History Will Lower Its Gaze Upon You

"This crown...?" Bai Zhou jolted and immediately looked down. He had stolen the thing from the Special Control Bureau so long ago that the grave charge of stealing a Black Box already lay on him, yet its silence all the way until now had never let him work out how to gain its "recognition." Those incomparably majestic Twelve Golden Giants... "Is it this mark?" Bai Zhou fixed his eyes on the Blood Emblem clutched in the corpse's palm. The emblem was like a language, a cipher, yet the strokes were blasphemous and twisted. Intricate patterns built the image of something like a scarlet eye, filled with the most extreme ill omen. Merely seeing the emblem left Bai Zhou's head swimming, and his temples would not stop throbbing. The writing condensed from blood seemed to flow open before his eyes and turn into an unfamiliar cipher; yet the unfamiliar grew familiar, and the familiar grew unfamiliar again. After several cycles back and forth... Within the blood-red emblem, so vivid it seemed about to drip, Bai Zhou deciphered what it said: 【Deep in every person's heart, they long for the coming of the apocalypse...】 The coming of the apocalypse—coming, coming, coming!!! Knowledge seemed to reproduce itself. It began to swell of its own accord in the depths of Bai Zhou's mind. His consciousness would be filled by this knowledge. His reason was sinking. The air all around grew restless. Fine, dense whispers echoed softly at his ear and gradually closed around him. Upon the Sea of Ignorance, the character Soothe was just about to activate, but something was faster than it. As if it had met some intolerable provocation, the crown ring on Bai Zhou's left index finger gave a hum, and a scorching heat nearly burned him. Golden radiance flowed within it, flashed, and was gone, shooting straight at the Blood Emblem in the corpse's palm. "Hum..." Like a snowflake meeting sunlight, like ice meeting a branding iron, the Blood Emblem melted away with a hiss and became black-red blood, flowing meaninglessly across the corpse's palm. The knowledge swelling madly in Bai Zhou's mind vanished rapidly with it. Everything grew quiet. "Damn it!" Cold sweat broke out all over him. "The Xiluo Empire—how can it be like this?" This was nothing like the vast and magnificent empire he had imagined. A dim, ominous, damp black cell; a Blood Emblem met the moment he arrived; and fine whispers everywhere... If he had not had the character Soothe as a hidden card, if he had not had the Crown of Thorns, an ordinary Extraordinary who met this Blood Emblem might have lost all reason, and might even have gone on to suffer some unpredictable mutation. Just now, Bai Zhou had clearly felt as if his skin were about to split, as if some organ were about to grow out from inside. Bai Zhou had not been without encounters back in Tinghai that affected his reason, but a case this impossible to guard against was still rare. One look, and he had nearly been caught. If things like this were in fact very common within the territory of Rome... Bai Zhou's expression grew grave. Just as when he had first arrived in Troy and learned an Adventurer's way of fighting. This time, too, he had learned a lesson. Perhaps this vast empire of Rome also held many dark places that the empire's glory could not shine upon, where shadows grew thick and evil gods watched on every side. Just as, outside a small city on the empire's farthest frontier, a God-Chosen Blood-Red Skeleton might lead a heap of skeletons in rebellion. It seemed he was still not careful enough. From now on, walking the mystical world, he ought to be more cautious. What was more, "ominous knowledge" itself could also be used to do someone in from the dark... Bai Zhou drew the lesson from it. He turned it over: one look, and a man would be hit—a handy move even harder to guard against than an explosive ritual. If, later, he had a chance to get his hands on something similar in Rome... Bai Zhou shook his head. His thoughts finished their turn in an instant, and his gaze fell once more upon his left index finger. "Why could this Blood Emblem draw a response from the crown?" He recalled the Crown of Thorns' reaction just now. Some emotion had been perceived by him; as the one wearing the ring, he could even feel it as his own. That feeling was... "Like—disgust, scorn, and hostility?" This was the first time Bai Zhou had felt anything of the sort from the crown. Though he did not understand the reason—this was, without doubt, a good thing. Because it confirmed Bai Zhou's guess. In this Rome, he would be able to find clues about the crown, and from them a way to gain the crown's recognition. From nothing more than that fleeting glimpse of the Twelve Golden Giants he had once caught by means of the crown, a clear premonition rose in Bai Zhou's heart. The gains this crown could bring him might be greater than any opportunity he had met so far! "Hum, hum, hum..." Then the token that had been vibrating in Bai Zhou's hand at last completed its final step. The pattern of a bloody maw on the token snapped shut, as if swallowing something in one bite. "Whoosh." The token vanished from Bai Zhou's palm, and the corpse before him vanished with it. It did not vanish all at once. Like a pencil sketch wiped away by an eraser, the corpse before Bai Zhou disappeared little by little, from the arms to the chest, from the toes to the navel. Something formless wrapped Bai Zhou's figure. The feeling was hard to put into words—only that his heart suddenly sank—and then the feeling was gone, flashing past in an instant. In that moment Bai Zhou knew that, in every sense, he had "eaten" the corpse before him and obtained everything of the man, including his name and identity. Even in anyone else's eyes, the man had never died, and there had never been two people in the room—he had only fallen to the ground, and then stood up again. The one who stood was, of course, Bai Zhou. Before him, only that gold-edged purple robe remained on the ground. In the filthy dungeon it forever kept a certain cleanliness, spirituality flowing over it. It clearly possessed some power to cleanse itself. Bai Zhou felt that a "wanderer" of Rome ought not to be this wealthy. The robe might have some uncommon origin, so he picked it up. He thought a moment, looked down at the windbreaker on his body, and pulled the robe on over it. The instant the robe was on, the heavy feeling at his chest vanished completely. Bai Zhou suddenly felt his whole body lighten, as if he had gained the recognition of this world. And so he knew the ritual had been fully accomplished. The instant he put on the robe, Bai Zhou completed the change of identity. From this moment he tore aside the curtain with which the ritual had screened him and formally arrived in this world—not an unregistered outsider, but one born of this very soil, a genuine... Roman. Memory fragments leaped out in his mind, one length after another, laid before Bai Zhou's eyes like a spinning lantern. First was 【Lucus Nies Nolanus】. This complete name, carrying the rising and falling cadence of ancient Rome, rose coldly in the depths of Bai Zhou's mind. What came crowding after were all sorts of broken shards. Beneath swaying, exquisite candlesticks, in a dim apprentice's hidden chamber, amid the pungent smell of herbs, a pen tip rustled. "The price of knowledge, Lucus..." In the ear of the "self" who had copied notes through the night until his wrist ached came his mentor's low, cold voice: "The price of knowledge always comes before its sweetness!" Ill news arrived from distant Luoye. Beneath rolling smoke, the family estate burned in a great fire, and upon the clan property bearing the Putao Teng family emblem, sheet after sheet of bright-red seals was posted. Former allies of the family turned into a pack of greedy wolves. Soldiers roughly sealed the mansion. Brothers and sisters who had grown up together since childhood wept in a chorus. When the younger brother was dragged away in chains, he looked back toward "himself" with one despairing glance. Soon the scene flashed on again. With a boom, the iron door of the dungeon locked heavily shut, and in endless darkness and filth "himself" passed one agonizing day and night after another. At last, "himself," with nowhere left to turn, sank ever deeper into madness. With broken nails he carved blasphemous symbols into the stone wall, and with his own blood mixed with the mold on the ground he inscribed runes. In hallucinations born of extreme hunger and despair, he seemed to hear the merry voices of his brothers and sisters from days gone by, and to see the warm, gentle eyes of his classmates and his mentor... Then he heard a bewitching whisper, and, in obedience to that whisper, drew an utterly blasphemous and mad sigil. His eyes were empty, and fanatical. All the spirituality he had left—long since fouled and thin—together with his boundless hatred of the empire, he poured entirely into the sigil— 【O god, if you truly exist...】 He said, 【I am willing to offer up the whole of my life—please take revenge for me!】 And then Bai Zhou arrived in this world. "This man..." Bai Zhou abruptly came back to himself. Now he knew what his identity was. Lucus Nies Nolanus, a man of Heishi City, neighboring the Luori Mountains, in Laien Province of the Fifty-Second Sector of the Xiluo Empire. An ungraduated ritualist apprentice of the Heishi City Ritualist Academy, born of the minor nobility, once a ninth-rank citizen; his father had once been a still nobler seventh-rank citizen. The reason one said "once" was that the family this man came from had already gone bankrupt. Because the main line, seated in the provincial capital, had collapsed with a crash, the collateral branch of the family in Heishi City had been caught in it... Though the two had not been in contact for who knew how many years, the branch was implicated all the same. The other nobles in the city moved one after another, taking the whole family in a single net and killing them to the last. His father was dead, his mother's whereabouts unknown, and the brothers and sisters of the family had either been seized as slaves or driven outside the city to become wanderers, no longer holding the status of citizens. As for Lucus... he had hurried home from the academy, and, faced with the rolling smoke of the family estate, unable to bear the shock, he resisted the soldiers and failed. His citizenship was stripped from him, and at the same time he was thrown straight into the dungeon. That confinement lasted ten months, and no one ever asked after him. Three minutes ago, this pitiable young noble, who ought to have had a fine future before him, met the end of his life in a coma of despair. It was hard to say whether Lucus had in the end died of madness, starved to death, or died of the backlash of a mad and dangerous esoteric rite. "A starting identity like this..." Bai Zhou blinked twice. "Seems unexpectedly decent?" Both parents dead, brothers and sisters all taken away, and his classmates had probably long since thought him already dead. This Lucus had always come and gone alone even within the family, and at school he was more of a shut-in still, the sort who had no friends. He had no social ties whatsoever, so there was no need to worry that getting along with anyone later would strike a false note. And he was a ritualist apprentice— That let Bai Zhou display ritual methods openly and without excuse. At least it was not what Bai Zhou had worried about: a gambling father, a sick mother, a little brother still in school, and a girl he could not forget. That sort of household would have been the hardest thing for Bai Zhou to handle. The only problem, though, was... Bai Zhou first had to consider how he was going to escape this prison. Although not a single jailer paid any mind to his insignificant self, getting out of this jail would still not be easy. He did not want his journey in Rome to end like this at the very start. "In truth, it's mainly that there was no choosing." Bai Zhou let out a faint sigh. In truth, Bai Zhou had wanted a better start as well, but a man had to know contentment if he wanted to stay happy. Aside from old men who died naturally of age or illness, a young person who died this early generally had to have some reason or other. Among them, if one wanted an Extraordinary who had only just died, Lucus was already a choice of the highest order—perhaps even the result of the ritual's careful selection. Though this mad ritualist apprentice bore a hatred, hatred was no great matter to Bai Zhou. "Since it is I who bear your name." Bai Zhou's gaze turned to the place where the corpse had lain: "Then your prayer—I accept it." He had come to Rome in the first place to seek offerings. Any person or any thing could be an offering. The more Bai Zhou killed in this world, the more he could obtain from Troy in exchange. Then every Roman, in Bai Zhou's eyes, was potential prey. Revenge, and the hunt. The two did not conflict. "Hm?" All at once, Bai Zhou frowned at the place where the corpse had lain. "What is this?" Drawing near, slowly and with care, Bai Zhou found an anomaly here. In the dim, classical prison, a brazier swayed overhead. Ghost-blue flames lit the filth across the floor. In the middle of a pool of black blood, Bai Zhou found something almost fused with it... The remains of an "insect." Bai Zhou wanted to call the thing an "insect," yet he knew perfectly well that it was absolutely not an insect. It had none of the ferocious mouthparts or jointed limbs of an ordinary bug. Its whole body had a transparent quality like half-congealed blood, as if some liquid had solidified, and yet it seemed to possess no substance at all. Looking closely, one could still make out fine natural markings on its surface, like broken runes. It had already "died." It had dried out, and yet it still held a posture of struggling and creeping forward, its head pointed toward where Bai Zhou stood, as if in the last moment of its life it had still been straining to pounce upon some target. But now it had stiffened and lost all vitality, mixed into the black blood Lucus had left and stuck fast to the floor tiles. The moment Bai Zhou saw it, he felt, without thinking, an almost instinctive disgust and horror, as if the thing were extremely dangerous and ominous, innately opposed to living beings. "This is...!" A curse. The word rose of itself in Bai Zhou's mind. A living curse. A curse reared by an Extraordinary, feeding on hatred, despair, and the spirituality of self-sacrifice—a thing that ought not to exist, brought forth beneath a specific ritual. Crow had told Bai Zhou of this. What lay before his eyes was very likely just that... Bai Zhou frowned. Lucus's death had caused the curse parasitizing him to die as well. But the problem was that raising a curse was no easy matter, and the resources it consumed were immense. Who would go to such lengths, against Lucus—so unremarkable a ritualist apprentice, a luckless wretch locked in a dungeon—to lay a curse like this? To what end? "Hum." All at once, as Bai Zhou drew near the curse's "corpse," the altar pattern on his wrist sent out a wave of scorching heat. To be precise— the altar was conveying a certain craving to him. Bai Zhou's expression slowly turned odd. Any Roman of value, person or thing, could be offered up, so long as the other would not resist. Then a curse... Could a dead curse be offered as well? Bai Zhou blinked twice. He took out the purple-gold saber and prodded the curse's "corpse" on the ground twice. Once he found that it truly had no substance and could not be caught, he carefully brought the altar pattern, burning hot, close to it. "Hum!" The curse's "corpse" on the ground vanished all at once, turning into specks of flowing light that streamed toward the altar. Or rather, it was being eaten by the altar. Then the altar pattern glowed faintly. Countless flowing phantoms suddenly appeared before Bai Zhou's eyes. An indescribable weight descended upon him in that moment. "Rumble..." It was as if grand thunder came at his ear, and a passage of information flowed into the depths of Bai Zhou's heart. 【Executor of the History of Troy, you have presented an offering, "Scarlet Curse · Imitation."】 【You have pleased the Root of Troy, and brought it joy.】 【History will lower its gaze upon you.】 【You have gained the gaze of history.】 【You have awakened a new "instinct," "Scarlet Senses."】