Chapter 137
Shaqar, with the letter still clutched in his wrinkled hand, with his voice slowly returning to normal after reaching its peak, looked at each person in the room one by one and realized that there was nothing left for them to do except accept the reality that their enemy, the Accursed One, was carrying out the most insane experiment ever conceived.
An experiment upon himself to become more than he once was, to transcend the limits that had restrained even a creator, to reach a level of divinity never before recorded in the history of creation.
Fhooooh!!
The silence that followed was not an ordinary silence, not merely a pause between conversations or an empty space waiting to be filled by the next voice.
This silence came like a living being that crept through the cracks of the walls, slipped into the lungs of everyone present, and sat cross-legged upon their chests with unbearable weight.
It spread across the dusty floor, climbed unseen yet palpable walls, seeped into every corner of the room where this sudden meeting was held, turning the once merely stuffy air into something dense and sticky like living mud.
For the first few seconds, not a single one of them could move, not one could look away from Shaqar even though the old man now only sat in silence with the letter still in his wrinkled grasp, not one could breathe normally because every inhale felt like swallowing shards of sharp glass.
"Allow me to speak."
Huuuuh!
"First of all, Shaqar—what I am about to say is not an attack on you. You are merely delivering a report. That, I understand. But precisely because of that, I feel the need to raise this irregularity."
Sssssh!
"We have just heard that the ritual does not merely resurrect a being, but elevates it beyond its original nature. Beyond the Angels. Beyond the Holy Beings. Even—if taken further—an experiment of the Accursed One upon himself. Does no one find this… too strange?"
Hhhh!
"If the Accursed One truly intends to 'experiment' upon himself, why do so through a ritual structure that can be observed? Why involve an open formation whose pattern can even be read by us? An entity of that magnitude does not require a stage. And if this is indeed meant to surpass the Angels, then would not the Angels themselves become a threat to that very process?"
Six minutes.
Time that felt like six hours—or even six days—for those still trapped in the paralysis that followed Shaqar's reading of the letter.
Six minutes in which no one moved, no one spoke, no one dared to alter anything about their position.
Six minutes in which the silence thickened, grew heavier, felt increasingly like it was testing the limits of everyone's patience in that room.
And when those six minutes finally passed, when the unseen yet palpable hand of time reached the point where silence could no longer be tolerated, a hand rose from one side of the circle.
The hand belonged to Hopsly, one of the Satanist Elites under the Banner of Zhulumat, a man whose age could not be precisely guessed, yet whose face bore the traces of thousands of battles he had endured.
His hand rose without haste, yet without hesitation, with a calmness that showed he had carefully weighed every word he was about to speak before deciding to break the stillness.
All eyes in the room, once empty and unfocused, slowly turned toward him—toward his raised hand, toward his face preparing to release a voice.
The captains of Team Xirkushkartum straightened their backs one by one, the other Satanist Elites shifted their gazes from the void toward Hopsly, and even Shaqar, who had barely moved since finishing the letter, now lifted his face and looked at Hopsly with eyes that began to show a faint glimmer amid fading resignation.
When the hand slowly lowered, when the signal of his intent to speak had been acknowledged by all—including Zhulumat, who merely nodded once with a nearly imperceptible motion—Hopsly began to voice what had settled within his chest for those six long minutes.
His voice was neither loud nor soft, but carried at just the right frequency to be heard by everyone without shouting, without forcing, without disturbing the fragile balance of the room that had only just begun to recover from suffocating silence.
He spoke carefully, with deliberately softened words, with a tone that tried as much as possible not to offend anyone—especially Shaqar, who had merely fulfilled his role as the bearer of information.
Hopsly was an elite long accustomed to heated discussions, well aware that in a situation like this, cornering the messenger was the most foolish action one could take.
Thus, through every word he chose, every pause he created, every modulation of voice he controlled, he ensured that his skepticism would never be interpreted as a personal attack against Shaqar or the members of Team Xirkushkartum who had conducted the observations and written the letter.
Yet despite the careful wrapping of his words, despite the neutrality of his tone, the essence of what he conveyed remained clear, sharp, piercing straight into the heart of the issue that had troubled his thoughts for six minutes.
Hopsly questioned—with all the humility he could present—the disorderly illogic of the information they had just received.
He did not outright declare the information false, nor openly doubt the competence of the observing members of Team Xirkushkartum; instead, he invited everyone in the room to reflect together, to think together, to search together whether none among them felt something strange about what they had just heard.
'Hopsly is not entirely wrong. Even I find it strange.'
Fhaaaah!
'I am the one who read it. I am the one who spoke each word as if it were absolute truth. Yet in my mind, it all sounds like an echo that may not even be real.'
Hooooh!
'Angels and Holy Beings seeking to awaken something more almighty than themselves? That sounds like the kind of tale prophets tell to shake the faith of a civilization. About a creator surpassing creation. About an entity ascending beyond the ladder of the heavens. A grand fable wrapped in symbols.'
Hiiiih!
'And Onigakure's claim about the ritual of resurrection—the Twelve Prohibitions, the Ten Obligations. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like a chapter from an ancient scripture. Are we facing a real threat, or merely the shadow of stories told too many times?'
In the deepest chamber of his heart, in a secret space he had never revealed to anyone, Shaqar admitted something that would shock everyone in the room if they could hear it.
He agreed with Hopsly.
Not partially, not merely going along, but with all the courage that remained within his weary chest.
And ironically, he was the very one who minutes ago had read that letter with a thunderous voice like a general commanding his troops forward, the one who had given life to words now being questioned by Hopsly and beginning to be doubted by the other elites as well.
Yet here he was now, within the silence of his own thoughts, acknowledging that Hopsly's skepticism held reason, held a foundation he could not refute, held a logic that for six minutes had also disturbed his mind—even though he himself had been the bearer of that very message.
To be continued…