In the vicinity of a completely destroyed temple, there was a huge hole that didn’t fit well with the surrounding terrain. This was the hole that had been made by Eugene a few days ago.

A tall woman stood at the entrance of the hole. She tilted her head to the side while looking down into the hole, which was too deep to see the end of. Although a half-moon was shining faintly in the night sky, a wave of darkness began to spread from the woman’s back.

The darkness created by the woman enveloped her surroundings like a fog and began to sink deep into the hole. After the darkness spread completely, the woman walked down into the hole, her feet utterly bare of any protection.

Just a few steps into the hole and she had already found corpses. It looked like they had desperately tried to climb out of the hole. While this was perhaps due to the difficulty of climbing out of a hole this deep with their broken bodies, most of the collapsed corpses also had what looked like wounds from a snake’s fangs.

Most of these corpses had their fingertips crusted with blood and dirt and looked like they had been crushed. In the days since their deaths, their bodies had already stiffened in rigor mortis, but the looks on their faces, contorted in pain and horror, remained. The woman examined each of these faces one by one as she headed deeper and deeper into the hole.

The thin cotton veil covering her lips twitched. With each step she took downwards, an unpleasant stench weighed ever more heavily in the space around her.

It was the smell of blood and spilled intestines. The smells of the rot that started days after the death of a body. A stench of death had concentrated in this hole from countless corpses. The woman felt slightly aroused by the smell. In this peaceful era that hadn’t seen any wars break out, it was hard to find a place like this where so many corpses were buried in one location.

Especially corpses like these. These weren’t the worthless corpses of a person with little to no status. The woman scanned the uniforms worn by the corpses. The red cross on their chests was the sigil of the Knights of the Blood Cross, and that red cloak was the symbol of the Inquisition's Maleficarum.

There were well over a hundred corpses. Though not all of them had died instantly. Quite a few of them looked like they could have survived, but they hadn’t been able to escape this pit due to their severe injuries and exhaustion.

However, as human lives were very tenacious, a...