Steampunk: Sixth Era Epic-Chapter 802: The Descending Blood God

Chapter 802 -802: The Descending Blood God

“Moonlight Greatsword!”

Miss Orland’s combat techniques taught Shard how to attach an invisible spiritual weapon to a physical blade. The treasure sword, transformed from a tree branch by the middle-aged witch, now glowed with the radiance of Silvermoon, aimed at the bats within the blood mist behind Shard.

The bat swarm dodged Shard’s attack with ease, but his halt allowed the blood mist to catch up to them.

The bats converged, and the woman emerging from them didn’t utter a word before summoning her Eleven Rings of Fate. A colossal blood-colored greatsword, larger than the surrounding trees, slashed in the air. Shard hurriedly swung his sword in retaliation.

With a piercing metallic clash, his sword was knocked out of his hand. But instead of attacking again, the blood-colored greatsword transformed into a giant hand, reaching for Grace and Helen:

“Sorry, you can’t take the Red Butterfly Twins away!”

“Silvermoon Slash!”

Shard kicked into the air, but the arc-shaped light blade didn’t scatter the blood hand.

Yet, from the uncorrupted white mist, a new spirit emerged. Picking up Shard’s fallen longsword, he leapt high and shattered the red giant hand. After drinking a magic potion, he fiercely slammed forward, dissipating the pervasive blood mist amidst the roar of twisted air.

An elderly man with white hair gradually came into view. Dressed in brown cloth armor and long-sleeved leather gloves, his face weathered and cracked, yet his eyes were exceptionally sharp.

It was the old man from the Divine Banquet. He was once the owner of the Night Watchman and finally died in the Sicarl Mountain Region.

“Sir, take the girls and leave.”

Perhaps in his days, men couldn’t become Transcendents. But now, as a spirit fueled by rage and holding a longsword, he also possessed the power to fight:

“Girls, this is to repay you. Thank you for the pills (609) you gave me all those years ago. Finally, I have the chance to repay you!”

He charged at the Eleven Rings vampire. Meanwhile, Shard pulled Helen and Grace to run farther away:

“Thank you! Really, thank you!”

Above Midshire Fort City, more and more terrifying and twisted limbs stretched out from the giant cocoon. Though the limbs were destroyed by the Church, they grew back even faster.

As the holes in the cocoon increased, even from the mountain base, Shard could clearly understand how horrifying the monster incubated by Interstice’s power within the cocoon would be.

Rooooar~

Even before its complete birth, the terrifying howl echoing from the abyss was already deafening. Suddenly, black lightning bolts appeared in the night sky above the white mist. Simultaneously, the ritual marks in the city below the giant cocoon grew brighter, with more Circle Sorcerers appearing in the air.

Shard continued to hold Helen’s and Grace’s hands as they ran through the forest. Though a courageous spirit blocked their vampire pursuer, the blood mist and trails were still chasing them.

“Sir, it seems we can’t escape.”

“Don’t say that.”

Shard rebuffed without turning his head:

“If I didn’t believe in rescuing you, I wouldn’t have come here.”

As Grace’s and Helen’s strength was gradually recovering, Shard couldn’t tell in the rush through the forest if he was running or had transformed into a swarm of red butterflies flying forward.

But the dense forest was becoming sparse, and they seemed close to leaving the Blood Mist Woodland.

“When this is over, I want to invite you to visit Saint Delan Square, to see my home in this era. I also want to invite you to Tobesk, to experience the scenery of the Northern Pearl, the pinnacle of industrial civilization in this world. I want you to help my friends, too. I know two more souls connected by fate, but they can never meet…”

Shard rambled about his thoughts, not just to give Helen and Grace confidence, but also to bolster his own.

The girls in white and black dresses looked at his back, reminiscing about everyone they had met at the banquet tonight. For a moment, they felt as though they had never left the Divine Banquet at Night Manor.

As Shard finished recounting Dorothy and Lecia’s story, they reached the edge of the woodland. Shard leapt through the last bush, but what he saw made him stop in his tracks.

He and Grace and Helen had reached the shores of Bena Lake once again. This time, the lake had indeed turned entirely blood-red.

Enveloped in a blood mist, a thick, bloody smell mixed with the fragrance of wine filled the air. Numerous stakes lined the shore, their dry corpses now transformed into nobles dressed in ornate clothing from various eras.

Pierced on the stakes, they showed no signs of pain. Instead, they faced the lake with solemn expressions, as though awaiting the arrival of someone noble.

The blood-red waters of the lake remained calm, even the muddy edges were still. The antique coffin that originally floated in the lake was now drifting toward the shore.

Under a faint blood mist on the lake’s surface, the crimson full moon between two distant hills seemed ready to plunge into the lake at any moment. freёwebnoѵel.com

The red moon was so clear, so enchanting. Just looking at it, one’s gaze felt irresistibly drawn as if pulled by a black hole, unable to look away.

It was a perfect, flawless orb, yet grotesque like a tumor-filled red mass. The red light shone on the three faces who had just escaped the forest, gradually making Helen and Grace serene, while Shard felt his eyelids irresistibly heavy.

He was too exhausted. Since leaving the House of the Blind in the afternoon, he had engaged in multiple battles, traveled back in time, and then experienced that great battle in the realm of death. After emerging from death, he hurried to the auction house, followed by the battle in the mountains.

And now, gazing at the increasingly clear crimson moon, Shard instinctively wanted to close his eyes and remain motionless.

“No… I can’t…”

Forcing himself to stay awake, he tightly held Helen and Grace’s hands and turned to return to the forest. Unexpectedly, after plunging into the dense woods, he still found himself on the shore of Bena Lake, under the red moon and the shroud of the blood mist.

They could no longer escape. The midnight bell was about to toll, and the scene at the foot of the Sicarl Mountain was so sacred, solemn, and strange.

The vampire-kind in black robes prayed in unison, and the impaled sacrifices on the stakes praised the blood and the moon loudly, their voices almost shattering Shard’s eardrums. The crimson lake water seemed to have been infused with the blood of thousands, but it was merely a cup of exquisite red wine.

The taste of blood and wine was so intoxicating that when the inexplicable sacred song began to echo in his ears, Shard didn’t immediately seek the source of the singing.

“Can’t escape… This truly is the worst-case scenario…”

He took the fishing rod off his back, stopped, and listened to the song praising the Blood Moon. The children’s singing voices mixed together, but unlike the grandeur and sanctity expressed by the True God Church choir, there was instead an eerie sense of divinity.

The calm Blood Lake began to stir, slowly pushing the coffin toward the shore. A beam of blood-red light broke through the blood mist above, descending from the sky and enveloping the coffin, moving with it.

Everything before his eyes doubled in vision; the kneeling beings were sometimes vampires, sometimes blood-drained corpses; behind him, sometimes it was the Blood Mist Woodland, sometimes a red rose garden surrounded by thorns; and on Lake Bena, the water glowed red, stimulating Shard’s Echo of Blood to activate spontaneously.

The metal coffin, under the shroud of the red light pillar, had already reached the shallow waters near the shore. The mental pressure increased bit by bit, and the power of chaotic and uncontrolled desecration seeped in little by little.

Though it was just a coffin, in Shard’s eyes, it seemed larger than the entire Sicarl Mountain and even the entire Rommel Mountains. The surface of the coffin reflected the light of the Red Moon, and the previously heavily rusted metal slowly repaired under the Red Moon until it turned into pure silver.

A huge inverted cross appeared on the surface of the silver coffin, and rows of delicate engravings automatically added more external decorations to the coffin. Subsequently, the surface of the silver metal coffin indented, revealing nine slots for placing items.

Holding the fishing rod in his left hand and the Blood Brew made from a quarter of Joey Barton’s soul in his right, Shard no longer attempted to escape but moved forward.

Helen and Grace followed him unconsciously until the three of them reached the lakeside.

The pure silver coffin did not come ashore but stopped in the shallows. The crimson lake water suddenly surged, and layers of blood covered the surface of the pure silver coffin amid the increasingly loud sacred song.

The silver was tainted with blood red, and with the washing of the lake water, it fully turned into a blood-colored metal coffin.

Pulled by an invisible force, the coffin stood upright and slightly lifted off the ground in the blood-red divine light. The eight relics held by the impaled corpses on the stakes and the Blood Thorn Scepter from the depths of the dense forest simultaneously flew out and inlayed onto the surface of the coffin.

For a moment, Shard seemed to hear the sound of gears clicking into place. He didn’t know what this meant, but he knew, He was coming. Unknown clocks rang in the distance, and large groups of bats flew from the Blood Moon in the valleys to the woodland.

[It’s midnight.]

“She” softly sighed in Shard’s ear.

Over Midshire Fort City, the undead and Circle Sorcerers seemed unable to see the blood mist and light pillars at the foot of the mountains. Cracks appeared across the surface of the giant cocoon as the final black lightning struck it, causing it to shatter completely.

Revealed before the Circle Sorcerers was an indescribable undead behemoth with a terrifyingly giant head surrounded by countless bizarre limbs. The black giant’s hand, writhing disgusting tentacles, the gray-white skull of the Bone Dragon, and even the slender body of an underground worm—all stitched together, forming a monstrosity of all the powerful beings that had died in the Sicarl Mountain Region. With the roar from that giant skull, black ripples spread out, striking down all enemies around it.

The night fog over Midshire Fort grew thicker.

Meanwhile, on the shore of Bena Lake, above the Blood Lake, beneath the blood mist, under the Blood Moon—

Creaaak~

With a clear turning sound, the upright blood-red metal coffin cracked open.

Shard stretched an arm to shield the two girls behind him. Despite the lingering Divine Afterglow, the absence of full divinity still left him suffering from a splitting headache, nearly causing him to lose consciousness.

Amidst the illusion of the entire world being filled with red, the metal coffin slowly opened.

Inside, dressed in old-fashioned noble attire, lay Lester Bernhardt, Mr. Armand Bernhardt’s “nephew,” with his eyes closed, asleep in the coffin. The sacred song praising the blood and the moon reached its climax.

Above Midshire Fort City, the great battle erupted in infinite light, but at this moment, the Blood Moon above Bena Lake remained eerily serene. Though they existed in the same world, they were so distinctly different.

Waves of blood surged, and the sacred song rang loudly. The whispering prayers finally turned into deafening shouts at this moment. In the opened coffin, the boy’s eyelashes trembled, and he then opened his eyes.

Time stood still in that moment. Destiny and the flow of time froze. Shard couldn’t describe his feelings; even with bleeding eyes closed, he could still “see” the boy opening his eyes, as the blood coffin turned into a scarlet light, dressing Him in robes.

In that divine light, the boy walked through the void towards the shore, absorbing the nine relics into his body. With each step he took, he grew larger until—

When He finally stood on the surface of the Blood Lake, gazing at Shard from afar, that familiar figure, that sacred body, that majestic power, that indescribable form…

The Vampire God – Vampire Duke Lowell in his Saint Form, descended.