Temple of Stasis.
It is still quiet and empty here. Old dust falls from the darkness above, spreading evenly in every corner, like a dead world.
Apart from the new Pope, no one else can be seen, but you can hear the subtle breathing and heartbeats in the silence, as if there are unknown lives in the invisible places.
Under the steel mask, his eyes were coldly staring at the words on the paper.
After so many days of collating information, reviewing past records, and torturing those who were involved... after countless violent means, the new Pope finally got these. Although it was not the whole picture of the whole matter, it was also a highly credible guess, and now he needed someone to confirm these guesses.
As he thought this, blazing flames rose from his hands, burning the paper ashes. The gray-black residue floated away randomly, but suddenly an inexplicable suction force pulled it, sucking it into an invisible vortex and falling into the huge hole in front of him.
Seni Lothar stared coldly at the thing in front of him. It was a pitch-black well, pure darkness. There seemed to be an endless abyss below, and even light shining in would be completely swallowed up.
The Well of Ascension.
When the alchemists were still alive, this was a kind of altar for performing rituals. In a way that the new Pope was not clear about, they extracted the mysterious secret blood from this well.
If the Temple of Stasis is the source of the demon hunters, then this is the source of the secret blood. Even though it has been abandoned for many years, standing on the edge of the Well of Sublimation, the new Pope can still smell the strong stench in the darkness, as if countless corpses are piled in the depths of the darkness.
"Remove impurities and make the substance purer. The good will rise upwards, while the dirty will fall downwards..."
The new Pope whispered that this was the explanation of "sublimation", the core of alchemy.
That is the miracle that all alchemists are pursuing. They believe that by constantly sublimating a substance, they can obtain the "soul" of that substance, and when a large number of "souls" gather together, they can crystallize into something called a "miracle."
"The philosopher's stone, the elixir of life..."
The new Pope recalled the names of those "miracles". These were the products of alchemical sublimation. But in fact, different things would be obtained through sublimation of different substances. For example, the miracle obtained through sublimation from demons was called the miracle of secret blood.
The Well of Sublimation is a place where large-scale alchemical sublimation is carried out. Good things gush out of it, and dirty things fall into the dark deep well. The Gospel Church has a history of refining secret blood for thousands of years, and countless dirty things have been removed from this Well of Sublimation. However, after so many years, they still cannot fill this deep well.
It seems like this is a bottomless pit. If you slip and fall into it, you will just starve to death in the process of falling and will never reach the bottom.
But this is only a legend. The new Pope knew very well what it looked like. So while he was waiting, the sound of machinery turning was heard. The old structure triggered dust to fly again. Amid the harsh friction sound, many step-like protrusions extended along the wall of the well. They spiraled downward and fell into the dark end, which was bottomless.