705 War and Daybreak (1/2)
Several months before Watson and Shi Dong had set out from Avalon together, but they had different missions and different destinations. Compared to Shi Dong, who would send messages from time to time to prove that he was still alive, there was no news at all from Watson on any channel. If he was alive no one had seen him, if he was dead no one had found his body.
Even though he knew that something that would completely kill someone else would not even necessarily harm a hair on that guy, Ye Qingxuan was still a bit worried. But the news that he was waiting for was not whether he had succeeded or failed, but whether he had advanced to the Scepter level…
Ye Qingxuan had never worried about Watson's qualifications. He could count the number of people in the world who could compare to him on one hand. After all, he was the robin. He was the evil spirit of the Anglos who had once been a Royal Musician. For others breaking through to the Scepter level was as difficult as ascending to heaven. For him, it was merely a step by step process.
Although when Ye Qingxuan had cleansed the evil spirit he had once again become an official musician, after that he had an unlimited supply of core music theory from each of the schools. If he couldn't make tremendous strides in a short amount of time that would be fishy.
But Ye Qingxuan had not thought it would be so quick.
”He must have prepared for a long time,” said Shi Dong. ”He incorporated purifying music theory into the animal nature of a robin and then let his own animal nature be infected by the Abyss and then purified himself. He repeated this several times a day. By the end, I couldn't tell what state he was in. Purifying music theory didn't work on him, and the Abyss's infection didn't affect him at all. He made his Scepter by wavering back and forth on the line between redemption and depravity.”
”When did he make his breakthrough?” asked Ye Qingxuan.
Shi Dong took a sip of the bitter concoction and smirked. ”He did it on the way after we left Avalon, before we got off the boat at Netherlands Harbor.”
Ye Qingxuan was silent.
He knew what Shi Dong meant.
The whole process of an official musician becoming a Master, and a Master becoming a Scepter, was for the musician to promote their sound of heart to a Symphony of Predestination, and then to promote their Symphony of Predestination into a Scepter.
This was a distillation of the self.
In short, in order to become a musician, you first had to be yourself: the self that you most wanted to be. This was one of the reasons why he had been able to elevate himself so easily after he had left Avalon, as Ye Qingxuan had made him do it, it went against his very nature. Even though Ye Qinguan had given him the whole lower city to do with as he pleased, this was only to make him use his dark side to suppress all the gangs down there.
Use evil to control evil.
By fully leaving Watson to his own devices, he could absolutely produce dozens of huge results.
Not everyone could be killed, and not everything could be dealt with. He had to leave a line and be careful about crossing it. The most excessive thing would be to ask him to be a good person.
That was too difficult.
Ye Qingxuan was not worried that after he set Watson loose who would become a man-eating, blood-drinking demon. He had enough willpower and wisdom to overcome his dark side, and would only get better and better.
But in the end, that wasn't good.
Ye Qingxuan hadn't freed him to let him curl up in the shadows his entire life and become the next Shaman, but to let him live properly in the light.
Unfortunately, hate was hate, after all.
”It seems like this mission made him very happy...” Ye Qingxuan sighed. ”Forget it, a forcibly picked melon is not sweet. Let him live how he wants, I won't get in his way.”
”You should have done that from the start.” Shi Dong rolled his eyes. ”He told me to tell you that he was going to disappear for awhile, and not to worry. If he doesn't come back that means he died. If he doesn't die, then sooner or later he will come back with success.”
”He has his own ideas. Let him go then.”
”So, other than us and the Holy City collapsing, did anything happen after I left?”
”Lots.” Ye Qingxuan shrugged. ”Yesterday, the Holy City officially declared the Orthodox Church to be heretical and asked the Inquisition to protect God's authority by sending a punitive expedition to the east against the Confederation of Caucasian.”
Shi Dong laughed. ”Is that what you wanted?”
”Haha.” Ye Qingxuan was too lazy to even roll his eyes. ”They're saying now that the College of Cardinals is even ready to accuse the Anglo Kingdom of Heresy. We can expect that in a few months I'll be the ”big red dragon” that has plagued the Anglo Kingdom. Will I have to obey the Sacred City's orders and kill myself?”
Shi Dong did not bring this up anymore.
This was a leftover set from the game they had been playing that year. During the witch hunts, many people who were suspected to have connections to the Abyss were sent directly to the stake. For civilians, they did not need a reason, and for nobles, any excuse would do. In those days when that crowd of mad men had been barbecuing demons, the people in the Sacred City hadn't even learned how to light a fire.
”What about the East?” Shi Dong asked. ”Since Bai Heng broke the balance of power between East and West, could it be that he's planning something big next?”
Ye Qingxuan was silent for awhile, then shook his head.
”No.”
”No?” Shi Dong looked up at him. This was the only thing that surprised him, so unexpected. For centuries, the East and the West had maintained what could only be said to be a tenuous connection. The two sides had rarely interacted with each other, had kept each other in check, and had rarely interfered in each other's spheres of influence. Now that Bai Heng had rashly broken the tacit understanding and balance between the two sides, a storm was sure to come.
But it turned out that he wasn't doing anything.
What on earth did he want to do?
”It's not only that he isn't doing anything,” Ye Qingxuan said unhappily. ”He also isn't letting anyone else do anything.”
”What do you mean?” asked Shi Dong.
”See for yourself.” Ye Qingxuan sighed and knocked on the table. A ray of light emerged from the void, intertwined until it became an image in front of Shi Dong's face.
It was a huge three-dimensional map of the whole world. But compared to parts of it that had been mapped out by humans, at least two-thirds of it was shrouded in darkness. And of the parts that had been discovered by humans, more than half of it was ocean.
The Anglo Kingdom was located on the western part of the map among the several dozen countries of the West. And facing it from far away was the Empire of Aurora in the East. In reality, the Empire of Aurora couldn't be compared to the West, as it was only about half the size.
The reason why the world was divided into East and West was that the two halves were separated by the almost completely unexplored World of Dark, leaving only a few shipping lanes and winding roads that were difficult to travel to connect them.
The Aurora Empire had never really paid attention to the changes outside, having little interest in the West that lay on the other side of the World of Dark. There were only a few dozen students who came to the West to study abroad every year, but they rarely spoke of their hometowns.
That included Ye Lanzhou.