Chapter 43#
Temple of the Burning Lamp 14#
How inseparable were the true Pope and his Knight Commander, really? Even the nuns of the temple were asking such a question.
Yet the moment those words left the nun’s mouth, Yu Feichen knew his earlier suspicion had been correct. The Holy Son and the Popedidknow each other. If not for this assumption, he would never have walked so directly to the Holy Son’s door.
By all logic, the Knight Commander should have been accompanying the Pope. In order to minimize the risk of violating any rules, Yu Feichen reached up and removed the thorn-rose bookmark pinned to his collar.
But then, he pinned it back in place and said, “The Pope has urgent matters to attend to and sent me ahead.”
At this, hope flared in the nun’s eyes, as though she were seeing a savior. “Sansa said she spotted traces of outsiders in the temple. I thought it must be you, here to help the Holy Son. His Highness once said that only Pope Ludwig and Knight Commander Yu Fei were his truest friends.”
Yu Feichen nodded. “Take me to see him.”
Although it was still daytime, the nun led the way holding a candle.
Passing through the arches, they entered the front hall. At its center stood four extremely tall candles arranged in a straight line, with a gap left in the middle. Each candle was as tall as a grown person, its wax pure white and its flame bright. The floor here was made of crystal, transparent, with an additional layer beneath it where brilliant candlelight burned. Combined with the many chandeliers along the walls and ceiling, it was enough to erase all shadows completely.
It seemed the temple had spared no effort to prevent the Holy Son from being harmed by evil spirits.
Beyond the church-like front hall lay the Holy Son’s bedchamber. In the center of the spacious room, radiant candlelight stretched inward from all sides, guarding a square crystal bed. Lying atop it was a figure in white robes, unmistakably the Holy Son. Yu Feichen stepped closer.
On the bed lay a boy of seventeen or eighteen, dressed in snow-white robes adorned with golden sun patterns. His deep red hair fell to his shoulders. He lay quietly on the gleaming crystal bed, eyes closed, as though merely asleep.
Yet a long black iron spike protruded diagonally from one side of his pale neck, tearing out the other side and leaving behind a horrifying bloody hole. The surrounding flesh was torn open, half-scabbed over. A nun dressed in white, with white hair, was carefully wiping the blood from the Holy Son’s lips and replacing the blood-soaked pad beneath him as she wept softly. She was the praying nun they had seen by the lake that day.
“Sansa, I’ve brought Knight Commander Yu Fei,” said the brown-haired nun who had led Yu Feichen here. “You’re always inside the sanctuary and never go out, so you’ve never met him.”
The white-haired nun Sansa glanced at Yu Feichen. Perhaps she recognized him as one of the two people from the lakeside. Her sorrowful eyes brimmed with tears.
Yu Feichen, meanwhile, stared at the black iron spike jutting from the Holy Son’s neck, frowning. At such an angle, it was almost unimaginable. It could only have happened if an extremely long black iron shaft had pierced in from the left side of the waist, passed through nearly every vital organ, narrowly missed the heart, continued upward through the throat, and finally burst out from the upper right side of the neck.
“Let me see his wound,” Yu Feichen said.
The white-haired nun lowered her head and lifted the coverlet from the Holy Son.
The injury was just as Yu Feichen had imagined. The object had indeed entered diagonally from the left waist. But what had caused the wound was completely beyond his expectations. It was not a black iron spike or shaft, but a candlestick.
The temple’s candlesticks were designed as a tray with a sharply pointed iron spike cast at its center. A candle could be fitted onto the spike and held firmly in place. And now, that very spike had impaled their Holy Son clean through.
The people of the temple probably did not dare remove it, so they had placed the Holy Son, along with the spike and tray, directly onto the bed. At this level of injury, pulling the spike out would almost certainly have caused massive internal bleeding and immediate death.
Yu Feichen was not someone who empathized easily with others, yet standing there now, facing such injuries, he felt a strange sympathetic pain, like seeing a toothpick jammed beneath a fingernail.
The white-haired nun wiped the blood from the Holy Son’s lips again. In the candlelight, his skin, drained of blood, looked almost translucent.
Yu Feichen lifted the upper part of the Holy Son’s robe. Seventeen or eighteen, still a child. His arms bore severe burns, and his thin chest was covered in dark purple and blue bruises, dotted with sharp, pointed marks. These were signs of internal bleeding that had congealed beneath the skin.
“How did this happen?” Yu Feichen asked.
“The dawn came very late that day,” the brown-haired nun said. “Before daybreak, we woke to find the Black Veil had risen much higher. Our hearts were heavy, so we went outside to pray to the sky. The Holy Son remained in the front hall, reciting prayers for Casablanca. When we left, the great candle at the center of the hall had only burned halfway. But Sansa was always worried about him. In the middle of our prayers, she looked back and saw that almost all the candles in the front hall had gone out.”
The white-haired nun Sansa continued, “I ran back immediately and saw a dark shadow rush out of the front hall and vanish among the trees outside. I recognized it as the evil spirit said to appear only in darkness. When I entered the front hall, nearly all the candles had burned down, and the Holy Son had already…”
Her voice caught. “He was already like this. The candlestick had been knocked over on the floor, there was blood everywhere, and the Holy Son was unconscious.”
As they spoke, Yu Feichen immediately recalled the human-height giant candles in the front hall. Such candles would naturally be mounted on massive candlesticks, and among the four candles, one space was empty. The missing candlestick must have been the one that impaled the Holy Son.
Based on their account, a scene almost fully formed in his mind.
A sanctuary always flooded with light, its candles inexplicably extinguished. An evil spirit moved within the shadows, its jet-black tentacles coiling around the Holy Son, cruelly lifting him high before slamming him down onto the candlestick.
But if the sanctuary had truly been brightly lit, no evil spirit should have been able to enter. So who had extinguished the candles in the first place?
Led by the brown-haired nun, Yu Feichen returned to the front hall.
The vast hall stood empty. The windows were tightly shut, with nowhere anyone could have hidden.
“Were all the candles blown out?” he asked.
“Some were blown out. Some burned down.”
“When you left, how far had the central candle burned?”
“About halfway, so we felt safe enough to leave.”
Yu Feichen surveyed the hall.
Gazing at the brilliant dome and the countless candles, he suddenly asked, “How do you light the candles?”
With so many candles, lighting them one by one and keeping them burning indefinitely would require immense labor.
The nun pointed to black iron climbing frames along the walls. “Long ago, the senior nuns would climb up and light them one by one.”
“Later, we discovered that flame lizards growing in the back mountain possess wondrous magic. Powder made from drying and grinding them can help ignite flames.”
As she spoke, the nun took out a small bottle, poured a handful of deep red powder into her palm, and scattered it against the wall. The powder spread like smoke, shrouding the entire wall. She then struck a match against the iron frame and extended it into the haze.
With a boom, meteor-like flames surged through the red mist. Under that blazing wave, all the candles caught fire. Moments later, the mist burned away, the flames vanished, and the candles remained lit.
“That’s how it works,” she said. “One use can light an entire wall.”
Yu Feichen looked at the bottle of powder, something stirring in his mind.
“What happens if you use too much?” he asked.
“Neveruse too much,” the nun replied sternly. “The candles will burn out very quickly.”
“May I borrow some of the powder and a few matches?”
“Of course.”
She handed them over.
After inspecting the front hall, they returned once more to the Holy Son’s bedside.
“Has he been unconscious the entire time?”
The nun explained that immediately after the injury, the Holy Son had not yet lost consciousness, but with his throat damaged, he could barely make any sound. He had asked her to ensure that Pope Ludwig was summoned here, and then he had fallen into a deep coma.
She went on, “Yesterday, the priests performed a grand ritual for the Holy Son. Although it was disrupted in the end, his condition still improved somewhat. He stopped bleeding so much. Sansa said his hand even moved a little yesterday and grasped hers.”
“And now?” Yu Feichen asked.
“Now he can’t. He has a fever. We tried calling out to him.”
Yu Feichen’s mind raced.
No usable traces remained in the hall. Everything relied on the nuns’ accounts. Though they clearly stood firmly on the Holy Son’s side, they could provide no precise clues, leaving him to probe continuously with questions.
The fastest way to solve the mystery of the Holy Son’s attempted murder would be to let the Holy Son speak for himself. And once he regained consciousness, the first thing he would do would be to name his attacker and call for help.
And the nuns had said that after yesterday’s ritual, the Holy Son’s hand had moved.
His hand.
At that moment, blood once again soaked the white cloth pad beneath the Holy Son’s wound. Sansa replaced it and placed the soiled cloth into a disposal box beside the bed.
A sudden thought struck Yu Feichen. He strode over to the box, overturned it, and spread out every discarded cloth, inspecting them one by one.
The nun exclaimed in surprise, “What are you doing?”
There was no time for lengthy explanations. Yu Feichen quickly flattened each cloth. The child’s wound had bled heavily; every piece was stained with large swaths of blood, dotted with scattered marks.
If the Holy Son had ever been conscious, there was only one way he could have left behind a message.
The next moment, beside one of the stains on a flattened cloth, crude blood-drawn strokes appeared.
They were characters from this world’s writing system. This one meant “I” or “Me.”
The nun still asked, “What are you looking for?”
Yu Feichen suddenly realized something and asked, “Can you read?”
The nun shook her head blankly.
His heart sank. Yu Feichen continued searching. Finally, just as they were about to run out of cloths, another blood-written symbol appeared.
This one meant “kill.”
Or rather, not just “kill.” The language here has tenses, and this character was in the past tense. It could be “killed,” “has killed,” “was killed.”
“Killed.” “Me.”
The subject was missing. Who had killed him?
Yu Feichen kept looking, but no third blood-marked symbol appeared on any of the remaining cloths.
His gaze turned cold. “Is this all of them?” he asked.
“These are today’s,” the nun replied.
“What about yesterday’s?”
She lowered her voice. “We… sent them to be washed. They’re hanging outside to dry.”
In the courtyard where items were laid out, the cloths had indeed been washed spotless, now pure white again. The most important piece of information the Holy Son had struggled to leave behind, the very first character, had been washed away the day before by illiterate nuns.
No.
Someone else had been investigating the attempt on the Holy Son’s life yesterday as well. The Empress and her people.
Yu Feichen asked, “Did any outsiders visit yesterday?”
The nun hesitated visibly.
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