After the souls dissipated, the corpses below the ground stopped rioting. The priest, who had freed his hands, looked at Shade in surprise:
"I wanted to ask just now, what kind of magic is this? Although power does not distinguish between good and evil, this..."
"Priest, try to channel the soul again."
Xia De waved his hand and didn't want to say more. He pointed to the corpse on the ground:
"The body can be restored after destruction, and perhaps the soul can be restored as well. If successful, we will try to communicate again; if the soul is really completely destroyed by me, then this body can be safely sent to the church."
"no problem."
Then the corpse was slapped by the priest again, and the soul that appeared afterwards was in a normal state, and obviously remembered what had just happened.
As soon as it appeared, it wanted to move away quickly. But Shade, who had been prepared, used the chains to bind the soul tightly.
The tip of the slender chain, the rune chain symbolizing gluttony, pointed at the soul's head. The soul was a little crazy at this time. It was unknown whether it was the experience of the soul's twisting and collapse that made him crazy, or whether the influence of the chain of sin was not eliminated by the soul's rebirth.
"If you want to experience the feeling of being on the verge of losing control again, I can help you."
Shade said the threat was deterrent enough.
"No, no, I won't run away."
The soul shook its head hurriedly, its transparent head showing a confused expression, but its eyes were fixed on the black metal dagger on the ground.
Father Augustus asked:
"What are you doing? What is the purpose of this resurrection ritual? Or, why is there no whispering element on the dagger, but on your corpse instead?"
Soul did not want to answer this question, but Shad tightened the chains and he was forced to speak:
"It's nothing, actually. I'm using the resurrection ritual to grab the power of the relic during the nine resurrections... In other words, I'm merging myself with the relic. This is a poet-level relic, the Death Curse Dagger, which can enhance the abilities of the undead and control the undead through the dagger."
“Merge with the relics?”
Hearing "her" laughter, Shade frowned, and the priest's face turned red with anger:
"Why are there always crazy people like you? Even the church and the academy only dare to accept and use the relics to a limited extent. How dare you... What organization's ring wizard are you from?"
"Let me go, otherwise the organization will definitely retaliate against you... Oh."
The tip of the chain tapped his face a few times.
"I say, remove these damn chains. The Truth Society! I am a member of the Truth Society!"
He was probably really afraid of what was in front of him.
"The Truth Society?"
Shad had heard the name of the Truth Society once, when it was mentioned by Iluna. Like the one with silver eyes, the girl with long brown hair also had an irreconcilable hatred with the Truth Society.
"The Truth Society is an illegal ring sorcerer organization rooted in the primeval forest in the southern part of the Old World. It has its own secret castle deep in the forest. The Truth Society is said to have originated in the chaotic era of the Fourth Epoch. This group of people claims to be an academic organization that gathers together to pursue the truth, but their crazy actions always cause big trouble."
The priest explained this to Shade, knowing that Shade definitely didn't know this:
"Detective, kill him. Everyone in the Truth Society will die. There's no need to keep him here."
Shade nodded and raised the sword in his hand.
The soul immediately cried out:
"I've almost succeeded. Don't you want to see my research data? Under extreme circumstances, it is possible for people and relics to merge into one! This is especially possible with those weird and powerful relics!"
He looked at Shade and the priest in turn:
"You can too! You are all very promising ring sorcerers. You can definitely perform the ritual I am performing now! Become one with the relic. You can all do it!"
"Detective, don't listen to his nonsense. Kill him and I will report the matter to the church. All the research materials he left behind should be recovered and destroyed."
The sword in Shade's hand fell, and the soul screamed wildly. He seemed to want to fight with the two people with the words of sublimation, but the chains of sin had the effect of sealing the power of the ring warlock:
"Until I died, I never saw the real person who had merged with the relic!"
The soul was shattered by Shade for the second time and then dissipated into the air.
This time, Priest Augustus suddenly stretched out his hand and grabbed the air. Shade saw the illusory white feathers falling behind him again. The priest's hand grabbed some black marks. The old hand struck the air like plucking the strings of a guitar. A series of white runes appeared in the air and then disappeared.
Following the traces captured by the priest, the two dug out a purple-gold pendant in the mud in front of the coffin. The resurrection ritual requires real death, and in order to prevent the soul from actually leaving and causing the ritual to fail, the ring sorcerer who uses the ritual must prepare a container for the soul.
All this information was told to Shad by Priest Augustus, who knew a lot about this kind of ritual.
After sealing the locket and the dagger that could not sense the whispering element for the time being, the two of them took the coffin out of the grave to prevent there from being anything else nearby.
There was indeed something under the coffin, but it was the body of an ordinary person. I guess this was the real body of the peasant woman's husband.
After confirming that the second body was fine, Shad and Father Augustus reburied him. Shad even picked a bunch of wild flowers and placed them in front of the tombstone next to the fence where Mia had just stood, as an apology for digging up the grave tonight.
During this time, the light in the gravekeeper's hut remained dark. Shade was not sure whether the gravekeeper was really fast asleep or had woken up but didn't dare to make a sound.
"Priest, what shall we do with the body, soul, and dagger of this ring warlock? Do you need me to call a carriage?"
After making sure that all traces had been dealt with, Xia De asked.
"You can go back first, detective. You've worked hard tonight. I'll give you the weak angel potion next week."
The priest rolled down his sleeves that had been rolled up while digging and waved to Shade:
"I have done similar things many times. Next, I will find a way to notify the church and ask them to get the body back."
"Well, I'll take Mia away first. I feel like tonight's action didn't yield any results."
Shade yawned and said, while Father Augustus looked very happy:
"We successfully stopped a guy who would cause trouble in the Tobesk Parish, and also returned a corpse that was unfortunately implicated to its own coffin. Isn't this a reward?"
"It was indeed successful. Well, priest, I'll go back first. Oh, it's almost two o'clock, and there's a doctor's study meeting this afternoon."
Shade nodded, said goodbye to the priest, and walked briskly towards the exit of the cemetery with the cat.
Father Augustus kept smiling as he stood beside the body and in front of the grave, watching Shad's figure disappear on the path in front of the cemetery.
The smile on the old man's face disappeared. He returned the lantern to the gravekeeper's hut, then bent down to pick up two shovels and clamped them on the left side of his body. He put the box containing the dagger and the soul into a big bag and tied it around his waist. Finally, he lifted the corpse's hand with his right hand.
He looked around alertly, and after making sure that no one was around, he turned to face the moon, closed his eyes and frowned. After a long time, with the sound of birds flapping their wings, a pair of broken white feather wings with bones and flesh exposed appeared behind the priest.
The moonlight shone on the priest, and the light shone through the gaps between the charred feathers, causing strange shadows to appear on the ground. The feathers with faint light fell to the ground, but disappeared before touching the ground. The wings were translucent.
The priest flapped his wings twice and slowly rose into the air. Then, under the moonlight, holding the shovel and dragging the corpse, he flew towards the city.
"This is the weirdest scene of the night."
Silver mist suddenly appeared behind the gravekeeper's hut. Shad walked out of the silver mist carrying the cat on his back. Together with Mia, they looked up at Priest Augustus, who was left with only a small black dot in the moonlight.
He didn't mean to pry into other people's secrets, but he was curious about how the priest would get back when there was no carriage nearby.
"Vice-President Professor Sanchez said that thirty years ago, in the third year after Rat Augustus joined the Church of Dawn, he, as an ordinary person, was involved in a containment failure of a Level 0 relic. And Priest Augustus was one of the few survivors that year..."
Shade narrowed his eyes and looked at the priest who had disappeared into the deep night sky:
"What creature could that pair of strange wings belong to? Perfect, broken, holy, bloody... Interesting, everyone has their own secrets."
Thinking back to Professor Sanchez's evaluation of the five people in the group, perhaps the professor's conclusion that Xia De was the only normal person among them was really the right one.