The Shadows of the King City and the Cult of the Evil God

Radiant King City.

Rosen silently returned from the middle layers of Storm Canyon via data transmission.

The Sea God's resurrection was still a matter of thousands of years away.

It wasn't something he needed to worry about for now.

If the sky collapsed, the true gods of various races would be the ones holding it up.

Only when they couldn't hold it anymore would it become his concern.

Besides, the Sea God was just one Great True God.

There had been many Great True Gods throughout history, and all races were still living just fine today.

Unless an Ancient God awakened, nothing else was truly catastrophic.

In the Radiant Royal Palace, Rosen lounged in the open-air hot spring on the top floor, soaking in the warm waters as he leaned on the pool's edge, gazing down at the city below.

Since his return, his Seventh Sense had been nagging at him, signaling that something was off.

The Radiant Kingdom had developed well over the years, with new towns steadily established.

The total population of Radiant Continent had already surpassed ten billion, and it was projected to double every twenty years at a minimum.

On the surface, everything seemed normal, with the kingdom flourishing.

But since his Seventh Sense was telling him something was wrong, it meant there definitely was a problem.

Rosen casually flipped open his Void Sketchbook and quickly completed a prophetic painting.

Staring at the content of the painting, he lifted his head and looked up at the sky.

Unlike regions shrouded by the Ashen Veil, Radiant Continent still had blue skies, white clouds, and a brilliant sun.

The Hunter's God-Eye ignored the sunlight's obstruction, piercing through endless voids toward the star realm.

Soon, he locked onto a meteor.

But in the next instant, the Hunter's God-Eye self-destructed.

It destroyed itself to avoid mutation—any further observation would have corrupted it.

The meteor, several hundred meters in diameter, was determined through prophecy and observation to be on a trajectory toward Radiant Continent, set to impact in ten years.

Hidden within the meteor was a slumbering Mother of Flesh and Blood.

It was clear that the Cult of the Mother of Flesh and Blood had already infiltrated the kingdom.

It would have been one thing if they had simply lurked in the shadows, but they had managed to muster enough resources to guide the descent of the Mother of Flesh and Blood herself?

This could only mean one thing—the World Government's Intelligence Bureau, dispatched to the kingdom, had already turned against him.

Otherwise, the cult wouldn't have been able to operate on such a large scale without the bureau knowing.

The Intelligence Bureau's primary responsibility was to gather information, with its foremost duty being vigilance against evil god cults.

Now, with the cult orchestrating such a grand scheme, the bureau was acting like blind and deaf fools.

The cause was obvious—there was internal corruption.

Rosen released a regenerated Hunter's God-Eye to monitor the bureau members, while intelligent Magic Eye lifeforms scoured the Spirit World Deep Web for suspicious information.

Soon, there were results.

The bureau director assigned to the Radiant Kingdom had close ties with Qinon Touré.

After the incident in Shentu City, Qinon had been punished and sent to the frontlines for duty.

For years, he had kept a low profile.

But approximately ten years ago, Qinon successfully completed his mission at the frontlines.

That was likely when he started plotting his revenge.

However, the establishment of the Radiant Kingdom had the strong backing of the Star Coin True God.

Qinon didn't dare openly make a move.

Instead, he planned to leverage the Cult of the Mother of Flesh and Blood to summon the Mother of Flesh and Blood to Radiant Continent.

He would then pin the blame entirely on the cult, keeping himself out of the fray while using their knife to eliminate Rosen.

It seemed that after suffering a setback in Shentu City, Qinon had grown smarter and resorted to playing dirty.

Since Qinon had come knocking, Rosen had no intention of backing down this time.

In the past, he couldn't afford to provoke a Sequence 0 opponent and had to hide rather than confront him directly.

But now things were different—he was confident he could deal with a Sequence 0.

Using the Painting Law, combined with Time Authority and Fate Authority, Rosen created prophetic paintings that easily pinpointed the exact locations of the cults.

There weren't just one but six evil god cults hiding within the Radiant Kingdom.

No one knew evil god cults better than other cults.

The abnormal activities of the Mother of Flesh and Blood cult had immediately drawn the attention of five other cults.

These cults sought to use the Mother of Flesh and Blood cult as the vanguard while seizing the opportunity to sow chaos in the kingdom.

They had to act before the Ashen Veil enveloped the Radiant Kingdom, as that would make it much harder for their gods to descend.

Rosen didn't plan to deal with all six cults personally.

He only had two avatars—it wasn't as if he could split his true body in half as well.

Although Little Dragon Girl and the others shared his powers and could handle Sequence 2 enemies without difficulty, Rosen was reluctant to send his precious subordinates against cults of evil gods.

What if they accidentally grew eight eyes or three legs after the encounter?

After weighing his options, Rosen decided to let the Holy Grail Knights handle all cult members below Sequence 2.

Over the years, he hadn't stopped appointing Holy Grail Knights.

Aside from reserving a few positions for potential top talents, he had appointed a total of eighty knights.

In just over two decades, most of them had already advanced to Sequence 4.

Such terrifying cultivation speed was made possible by accelerated time and an extravagant investment in resources.

Additionally, Rosen had replaced all their bodies.

While their souls and divine essence remained their own, their physical forms had been transformed into Flesh Clones, similar to the dragon race.

Even a weakened Ancient God Physique limited their growth to Sequence 4 deliberately.

Of course, not all of them had been artificially boosted—those who were forcefully advanced typically lacked top-tier talent.

At best, they could reach Sequence 1 with extensive cultivation.

The handful of knights with the potential to become gods were naturally talented and were currently only at Sequence 5.

Despite their strongest being only Sequence 4, the combined combat power of eighty Holy Grail Knights exceeded that of over a thousand Sequence 3 Dragonblood Naga.

This was because all Holy Grail Knights could share Rosen's painter sequence skills.

If the potential of the knights appointed by a king wasn't remarkable, the Star Coin King wouldn't have invested so heavily in them.

Still, Rosen prepared for unforeseen circumstances by ensuring that his two avatars would always be ready to assist the knights.

That left only the Mother of Flesh and Blood cult for Rosen to deal with personally.

As night fell, the Holy Grail Knights collectively activated their Holy Light Invisibility.

Each knight rode a Sequence 3 Holy Unicorn bought at great cost from the angel race.

Despite radiating brilliant Holy Light like miniature suns, they bent and constrained the light, making them ghost-like and invisible in the dark.

In the depths of the sewers at the edge of Radiant King City, fifteen Holy Grail Knights passed through the surface by elementalizing into light.

Ahead was the hiding place of the Cult of Pain.

In unison, the knights summoned their Void Sketchbooks.

These sketchbooks were all projections of Rosen's own Void Sketchbook.

Years ago, to allow the knights to share this resource, Rosen had upgraded the sketchbook to Sequence 3 and fused it with the Sequence 1 transcendent essence of an Abyss Split Demon, granting it the ability to create projection clones.

In the blink of an eye, the original fifteen Holy Grail Knights became thirty.

The additional fifteen were Self-Portrait Avatars.

These avatars lacked Holy Unicorn mounts and did not handle direct combat.

Instead, they focused on supporting their originals by sharing Rosen's Painter Sequence skills.

The fifteen avatars simultaneously began creating prophetic paintings, quickly revealing the entire layout of the Cult of Pain.

The paintings captured every defensive measure, the number of cultists, their future positions, and even their reactions during an attack—all foreseen with absolute clarity.

Once the prophetic paintings were complete, the avatars began painting portraits of every cultist.

These portraits allowed them to execute Death Verdict, launching mind-curse attacks directly into the cultists' consciousness seas.

For those who couldn't be killed by Death Verdict, the avatars could use the portraits to activate Human Model, immobilizing their targets.

If the originals couldn't kill all the cultists even with this level of assistance, the avatars were prepared to scatter around the cult's perimeter, sealing the entire space with Five-Dimensional Painting, trapping the Cult of Pain inside with no way to escape.

Once the portraits were finished, the fifteen Holy Grail Knights simultaneously unleashed Holy Throws.

The tips of their lances transformed into massive energy-formed Holy Unicorns, shining with divine light.

Each unicorn locked onto a different target, and as the lances were thrown, they charged at near-light speed.

Wherever they passed, the rock and soil of the sewers disintegrated into ash, and the cult's protective barriers were shattered on impact.

Following closely behind, the mounted knights charged in with Holy Onslaught, wielding Sequence 2 Angelic Sacred Swords as they stormed into the heart of the cult.

Despite possessing powerful defensive skills, the knights uniformly abandoned defense, concentrating all their power on offense.

This made their attacks devastating but greatly reduced their defensive capabilities.

In the ensuing life-or-death battle, the cultists were swiftly slaughtered.

However, a few knights were also killed by Sequence 2 cultists.

Yet before their bodies hit the ground, they were resurrected by their comrades, restored to full health.

The fifteen Holy Grail Knights, like fifteen undead monsters, worked in perfect coordination, creating rivers of blood from over a thousand slain cultists.

If not for the wizard tower extending an elemental barrier to contain the battlefield, the entire Radiant King City would have been torn apart.

Even now, the whole city trembled and shook as if caught in a wild dance under the night sky.

While five teams of knights aggressively assaulted the evil god cults, Rosen had already surrounded the Cult of the Mother of Flesh and Blood.

Shockingly, the entire cult was hidden beneath the Intelligence Bureau.

Thus, when Rosen deployed Five-Dimensional Painting, he deliberately enveloped the bureau as well.

Within a radius of a kilometer, everything was engulfed by the five-dimensional space.

Rosen began the dimensional reduction process.

Buildings within the area instantly flattened from three-dimensional structures to two-dimensional planes, as if slapped flat by an unseen giant hand.

Terrified residents caught in the affected zone were ejected, many screaming as they clutched their blankets, having been interrupted during their nightly activities.

With a mere thought, Rosen compressed the collapsed two-dimensional painting into palm-sized form.

Through the painting, he could see the cultists and bureau agents frantically attacking the surrounding space, desperate to escape.

Due to the hasty nature of the painting and the presence of a Sequence 1 Archbishop of Flesh, the painting would only hold for a few seconds at most.

Time was sufficient.

Rosen carried the painting directly to his Divine Domain.

The hastily drawn dimensional painting was meant primarily for capturing enemies to prevent the battle from damaging Radiant King City.

But within his Divine Domain, the Five-Dimensional Painting had been meticulously crafted over the years.

There were nine layers in total, each a Sequence 2 Spiritual Realm Painting.

The nine layers intertwined with loops of time, space, and memory.

Any Cult of the Mother of Flesh and Blood members who fell into it would find escape impossible unless divine-level power was employed.

Hiding within the outer eight layers of space, Rosen used Dragon God's Wrath to shoot and kill the trapped cultists.

The cultists tried every method they could, but all they knew was that fatal bullets were coming from some other dimension—they couldn't pinpoint Rosen's exact location.

As the cultists were picked off one by one, the Archbishop of Flesh finally couldn't sit still any longer.

As the head of the evil god cult, the archbishop wielded the Sequence 0 transcendent artifact, Rotting Flesh.

When fully unleashed, Rotting Flesh could even corrupt and consume a deity's divine kingdom.

However, activating Rotting Flesh required the cultists to sacrifice themselves to feed it.

The archbishop didn't even need to give the command.

The mere sight of Rotting Flesh drove the cultists to rush toward it eagerly.

Rotting Flesh was a transcendent artifact formed from the decaying flesh of the Mother of Flesh and Blood.

To the cultists, merging with it was equivalent to returning to the supreme glory of their mother god.

This death was not a torment but a sacred homecoming.

Seeing that Rotting Flesh was about to be activated, Rosen instantly deployed Space Reset, Time Reset, and Memory Reset.

The memories of all surviving cultists were rewound to the moment they broke through the five-dimensional painting and fell into the Divine Domain.

Rosen carefully controlled the reset range—only the living were affected, while the dead remained truly dead.

None of the cultists realized they had just experienced a massacre.

They simply assumed that the missing cultists had been separated and trapped in other spaces by the enemy, never suspecting they were already dead.

After another round of slaughter, the archbishop was once again forced to deploy Rotting Flesh.

Rosen immediately performed a full reset, never giving the artifact a chance to activate.

This cycle of resets continued, leading to more and more cultist casualties.

By the final reset, only the Sequence 1 Archbishop of Flesh and three Sequence 2 cultists remained.

Their sheer strength had allowed them to survive Rosen's attacks, and their resilience kept them from succumbing to the impulse to merge with Rotting Flesh.

"Be careful. We've been split into different spaces," the archbishop warned after the memory reset, completely unaware that the other cultists were long dead.

Such was the terrifying nature of Memory Reset: events that had already transpired were completely erased from memory again and again.

However, Memory Reset was not without flaws.

Essentially, it involved tampering with the memory storage of divine consciousness.

A few resets might go unnoticed, but repeated tampering could inflict irreparable damage to the divine essence.

The more resets were performed, the more likely the targets were to realize something was wrong with their existence.

The Archbishop of Flesh had already sensed something was wrong.

Moments ago, he had been inside the cult, only to be ambushed and trapped within a painting.

After breaking free, he found himself in the enemy's Divine Domain.

This entire series of events had taken mere seconds, yet his Divine Essence was severely damaged.

The archbishop suspected that the enemy had used some sinister method to harm his essence but hadn't yet realized that his time and memory had been reset multiple times.

Now, with only a few Sequence 2 cultists left by his side, he faced the terrifying threat of transcendent bullets imbued with True Damage.

In the end, he was forced to bring out Rotting Flesh.

At this point, the only remaining sacrifices were the Sequence 2 cultists.

After several more resets, the Archbishop of Flesh was left utterly alone.

One had to admit that an archbishop was indeed formidable.

He possessed a seemingly endless arsenal of Sequence 1 transcendent artifacts and even three Sequence 0 ones.

Aside from Rotting Flesh, the other two were the defensive artifact Flesh Robes and the escape-type artifact Flesh Doll.

The archbishop had no intention of sacrificing himself to activate Rotting Flesh.

Whenever pushed to the brink, he would use the Flesh Doll to escape.

Even Rosen's Divine Domain couldn't fully contain the archbishop's determined flight, forcing Rosen to reset the scene repeatedly.

After dozens of resets, the archbishop finally realized what was happening.

His memories had been crudely tampered with countless times.

The enemy never gave him a chance to escape using the Flesh Doll.

Realizing he was trapped in the Divine Domain with no way out, the archbishop decided to abandon self-preservation.

The Flesh Doll had two functions.

The first was transferring his Divine Essence into a prepared flesh vessel, but this required time to activate or would be triggered passively upon death.

Activating it proactively was impossible—Rosen would interrupt it.

Thus, the archbishop opted for passive resurrection and activated the Flesh Doll's second function: temporarily bearing all damage in his place, including forced memory tampering by the enemy.

After the next reset, the archbishop retained his previous memories.

Realizing the terrifying power of time and memory resets, he no longer hesitated—he sacrificed himself to activate Rotting Flesh.

Rosen's emergency reset was blocked by the Flesh Doll.

Consumed by Rotting Flesh, the archbishop was no more.

The cult's most terrifying transcendent artifact was finally fully activated.

A mass of rotting flesh began to grow wildly like cancer cells, devouring everything in its path and turning it into nourishment for its relentless expansion.

The nine-layered five-dimensional space was rapidly destroyed—five layers were gone in mere moments.

Seeing that he couldn't stop it, Rosen decisively transferred Rotting Flesh to another five-dimensional space.

This space held the Intelligence Bureau members.

Faced with the onslaught of Rotting Flesh, the agents had no means of resistance.

Aside from a few clueless individuals that Rosen relocated, the rest—loyal subordinates of the bureau director—were all consumed by the rotting mass.

As Rotting Flesh threatened to break through the five-dimensional painting and devour the Divine Domain, Rosen calmly brought out the Flesh Hell Tree.

This artifact was the ultimate bane of any fragment or manifestation of the Mother of Flesh and Blood.

Since Rotting Flesh was formed from a piece of the Mother of Flesh and Blood, it was naturally suppressed by the Flesh Hell Tree.

However, that suppression had its limits—against the Mother of Flesh and Blood herself, the Flesh Hell Tree would be the one devoured instead.

(End of Chapter)