Banished to the Abyss After Defying the Author-Chapter 29: Whispers Beneath Solaris

The guards were already moving.

They lifted the bodies efficiently, covered the faces, and began scrubbing blood from the marble before most people had even processed what they were looking at.

Solaris recovered quickly.

Noah watched for a moment, then turned away.

Not my problem.

He moved toward the inner palace, scanning the corridors as he walked. The priest had been summoned here, which meant he was somewhere inside.

He found him near the balcony overlooking the inner garden.

White robes. Silver-threaded sash. Calm posture.

Noah walked directly toward him.

"Are you the priest of the Church of Xenovia?"

The man turned slowly and looked at him.

"Yes, I am. But who are you, young man?"

Noah sighed.

"I want to use your church’s backdoor dimensional gate."

The priest’s calm expression broke immediately.

"How do you know about the dimensional gate? Who are you, really?"

"My name is Noah. And I know everything. So just give me the key to that dimensional gate."

The priest looked at him for a moment, then his jaw tightened.

"I don’t have the key. Someone stole it. That’s why I came to the palace today."

Noah ran his hand through his hair.

It must be Dragonforce’s doing again. He wants me tangled in these mortals’ business.

He looked at the priest.

"Do you know anything about the murder that happened in the garden?"

The priest’s eyes widened.

"Did someone get killed in the garden?"

Noah nodded.

The priest immediately rushed past him toward the garden.

Noah sighed and watched him go.

"I guess I have to find that key on my own."

Footsteps behind him.

He already knew who it was.

"Ah, Lord Noah! Here you are." Astriye came up beside him, slightly out of breath. "You wanted to meet the priest, right?"

Noah looked at her.

"I already met him and finished my talk."

He started walking.

She followed.

Noah sighed internally.

What a headache following behind me.

He kept moving through the palace corridor, and a group of knights passed going the other way. One of them glanced toward Astriye and smirked at his companion.

"Look at her. The idiot princess running after another outsider again."

They laughed and kept walking.

Noah stopped.

He turned toward Astriye.

Her face was composed, smiling even, but her thumb was rubbing against her other thumb and her eyes were fixed on the ground.

"Lady Astriye," Noah said, "why do those knights speak about you that way?"

She looked up quickly, surprised by the question.

"Ah, it’s nothing. You must have heard something wrong."

She kept her smile steady.

Noah looked at the knights disappearing around the corner, then back at her.

"Okay. I believe your words."

He turned and kept walking.

Three problems now. The murders. The stolen key to the dimensional gate. And this princess, Astriye.

Another scream.

Closer.

Noah ran.

He reached the second location.

Another body on the ground, mutilated in the same fashion as the first.

And written in blood across the stone:

YOU ALL PAY FOR WHAT HAPPENED IN KURUGSHETRA

Noah read it and exhaled slowly.

Some misguided fools doing this.

He looked around the garden and noticed a lone figure standing among the flowers. The plants around him were dead or withered, as if the life had simply drained out of them. The figure stood lost in his own thoughts, unaware or unbothered by everything around him.

Astriye arrived beside Noah.

"Lady Astriye," Noah said, "do you know who that person is?"

She looked toward where he pointed.

Her body stiffened immediately.

Then time stopped.

The entire Solaris kingdom went completely still, not a single movement anywhere, and when Noah looked back at the garden, the figure was gone.

Noah kept walking toward the gate, thinking.

That person was not a person.

The air carried a faint red hue now.

He approached the palace gate and a girl formed from the mist in front of him. She was roughly his height, with pale skin so thin that the shapes of veins and bones were faintly visible beneath it.

She looked at him.

"You must be someone beyond this world, right?"

Noah looked at her.

"Yes. And you are a ghost, aren’t you?"

The girl looked shocked.

"What is a ghost? We are human. We... are... humans."

She tilted her head as she said it. A full one hundred and eighty degrees.

Noah looked at her steadily.

"You people must be the spirits that died in Kurugshetra during the Chaos invasion and still believe yourselves to be human."

Tears began flowing from her eyes.

"I am a human. I am a human. I am a human."

She kept repeating it.

Noah walked past her and through the gate.

He stopped.

He was no longer in front of the palace.

He was standing in a garden surrounded entirely by blue flowers that stretched in every direction, glowing faintly like moonlight against a sky that had no source.

He looked around.

"So this is your illusion."

Something scratched across his entire body at once. No visible source. No figure nearby. Just invisible cuts opening across his skin.

Noah looked down at his arms.

"No. Not an illusion."

He looked up at the flowers, the false sky, the air itself.

"You spirits are using Real Sky environmental energy to replace Solaris with this."

Several ghosts appeared among the flowers and smiled at him. They began dissolving and reappearing, circling him.

Noah appeared behind the nearest one and grabbed its neck.

"Tell me. Why are you all doing this? On whose order?"

He squeezed.

The other spirits froze and began shaking.

Then they raised their hands.

Magic circles formed in the air around him, dozens of them layering over each other.

Noah crushed the spirit in his grip and made it vanish entirely.

He looked at the remaining circles.

A massive dragon materialized from red mist, stitched together and phantasmal, and its roar shook the entire kingdom.

Noah sighed.

"Summoning a phantasmal beast against me. Really."

He leapt toward it and threw a punch directly at its body.

The force reversed.

His own strike came back and hurled him across the flower field.

He hit the ground and stood slowly.

"What a bore."

He forced power through his sealed channels.

His eyes began bleeding immediately. His nails cracked and broke from the force passing through his hands.

He summoned the Void Spear and launched it.

The spear tore through the dragon.

The dragon vanished. The red mist collapsed. The time-stop effect dissolved with it.

The blue flower field was gone.

Time resumed.

He was standing in front of the Church of Xenovia.

Blood ran down his face from his eyes.

He walked inside.

Claus was still there.

He looked up and saw Noah and immediately rushed toward him.

"O Great One! You are wounded—"

"Do you have a healing potion?"

Claus turned and came back almost instantly, holding a crystalline vial with both hands and presenting it carefully.

"The highest quality! An Elixir!"

Noah took it.

"I am not dying. I just need to heal these wounds."

Claus dropped to his knees.

"I am sorry, O Great One, for the sin I have committed. I should just die now—"

Noah looked at him.

"No need to die."

He drank the elixir.

Warmth surged through his body. Skin sealed. Blood stopped. Vision cleared.

He stood still for a moment, letting it finish its work.

Those spirits, that phantasmal beast. They are empowered by Real Sky residue. I have to seal that breach before it gets worse.

He set the empty vial down and looked toward the church entrance.

Solaris was not as untouched as it appeared.

Kurugshetra’s dead had followed him here.

And something deliberate was guiding them.