In Eris City in the west, atop the altar that served as the Church of the Supreme God's headquarters, the crystal skeleton in the statue's embrace blazed with light. The radiance grew brighter and brighter, shooting straight into the sky, and every believer in the city — indeed, in all the west — no matter what they had been doing, dropped flat to the ground, trembling with excitement, and prayed.
The Servitors, bathed in that red light, felt they had touched supreme bliss. Eyes glazed with rapture, they rose into the air. But the First Servitor walked softly to the foot of the crystal skeleton and reached out a hand, as though she wanted to touch something, and murmured, "My child, soon, very soon you will be revived. Mother will sacrifice the whole world in exchange for your new life."
The First Servitor had a very clichéd past.
She had once been the lowest, cheapest kind of slave, with no family name and no given name. Her only reason for existing was to work for the nobles — and to serve as a tool for venting their desires.
Sadly, she had a child. She did not even know who the father was, but that hardly mattered, because the child was hers.
She loved that child with everything she had. To her, the child was a gift from the gods.
She worked herself to the bone every day for the sake of trading for a little more food. She hid the child in the most secret place she could find, terrified that if the child were discovered, she would be killed or carried off.
She clawed her own face, turning what had been a beautiful face into something gods and men alike would recoil from — all to reduce—
That was the happiest stretch of her life. However great the humiliation, however much pain she endured, even hungry and in rags, as long as she caught sight of her little angel, she felt it was all worth it.
She had even decided that once her little angel grew a little older, she would take her and flee the west. They said the Northland was thinly peopled — the soil was hard to farm, but anyone willing to work could eat their fill. They said the south was prosperous — anyone willing to try could find a chance to survive. They said...
Day after day she kept dreaming and kept waiting for her daughter to grow up.
Then came the day she finished work as usual, carried home a piece of black bread she had saved, and happily returned to the thatched hut where she lived. After carefully shutting a door that was a door in name only, she teased softly, "Sweetheart, Mama's home. Guess what I brought you today?"
Her little angel could not speak yet, but she was so well-behaved it made your heart ache — she never cried or fussed, and only let out a silvery peal of laughter when she heard her mother's voice. She was certain that was the loveliest sound she had ever heard.
But today, the laughter was gone.
The black bread fell from her hand and struck the ground with a dull thud. She threw herself down and clawed frantically through the straw, letting the sharp stalks slice her fingers, then lifted the wooden board — this was where she hid her little angel every day.
Her little angel was gone.
"My child! Who stole my child!" She let out a despairing scream and burst out of the hut, asking everyone she saw.
A passerby, a slave like herself, shoved the ugly woman away in disgust and said in a mocking tone, "Your child?"
"Your child?"
She begged in the most abject manner for anyone to tell her where the child was, and at last someone answered her: "Go look at the hill behind the settlement. But I think it—"
"No, no, no!" She did not dare imagine it, and she would not believe it. She simply ran for the back hill, heedless of everything.
Sprinting up the back hill, she saw the most extreme manifestation of this world's evil: a small body curled up on the ground, covered in wounds, its face twisted in an agony she had never seen there before.
The murderers laughed wildly and insulted her with the vilest words, violated her in the most brutal ways, and she did not react at all. Her heart was already dead. She only wanted to lie there and die with her angel.
When they were done, the murderers swaggered off, and no one paid the mother and child any mind.
After who knew how many days and nights, in the cold, damp climate of the west, the child's corpse had rotted and begun to stink, yet she still would not let go of her hand. Just as her own life was flickering out, she felt the corpse in her arms move. She drew on the last strength of her life, sat up, and watched her child turn into a crystal skeleton — which spoke to her: "Do you want to revive it?"
She felt no fear at all. She clutched the crystal skeleton tightly and repeated over and over in her heart, Help me, help me. I can give anything.
The crystal skeleton rose from her arms and burst into a violent radiance in the dark night sky. Every soul within the noble's domain where she lived died in an instant; their flesh and blood gathered upon the crystal skeleton and then passed into her body. Her frail frame filled with energy, and her gashed face healed and turned more beautiful than before. Then the crystal skeleton spoke once more: "Kill. Sacrifice. And then guide my coming."
However anxious they were to hear the latest oracle, no one dared interrupt the First Servitor's prayer. Those who had once done so had paid for it with their lives.
So the Servitors, their bodies wound with threads of every color, stood respectfully below the altar and waited for the First Servitor's command.
A long while later, her gentle voice sounded: "Order every low-ranked believer to give their lives in loyalty to the Supreme God. Then set out, build the true kingdom of God, and guide the Supreme God's descent."
Her command was exactly the same as Brown's, but flatter and crueler still; she did not even deign to dress it up. Yet not one Servitor dared defy her. They bowed respectfully, withdrew from the altar, and descended among the ordinary believers of every region.
"The Supreme God is about to descend! The kingdom of God is about to be built! Brothers and sisters, the time has come to offer everything to the Supreme God!"
The believers waited in longing for an oracle from the Supreme God, only to hear the Servitors say, "Prove your loyalty to the Supreme God with your lives!"
The words had barely landed when the believers, bewildered, felt the power they had once been so proud of raging inside them, beyond all control. They howled in agony, but it did no good; one after another, the believers burst apart where they stood.
Like dominoes, the explosions came faster and faster, claiming more and more, until in less than an hour the only things left in all the west were the Servitors, hovering in the air.
Their bodies were pierced through by chains, and the chains stretched to the altar; flesh-and-blood energy poured along them into the altar and lifted that vast structure into the air. The First Servitor still stood beneath the crystal skeleton and gave a soft command: "Set out. The royal city in the center."
Adam and the other three hammered the shield with magic without pause, but a shield formed from the flesh and blood of countless human lives was unexpectedly tenacious. Inside it the Servitors kept receiving infusions of flesh and blood, their energy auras growing stronger and stronger; at the very top, Brown's body had already swelled to three meters tall. His muscles split apart and sprouted fleshy buds, the buds turned to muscle again, until he had no human shape left at all — he had become a monster through and through.