Chapter 523: Prison Experience Specialist

Running his fingers over the padded walls, Ashe could not help muttering a self-deprecating remark. "Has visiting every country's prison become a regular part of our travel itinerary? If reality were a game, we would definitely unlock the Prison Experience Specialist achievement."

Meanwhile, Iger was lying sprawled across the padding. He replied lazily, "You would have also unlocked achievements like Defeated in One Second, First Place in Getting Beaten Up, and Losing by a Little Counts as Winning while you're at it."

"That's right. I was only this close to turning things around," Ashe said, biting his fingernail. "I simply had not had enough time to master Eternal Flame of Calamity. On top of that, she somehow managed to combine the power of four Grand Laws while ambushing a newcomer from another country. If those Calamity Flame fanatics had not given me false intelligence, if I had more time to train, and if she had not tricked me with that harmless, non-combat appearance, victory definitely would have been mine!"

Iger shot him a sidelong glance. "That is not what I meant. I did not mean you only lost by a little, so it counts as a win. I meant that if you had only a tiny bit of yourself left after getting crushed, we would still count it as your victory. You were completely overwhelmed without even the slightest chance to fight back, yet you have somehow managed to come up with this many excuses. What else can I do? Fine, you win."

Ashe folded his arms across his chest and nodded repeatedly. "I understand completely now. So, in your heart, I have already won. I am deeply touched."

Iger's face twisted in exasperation.

Harvey chuckled beside them before speaking leisurely. "Still, this time, I genuinely think that Ashe wasn't the one to blame. Even if the real Gospel's First had come, they probably could not have turned the situation around either. Do you think the Omniscient Weaver foresaw that? Maybe that is why She sent a knockoff like Ashe to make do."

"That is possible," the fraudster mused. "After all, the Gospel's First is the Omniscient Weaver's chosen emissary. This should have been the perfect opportunity for Her to establish a foothold in this kingdom. Yet instead, She stuffed Ashe in here..." He paused thoughtfully. "Either the Omniscient Weaver does not think this kingdom is worth the effort, or sending the genuine Gospel's First would have changed nothing. So She decided to cut Her losses and sent Ashe to fool the Temple of Calamity Flame instead."

"Could you two wait until after we escape before roasting me?" Ashe grumbled. "Can we focus on getting out of this cell first? And why are both of you acting as if you have come home?"

"To be honest," Harvey said, "it is your nervousness that seems strange to me."

Iger added, "And why do you think we even have a chance to escape? Outside these walls is the headquarters of the Four Pillars Cult. If we somehow broke out of this cell, how far do you think we would get?"

Ashe retorted. "That wasn't what you were saying earlier. Back at the Temple of Calamity Flame, you were dead set on running away. Now that the Four Pillars Cult has captured us, you have completely given up? How much did they pay you?"

"Because I knew almost nothing about the Temple of Calamity Flame," Iger replied unhurriedly. "As for the Four Pillars Cult... counting you, another regional branch manager, this is already our third encounter with them. I would say that makes us old acquaintances by now. And besides..."

The fraudster sat up and patted the padded wall. "There is no way we are breaking out of this room. This place is probably..."

Harvey finished for him. "Your office?"

Iger shook his head. "I worked part-time as a psychotherapist once, but I have never been a psychiatric rehabilitation therapist."

The room was a sealed chamber of roughly twenty-five square meters. Deep-blue padding completely covered the floor, walls, and ceiling. The toilet appeared to be made of a soft, slime-like material. Warm light seeped through the gaps between the cushions, illuminating every corner of the room without leaving a single shadow.

The trio of notorious troublemakers had never been inside a place like this before, yet the clues were impossible to miss. This was a treatment room for psychiatric patients.

After Ashe had been thoroughly beaten into submission, Iger immediately dragged Harvey over to surrender. Interestingly, the moment the red-robed priests saw the Grand Law of Eternal Calamity Flame taken away, every last bit of their fighting spirit vanished. They abandoned all resistance, and the Calamity Flame believers fighting so desperately until the very end surrendered one after another.

The Four Pillars Cult did not carry out a massacre. Instead, they simply demolished the Temple of Calamity Flame, dispatched their own people to take control of the region, and escorted away every sorcerer.

The rules of war in this world seemed to follow an unspoken law, which was that the Grand Law was everything. As long as a Grand Law remained, everything else could be rebuilt. Once it perished, everything else became meaningless.

Their means of transportation was equally bizarre: a maglev train pulled by pack beasts. It was a train composed of magnetic-levitation carriages, drawn across the land by beasts resembling a mixture of cattle and horses. The train floated above the ground without requiring tracks. Such a strange blend of futuristic technology and primitive livestock challenged even Iger's sense of aesthetics. Ashe and Harvey found themselves forced to reevaluate their understanding of good design.

To be fair, the cattle-horse train was not slow at all. It rode remarkably smoothly without the slightest discomfort, proving even more stable than the Gospel's hovercars.

The journey should have been their best opportunity to escape. Unfortunately, the woman spent the entire trip pulling Ashe aside and peppering him with questions. Harvey made several attempts to stir up trouble, only to be firmly restrained by Iger each time.

Several hours later, they arrived at the headquarters of the Four Pillars Cult. Much like the Temple of Calamity Flame, the cult's headquarters sat amid the ruins of an abandoned city.

Only after being locked inside this cell did the three of them realize what these ruins had originally been. It had once been a psychiatric hospital.

Blood Moon did have psychiatric hospitals. Mental illness could be either congenital or acquired. Those born with severe conditions generally never survived infancy and simply began life anew. Acquired disorders were another matter altogether, being both physiological and psychological illnesses that even healers found difficult to treat.

Almost everyone in Blood Moon had developed the habit of regularly seeing therapists. Ironically, the profession with the highest rate of mental illness was psychologists themselves. Those spending their lives pulling others from the mire eventually found themselves standing in the mire as well.

Not every baby born in Blood Moon was allowed to survive. Those surviving were entitled to enjoy the kingdom's extensive welfare system in full. The state provided child-rearing, healthcare, elderly care, and unemployment benefits. In other words, staying away from consumerism, sugar, gambling, and Mud and Tea Cafes meant you could spend your entire life idling away without working. Blood Moon would provide your food and shelter until the day you were selected as experimental material for the Blood Saints.

Apart from having to sit through several minutes of advertisements when watching dramas and occasionally serving as part of someone else's gaming experience while playing games, ordinary citizens generally enjoyed comfortable lives, freely benefiting from modern technology.

The only problem was that Blood Moon Kingdom itself was a nation overflowing with anxiety, discrimination, mania, and temptation. No one could avoid falling into corruption, because there was nowhere they truly fit in. Seen in that light, psychiatric patients were perhaps the only group capable of resisting that downward spiral. After all, they had finally found a place to call home.

The orthodox branch of the Temple of Calamity Flame had occupied a bathhouse. The Four Pillars Cult had made its base inside a psychiatric hospital. It was certainly difficult to accept. Still, the more they thought about it, the more fitting it somehow seemed.

That brought them to another problem. Ashe and the others could not damage their prison cell. Their mana had not been sealed. Their spirits had not been restricted. Yet the three Sacred Realm sorcerers were utterly incapable of inflicting even the slightest damage upon the room.

The blue padding covering every surface absorbed one hundred percent of all kinetic force and every form of spell damage. Ashe used his Honeyed Tongue Sword. Harvey released his corrosive Death Gas. Iger took a noise-suppressing pistol out of his spatial card and fired a test shot. None of them managed to leave so much as the faintest mark on the padding.

No wonder the Four Pillars Cult had been perfectly content to lock them in here. They could not even damage the toilet.

For a moment, the trio suspected this had been a specially designed ward built to confine insane Legendary sorcerers. Upon thinking it over, Iger recalled catching sight of pieces of the same blue padding hidden beneath the black-robed sorcerers' clothing.

The Four Pillars Cult had likely stripped the padding from the other patient rooms throughout the hospital and turned it into soft body armor for their followers.

That's right! When you have a material capable of shrugging off virtually all damage, you should naturally make armor out of it. Why on earth would anyone waste something so valuable lining the walls of a psychiatric ward?