Just when Eryi thought the Magic Guild was unreliable, she received a letter from the Believers Guild.
—Can you give us some black stones?
The Believers' Guild does not have the strange habits of the magicians. The fact that they have such a request only means that the black stone should be a key prop.
Eryi divided the black stone into two parts and asked their respective postmen to take the things back.
Sunset City.
"Someone disappeared again, did you hear?"
"This time it's said it wasn't a child who disappeared, but an adult."
"It is said that the whole family disappeared."
"This is too scary..."
"This matter has been reported to the patrol team, and they are said to be in a state of panic now."
"It is said that various churches have begun to intervene and investigate this matter, but there has been no result."
That day, the people in Anze City did not wait for their magic buyers.
Early that morning, Jory arrived at the Healing Inn in his carriage, as usual. He preferred the breakfast prepared by Mrs. Eddy to the almost daily bread and milk in the castle.
The slightly dazzling morning sun made him squint his eyes. Halfway through stretching, he heard hysterical crying in his ears.
Jori looked in the direction of the screams and saw a middle-aged woman lying on the ground in the Adventurers' Guild, sobbing uncontrollably. She occasionally uttered curses.
Jori recognized her. This was Qili, a believer of Maria. She was a single mother who sent her daughter to the treatment center every morning.
"What's wrong, Qili?" Jory asked as he entered the Adventurer's Guild. As Maria's priest, he had an obligation to pay attention to the lives of his followers and do his best to keep them in good spirits.
"Good morning, Master Priest." A young Adventurer's Guild employee stood nearby, looking bewildered. "Her daughter is missing."
Qiao Li was unusually calm. He squatted down and tried to meet Qili's gaze. "Do you remember where she disappeared? Time and place are crucial."
"Home." Qili had obviously been in grief for too long. She couldn't stop sobbing and her speech was intermittent.
"They said she was home last night, but disappeared this morning." Seeing Qili's unclear speech, the young employee spoke for her, "We've reported it to the patrol, but..."
"They say that recently, no one who disappears like this can be found!" Qili's face was full of despair, and she tugged at Qiao Li's clothes: "My poor Winnie!"
Jory patted Qili's back comfortingly: "May Maria bless her."
Qili seemed to suddenly remember something. She prostrated herself at Qiao Li's feet and kissed his shoes. "Priest, could you please pray to Lady Maria for me? I just want to find my child. The gods are omnipotent and will surely know where my Winnie is."
"Don't be like this..." The young staff member looked at Jori awkwardly: "Other churches have not been able to find their believers. After all, the gods..." He stopped talking halfway, really not knowing how to continue.
"Take me to your house," Qiao Li said. He had heard from believers about the recent disappearances in Sunset City. Although he hadn't experienced similar incidents, they were recorded in the literature, and he had a guess.
"What's wrong?" Qili's voice was so loud that even Piccolo came downstairs to ask.
Jory briefly recounted what had happened.
Piccolo was quiet for a long moment, seemingly in thought, but it seemed no one could read his expression.
After about half a minute, Piccolo said to Qili seriously, "Take us to your house, and Piccolo will go too."
"Fluffy!" Piccolo called to the treatment station, "My beloved Wolf King, come here."
The increasingly agile demon wolf leaped and stopped beside Piccolo, rarely glancing at Qili.
"Picco needs you to be our guard. Only you can do this. You are the best." Piccolo scratched the furry chin a few times.
Fluffy raised its proud head and nodded slightly.
"Okay, we can go now." Piccolo said.
Winnie knew she was not at home, but she did not cry or make a fuss. She was used to her mother sending her to various places when she was at work.
She was now in a very open place. She couldn't see the sky or the windows, but it was unusually bright.
"This place is not as good as the healing station." She was a little disgusted, because there would be people telling her stories and playing with her there.
There were many children of her age around her, most of them just sitting there, not speaking, blinking, or moving.
A middle-aged man held a girl and tried to wake her up: "Daddy is here, wake up."
"Where is this?" she asked a young girl sitting next to her. The girl looked normal; she moved and blinked.
The girl glanced at Winnie and said, "I don't know."
"I want to go home," Winnie said, realizing that something was wrong.
The girl shook her head.
"Mom misses me. Winnie is leaving. Goodbye." Winnie waved and left with her short legs.
The girl watched Winnie's back and saw her walk to the only exit of this space and unable to take another step.
"We can't go back."
Walking into Qili's house, Qiao Li's expression was somewhat solemn, while Mao Rongrong looked a little irritated. You have to know that as a mutant wolf king, he always maintains his own demeanor and rarely behaves like this.
Before Qili even introduced him to Winnie, Piccolo had already found her room. "Did Winnie sleep here before she disappeared?"
"Yes." Seeing that there seemed to be hope, Qili finally cheered up: "Winnie usually used to sleep with me, but lately she has been saying that she wants to be independent, so I bought her a separate bed."
"I wait until she falls asleep before leaving every day. I'm sure she slept here last night."
Piccolo jumped onto Winnie's bed and tried to chant a spell, but halfway through, he remembered that his spell didn't work.
Piccolo noticed Jory standing inside the room, flipping through his notebook. He walked over to Jory and tugged at his priestly robes. "Piccolo, I heard you have a good affinity with the Holy Elements?"
"Where did you hear that? Stop chatting, I'm busy." Jory kept flipping through his notebook. He remembered that he had copied down spell templates related to the Abyss before, but he couldn't remember where they were.
Piccolo tugged at the corner of Jori's robe again: "Don't look at it, Piccolo will teach you."
"Read after me, it's a bit long."
Piccolo uttered a string of characters, the kind used to communicate between gods and priests. Just as he had thought, even if his spell was perfect, it wouldn't produce any effect.
(The prelude is a long hymn, praising all the gods with the four seasons of harvest and the changes of the sun and moon.) - Dark and filthy monsters of the abyss, all the gods are watching you, and you will have nowhere to hide.
For the priests, no matter how long the hymn was, it was no problem for them. After all, they recited it every day when they had nothing to do. Jory only had to learn the last sentence.
Unlike Piccolo, after Jory's spell ended, a faint light spread across Jenny's bed. In the center, there was a pure black hole. Fluffy tried to pull something out with his claws, but failed.
"Space magic, we can't find them through this." Piccolo bit his finger: "Things seem to be worse than Piccolo thought."
When Eryi woke up, she noticed that Piccolo and Jori were both gone, but she didn't care. Piccolo had occasionally gone out to play since arriving in this dimension. Jori was often late, so Eryi wouldn't be surprised if he didn't show up one day.
It wasn't until she was about to go out to the teleportation hall that she realized something was wrong when she found that even Fluffy was gone.
"I didn't see them when I came today." Judy's working hours were 9 o'clock, so she didn't see the scene in the early morning.
The patrol team walked into the treatment station, followed by people from the Believers' Union.
"Good morning." They greeted Eryi politely.
"So early today?" Eryi thought they were here to see Mrs. Eddie.
"Qili, an employee of the Adventurer's Guild, reported that her daughter disappeared between last night and this morning. We still have some matters to discuss with her. The Adventurer's Guild employee told us that she went home with Jori, Maria's priest. Have they not returned yet?"
Eryi was digesting the enormous amount of information contained in this sentence: "They haven't come back yet."
The patrolmen were a little tired. "Because you are priests serving the gods, we will need your assistance later. We are not afraid to tell you. Similar things have happened several times. As you can see, we have been up all night for several nights."
"Come in and sit down?" Eryi suggested, "You need to wait for them to come back, right?"
"Thank you for bothering me."
The members of the Faithful Union waited until the patrolmen entered the prayer room before pulling Eryi aside. They said in a serious tone, "Regarding this disappearance, which involves Maria's followers, you need to come with us. The various churches are preparing to hold a meeting."
Then he lowered his voice and said, "This matter seems to be related to the black stone you gave us before."
Winnie found herself unable to leave, so she returned to where she was.
"Hello, I'm back." She sat next to the girl.
The father holding his daughter and calling out to her gradually became sluggish, his eyes blank, and he mechanically patted his daughter's back.
"Aren't you afraid?" the girl asked.
"It's okay." Winnie picked up a stone at her feet and threw it towards the place where she couldn't get out. The stone rolled a few times and then left smoothly. "I've heard a lot of scary stories."
Because her mother worked in the Adventurers' Guild, Winnie would occasionally go there to play. Adventurers had been scaring her with all sorts of strange stories since she was little, and she was used to it.
"That's right, there's nothing to be afraid of. Look." The girl pointed at the father. "When you become desperate, you will become like that."
"If you get scared, it won't be long before you lose your senses."
"How do you know?" Winnie asked curiously.
The girl smiled and said, "Because I was the first one to come in."
"Don't worry, Maria will protect us." Winnie said, "Let me tell you the story of Maria."
Jori and his team returned to the healing inn, but they learned nothing except that the incident was related to the abyss.
Qili rummaged through her bag, pulled out a Marian scripture, and began to recite the prayers one by one, believing that this would help her find her daughter quickly.
Her faith at this time was more like a placebo.
Every priest in the Church of the God of Light was on edge, as this matter involved the abyss.
The Light God's priests, the main force in the previous attack on the Abyss, were relied upon again this time. They had already temporarily transferred a number of priests from other branches to Sunset City, but the problem was that they couldn't find their target, and they had no other options.
They knew everything from the beginning. The Abyss's admirers seemed to know that the gods were not to be trifled with. To avoid unnecessary trouble, almost everyone on the missing list was either a nonbeliever or a believer in less powerful gods.
"Has one of Mary's followers disappeared?" asked a high-ranking priest from the capital. On his first day in Sunset City, he discovered that the head priest had concealed some information, but he hadn't had time to investigate due to more pressing matters.
"Yes."
He muttered, "This isn't right."
"I want to go see her."
Eryi had no time to see anyone at this moment. He was leading a large number of high-level adventurers to a place outside Sunset City.
Her belief system has a prayer positioning function. As long as believers pray in their hearts and mention Mary's name, the system can find her location through the place where the power of faith is emitted.
Since Winnie disappeared, she has called out to Maria about once an hour, and each prayer lasts for more than ten minutes. Eryi is receiving her signals.
The magic carriage stopped beside a meadow ten miles outside Sunset City. There seemed to be nothing here.
"It should be a ruin." The trapper peeked out of the magic carriage to take a look. He took out his tools and began to measure. "I need the help of an assassin."
A slender young woman walked up to the trapper and slashed her dagger several times quickly at the places indicated by the trapper.
Not long after, a cave entrance appeared in front of everyone.
Eryi released the owl from her hand and said to it, "Send a message to your master who raised you and ask them to bring people here." This was the bird given to her by the Believers' Guild.
Each church received a notice from the Faithful Union, asking its combat priests to prepare.
"What are they doing?" The war priests were puzzled.
"It is said that they have found a place."
"You mean...the ones that are missing?"
"Oh, I don't want to fight alongside those idiots. It'll make it look like we're all just friends behind the scenes."
"Shut up."
Giles looked at Eryi's back and was unusually silent.
Someone went missing in Sunset City, which happened after he returned from his previous Warcraft subjugation mission.
Unfortunately, most of those missing are children without faith.
"Poor guy, it must be because he doesn't believe in any gods that he is targeted by bad luck." Such voices were everywhere in the city.
Giles always replied with a smile: "Really? If people with faith encounter such a thing, will their gods come to save them?" He didn't believe such nonsense.
Giles was able to become the youngest B-rank adventurer in Sunset City simply because he had to take on everything at such a young age.
"It's better to trust in gold coins," Giles always said.
His family owned a small ranch near a small town. A strange disease wiped out all the sheep. The infected sheep were unfit for human consumption, their fur rotting and unable to be sold. His parents nearly died from overwork trying to pay off their debts.
The priest of the god he believed in claimed that he was powerless to treat his parents' illness. After becoming an adventurer, he used the coins he earned to take his parents to Sunset City, where he found the priest of the Goddess of Life, who was the most skilled in healing. After paying a large sum of money, he successfully cured his parents.
Therefore, he absolutely did not believe that any god would be willing to unconditionally sacrifice anything for their believers. ——Until Eryi posted a large-scale B-rank quest in the Adventurer's Guild with no limit on the number of people who could accept it.
The minimum adventurer level required to accept the mission is C-level, and the reward is 1 gold coin per person. For a B-level mission, this reward is indeed a bit meager. Not to mention that the target of the mission is likely the culprit of the recent large-scale disappearances in Sunset City, making the mission quite difficult.
The number of people willing to take on the mission was much greater than Giles had imagined.
"Even if it's just for a day or two, we are honored to be the High Priest's subordinates," said the adventurers.
Indeed, the adventurers have witnessed how powerful the priest's healing power is.
The woman at the front of the procession wore a pure white priestly robe.
She was different from other priests. She was unwilling to be protected at the rear by the others, but always walked in the front, as if she was using her body to protect these adventurers who were used to risking their lives.
"Watch your side and step back," she said.
Strange mist-like creatures floated among the adventurers. A hooded adventurer took out a very short dry branch and released burning magic.
Rows of skeletons rose from the ground.
"Necromancer."
"Damn it."
"Oh my god, this is really weird."
A soft light fell upon the injured adventurer, lessening the pain and rapidly healing his wounds. Everyone felt at ease.
Several adventurers began to attack their own people.
"What's going on?"
"Look carefully!"
After a few spells, smoke began to rise from several adventurers, and with a snap, they returned to normal.
"Giles." Eryi called out.
"I am here."
"Here." Er Yi handed him a curse dispelling storage device: "You know how to use this, right?"
Giles held this familiar magic prop and said after a while: "Hmm."
This time he didn't pay the expensive deposit.
The necromancer kept using the magic circles he had drawn in advance to summon his skeletons. This group of adventurers was more difficult than he had imagined.
"Use the curse you are good at." The necromancer said to his temporary companion, the black mage.
"Why, are your skeletons useless?" the black wizard sarcastically asked. He dragged a long wooden stick across the ground, writing crooked words. With each line of text, the characters would gradually pull themselves out of the ground and turn into smoke and drift away.
"Didn't you say you couldn't find us using space magic?" The necromancer said impatiently, "What kind of rubbish magic item is that?"
"That's something from the abyss. What do you know? Do you still want your bone dragon?"
“…”
"Did they bring a priest with them?" The necromancer drew a circle in the air and shifted his perspective to one of his skeletons.
"Oh, just right." The black wizard said disdainfully. His curse had been tested by the dragon and could even penetrate dragon skin.
"What a bullshit, see for yourself."
“…”
"What do you mean!" The Necromancer threw the skull in his hand over the head of the Black Mage. He saw that the Black Mage looked like he was about to run away.
"I'm going to take a look at our offering."
"If necessary, perform the sacrificial summons now."
After the Black Mage excused himself and left, only the Necromancer was left struggling to hold on. The team of adventurers and priests soon arrived in front of him.
This priest must be a fool. The necromancer looked at the thin woman in the front, his mouth wide open, revealing his crooked teeth.
Not long after, a feeling of tiredness came from my head.
The Necromancer decided to use his ultimate move, summoning a Death Knight. After the summoning was successful, he staggered, a little puzzled. He'd summoned less than half of his limit today, so why was he so exhausted?
Then everything went dark.
The last words he heard before fainting came from the priestess: "Go this way."
How did she know where the offerings were placed?
Winnie was still telling a story to her new sister, and she was in the middle of it: "Maria killed the dragon and rescued the princess. Then they counted their treasure..."
This was a bunch of Dragon Quest that the adventurer had made up for her, and she had ensnared Maria in it herself.
"It's a bit noisy outside." The girl interrupted Winnie.
"I heard it too," Winnie pouted. "Now I'm starting to get scared."
A person covered in a black robe floated in from outside, and after confirming that the people inside were still there, he floated out again.
"What is that?" Winnie shuddered.
"The black wizard who brought us in," the girl said, "and there's also a necromancer."
"Is it the bad thing described in the story?"
The girl smiled silently: "Yes."
"Oh, may Mary bless you." Winnie began to stammer and recite her daily prayers. She firmly believed that Mary could drive away any bad things for her.
The noise outside gradually grew louder, and suddenly a huge explosion was heard.
There was dead silence.
A few minutes later, some footsteps were heard.
"Ah, these broken skeletons."
"How did the Necromancer get involved with the Black Mage? Aren't they sworn enemies?" As both are evil factions in fairy tales, they look down on each other.
A familiar white robe appeared in Winnie's sight, and she stood up happily: "Priest, Winnie is here!"
"Look," Winnie turned to the sister she had just met, "Maria will protect us."
The necromancer was tied up and held in the hands of the adventurers.
The black wizard had been hiding in the back, and when he saw a priest in the group, he felt something was wrong, so he abandoned the necromancer and ran away faster than a rabbit. As a result, he was caught by the army of various churches that followed behind, and the explosion was caused by them.
Eryi checked everyone's status and breathed a sigh of relief.
All the disappeared people are still alive, they are just in a negative state. After the magic circle here was blown up, they have gradually returned to normal.
The most problematic one was the girl who nodded as Winnie spoke. Eryi couldn't figure out the girl's condition.
[Abyss's Favor: Dark Element Affinity 100%]
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