Chapter 43: Your Majesty, Aren’t You Afraid of Picking the Wrong Fight?
The Empress of Eternal Night’s magnificent golden-red robe was torn, her hairstyle disheveled, and several leaves were stuck to her head.
However, Roger had no intention of laughing, nor did he dare to take the opportunity to pry at her dazzlingly fair skin… On the contrary, the Empress was still holding a severed leg upside down in her small hand.
When a young girl with battle-damaged, ripped clothing isn’t acting frail, but instead looks fierce like Lu Zhishen uprooting a willow tree, even a pervert wouldn’t dare to entertain any improper thoughts, right?
Moreover, this wasn’t an ordinary human leg, but a wooden one. Its broken end was filled with torn wooden fibers, surging with the aura of divine power, making the splintered wood show signs of reanimation. If one looked closely, they would find that the divine power on the severed leg originated from the same source as the explosive residue at the scene…
[Combined with her calling the believers “master” just now, did Your Majesty ambush the God of Nature and rip off a leg?]
Roger was utterly shocked.
Even though the Empress of Eternal Night was on the verge of a rampage, her tightly strung young face couldn’t help but curve into a slight smile of pride upon hearing Roger’s shocked thoughts. This scoundrel had many bad habits, but he always had a good eye and recognized quality. At least he could understand her heroic deed without needing an explanation.
“Were you scared? Cheer for me quickly? Those who offend my Azurevine Empire shall be punished, no matter how far away!” Her Majesty wanted to give herself a big thumbs-up for her decisiveness!
But just as she was feeling proud, the Empress heard Roger’s next thought:
[But the divine power left at the scene is from the God of Nature, yet this style of acting doesn’t seem like the God of Nature at all. There might be a catch. Is Blood-Mom so reckless that she’s not afraid of picking the wrong fight…?]
The Empress of Eternal Night almost fell from the sky.
*You’re* reckless, *you’re* the most reckless, your whole family is reckless! Shouldn’t your focus be on my advancement in power, and whether I can defeat the gods now? Although it was only an Incarnation, and an Incarnation caught completely off guard, ambushed by me. But in the past, I couldn’t even scratch its defenses. It was the breakthrough before the Great Library, which allowed me to glimpse the God’s domain, that led to today’s victory. You even deserve 1% credit from this achievement!
Wait, completely off guard? The Empress of Eternal Night suddenly realized the problem. If the explosion in the City of Mysteries was an Arrangement by the God of Nature, how could he be completely unprepared for the Empress of Eternal Night’s retaliation?
Suddenly, the Empress of Eternal Night felt truly guilty. It seemed she had really acted out of impulse and attacked the wrong target… But she pretended not to hear anything and ordered her reinforcements: “The Gods are all in cahoots. From gods to believers, all deserve to die! Immediately search the entire city for members of the Seven Gods’ church. If there is any resistance, you may execute them on the spot!”
We’ve already fought, so what if we picked the wrong fight? Anyway, the Azurevine Empire refused to proselytize, and had already offended all of the Seven Gods. Fighting them one by one or all at once didn’t make much difference… right?
“Yes, Your Majesty!”
The military and the City of Mysteries’ defense force immediately took action, launching a city-wide dragnet. With such an incident, everyone was filled with anger, wishing they could skin the believers of the Seven Gods’ church alive. It was foreseeable that today would be a sleepless night.
As more and more news reached Roger, he learned that it wasn’t just the northern camp of the city that was attacked by self-detonating believers in the City of Mysteries. The Supreme Mystery Auction House and the Natural Selection Arena were also targeted. Hundreds of nobles died, over a hundred thousand commoners perished, and more than three hundred thousand were injured. Countless buildings were affected.
Besides the direct destructive force of the explosion, the God of Nature’s divine power also had the characteristics of devouring living magic power and life force, and summoning treants. These treants caused secondary and tertiary damage, requiring considerable effort from the city’s defense force.
The original targets of the church’s attack also included the Imperial Magic School. However, a pair of illicit lovers in a small grove, caught in the act of “night battle,” stumbled upon the believers’ hiding place and sounded the alarm early, successfully thwarting the believers’ plot against the Imperial Magic Academy.
But such sudden, simultaneous attacks were the most severe attack incidents to occur in the City of Mysteries since the founding of the Empire. The Empire was shocked and angered. Commoners trembled with fear and insecurity, while nobles lived in constant apprehension, fearing that more believers were lurking nearby, ready to self-detonate. After all, divine power, unless actively used, renders believers indistinguishable from ordinary people from outward appearances, making them extremely difficult to detect.
The believers in this World don’t constantly chant “Amitabha” or wear their true faith on their sleeves. Just like it was difficult to capture all the pastors who had infiltrated the crowds in the former territories of the seventeen nations, the City of Mysteries also had a large and mixed population. In such a vast city, with its chaotic common districts and slums, it was difficult to find believers who were determined to hide.
The good news was that the Imperial Capital had enough mages, and with the help of certain spells, they could still distinguish true believers from false ones.
From different directions, injured individuals corrupted by the God of Nature’s divine power were continuously sent to the northern camp. This was because, within the entire Empire, only the Empress of Eternal Night could expel the God of Nature’s divine power from survivors. If they did not receive timely treatment, these injured would be drained of their life force by the God of Nature’s divine power, and treants or similar creatures might emerge from their corpses.
Therefore, even though the Empress of Eternal Night looked disheveled and was slightly injured, she persisted without returning to the imperial palace, instead dedicating herself to rescuing the survivors. Given her proud nature, Roger was genuinely impressed that she could achieve this. He had thought Her Majesty would at least change into clean clothes to avoid losing her dignity in front of her subordinates and subjects.
In reality, the Empress of Eternal Night had fought her way out of the military ranks, and didn’t have so many scruples. The sooner she started, the more people she could save. She naturally knew how to choose. As for looking disheveled? By displaying her side as a ruler who loved her people as her children, the Empress of Eternal Night earned even more admiration from the people of the Empire.
What Her Majesty was doing at this moment was by no means for show. If she wanted to increase her deterrence, she only needed to publicize her defeat of the God of Nature’s Incarnation in tomorrow’s “Long Live the Empress Gazette,” and the reverence of the Empire’s people towards her would undoubtedly soar. But she didn’t choose that easy path. Instead, she raced against time, treating both military officers and ordinary commoners.
Because the number of injured sent was so large, even though the Empress could heal hundreds at a time, queues had formed. Roger silently observed and summarized, arriving at a simple standard for diagnosis and classification. He could infer the degree of corruption by the God of Nature’s divine power based on the injured’s condition and vital signs. Based on different degrees of corruption, he could estimate how much time the injured had left and arrange them into batches for treatment based on urgency. This was to optimize the utilization of medical resources and minimize the chance of critically injured patients dying while waiting.
The Empress of Eternal Night was both surprised and delighted by Roger’s rare proactive display. His method was simple yet effective, and none of his subordinates had thought of it. When magic and divine arts treated diseases, they didn’t look at the type or cause of the illness, only the severity. If that didn’t work, they’d blindly use prayer. This stifled the normal development of medicine significantly. For commoners, if they couldn’t afford a mage, a priest, or an alchemist, they were left to die. Therefore, basic medical knowledge like diagnostic differentiation was practically non-existent in this world.
This wasn’t to say the people from another world were foolish, but rather that their knowledge and thinking habits dictated it. Modern education, instilled from childhood with materialism and dialectical thinking, was considered heresy in this era. Roger taught the soldiers the essentials of diagnostic differentiation, and they transported the injured to different areas for classification, awaiting successive treatments by the Empress of Eternal Night.
After finishing this task, Roger went to help count the losses at the northern camp. The Empress of Eternal Night happened to emerge from a temporary tent and saw the usually idle youth busy like a small worker ant. She paused, then let out a soft sigh. The Empress understood that at this moment, Roger couldn’t stop, and didn’t dare to stop. If his mind were to go blank for even an instant, he might recall the hellish scenes under divine power. She had experienced such things. Therefore, she didn’t want the younger generation of the Empire to be further poisoned.
“It seems I’m still not strong enough,” the Empress thought to herself. Only by destroying all enemies could her Empire be truly safe.
