Filled with a Sense of Justice

It was several days ago that Sonia first confirmed a huge problem had happened to her. That was the night the Meteor Calamity ended. She had gone to the Secret Garden with the Paw-Stretching Club to celebrate through the night. Even Professor Trozan and Professor Nidala had taken time out of their schedules to have a few drinks with her, and far more people had flocked over hoping to build connections with her or simply looking up to her in admiration, including representatives from commerce chambers coming to talk business. Sonia skillfully deployed her social finesse, multiplying her high-quality network more than tenfold in a single night. Naturally, she knew her social skills were merely icing on the cake; Sanctuary combat power was the true foundation of her confidence. Precisely because she already possessed Sanctuary combat power, her humble, polite smile drew endless admiration, and her gaze of equal respect made people feel deeply honored. Inside the Secret Garden, the Crimson Empress surveyed her territory. Reminiscing the next day, the country girl felt she had gone a bit too far; Lois leaving without saying goodbye was practically justified. Although she resolved to curb her sharpness, she hadn't forgotten to report her achievements to Martha. Knowing her mother's work schedule, she deliberately waited until her mother was on the factory floor to initiate a video call. In the simplest, plainest words, she described how incredible she had become, how she had earned so much money that her mother wouldn't need to work anymore, and how she would soon bring her mother to settle in Jialesi, and so on. If she hadn't spoken so crudely, the other workers in the workshop wouldn't have understood. Her mother, of course, turned down her kind offer. Sonia had sent home the money from selling sorcery spirits two months earlier; prices in their small village and town were low, so her mother could have quit that job long ago. But it was the agricultural slack season now, and being idle was idle anyway. The factory work wasn't tiring, and her mother treated it as an excuse to chat with coworkers. As for Jialesi, she harbored a fear of the unknown regarding big cities, and having tended the family fields all her life, she was unwilling to change her way of living. Yet whether Martha was unwilling or not, Sonia knew well the bully-the-weak-and-fear-the-strong mentality of remote villages and towns. Naturally, she had to bolster her mother's prestige. Over the past few months, she had continuously bought plenty of things for home, letting everyone know her daughter had made a name for herself in Jialesi. Next, she only needed to build a new house that outshone the entire village, and Martha would discover just how friendly the world could truly be. Refreshed and invigorated, Sonia enjoyed a rare moment of relaxation, strolling through Sword Flower University. Along the way, every student she encountered looked at her with eyes full of awe and longing. Although she had long resolved to keep studying and cultivating, bathing in such wonderful gazes inevitably made the country girl feel a little smug. Delighted in her heart, the young woman naturally wanted to find someone to share it with. Yet Sonia, who had a contrarian streak, began to examine her own feelings coolly—yes, though she dearly wanted to seek out the Observer to share this joy, she also wanted to share it with her mother, Leonie, Trozan, and others. Though she worried about the Observer's safety, she also worried about her roommates' safety. Though she wanted to meet the Observer, she also desperately wanted to shake hands with Daidalos. The Observer was important, but how important was he? *I'm already a Sanctuary sorcerer, a Sword Saint with boundless prospects. I have to handle emotional matters prudently and not act like those naive, silly female leads in romance dramas who foolishly give away everything!* *Besides, the Observer actually has plenty of flaws...* While dissecting the Observer's shortcomings to keep her mind clear, Sonia headed to the dining hall for a meal. Her usual nutritious vegetables weren't available, so she casually picked up a few dishes of meat. When she sat down and took a bite of fish, she gagged immediately. It was terrible! How could such good fish taste this awful! *Damn it, I've got to make a note to tell the Observer—this is so disgusting!* Disgusted, Sonia pushed the fish aside, finished the other dishes, and then went to practice swordsmanship as usual. During a break, she thought back to that awful fish, thinking that she absolutely had to tell the Observer about it; it was so bad she would remember it for the rest of her life... *Wait?* Wiping the hot sweat from her flushed face with a towel, Sonia blinked blankly. Only then did she realize: A huge problem had happened to her. Therefore, she had to take part in the Observer's life, just as the Observer had entered hers. Because she couldn't be the only one caught up in this mess. "If you run into any baffling problems, maybe I can look up reference materials back home to help answer them," she said. "Besides, you're caught in the middle of it all, so as outside observers, maybe we can give better advice." "Right, right!" Diya chimed in hurriedly. "I can also go back and ask someone to help analyze things!" She said "ask someone," but she really meant querying the Gospel system. Although Diya also spent points to use Gospel, calculating precisely how many children she and Yaxiu would have in the future wouldn't even cost one hundred-millionth of the royal points. It was a pity that Gospel couldn't extend into the realm of Senluo; otherwise, she could have customized a foolproof walkthrough guide for Yaxiu. "Then I have to start from the beginning," Yaxiu said. "There was one thing I didn't mention just now—I've become a semi-feeler of the Four Pillar Cult." "A semi-feeler?" Yaxiu briefly explained what a semi-feeler was. Sonia and Diya had barely reacted to the Four Pillar Cult at first, but their expressions grew serious when Yaxiu mentioned that becoming a feeler almost always caused a drastic personality shift—they could accept Yaxiu becoming a villain boss, but they couldn't accept Yaxiu being changed into one. "Speaking of which, when I became a semi-feeler, I also saw something resembling a prophetic dream," Yaxiu said. "I saw eight things in the darkness. The first died, its corpse lying in a pool of blood. The second died, its corpse lying atop the first. It wasn't bleeding, but from a wound beneath its corpse crawled a tiny white soul, and that white soul propped up the second corpse." "Sounds like a fairy tale," Diya remarked. "Could it be some kind of mental contamination?" Sonia frowned. "Stop dwelling on that dream." Just then, the consistently silent Weise suddenly had a flash of inspiration—this was not a figure of speech, but a genuine ray of inspired light flashing across her mind. "The Inspiration sorcery spirit is pretty handy," she said. "This isn't a prophetic dream; it's probably the worldview passed down by the Four Pillar Cult." "A worldview?" "Above the pool of blood is the first corpse; upon the first corpse is a white soul; the white soul props up the second corpse... doesn't that sound familiar to you?" Weise said. "In the past, I certainly wouldn't have understood it either. But after hearing you talk about the Seven-Colored Tail secret poison and then using the Inspiration sorcery spirit to make connections, I found that everything matches up." Everyone paused, and Sonia immediately reacted: "The Void Realm!" Diya exclaimed in wonder, "Upon the sea is the golden fish; upon the golden fish is the White Ox; above the White Ox is the Time Continent... it really is identical!" "So the Void Realm is actually a world formed from corpse after corpse?" Yaxiu found it hard to imagine. "The entire Void Realm is actually the remains of corpses?" "This is merely the worldview of the Four Pillar Cult; it might not be the truth," Weise said. "Too many sorcerers wish to decipher the Void Realm. Other evil cults might have even more outrageous ideas, such as sorcerers actually being bacteria of the Void Realm, reality producing sorcerers solely to murder the Void Realm, or sorcerers being pawns of reality... there are endless fantastical theories like that." Yaxiu nodded. Besides, the truth of the world had no practical meaning for a sorcerer of his level—it couldn't help him cross realms anyway. He continued, "A couple of days ago, we almost caught Silver Lantern, but unfortunately she escaped. It's probably going to be very hard to catch her now." "Why?" Sonia asked. "If you could catch her once, you can naturally catch her a second time." "The reason we successfully set a trap to scheme against her was that the town had been infiltrated by the Four Pillar Cult, allowing me to use their intelligence to pinpoint her in advance," Yaxiu said. "But not only is she on guard now, more importantly, she entered the sphere of influence of the Harp Sun Alliance. The Four Pillar Cult's tentacles don't reach there, so we can only rely on ourselves to track her down." "The Harp Sun Alliance?" Yaxiu: "It's a religious alliance that formed rapidly in response to the rise of the Four Pillar Cult. Their united front was precisely what curbed the cult's rate of expansion. As a result, not only can we get no help inside their territory, but we'll also be viewed as outsiders and treated with hostility. Conversely, Silver Lantern has the power to bewitch people's hearts and can move around far more freely than us." "We've tracked her to an underground skyscraper, and all we know is that Silver Lantern is inside, but not where she actually is." "There can't be that many people in a building, right?" Yaxiu said helplessly, "Two hundred thousand people live in it. The building has a hundred floors and is a relic of the Grey Fox God Era. It has every living facility inside, with no structures at all above ground." Diya understood at once—a complete version of the Sennheiser Building. In the blossoming, diverse realm of Gospel, it was truly hard to find a social system that Gospel didn't have. "This building is the primary base of the Harp Sun Alliance's Transcendent Temple. We barely managed to move in by disguising ourselves as traveling merchants, but we're under surveillance day and night. For now, all we can do is wait for Silver Lantern to make a move." Sonia shook her head. "That's too passive. Can't the Four Pillar Cult divine it for you?" "The Four Pillar Cult actually could divine an approximate range for us, but Silver Lantern is so cunning she didn't even leave behind a real name, and her appearance is fictitious. The Four Pillar Cult also has to rely on other intelligence sources to pinpoint her location." Yaxiu spread his hands. "Back when we hadn't even touched the prophecy faction, Silver Lantern was already taking precautions against the interference of these mystical factions... She had long prepared to defect, whether from the Calamitous Fire Temple or the Four Pillar Cult." He let out a long breath. "Not only that, her disguised appearance seems brimming with affinity. Aside from us pursuers, everyone else's first impression of her is favorable. When we launched our surprise attack, she immediately ducked into the crowd to conceal herself, attacked nearby buildings to sow chaos, blew up a gas station, and triggered seismic collapses to halt our pursuit... Precisely because she committed destruction that none of us dared to do, she managed to escape our ambush by the skin of her teeth. "Instead, we were blamed as the perpetrators of all the destruction. If not for the Four Pillar Cult's help, we would have had no choice but to fight our way out of town. "Heartless, uninhibited, unrelenting. You can't necessarily call her cruel—after all, we were the pursuers, and there was no reason to expect our quarry to cooperate with us. It's just... "Have you ever played virtual reality games?" Yaxiu said. "Players all know that everything in a virtual game—companions, bystanders, enemies—is fake. So to achieve their goals, some players will stop at nothing. "The impression Silver Lantern gives me is that she treats reality like a game. To reach her objective, she doesn't care about anything else at all; after all, it's all fake. "Rather than calling her evil, she's more like a disaster. At the level of a Sanctuary sorcerer, she can well be considered a natural calamity." Weise couldn't help but glance at him. Even with the intelligence provided by the Four Pillar Cult, for Yaxiu to form such an accurate assessment of her from just a handful of encounters—no wonder he had the potential to become a feeler. "Just a vicious, ruthless shrew," Sonia said. "I think she's more like one of those wicked, crazy witches from fairy tales," Diya huffed. "Maybe her true self is actually a hunchbacked lunatic covered in pus, with a hooked nose and no teeth left." A bloody light gleamed in the Sword Princess's eyes. "If I were by your side, I could slay her with a single strike of Blood Moon Shattered Lake and leave her crawling for a few meters dragging her entrails." "No way, killing her in one strike is letting her off too easy. You've got to let me do it," the Witch's voice echoed in layered reverberations. "Let me use Water-Born Line to dismantle her into hundreds of pieces." They exchanged a glance. After being reunited for so long, they had finally found their tacit understanding once more. Puzzled, Yaxiu remarked, "I never knew you two were so filled with a sense of justice." Sonia didn't puncture Yaxiu's lovely illusion, instead turning to look at the silent Weise. "Weise, you're so smart—do you have any suggestions?"