There’s a wide open space below the gray castle walls that divide the royal castle and its outside.
Just until yesterday, Tis’s coffin that had circled the capital was there, but now a high altar has been built in the middle of the wide open space.
People living inside the castle all know what this means.
An execution platform.
It’s a place where, if there’s an extremely wicked criminal, their crimes are widely announced and they’re beheaded in front of everyone.
While this method of execution is carried out to uphold national law, unfortunately, the layer that actually enjoys it receives it differently. And those conducting the event know this too.
Executions are a kind of circus providing fun shows to citizens.
Human blood brings excitement.
Watching a sinful human being killed in a miserable state gives people peripheral pleasure.
Just hearing this might be hard to understand. You might think it’s because these people are uncivilized.
But if you think a little more, you’ll know. Don’t people get excited watching scenes where many people swarm and tear apart someone who made a mistake in personal video media?
This isn’t a matter of people being good or bad.
It’s closer to a quality acquired in the process of gaining sociality. Because in primitive societies, if you don’t condemn humans who did wrong, you can’t maintain society.
They reject outsiders, and if you don’t follow their rules, they kill or drive you out.
What if you can’t do that?
The primitive era was an environment too harsh for people to live as individuals.
If society disintegrated, that group collapsed.
And we are the group that survived by sticking together. So it’s not strange that this quality is passed down through blood.
Therefore, as signs of a blood festival beginning to appear, people instinctively started gathering one by one to the square in front of the royal castle.
Happily wondering what kind of villain will scream and die today.
Especially as a reaction to the gloomy event of the funeral, a tremendous crowd flocked to the square in front of the royal castle.
There were people satisfied seeing the place filled with crowds.
The priest and paladin.
They rejoiced seeing the number of people gathered in the square, saying it’s an opportunity to show the dignity of the Holy Spirit Religion to the Kingdom of Anselus.
They even consulted each other on how to torment the girl called an evil god to extract words begging for life.
In the current worldview, an enemy declared by god is really a subject you can do anything to. Even if the evil god wasn’t a god but human, they would have done the same actions without guilt.
There are generally two cases where people become extremely cruel:
When they feel they are right, or when the other doesn’t look human.
And when these two overlap, more terrible things happen.
If it’s an event that happened in early modern times, witch hunts are representative. Of course, there were countries that actually realized the expression “days of pastoral slaughter” even later, but if we compare the current situation, witch hunts are most appropriate.
Of course, the outer god deserves to be witch hunted.
Because it’s a beast, not human offspring.
Anyway, while the Holy Spirit Religion people were pondering how to cook the outer god.
There was one more person happily waiting.
None other than the outer god.
Though it didn’t show on its expression, seeing the crowd of people gathered, it was pondering how to speak to make the gods eat more shit.
Of course, most of that composure was elsewhere. The outer god was watching through their eyes as three men were earnestly reading papers in a mansion on the outskirts of the capital.
Admirably, no one is thinking about them at all.
Especially since Hyunkeshuni, the most dangerous factor, is watching among the spectators expecting the outer god to be executed.
If Hyunkeshuni changed her mind again thinking the outer god was dangerous and thought to erase its traces, there’s a high possibility she would harm those reading the book far away.
There’s no way to prevent this.
Because the only contract Hyunkeshuni has to keep is making the book.
The outer god knows very well that no promises were made about anything after that.
Because in case of emergency, it had to bless Hyunkeshuni or at least induce her to be killed by someone who received its blessing.
If it can drag out time until those three finish reading the book completely, it’s the outer god’s victory.
Thinking like that, the outer god looked at the chains on its arms, legs, and neck. It’s a restraining device that the Holy Spirit Religion’s paladin put on the outer god when coming out, saying they need to prevent escape.
On the restraining device are letters invoking god’s power, written in characters only used by the Holy Spirit Religion. And those characters are actually exerting power and restraining the outer god.
No, beyond restraining, they were attacking the outer god as if scraping flesh with a small spoon.
There is terrible pain. An ordinary person would feel pain like their whole body being torn apart alive. And that pain is exactly what the outer god is feeling.
But the outer god didn’t even feel itchy.
Because the cold that keeps digging into its whole body is more painful than that. Beyond the flesh, beyond the bones, it continuously digs into something more important inside and gives pain.
That’s why it has no choice but to be obsessed with warmth.
It can do anything for warmth.
It also knows that even if it gets warmth as a temporary measure, if it can’t maintain it, this pain will continue forever.
So despite the maddening impulse, it looked very far ahead instead of right in front.
If it had been a little simpler, it would have moved like an insect. To avoid endless pain, it would have thoughtlessly rushed towards the warmth in front.
Many people mistakenly think pain is something you can get used to. But the human body doesn’t have such a function. Biologically, pain doesn’t have a mechanism for adaptation.
You can’t adapt. If it were just that it might be okay, but like people with certain diseases, it actually gets more painful.
That’s why the outer god desires warmth.
But there’s a reason it can’t move simply. There was a reason it didn’t immediately rush towards warmth to avoid that terrible pain.
Below that surface, the outer god couldn’t even die.
That fear and despair is the driving force suppressing the outer god’s impulses.
So the outer god uses its brain to the maximum and looks far ahead. And it doesn’t expect much.
The treasure it can obtain in this world is the technique to summon itself to other worlds. It set only that and didn’t expect anything else.
So in this place now, until the game download is complete, it decided to torment the gods like watching short videos on a phone.
It didn’t matter how effective it actually was.
It was enough if it could be satisfied just making them eat shit.
If the main quest was obtaining the summoning method, what it had to do in front of these people now belonged to a mini-game, not a sub-quest.
Something that didn’t matter whether it did well or not, just needed to kill time.
So it decided to do as it pleased.
The outer god thought like that until quite a long time passed, the execution platform was completed, and it was dragged up onto it.
And it knelt before the execution platform while countless people watched.
The paladin stepped forward first and introduced himself. People with even a little interest in rumors immediately recognized who he was.
The most famous Holy Spirit Religion paladin of the current era.
After briefly and concisely introducing himself, he read once more the letter from the head of the Holy Spirit Religion that he had read in front of the king.
And saying this is that evil god, he kicked the cheek of the girl kneeling down.
If you don’t think of the girl as the outer god, it was quite a cruel sight.
But people were excited.
There’s an evil witch there. Of course, to ordinary people, an evil god or evil witch was the same thing, so there was some misuse of language.
The meaning was the same.
A creature that can die painfully.
“This evil god made a contract with your hero, Tis! Do you know why he had such superhuman power? It’s because he received power from this evil god!”
For a moment, the square fell silent.
Because this was an incredible event. Tis, the hero of the Holy Spirit Religion, made a contract with an evil god. Everyone wants to think it’s nonsense, but on one side of the execution ground stand several people with purple hair.
As far as they know, purple hair symbolizes royal bloodline.
So the confusion was even greater.
The paladin, smiling with satisfaction looking at them, brought up an old story to further tear down Tis as planned.
He explained an incident from over 80 years ago, which no one living in this capital now knows properly.
Heretics of the evil god invaded the Kingdom of Anselus, and eventually destroyed the capital.
And at that time, all the heretics of the evil god had purple hair.
The paladin shouted loudly.
Tis was a heretic. But he repented his sins and entered the embrace of the merciful Holy Spirit. However, though the punishment disappears, the sin remains.
Saying that was Tis’s sin, he denounced the person they had sent off crying just yesterday.
To the paladin and priest, this was simply a speech to disparage Tis and raise the status of the Holy Spirit Religion. No matter how great a hero Tis was, he was an old man who died of old age.
They thought if they told the truth, the people of the Kingdom of Anselus would naturally look down on Tis and look up to the Holy Spirit Religion more.
However, in this capital of the Kingdom of Anselus, Tis was a great king. He was a king who rebuilt the devastated Kingdom of Anselus and established a greater kingdom than ever before.
The adults here know that king’s rule.
The children here grew up hearing that king’s legends.
Very slightly.
A crack formed.
And unfortunately, to make this execution show more enjoyable, they gave the outer god a chance to speak.
The paladin brought a long sword, stabbed the outer god’s shoulder, pointed at the people with his finger, and shouted to tell the truth.
A technique to make one confess their sins. A gaslighting technique also called self-criticism in some countries.
It would have been hard for a human to endure.
If it were human.
The outer god opened its mouth.
“That’s right. I gave Tis a blessing.”
And that outer god intended to speak only pure facts. It thoroughly did not lie, saying if it lied, it would surely be caught with its head.
This shines only when there’s a long gap like this.
“He was a person who grew up in a pseudo-religion called the Future Hope Church, and because he was born good, he had doubts about the pseudo-religion that killed people as sacrifices.”
Tis’s past, which only an extremely small number of people knew about, slowly flowed out.
Perhaps the person who knows about Tis in more detail than anyone else in this world began to slowly unfold his story.
Not to reveal the truth, but to spread poison purely filled with malice to the world.
“He was forcibly dragged before me and had to receive a blessing against his will. It was unavoidable because he would have been killed otherwise.”
The paladin, flustered by unexpected words, pushed in the sword stuck in the shoulder to stop the words.
But to the outer god, such pain was simply a signal.
“Tis, who received the blessing and overcame the crisis of life like that, escaped from the pseudo-religion when he saw the opportunity. And he went to the Kingdom of Anselus to stop the pseudo-religion that committed immoral acts. And he gained recognition from the Kingdom of Anselus and the Holy Spirit Religion with his goodness. And the Holy Spirit Religion recommended conversion to him, and he accepted the conversion.”
This is a good story for the Holy Spirit Religion.
The paladin thought so and loosened the force on the sword stuck in the back.
At first glance, it sounded like the Holy Spirit Religion forgave and embraced a heretic. The priest behind also thought it was a good story at that part.
They thought too much from the Holy Spirit Religion’s perspective.
So they couldn’t predict what would be said next.
“Tis became a believer of the Holy Spirit Religion. I still continued to bless him. Because humans have the freedom to choose religion.”
No, rather, who could have predicted?
That a god would directly say humans have the freedom to choose religion.
The outer god didn’t think at all about the ripples these words would cause.
Just suffer dealing with religiously annoying things.
The outer god had just that level of sentiment.
The monster wearing the mask of a god began to spread poison to the world in earnest.
It did so to buy time for the three people reading the book to finish reading it, or to torment the gods in that spare time.