During the night, somewhere within the vast desert of Busalet, the entire land had turned blood-red. What was once a barren expanse of drifting sands had now transformed into a hellscape covered in sinewy flesh, heaving muscles, and countless eyes and mouths. Amid the stench of decay, the grotesque land vomited forth innumerable thick, malformed arms, reaching skyward to snatch at anything attempting to flee by air.

Confronted by this tide of monstrous hands, even massive steel warships hundreds of meters long, armed with powerful firepower, were unable to hold out. Their retaliatory shells turned to sticky flesh, and their dense close-in defense systems were completely helpless against the blood-red fingers that crashed toward them like living walls. Soon, every part of the steel juggernauts was seized by those blood-soaked limbs and forcibly dragged down by overwhelming strength. Despite Ivy's full activation of propulsion systems to resist, she could not fully negate the immense pulling force, and the entire warship continued its irreversible descent toward the vast crimson earth below.

“Damn it... what even is this thing? A Gold-rank member of the Afterbirth Cult? Why did it suddenly appear here?”

As she watched herself slowly being pulled into the grotesque land of blood and flesh, Ivy’s projection gritted her teeth, her expression solemn. She then turned to a robed man beside her and spoke.

“We can’t defeat this thing. I’ll stay here and hold it off with everything I’ve got. You take Sister Vania and get out of here!”

Ivy said this to Dorothy’s corpse marionette, having realized the vast difference in power and tier between her and the enemy. It wasn’t even a question of victory—escaping might not even be possible.

Ivy’s massive steel body didn’t just provide durable and powerful firepower—it also made her a huge target. Her sheer size meant escape was nearly impossible, so she chose to stay behind and cover the others' retreat.

“This isn’t the time to talk about who’s staying behind. We might be able to escape together. Sister Ivy, you’ve seen some of our means, haven’t you?”

Dorothy’s corpse marionette replied bluntly.

“It’s useless! I’m too big a target—I can’t escape! Better for me to buy you time. Just make sure Sister Vania gets back to Holy Mount safely. I’ll give you a token so the people there will believe your words!”

Ivy continued, clearly resolved.

After a moment of silence, Dorothy’s corpse marionette asked calmly.

“Do you... have a central cognition unit of some sort?”

“What? A cognition what...?”

“A cognition core. Basically, the decision-making module for your warship body—your brain. Your whole warship can’t possibly be entirely made of critical systems, right? Regular captains can still abandon ship. For something as advanced as you, there has to be an emergency evacuation function built into the cognition core...”

Dorothy explained as she operated the corpse marionette.

After a pause, Ivy responded.

“There is, but that information is a high-level secret of the Radiance Church. And against that thing, even emergency evacuation might not save me... If I hold out just a bit longer, I might buy you more time.”

“No more nonsense. This is no time to care about secrecy! If you want to survive, tell us where your cognition core is and cooperate with us to dismantle it. We’ve already come this far together—do you not even have a shred of basic trust?”

Dorothy’s marionette retorted seriously.

Hearing that, Ivy finally showed a trace of hesitation for the first time. After a long sigh, she nodded.

“Fine. All the critical data is here. Go ahead.”

With a wave of her hand, glowing lines of dense text appeared before Dorothy’s corpse marionette—technical information about Ivy’s cognition core, including location and disassembly method.

“Good. Hold on a bit longer—we’re on it now!” the marionette said before mobilizing all the corpse marionettes aboard Ivy's ship and rushing below deck.

Meanwhile, Ivy continued to use her close-in weapons to burn away the hands gripping her and poured all power into her propulsion systems to break free of the restraint.

At that moment, Ivy noticed Vania in the distance being caught by the evil and powerful Gold-rank Afterbirth Matron. As she approached Vania, seemingly intending to do something, Ivy panicked and turned her remaining turrets to provide supporting fire. But both her artillery barrage and the lightning that split from the heavens were easily intercepted by the endless monstrous hands, rendering her attacks ineffective.

“This is bad…”

Seeing Vania about to be seized by the self-proclaimed Sister Faith, Ivy’s heart grew heavier. But then, a familiar light burst forth from Vania, repelling both "Faith" and the hands that restrained her.

“That’s... Her Excellency’s power. The protective talisman she gave to Vania is working… If that’s the case…”

Ivy’s heart slightly relaxed, but the moment she saw the face beneath “Faith’s” melting flesh—exposed under the purifying light—her eyes widened.

Under the melting disguise wasn’t Faith’s rough, sun-weathered face, but that of another woman—fair, smooth, stunning, and strikingly more youthful than Faith’s had appeared. She looked around twenty-seven or twenty-eight, with vivid red lips, defined features, narrow eyes, and a strange natural allure despite the stern expression on her face.

This face carried a kind of sorcery. A regular person might be deeply enthralled just by glancing at it. But for Ivy, it awakened memories buried deep in her soul.

That barely-smiling memory, once recalled, ignited like wildfire. In an instant, it set her entire heart ablaze with overwhelming fury—a rage that consumed her whole being and drove her to shout the name etched in her soul with hatred.

“Unina Dottina!!!”

The moment Ivy cried out that name, her entire steel warship seemed to resonate with the fury in her heart. Suddenly, spiritual energy surged from her, and sacred markings began to glow all across her hull. Her steel exterior rapidly heated, turning red-hot and glowing with intensity. The drastic rise in temperature caused parts of her structure with lower heat resistance to melt outright, disabling many auxiliary weapons on the spot.

But in exchange, the monstrous blood hands holding her were incinerated into smoke and ash by the scorching heat.

Now free, Ivy redirected all her thrusters backward and surged forward with full power. Her massive steel warship became a blazing crimson-gold arrow aimed straight at the woman now revealed as Unina.

Seeing the blazing charge, Unina—still covering her face—glanced sideways with icy eyes at the rapidly approaching projectile. She calmly extended a single finger toward the charging Ivy.

And so, a four-hundred-meter-long steel warship, encased in metal and burning at several thousand degrees, smashed directly into that extended finger… and stopped dead in its tracks.

No matter how much power Ivy’s engines poured out, she could not push Unina back even slightly. She couldn’t even make her flinch. Though her finger emitted smoke from the searing heat, there were no signs of it being destroyed or melted.

“What excellent craftsmanship…”

Raising her head slightly, Unina looked at the giant warship’s ramming prow—halted without piercing through her finger—and muttered in a soft voice. Then, with a look in her eyes, the bloody earth beneath her stirred, and two spiked, chitinous tentacles shot forth from the ground, stabbing precisely at the searing Ivy.

The tentacles pierced straight through the high-temperature-reinforced hull of the steel vessel like it was paper, boring a hole clean through Ivy’s ship. Her projection flickered violently, and the output from all the thrusters instantly dropped. The entire ship began to tremble uncontrollably.

“But… aside from the prow, it doesn’t seem quite so tough elsewhere…”

Unina continued speaking coldly. Then, from the blood-soaked earth, more horrific, grotesque human heads began to sprout—bloody, misshapen, with either missing or excessive facial features and filled with jagged teeth. These heads grew swiftly upward, necks stretching long until they reached Ivy’s height, and then bit down savagely onto her hull. Their humanlike white teeth showed no fear of the searing heat, and as they clamped down, Ivy’s reinforced hull began to warp and deform under the force. The shrill screech of buckling steel rang out, and Ivy’s projection flickered ever more erratically.

“Tra… traitor… You… shall suffer… destruc…tion… Your spir… it…”

On the bridge, Ivy’s projection glitched so severely it could barely speak, voice fragmented and stuttering. Still, her boundless fury was evident in every syllable.

Unina gazed at Ivy’s glitching projection. Retracting the hand that had blocked Ivy earlier, she allowed the monstrous heads to continue clamping onto the hull, then raised her hand toward the projection. At her command, a tentacle sprouted from the bloody earth behind Ivy and shot toward the projection, wrapping itself around it.

Then, something strange happened: the projection—clearly non-corporeal—was forcibly dragged forward by the tentacle as though it had mass, brought right before Unina. Strangely, the glitching seemed to lessen.

“Four hundred years… and you’re still slaving away for Holy Mount? Even turned yourself into this pathetic state? What a pity… Sister Emmerigo…”

Unina spoke as if reminiscing. Ivy, weak and restrained, murmured.

“I… I must… take responsibility for my mistakes… If I hadn’t trusted Angelo too much… your conspiracy with him—and Fabrizio—would’ve never succeeded… The Church wouldn’t have suffered such grievous losses…”

“Take responsibility? Heh… You think our plan only succeeded because of your negligence? Don’t flatter yourself. You were just one of the royal court’s guards. Whether you were there or not, the result wouldn’t have changed. If anything, Angelo pulling you away saved your life. You should be thanking him—your teacher, your savior…”

Unina smiled coldly. But Ivy snapped back without hesitation.

“Bah! You’re all traitors! Great, vile traitors! The rest have already been annihilated by divine judgment. I don’t know how you managed to cling to life, but now that you’ve reappeared—you won’t live much longer either…”

“Divine judgment? Hah. What a joke… Phaethon, that fraud, dares claim he executes the divine will? He’s the greatest liar. The true blasphemer. He betrayed us first. He deceived the entire world. We are not the betrayers. He is.”

Unina’s tone was calm, but a subtle passion stirred beneath the surface. Ivy responded with cold disdain.

“Deceitful heretic…”

“Stubborn fool… Since you won’t listen to reason, I’ll just have to make you listen by other means…”

As she said this, Unina’s eyes narrowed with intensity. Where she stared, thin blood vessels suddenly sprouted from Ivy’s projection and spread rapidly in every direction.

“Urgh… aaaaagh! Stop! What are you doing?!”

Ivy let out a cry of pain and thrashed, eyes wide with agony. But no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t break free.

“You’ve been like this so long, I bet you’ve forgotten what pain feels like. How is it, reliving the experience?”

Unina calmly watched her captive’s expression contort in agony, savoring the sight of that flicker of resilience and defiance lingering in Ivy’s eyes.

She knew full well Ivy was only stalling for time to let Vania escape. But against her, where could that little nun possibly run?

Nowhere. Not just Ivy—Vania couldn’t escape either. Even the hidden orchestrator behind them, who had been using the mysterious power of Revelation from the shadows—none of them could escape.

At this moment, Unina wasn’t just watching Ivy. Many other eyes—her eyes—were observing elsewhere: the little nun dashing off in the distance after breaking free, and the invisible threads of spirituality connecting to distant locations…

For all of it, Unina was prepared. Her fleshland was still expanding—faster than Vania’s flight. Though Vania was still protected by residual holy light, it was weakening under Unina’s erosion. Soon, with a single thought, she could re-bind her.

As for the spiritual threads in the sky, Unina had begun to corrupt them with an even subtler, untraceable method. The corruption had already spread back toward its origin without the owner noticing. It wouldn’t be long before it reached the source.

Unina believed she had everything under control.

But just as countless blood hands surged once more from her land to seize the thoroughly-corroded Vania, and just as the corrupted spiritual thread neared its end—deep inside Ivy’s blistering ship, in the core cabin, a group finally dismantled a steel Western-style coffin from among countless cables.

At the moment that iron coffin was detached, the ship’s thrusters instantly lost power. The whole vessel fell silent. Ivy’s projection—restrained by Unina—vanished like a monitor forcibly shut off by pulling the plug. The blood vessels across her faded and fell away.

Then, far off atop a sand dune, Dorothy scribbled the final sentence onto a prepared sheet of paper.

In that instant—Dorothy, the fleeing Vania, the corpse marionettes inside Ivy, and the items they carried—all vanished, leaving only a distortion in space behind.

Unina watched Ivy vanish, then Vania too—but showed no surprise. The moment Vania disappeared and space warped, a fine tendril trailing behind her, glowing with eerie red light, suddenly shot forward and pierced into the spatial distortion.

The tendril “nailed” the distortion in place. Blood threads began to grow from within it.

And thus, the tendril anchored what should have vanished, causing the distorted space to “take root” and remain fixed in reality…

Unina then slowly sank back into the fleshy ground. Moments later, she rose again before the anchored rift, silently observing the fixed tear now budding with veins, as though it were growing flesh.

She had lost Vania. Lost Ivy. Lost the mysterious hidden mastermind—every thread to them now severed. But that didn’t matter.

All she needed was this—this fixed, distorted pocket of space.

In her eyes, it was a fissure—an entrance to the most ancient and mysterious secret buried beneath this land.

She pressed a hand against it and poured her power into the rift. Immediately, the blood threads around it proliferated wildly. Chunks of flesh grew in the air, forming a throbbing tumor.

“No good… With just my power, I can’t force it open. This space was created by an ancient divinity. Only the chosen—or a god of equal rank—can intervene…”

Unina muttered softly, gazing at the massive tumor. She then silently knelt upon the bloodland and assumed a standard prayer posture of the Radiance Church.

Wearing a nun’s garb, she began to pray.

“Ah… my Lord… my Mother… Mother of Man… Mother of Beasts… Mother of All Living… Mother of All Things…

“I pray to You… I hunger for You… I howl for You… Open Your eyes and behold Your daughter… Grant me Your sweet milk… and I, Your daughter, shall bring You the secrets of the ancient slumber… and offer them as tribute…”

Unina knelt in devout prayer. After a short while, she rose silently. Tilting her head back, she opened her mouth wide.

And then came the blood—thick, foul-smelling blood—gushing from her throat. It was filled with shredded flesh and tissue, viscous and stinking.

The blood overflowed, covering her entire face, then ran down both sides, coating her skin. Her garments dissolved completely in the process.

After being completely covered in blood plasma, the substance began to smooth out and solidify, eventually taking on the appearance of glistening, crimson skin. It looked as though Unina was now wearing a tight, glossy red bodysuit. Her entire form became that of a faceless, bald figure, slick with blood, her lower abdomen slightly swollen, her shapely body fully outlined in a disturbing silhouette.

Then, Unina slowly walked toward the space distortion pinned in place by blood threads and extended her crimson hand into it.

The moment her hand pierced the distorted space, a sharp screech rang out. The disturbance suddenly expanded, and the blood vessels growing on it surged frantically into the void. The skies above cracked with abnormal lightning and thunder, and the entire land began to tremble.

“Mother… let the legacy of departed divinity become our feast…”

Feeling the violently out-of-control flashes in the sky, Unina murmured with her faceless mouthless face.

…

Elsewhere, far removed from the real world—in a certain pseudo-history world within Busalet.

It was still a nighttime desert. Having just teleported from the real world, Dorothy, robed and veiled, gazed at the calm, quiet wasteland and let out a breath of relief.

“We finally made it…”

She spoke with a trace of emotion. Dorothy had long anticipated the possibility of facing a crisis that would force her to evacuate into a pseudo-history world. For that reason, she had prepared a fake historical narrative in advance and distributed its pages to Vania, Nephthys, and several of her corpse marionettes. At the critical moment, she would only need to complete the “fake history” in writing to pull everyone into the alternate world—as she had just done.

The only deviation from the plan was that Dorothy had tried to rescue Ivy—her half-ally. That rescue attempt had delayed her entry into the pseudo-history world, forcing her to briefly contend with Unina despite realizing how dangerous she was. Her ability to stall came from the protective charm Amanda had given to Vania. Dorothy had already used Appraisal skills on it and knew just how powerful it was.

That charm contained a vast amount of spirituality and, when activated, could dispel all foreign spiritual influence on the wearer—both external and internal. Its effect even radiated out to a radius of over ten meters around Vania until the spirituality inside it was depleted. This powerful dispelling effect was of Gold-rank quality—overwhelming in force.

“To think we’d run into a Gold-rank of the Afterbirth Cult here… and not just any Gold, but that mysterious Matron of the entire unified cult… And on top of that, she used to be a high-ranking member of our own Church… Truly, fate is unpredictable…”

Scratching her head, Dorothy sighed in helplessness. She’d read the mystical text concerning Unina before, but never imagined that the woman responsible for recently unifying the three Afterbirth factions had once been a senior member of the Church—and a devout believer in the Holy Mother, no less.

“Just what could’ve happened to her… to turn her into this?”

Dorothy pondered with deep confusion. But she knew now wasn’t the time to dwell on it. The priority now was regrouping.

Using magnetic force to lift herself into the air, Dorothy flew toward the coordinates where Vania had been sent. Soon, she spotted Vania sitting in the sand, catching her breath.

“How are you feeling, Vania? Any injuries?”

Seeing her, Dorothy asked directly. Vania stood up, breathing steadily now, and shook her head.

“I’m fine, Miss Dorothea. I’m okay now. Thank you for bringing me here…”

“No need to thank me. You should thank the others instead… If you hadn’t risked activating that charm, she wouldn’t have gotten out at all.”

Dorothy said this and then looked toward the distant sky. A long, rectangular object was flying toward them and soon landed with a heavy thud.

It was a steel coffin of standard size, covered in various ports and interfaces. Several broken cables were still attached to its sides, and its surface was inscribed with countless dense markings. At its center was the radiant sun insignia of the Radiance Church.

Looking at the coffin, Dorothy, still veiled in her robe and hood, stepped up and examined it briefly before speaking.

“How is it? Can you speak, Sister Ivy?”

“Barely… In my core coffin… there’s a… temporary communication module. Even without projection capabilities, I can manage basic conversation… This is my first time using it… Thank you all for rescuing me. I thought… I was about to be martyred…”

Ivy’s fragmented voice came from within the iron coffin. After expressing her thanks, she seemed to assess her surroundings.

“What an… incredible power… We—we’ve left the real world, haven’t we? Is this… an alternate realm?”

“You could say that. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how to define it either… What matters is that we escaped that great traitor of yours for now.”

Dorothy shrugged and replied frankly. Ivy continued.

“You… You’re the master of those marionettes, aren’t you? The one the Heaven’s Arbiter Sect dispatched to Busalet as the general commander? I… I didn’t expect a young girl… The Heaven’s Arbiter Sect is full of talent. May I ask your name?”

“Just call me ‘Scholar.’ And skip the rest of the chit-chat—we need to move now.”

Dorothy said this decisively. Her plan was to regroup with Nephthys, who had also been transferred here, and then flee far from this place. Only once they were safely away would they exit the pseudo-history world and return to reality—escaping the catastrophe that currently awaited them outside.

But just as she was about to take flight, the ground suddenly began to tremble faintly. Thunder cracked in the sky above, and the entire pseudo-history world began to shake.

“…What’s going on?!”