Chapter 426: Saintess Of The Argent Flame [IV / Bonus - ]

Chapter 426: Saintess Of The Argent Flame [IV / Bonus Chapter]

Aurelia recognized their soul-frequencies and she recognized their spiritual mana. She of course recognized the unique patterns of the wounds she had healed within their flesh.

Directly or indirectly, she had touched every single soul in this crowd.

She had shared her sacred Argent Flame throughout the entire kingdom, absorbing their diseases, their broken bones, their demonic rot, and their fatal wounds for six straight years...

...And now, every single one of them was screaming for her blood.

"DEATH TO THE WITCH!"

"EXECUTE THE MONSTER!"

"CLEANSE THE REALM OF THE DEMONIC PARASITE!"

Aurelia’s lips shrank, pulling tight against her teeth in cold paralyzed silence.

Suddenly, the deafening roar of the mob shifted, turning into a thunderous reverent cheer that parted the crowd like the sea.

Authoritative, heavy footsteps echoed across the wooden scaffold.

Walking onto the platform, bathed in the brilliant light of the midday sun and clad in dazzling, gold-embossed divine plate armor, was Cassian.

The Otherworldly Hero looked magnificent.

His silver hair caught the light like polished steel, his handsome face radiating unshakeable righteousness as he held the delicate silk-clad hand of the Crown Princess.

Cassian stepped to the center of the platform, raising his free hand toward the roaring masses.

A heroic smile graced his lips as he gently let go of the Princess’s hand and addressed the gathered empire.

"People of Meolion! Brave citizens of the Light!" Cassian’s voice boomed across the plaza, amplified by magic until it vibrated in the chest of every man, woman, and child. "Calm yourselves! Today marks the final victory of our grand crusade!"

The crowd’s roar died down to a breathless, worshipful silence as tens of thousands hung on his every word.

Cassian turned slowly, pointing his gleaming gauntleted finger directly down at Aurelia’s kneeling, chained form.

"For six long years, you were led to believe that this woman was a holy Saintess!" Cassian proclaimed, his voice dripping with sorrowful disgust. "You believed she was a blessed maiden sent by the heavens to heal your wounds! But today, the Crown must lay bare the horrific unspeakable truth!"

Aurelia listened, her scarred body perfectly still beneath the iron chains.

"She is no Saintess!" Cassian roared, his eyes blazing with false righteousness. "She is an ancient shape-shifting Demon Noble captured during the early days of the rift! It was her demonic blood that allowed her to manipulate the foul Demon Rot, forcing the abyssal corruption to bow to her dark will! The Crown and the Church kept her chained beneath the earth, forcing the beast to use her foul magic to cure the very poisons her demonic brethren inflicted upon our kingdom!"

Aurelia’s lips shrank into a thin tight line with her brow furrowing slightly.

"She played the martyr to deceive us all!" Cassian shouted, his voice reaching a fever pitch. "She sought to plant her dark corruption deep within our souls so she could devour the kingdom once the war was won! But the sacred power of the Argent Flame is a holy primordial miracle meant exclusively for the true, pure Saintess of the Light! By executing this demonic imposter today, the holy flame will be liberated from her wretched corrupted flesh... reincarnating into a pure righteous maiden of our kingdom who will deliver us into an era of eternal divine prosperity!"

Silence hung heavy over the grand plaza for three long agonizing seconds.

Kneeling on the scaffold, Aurelia almost felt like laughing out loud.

’A demon...?’ she thought, the absurdity of the lie ringing in her ears like shattered glass. ’He called me a demon. The man I bled for... the man whose severed chest I knitted back together while screaming in the mud... is telling the entire world I was a monster all along. Who could possibly be stupid enough to believe such an obvious, pathetic lie—’

"GLORY TO THE HERO!"

A lone voice erupted from the front row of the noble gallery.

"KILL THE DEMON!"

"BEHEAD THE HERETIC!"

"DEATH TO THE WITCH!"

And within the span of a single heartbeat, the entire city of Meolion exploded into a bloodthirsty roar.

Tens of thousands of voices screamed in unified ecstatic approval, throwing stones, rotten food, and curses toward the scaffold.

Aurelia’s lips slowly, unconsciously curved upward into a wide hollow smile.

’Of course...’ she thought, her heart freezing into solid unbreakable obsidian. ’Of course they believe it. They don’t care about the truth. They just want an excuse to wash their hands of the blood they made me bleed.’

She turned her blind, milky-white gaze toward Cassian.

The Otherworldly Hero was standing at the edge of the platform, his arms raised high as he actively led the cheers of the mob, his handsome face twisted into an expression of triumphant ecstasy.

It was deeply painful.

The very man who had promised her under the stars that he would save her, that he would take her away from the corrupt church, that he would marry her and build a peaceful life where she would never have to bleed again... was the one leading the charge to slaughter her like an animal.

And standing next to him on the scaffold, the Crown Princess was holding a newborn infant wrapped in pure silk.

Aurelia’s spiritual perception locked onto the child.

’Ah...’ Aurelia recognized the soul-frequency instantly.

Months ago, during a bitter winter night, the royal physicians had rushed a dead, stillborn infant down into the dark dungeon, weeping and begging the Saintess to channel the Argent Flame to jump-start the child’s heart.

Aurelia had endured the agonizing sensation of having her own heart stopped and restarted three times in the dark to breathe life into the baby’s lungs.

And now, perceiving the subtle familial mana flowing between the child, the Princess, and Cassian, the final crushing truth clicked into place.

The child was Cassian’s daughter.

The Otherworldly Hero had bedded the Princess, fathered a royal heir, and replaced Aurelia entirely while she was rotting in chains beneath his feet.

A soundless chuckle bubbled up from Aurelia’s throat.

"Executioner!" Cassian commanded, turning his back on her with absolute, chilling dismissal. "Proceed! Let her blood water the dawn of our new empire!"

A towering executioner clad in black leather stepped forward, his massive arms hoisting a colossal, two-handed executioner’s greataxe high into the midday air.

"Die, beast," the executioner grunted.

With all his immense physical strength, the executioner brought the heavy steel blade down in a whistling, vertical cleave directly aimed at the back of Aurelia’s exposed neck.

CLANG! SHATTER!

An ear-splitting metallic screech echoed across the entire plaza.

The massive steel blade did not cut her flesh. The moment the hardened edge struck the pale skin of Aurelia’s neck, the metal violently shattered into a thousand jagged iron fragments, exploding outward like shrapnel.

The executioner flinched backward in terror, clutching his bleeding stinging forearms as he stared at the broken wooden haft in his hands.

Aurelia remained kneeling, entirely unharmed.

Her milky-white eyes were closed, and from beneath her pale eyelids, thick streams of liquid starlight and bright crimson blood leaked slowly down her cheeks.

...Yet, she was not crying.

Her thin scarred face was stretched into a wide terrifying grin, showing her pearlescent white teeth to the horrified crowd.

"I expected all of you to do something like this..." Aurelia whispered, her raspy voice cutting through the silence of the scaffold with supernatural clarity. "...Which is why I prepared a gift for you all."

Aurelia opened her eyes.

Her milky-white irises flared with an incandescent silver-white luminescence that washed over the entire plaza.

The executioner... a veteran soldier whose shattered collarbone and severed lung Aurelia had healed during the third year of the war suddenly froze.

His face completely drained of all color as a horrific, burning sensation erupted across his entire torso.

SCHLICK! CRACK!

Without warning, dozens of violent, invisible wounds violently tore open across the executioner’s body.

Slashes appeared out of thin air, ripping his chest plate apart.

His left arm was sheared off at the shoulder.

His right leg was severed at the knee and his head was cleanly sliced from his neck, spinning into the air in a geyser of blood, before his severed torso split down the center, his heart cleaving in two as his shattered soul dissolved into pure spiritual mana and flowed directly into Aurelia’s glowing core.

Aurelia’s manic grin widened.

The divine suppression chains wrapped around her body began to groan, fracturing into spiderweb cracks under the pressure of the ancient magic waking within her veins.

The Argent Flame had always allowed wounds to reflect upon the Saintess’s flesh to grant others life.

But what if she didn’t heal them? What if she simply kept all of those wounds, all of that poison, all of that rot, and all of those deaths contained within a single quarantined corner of her soul... and then, through the indestructible soul-links forged over six years, violently reversed the flow?

Would that work?

The answer was simple.

"Return."

The single quiet word fell from Aurelia’s lips like the decree of a vengeful god.

BOOM!

In a fraction of a second, the concept of mirrored death reversed across the entire kingdom.

A catastrophic slaughter erupted across the city of Meolion and everywhere else at once.

In the royal viewing box, the King’s chest violently caved inward, his ribs shattering through his lungs as an old siege wound returned to crush him.

The Grand Patriarch let out a blood-curdling shriek as his entire circulatory system turned to black boiling sludge, consumed instantly by the demon rot he had once begged Aurelia to purge.

On the execution scaffold, Cassian’s eyes widened in apocalyptic terror.

"A-Aurelia—?!"

SHING! SHING! SPLURT!

Before the Otherworldly Hero could draw his broadsword, hundreds of invisible overlapping lacerations sheared through his divine plate armor.

His arms were severed at the elbows. His chest was torn open from collarbone to pelvis, his organs spilling into the dirt.

A tidal wave of concentrated demon rot erupted from his bone marrow, dissolving his flesh into black slime in less than two seconds.

The Crown Princess and her infant beside him were consumed in the exact same breath, their lifelines severed by the return of their borrowed health.

Across the streets, tens of thousands of citizens and soldiers dropped dead simultaneously.

Some were decapitated by phantom blades, others collapsed as their hearts burst, and thousands more dissolved into pools of sulfurous rot.

Within thirty seconds, the deafening cheers of the capital were replaced by suffocating silence.

Not a single soul remained alive in the entire kingdom...

Only Aurelia sat on the scaffold, surrounded by a boundless sea of corpses.

PIT-PAT! PIT-PAT!

A cold heavy rain began to fall from the darkening sky, washing the blood from the wooden planks.

Aurelia collapsed forward onto her hands and knees in the pooling crimson, her breath rattling in her chest.

’I did it...’ she thought, her fingers digging into the wet wood. ’...I killed all my enemies. Every single one of them.’

Yet, her vengeance brought no warmth, no joy, and no salvation. There was only a cold hollow emptiness echoing in her soul.

VUUUUUUM!

Through the falling rain, the sky above the dead capital shattered like brittle glass, and the space between the clouds violently caved inward.

"What?"

A colossal terrifying entity descended from the fractured heavens. It possessed no definite mortal form... it was an undulating shifting mass of celestial authority, folding endlessly upon itself with interlocking halos of blinding cold light.

The unfathomable pressure radiating from its descent flattened the rain, crushing the marble columns and stone buildings of the city into fine powder under its mere presence.

Kneeling in the sea of blood, Aurelia felt a deep primal terror grip every fiber of her being.

She frantically expanded her spiritual sense, desperately trying to channel her mana outward to estimate the creature’s boundaries, its core, or even its tier but the moment her mana touched the entity, it dissolved into nothingness.

The power looming above her was utterly beyond measurement.

Trembling violently, Aurelia weakly pushed her blood-soaked hands against the scaffold timbers, forcing herself up as she cried out to the sky.

"Why...?" her cracked, raspy voice trembled with raw weeping fury. "Where were you?! For six years, I bled in the dark! For six years, they butchered me, chained me, and tore my limbs apart while you watched in silence! Why do you descend only now?!"

The shifting mass did not care for her tears... It did not listen.

"AURELIA EL MIMONTE."

The entity’s voice reverberated directly inside her skull... a deafening sound like grinding tectonic plates that made her eardrums bleed.

"YOU ARE FOUND GUILTY OF UNLAWFUL MASS GENOCIDE AND THE TOTAL ANNIHILATION OF AN ENTIRE MORTAL REALM."

’An entire Mortal realm...?’

How was it her fault that these people had not only gone to war with the Demons but other Kingdoms as well and they were the last surviving one?

"They betrayed me!" Aurelia screamed desperately, clutching her throat. "They were going to execute me after I gave them my life! Hear me... listen to my side!"

"JUSTIFICATION IS IRRELEVANT TO THE COSMIC ORDER," the booming law droned, completely deaf to her pleas. "YOUR SOUL IS STRIPPED OF PROVIDENCE. YOU ARE HEREBY SENTENCED TO ETERNAL CONFINEMENT WITHIN—"

The entity spoke the sacred ancient name of the penitentiary realm, but the syllables were far too heavy for mortal ears.

To Aurelia, the pronunciation did not register as words... it tore through her mind as a violent ear-splitting screech of static and deafening white noise.

BZZZZZZT... KZZZZT!

Reality tore open beneath her knees, and before she could draw another breath, a blinding vortex of cosmic compression swallowed her into the eternal dark.

When Aurelia finally opened her eyes, the rain, the blood, and the corpses were gone.

She was lying upon a slab of cold white marble floating in an endless pitch-black sea of raw ether.

Leaning over her, gently dabbing a glowing alchemical salve across the mirrored scars on her throat, was an ancient frail woman with silver hair and withered gentle hands.

Aurelia weakly looked up at her, her voice trembling.

"Who... who are you...? Where is this place...?"

The old woman smiled softly, her eyes filled with boundless tragic compassion as she smoothed back Aurelia’s platinum hair.

"Rest, child," the old woman whispered gently. "You are safe now. Our Savior... our true Savior is coming for us. We must only endure until he arrives..."

...

’Haah...’

Aurelia gave her head a slow weary shake, forcefully pulling her consciousness out of the suffocating swamp of old memories.