282 Sacrifice

As Sunny walked in circles, drawing near to the center of the mosaic, he saw the depiction of various deeds that the Starlight Legion had achieved.

The warriors led by the seven heroes were truly a fearsome force. Forged and tempered by the relentless malice of their dark world and the unassailable will of their leaders, they drowned the Forgotten Shore in the blood of the cursed creatures.

Even though many of them had turned into monsters themselves — especially those who had allowed themselves to falter in their conviction — the rest continued on, unbroken.

Sunny couldn't tell how powerful exactly the members of the legion were, but from some clues of their battles, he guessed that they were at approximately the same level as the Awakened of his own world, at least at the beginning. With time, however, it seemed as though the warriors of the cursed land had grown much stronger.

If most of the creatures they were fighting were of the Corrupted rank, then that would put the Legion far above the humans back in the real world. Sunny wasn't sure if the seven heroes and their soldiers were carriers of the Nightmare Spell, though, and if the same hierarchy of power could be applied to them.

Eventually, the surviving humans migrated to the shore of the colossal impact crater and built an impregnable wall around their new city. This endeavor alone was so arduous and ambitious that he couldn't help but feel a sense of awe.

Sunny slowed his steps.

On the images in front of him, the construction of the Crimson Spire… no, it wasn't crimson yet back then… had begun. The cyclopean tower was built west of the city, reaching high into the sky like an axis of the world.

Like a stairwell that was designed to allow humans to touch the heavens.

This was what he was truly interested in. Sunny wanted to know what happened in the Spire, how the artificial sun was created, and how the darkness that consumed this land was turned into a transient black sea.

What he saw next made him falter, and then close his eyes with an expression of deep, exhausted resentment.

In the second to last image, the seven heroes were depicted standing apart in the seven spots of the Forgotten Shore. In front of each of them, a crowd of thousands of people kneeled, waiting.

Among those people were the warriors of the legion and the civilians from the city, men and women, old and young.

Each of the heroes held a weapon in their hands.

'Of course. Of course, this is what happened. What else would it be?'

A feeling of dark, bitter disappointment grasped his heart. Sunny didn't even know why he felt this way. It was not like he knew anything about the seven heroes, really. But at some point, maybe because he needed to believe that there was a tiny glimmer of light in the vast and endless night, he had begun thinking of them as a symbol of the best humanity could be.

...What a foolish thought.

He of all people should have known better.

"Curse you all."

In the last image, one that took the center of the mosaic, seven tall hills made of dead bodies surrounded the Spire. Tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, their blood flowing like rivers toward the dark tower. On top of each hill stood one of the valiant heroes, their hands stained red to the shoulder.

As the last sacrifice, the slaughterers turned their weapons on themselves, thrusting them into their hearts.

…And somewhere out there, he knew, a tiny black seed floated in a pool of blood.

Sunny grimaced in disgust.

'This was your dream? This is how you decided to bring back the light? You sick wretches…'

As the rivers of blood flowed to the Spire, seven streams of glowing crimson light moved above them and entered it from seven directions. These streams represented the soul essence of numerous humans who had been sacrificed to create the artificial sun.

But theirs wasn't the most terrible fate.

In the center of the Spire, a lone human figure was drawn, convulsing in harrowing agony as the raging storm of soul energy entered her body. The conflux of all that power, the sacrificial vessel meant to be its conduit. The anchor of the sun.

Sunny recognized that figure, too. To him, the features of her face were painfully familiar.

It was the same face as that of the nameless goddess whose statue stood in the ruined cathedral.

The crimson light entered her body and shot from her screaming mouth and eyes upward, pure and white. It rose to the height of the Spire, where a new sun was being born.

Frightened by its light, the darkness retreated underground, where it was locked behind seven seals that were left behind by the heroes as their last deed.

The rest was easy to deduce.

After the heroes perished to create the artificial sun, everything was fine for a while. But then, maybe after a few decades, or even hundreds of years, the light of the sun began to dim.

So the people of the Dark City had to make a new sacrifice. Perhaps, the second time, only seven people had been killed to renew the power of the Spire.

But then it happened again, and that time, seven was not enough. So they sacrificed fourteen. And when it happened again, they sacrificed a few dozen.

And eventually, hundreds of people were being slaughtered every year to keep the sun burning. Because of the simple fact that the seven heroes and their people… all of them had terribly mighty souls. But their descendants, who didn't have to grow up in utter darkness and fight terrible monsters to live through the day, did not.

And at some point in this vicious cycle, the Vessel that had been imprisoned in the Spire and served as the anchor for the bloodthirsty sun was corrupted. Whatever kind of conscience it had left had been completely shattered.

The nameless goddess of the Dark City became the Crimson Terror of the Forgotten Shore.

All that pain, all that rage, all that blood exploded from the Spire and infected the very land itself, growing into an endless labyrinth of the strange crimson coral. The seven seals came undone, releasing that darkness that had been imprisoned underground for hundreds of years.

This was what Cassie had seen in the vision.

The darkness and the fury of the newborn Terror fell on the humans of the Dark City like a tide and wiped them all out, erasing even the memory of them from the face of the world.

…This was how the Forgotten Shore was born.