Chapter 32: A Corrupted Fragment of Faith

"A Sleeping Relic..."

Koda stared at the statue the goblins had somehow managed to make, and fell into deep thought.

First of all, from an artistic point of view, he personally found it hideous.

Secondly, from every other point of view, it was still hideous as hell.

He couldn’t even tell what the goblins had been trying to carve.

Was it a person with a bunch of eyeballs growing out of its body?

Or was it a bunch of eyeballs with a person growing out of them?

...

Either way, no matter how ugly it was, Koda still meant to make use of it.

"If I just trade it on the altar, I get three thousand four hundred soul stones."

He felt the number through the throne, and the corner of his eye twitched.

"That’s a terrible deal."

"After all that trouble, a Sleeping Relic only sells for this much?"

Soul stones were important, no question.

But now that the earliest days were behind him, and he’d made it through them, three thousand four hundred was hardly worth mentioning.

"What if I wake it up instead?"

"Would waking it give me something better?"

With that thought, Koda reached through the throne and checked what the altar would want to wake the relic.

"A thousand soul stones. A little expensive, but I can live with that."

"Forget it. Wake it!"

The moment he gave the command, the sky above the Third Layer changed.

A beam of golden light pierced down through countless realms and unimaginable distances, passed straight through the ever-turning black-and-red vortex, and fell on the statue in front of him.

Koda flinched. Whatever that light was, it didn’t feel anything like Hell.

In an instant, the statue began to dissolve.

Countless chips of stone and a single black shard floated into the air.

The black shard looked like a piece of broken glass, except its edges never stayed still.

Countless ripples kept flowing toward its center, twisting and tangling into one another.

The light faded.

Through the throne, Koda understood at once what he was looking at.

A Fragment of Faith. Corrupted.

’A Fragment of Faith?’ he thought. ’Isn’t that something only lords who walk the Path of Faith use?’

’Why would those stupid, ugly goblins have something like this?’

Seeing one for the first time, Koda stepped forward and picked it up.

In an instant, countless images flooded into his mind like a rising tide.

He saw goblins hunting weak animals and splashing their blood on the statue.

He saw goblins tying up helpless captives in front of it after they’d bred more of their own, preparing to slaughter them.

He saw goblins ambushing stronger prey, then smearing their blood and guts all over the statue.

And then...

Koda had no idea how many images flashed past, but he understood one thing.

Every one of them showed how depraved and cruel the goblins were.

With their low intelligence, they’d never realized the statue they worshipped wasn’t tied to any god at all.

Their prayers meant nothing.

Yet the fools kept using those cruel, twisted rituals to please a god they had made up.

As a result, something strange had happened.

The statue wasn’t connected to any living being, but far too many creatures had died in front of it. Their agony in their last moments had been overwhelming, and what the goblins poured out during their rituals had been extraordinarily intense.

So the hideous statue had actually started to gather faith!

Blood. Death. Slavery. Humiliation...

Countless ideas of faith began to take shape.

However, the foolish goblins had poured too many different feelings and ideas into it.

Those pieces of faith started tangling with each other and getting in each other’s way.

In the end, they all ran together inside the statue, forming a knotted mass where every piece corrupted the rest.

That was the real reason the Fragment was corrupted.

If the goblins had worshipped the statue with a single idea, Koda would have gotten a pure Fragment of Faith instead.

In that case, the statue might even have been able to...

Come to life!

Through the power of faith, it might have become something truly terrifying.

But now...

This corrupted Fragment of Faith was worth absolutely nothing to Koda.

"What a loss!"

"I have no intention of walking the Path of Faith. This thing is useless to me!"

Koda regretted waking it, but there was no taking it back.

The altar wouldn’t even trade a corrupted Fragment for soul stones.

If he wanted to sell it, he would have to wait until he survived the Claiming and the markets that served surviving lords opened up to him.

So the Fragment, which had cost him so much time and effort, had turned into a hot potato.

It couldn’t give him the fighting strength he needed right now, and he couldn’t turn it back into soul stones either.

Just as Koda was getting frustrated, he suddenly remembered something.

The altar had another face.

So far, he had only ever used it to trade junk for a fixed handful of soul stones. Its true purpose, the one the throne had shown him on the very first day, he had ignored completely.

The sacrifice.

Offer anything of value, and receive a treasure of the deep in return!

"Right! I almost forgot about that."

To be fair, there was a reason he had ignored it for so long.

Compared with the pool and the gate, the altar’s sacrifice really wasn’t worth much early on.

After all, you needed something to offer before you could use it.

His resources had been tight from the start. He would never deliberately spend a fortune on something valuable just to throw it onto the altar for a random prize.

It wasn’t as if he could seriously think about offering up his own soul, was it?

Besides, given how chaotic the Third Layer was, who knew what kind of treasure he might get back?

He wasn’t a gambler.

He wouldn’t bet on getting lucky, much less bet his own fate on something so uncertain.

Compared with a future he couldn’t see or touch, Koda preferred one he could.

"Since the altar takes anything of value, this Fragment should count, right?"

Koda placed the Fragment of Faith on the altar and called up the sacrifice.

As it began, the vortex overhead seemed to spin faster, almost as if on purpose.

As if the Third Layer itself had been waiting eagerly for its very first sacrifice...

Meanwhile, as Koda was still trying to offer up the corrupted Fragment, the throne suddenly began to tremble against his back.

Far away, out on the Tithe Lands, the threads that tied him to his demons began to go dark.

One after another.