Whispering Verse

After the servants finished serving the dishes, they left one after another, leaving only the middle-aged head maid and two older maids standing aside. Lecia signaled to Shade that it was safe to talk here, and the two of them talked about the morning's events while eating.

"It seems that the Scarlet Secret Cult has already penetrated into Coldwater Port, and even the establishment of the city is related to them. Those fish people and cultists have always existed in the shadow of Coldwater Port, but no one has discovered this. I think it was the first to appear Those mermaid statues are probably what they spread."

This is the conclusion that Shade deduced based on the clues he found in the morning.

"But what exactly do they want to do?"

Princess Lesia asked in confusion. She only took a small amount of food, probably because she was not used to eating too much at noon:

"The steps of the sea return ceremony have been basically confirmed. So what is the purpose of the ceremony itself? The last line of the nursery rhyme involves sacrifice, which is very disturbing."

She did not say the word "evil god" in front of the servants, but Shade understood what she meant and said while unskilledly manipulating the knife and fork:

"This time is different from the one in Tobesk. The church failed once in Tobesk half a month ago. There will be no accidents this time anyway. All we can do now is wait for news, and about you. The problem."

Shade said very cautiously:

"The captain who played cards with me said that as long as you are prevented from entering the red ocean when it appears, the curse will naturally disappear when the ceremony is over. That means that when the red ocean appears, you will most likely be mentally affected. Affected, unconsciously walking into the sea.”

The so-called "sacrifice" should not be about selecting individual individuals, but all those who are contaminated by the curse will eventually appear in the Red Sea, stagger on the beach, and then step into the ocean together. Thinking about this kind of scene makes people's scalp numb.

Leaving Cold Water Port was the first option that was eliminated. For this type of curse, once you leave the ritual location, the curse may break out immediately. As for the relics that suppress curses, Lesia already has sage-level ruby ​​earrings and the Saint Laurent ring purchased at the Coast Lighthouse.

After asking for help from Zarath Academy of Literature, the academy can also lend some relics against the curse. Shade believes that the safest plan is for him to stay by Lesia's side when the Red Sea appears.

Although he is just a second-level warlock who can't do anything, if the curse itself is really related to the power of God, then Shade's presence will make it easy to solve many things that ordinary people cannot do.

"So the difficulty we face now is that we don't know how the ceremony progressed after the pirate ship was driven away by you, and when the red ocean will appear again."

Lesia briefly concluded, while Shade frowned slightly:

"It will definitely be solved within a week. I have a very powerful fortune teller friend. She predicted that one of the male ring warlocks who encountered the pirates with us will set off for Tobesk in a week. At that time, the curse The problem must have been solved."

It had been raining all day in Coldwater Port. Because of what happened in the morning, Shade did not leave Sophia's mansion this afternoon in order to avoid the limelight. Instead, he waited here for news.

Shade's moonlight attracted the attention of the Church of Peace. Although the other party was called the "Peace" Church, its full name was actually the "Church of War and Peace". It was theoretically the most powerful of the five churches. The fishman stronghold on that ancient street may have become history.

Lecia entertained Shade well in the mansion, and after dinner, she took him to spend the afternoon in the study.

She has a lot of official documents to deal with. Most of the adult princesses and princes of the Cavendish family will be assigned some government work by the king. This is why the outside world generally believes that when the king gets old in a few decades, there will be big problems in the fight for the throne.

The study room in Sophia's mansion is about the same size as the study room of Larus III that Shade saw in Yodel Palace. The walls of the empty room are filled with bookshelves, and a desk is placed in the center of the room. There is a sofa set for guests at the door.

This is the preference of the current king, who likes empty rooms.

Lesia dealt with the matter at hand, while Shade was allowed to randomly select books on the bookshelf to read. Most of the dazzling array of books were related to political economy and history. Shade finally selected the semi-official publication "The Secret History of Cavendish".

This is a narrative literature describing the origin and history of the Cavendish family. Through this, we can effectively understand the development and prosperity of Delrayon.

Of course, Shade still had a lot of things left to do this week. He "wasted" this afternoon reading next to Lesia, mainly to find out the follow-up news related to the Scarlet Secret Cult.

Their actions this morning were not traced by the church, but the cultists who used the ancient streets in Nancheng District as their base were in bad luck. Among them, Mr. Jude, the ring warlock, was killed by Shade, and only one of the remaining four ring warlocks managed to escape.

Most of the humanoid fish-headed creatures that fled from the ancient streets were caught by the church. According to the information the princess received, there were at least 300 transformed targets on that street. And conceivably, there are more in Coldwater Harbor.

Some of these monsters, which are highly capable of self-healing in the water, can switch between human and fish-like forms, but most of the human forms are extremely ugly. After the morning operation, the Five Gods Church directly joined forces with the Coldwater Port officials to launch a large-scale search of the entire city.

But this is not Tobesk, which is controlled by a large number of troops and police. Searching in this free port is indeed useful, but it is hard to say how useful it will be.

The church related the fish-man monsters, the Scarlet Secret Cult, the Sea Return Ceremony, and the Mermaid Curse, and officially named this incident "The Shadow Over Cold Water Harbour in 1853". This represents the cult's infiltration into the city's shadows and has remained hidden from the port's earliest days.

After a shootout with the fishmen in the rain, the Peace Church successfully occupied Kesem Alley and Jude's mansion.

Through the captured prisoners and the documents left in Mr. Jude's safe, the church gained more information about the "Return by Sea" ceremony. With a strong intelligence network and strong information search capabilities, he gained a comprehensive understanding of what the cultists hiding in the city were trying to do.

Therefore, before dinner that evening, Shade and Lesia received a total of three important pieces of information through the intelligence sent by the "well-informed people" installed by the royal family in the church.

First of all, the specific number of Ring Warlocks who encountered the "Fishbone Pirate Ship" with them at sea on Monday night has been determined, a total of thirteen people. In addition to "John Watson" and "Miss Princes", two of the other eleven people have been found by the church. Through the descriptions of these rational people, the church learned more about what happened on the ship, and also learned about the clothes of the ring warlocks who participated in the auction that day.

But those two warlocks should not be the second chosen ones, because the church is still actively looking for the remaining unidentified people with unreasonable "enthusiasm" and actively investigating the foreigners who suddenly appeared in Coldwater Port starting from Monday Ring Warlocks, they do this because they want to exclude their competitors.

Secondly, the ancient text of the "Sea Return" ceremony was found from the Holy See Library that created the Church. This ceremony is not the god-summoning ceremony that Shade was worried about.

"I knew how it was possible that wherever I went, the evil god was being summoned."

This was Shade's opinion while sitting at the desk and listening to Lesia read the letter. With a relaxed smile on his face, Her Royal Highness the Princess glanced at him with her emerald green eyes, and her voice was decisive:

"Even if it is not the worst case scenario, if this ritual is successful, the consequences will be no less than the appearance of an evil god."

At the beginning of the Sixth Era, when Coldwater Port was not yet Coldwater Port, the influence of the Righteous God Church had not reached here. At that time, there were three different cult beliefs in the local area, namely, the "God of the Deep Sea Drowned" and "The Lord of the Scarlet Spiral". ] and [Furious Storm].

The three gods are all inextricably linked to the ocean. While the believers fight against each other, the common culture also penetrates into each other, allowing the cultists in Binhai to develop very similar customs and even very similar supernatural abilities. Strictly speaking, the "Sea Return Ritual" is a ritual that can be used by believers of the three evil gods, but the specific steps are slightly different.

The function of this ritual is to awaken the power left by the gods in the deep sea by sacrificing mortals contaminated with the power of the gods after the red ocean arrives, thus summoning tides to flood the city and turn the cold water port from a seaport into an underwater city.

The Scarlet Secret Cult was not a temporary initiative. They had been planning for this purpose for many years. The evidence lies in the fact that although the four main steps of the ceremony correspond to nursery rhymes, the ceremony also involves a lot of other detailed work and requires decades of preparation.

Hidden in the shadows of Coldwater Harbor, the murlocs have been making plans, but it just so happens that the final steps will be taken this summer.

This is a truly large-scale ceremony that is hard to see in the material world. The reason why the Scarlet Secret Cult wants to hold the ceremony is because they have transformed and developed too many fish-like humanoid creatures on land since the establishment of Cold Water Port.

They need a new habitat, but while gaining strength, the fish people are bound by the ancient contract signed by their ancestors and gods, and cannot leave the cold water port where their ancestors lived. Therefore, it was decided to call on the power left by the gods in the deep sea to let the sea submerge the city so that the terrifying fishmen could occupy and live here forever.

"The good news is that this incident is only related to the local ancient cult belief Scarlet Secret Cult and has nothing to do with the other two ancient beliefs. Therefore, the only ones the church has to deal with this time are those who have developed and hidden in Coldwater Port for nearly a thousand years. population of murlocs.”

Lecia said. Seeing that Shade was a little confused and wanted to ask questions, she explained to the outsider who only had a one-month career as a sorcerer:

“Only the secret sect of the guardian of the terrifying fishman species [Lord of the Scarlet Spiral] has the tradition of transforming the dependents through rituals and divine magic.

The believers of the evil god [God of the Drowned in the Deep Sea] are mostly human sorcerers who control the undead "floating corpses of the drowned". The followers of the evil god [Raging Storm] have nothing to do with marine life species. They control storms and thunder. Therefore, only the murlocs would want Coldwater Harbor to be flooded by the sea, and we don't have to worry about this time being related to other sects. "