handed down from their ancestors. In fact, the most powerful parasite sorcerers often possessed heirloom partners; after all, Void Realm creatures varied in quality, and those with superior attributes naturally had to be passed down for descendants to keep using.
From hybrid marriage, society had also spawned "inheritance literature," in which a Void Realm creature, having accompanied its first-generation sorcerer partner to the end of their life, gradually fell in love with that partner's children. Since Void Realm creatures were inherently sexless, they could alter their forms to suit their partners.
To the people of the Abyss, hybrid marriage was completely natural and proper. Even knowing that people in other nations had no Void Realm partners, they merely felt that foreigners were terribly pitiable for being unable to find a Void Realm mate.
Meanwhile, the other nations found the Abyss Country hard to stomach. Setting aside falling in love with Void Realm creatures—which could be written off as bizarre sexual tastes, since it wasn't as though people who fancied Lalafells didn't exist—inheriting the parasite partner of your parents or grandparents was an ethical framework far too wild to digest. Wasn't that essentially your stepmother or step-uncle?
Aside from the two extremes of Blood Moon and Abyss, Paradise, Starry, and Gospel also had numerous social values on which they could never compromise. Under such circumstances, Starry still had to implement the Nobility Act, requiring all sorcerers holding important positions to receive the Stars' Blessing, placing the interests of the state and the Stars above all else.
Still, the Nobility Act primarily targeted the ruling class. Coupled with the four God-Leaders actively yielding, the upper echelons of the four countries offered little resistance and submissively complied. Even so, suspicion and unease lingered among the common populace of each country; the overwhelming majority believed the Starry Kingdom would exploit the four nations and ravage their societies from the haughty stance of victors, rulers, and a superior race.
*Sure, you, Fanxing, are indeed the unparalleled greatest sorcerer of all time. Does that mean we have to pay more taxes, discard our former beliefs, and surrender our culture?*
The interests of the elite and the convictions of the common folk were both red lines that could never be crossed. The Starry faction could certainly suppress them by force, but all they would end up with was four relentlessly rebellious colonies.
Yet Fanxing's ambition went far beyond that; she genuinely wanted to integrate all four countries intact under her banner. She permitted them to retain their former systems, attempting through international exchange to subtly and gradually fuse the five nations into a unified sorcerer civilization gathered beneath the stars.
At such a juncture, prestige and stability took precedence over everything. If the Starry faction risked sacrificing the hundreds of millions of living souls in the Gospel Country just to capture Lisidiya, the other nations would inevitably feel the chill of shared danger, and Starry's subsequent policies would run into endless resistance.
Therefore, if Lisidiya were to descend upon the imperial palace and rule over Gospel from the throne, it would be tantamount to notifying the law angels to seize the opportunity to quietly dispose of this destabilizing factor. Not to mention, her appearance would signal that Yaxiu was nearby, and the law angels would surely mobilize in full force to invite the Vice Monarch of Heaven back to his loyal Starry Kingdom of Heaven.
With all these considerations, Diya extinguished her desire to kidnap Yaxiu back to make him her prince consort and offered an alternative plan: Azura.
Whether for seclusion to heal or for tracking down traces of Igola and Harvey, Azura was undoubtedly the most suitable place. And having returned to Azura, the natural place to stay was the Funeral Parlor—the starting point of their Gospel adventure and the Empress's rise to power.
Chapter 1194