The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 76

"You mean, with the awakening of the abominations, those fallen ancient gods... will also be brought back?" Perfit asked in a low voice.

Her heart was pounding heavily in her chest, and a very bad premonition was rapidly forming in her mind.

The old woman let out that short, dry laugh again, but this time there was no mockery or mystery in it.

There was only a kind of sorrow that bordered on pity.

"Come back? No. Dead gods don't rise again. The souls of the dead are dead, and souls tainted by sin don't even deserve to go to hell... But you're an alchemist—"

You know, if you stir up something dead, pound it, stuff it into a still-warm shell, it can stand up and bite. If humans can do that, then gods certainly can too.

As she spoke, she suddenly revealed a grin that revealed a few missing teeth, and pointed with her withered finger in the direction of the iron cage in the darkness behind Perfitt, as if she were stating a common sense fact that everyone should understand.

A chill ran down Perfit's spine.

She understood.

The corpses that rose from the morgue in the St. Petros underground morgue were living corpses infected with wilt disease, but the thing deep in the ruins of the Predelshinsk District Hospital was never human!

It is a remnant that broke free from the ancient seal after it was destroyed from the outside, a fragment that has separated from the original body but still possesses complete divine characteristics.

The Jade Record says that the "original body" of that thing has long since disappeared, and that before it was sealed in the deep well, it was a being imprisoned by the old gods—it was never a living person who died and became; it was a remnant of divinity from the very beginning, a manifestation of the sins of the gods.

If a human corpse becomes infected with wilt disease, then what will happen to the remains of a god after they are "infected" by sin?

The answer was the thing she sealed away herself.

The Jade Record states that divine sins are called divine sins precisely because they are the manifestation of the sins of the ancient gods.

Those beings they killed, imprisoned, betrayed, or forgot became resentment after the gods died.

Those remnants were sealed beneath ancient seals throughout the world, untouched for countless eras.

The outermost seal has now been broken, and the dregs at the bottom are rising along the cracks. Each piece of dregs contains the despair and hatred of a fallen god before his death.

The first few fragments that escaped—if they were found by later generations and still retained even the slightest trace of divinity—could be stuffed into a still-warm shell, stitched together with sin, and forged with blood and fire, and then stood up again.

That is not resurrection.

Perfit is an alchemist, and she understands the difference between resurrection and blasphemy better than anyone else.

Pulling a corpse off the mortuary and stuffing it with a soul that doesn't belong to it—this is exactly the same as the forbidden experiments written by alchemists in forbidden books, except this time the subject of the experiment is not a human, but a god.

She had witnessed firsthand what the trick would do to humans, and she had just been reminded that it could work on the remains of gods as well.

"A madman. A clever madman. Someone is doing this. He thinks he's opening the eyes of a dead god again. He's just dressing up a corpse." The old woman's voice suddenly turned low, as if she were grieving for someone who had done this or was about to do it.

It's not hatred, just sorrow.

Perfit quickly gathered his thoughts.

Inquiring about the other person's origins and identity was no longer important—the old woman in front of him clearly knew some information that should have been forgotten. Although her mental state was chaotic and disordered, her seemingly fragmented words were not entirely nonsense.

At least the divine abominations, seals, and sins she mentioned all corresponded perfectly with the information that Perfit had already gathered.

"The person you're talking about—the one who tried to make God stand up again—where in the Old World could he be?" Perfitt tried to pry open a more specific coordinate from this answer.

The old woman shook her head, the movement as light as a withered leaf falling from a branch.

"You want a direction? I don't know either. He's been searching in the north and the south, and they found things they shouldn't have found in a desert temple. Someone told him that a name was buried under the sand—buried for a very, very long time, and the person who buried it didn't want anyone to dig it up again."

But he dug anyway. If he could find that name and stuff it into the shell—a new god would crawl out from the corpse of the old, uttering in a broken voice the spell no one remembers anymore. And then—you'd all be finished.

Perfit wanted to ask more questions, but the old woman suddenly took a step back.

This step abruptly disrupted the atmosphere of their conversation—not a wary retreat, not fear of Belfast's blade, but more like a dying person who had finished explaining what needed to be explained and felt there was no need to continue.

"Don't bother looking. You won't find it. What's meant to come will come—soon. Sooner than you think." She pulled something from the inside pocket of her cloak and tossed it to Perfit.

The object traced a golden arc in the moonlight, and Perfit caught it.

It is a gold coin.

But it wasn't Victoria's gold pound, nor Romulus's eagle-patterned gold coin, nor Ross's double-headed eagle gold ruble.

Its surface is engraved with letters identical to the ancient script on those stone pillars, and the edge is engraved with an extremely fine serrated pattern, which gleams with a dim and warm golden luster under the moonlight.

She flipped the coin over, and the design on the other side made her involuntarily hold her breath.

It is a tree, not some exquisite relief, but the outline of a strangely shaped tree, like a symbol carved on a metal surface with minimalist lines.

It's abstract, but Perfit had seen the symbol—almost identical—in the dusty corner of the old town's watchtower floor and next to the broken seal stone slab in the underground hospital morgue.

Perfit looked up, wanting to ask more, but the old woman had already retreated into the shadow of the stone pillar.

Belfast took a few steps forward, her arm blade already extended more than halfway, but after a brief calculation, her differential engine found that it could not lock onto the energy outline—the old woman's figure shifted erratically between moonlight and shadow, disappearing into the rubble of the ruins as if evaporated within a few breaths.

A moment later, Belfast emerged from the shadows, stood back beside Perfit, and shook her head slightly at her.

Perfit stood there, clutching the gold coin in his hand.

You can feel the indented outlines of the ancient characters on the surface of the gold coin with your fingertips, which gleam with a dark and warm golden luster under the moonlight.

She turned the gold coins over and over, examining them carefully several times.

She finally realized that her relationship with the world might be far deeper than she had thought.

Before the underground seal in the Pledelshchensk district, she thought she had chosen to intervene in the disaster; on the spire of Wild Boar Ridge, she thought she had chosen to stay.

But now, standing before this ancient altar of the gods, whose name no one even remembers, clutching a gold coin that shouldn't exist in this era, she felt for the first time clearly that her intervention might never have been her own choice.