Secret: The years I served as a foreign aid for the Aurora Club

867
……

"We're finally reaching the top of the mountain..."

It took five hours, from the dawn of the sky to the sun at its zenith, to finally stop climbing alone. Leonard took a breath, leaning on a straight branch he picked up on the road, and prepared to rest for a while before continuing on.

There was no sound in his mind. Perhaps Pales was resting, or maybe he was thinking about something. Anyway, he didn't talk to me, nor did he answer my mumbling on the road. So he slowed down his pace and walked in the flat mountains, enjoying the scenery along the way to pass the time. After a while, he suddenly found traces of human beings in front of him.

Leonard suspected that he was dazzled. He stopped, stretched his neck and looked forward. He really saw a path through the mountains that were only covered with mud, gravel, weeds and trees.

The road was very plain, even crude, with stone slabs laid on the dirt. The shapes of the stone slabs were not uniform, but they were cut fairly smoothly. Just like that, a stone slab road about one meter wide appeared about four or five meters in front of Leonard, seemingly cut off.

Are they relics? Leonard didn't find it strange to see relics on a deserted mountain. After all, this was the Hornachis Mountains, the location of the "Kingdom of Night" that Pales told him was the main believer in Duke Antigonus during the Fourth Epoch. If someone lived here, it would be impossible for traces of human activity to appear only near the top of the mountain.

After confirming that there was no danger around, Leonard clicked his back teeth up and down once, summoning a spirit that had a contract with him and was lurking nearby. Then, leaning on a branch crutch, he cautiously approached the road.

It's quite stable when you step on it.

I didn't expect that after a thousand years, the stone slab had not yet decayed into mud, it just shook.

Leonard stepped hard a few times, and after carefully checking with Ling whether there were any remaining extraordinary abilities and traps near the road, he spoke to the air as if talking to himself:
"The ruins of the Kingdom of Night are at the top of the Hornachis Mountains. How could they be so well preserved after being exposed to the wind and sun? There must be some extraordinary power involved, right? Could it be that something left by Duke Antigonus is protecting this place?"

He openly sought help from the living history book. After all, even if the old man was out of form, he was still an angel. Unless Duke Antigonus was here, no one could find him. If someone in the ruins was paying attention to this place, then Leonard was just talking to himself.

However, Pales still did not speak, as if he had fallen into a deep sleep like before.

In other words, there is no danger ahead, or the danger is within controllable range, or it is so dangerous that the old man simply gives up resistance?

Could it be that Duke Antigonus is really here...

After all, they don’t know who the final winner of the “War of Gods” in the spiritual world will be, and whether the loser has lost his life.

Leonard immediately backed out in his mind. After all, there was more than one route over the mountain. If it didn't work, he could just turn back and change places. It would be unnecessary to accidentally enter someone else's territory and put his life in danger. But just as he was about to turn back, a will suddenly appeared in his mind. Pales didn't say anything, but hinted that he should not retreat and keep going forward.

Since the old man has said so, let’s move forward.

Leonard gripped the branch crutch tightly and continued along the relatively flat path.

The cobblestone road is indeed much easier to walk on than the dirt road on the mountain. Although it is just a walk, it is much faster than before.

Soon, a piece of open and flat land appeared in front of Leonard. After turning a corner, the view suddenly became wider.

Leonard's eyes lit up, and he saw the side of a church right in front of him.

The gray-white stone path under his feet extended from the side door of the church. This church was simple and quaint, without any sculptures or stained glass windows. It was a bit rough in terms of current architectural standards, and not tall enough to make people feel the church's heritage and the majesty of God from the outside. But as a church built on a mountaintop thousands of meters above sea level, it was very delicate, and it might even involve extraordinary power. This shows how much the people of the "Kingdom of Night" respected and revered the "Lord of Night, Mother of Heaven".

However, the church also took Leonard's vision seriously.

"Want to go in and take a look?" Leonard muttered to himself again.

He did not sense any living creatures in this ruin or even in this entire area, not even traces of spirits. Since it was so clean, it must have been a long time since anyone had been here.

As soon as he finished speaking, Leonard suddenly felt a sharp pain in his eye sockets, as if something had drilled out of his eyeballs, or as if a sharp object had pierced his eyes. Leonard subconsciously bent down because of the pain and covered his eyes with his hands, but then he was shocked to find that he could still see things!

——At the same time, he also saw things that he couldn't see before.

He saw that around his body, or in the open space where the church was located, there was an extremely thin gray mist floating at his feet and flowing slowly.

Gray fog?

"Fool"?
Could it be that Mr. Fool is here? Is He watching here? This gray fog is clearly His symbol!
Pales did not speak, nor did he answer. After all, it was not wrong to say that this was related to the "Fool". How could "Half Fool" not be a kind of Fool? Leonard had only seen the "Gray Fog" and had never seen the Fog of History. At this moment, he confused the two, and Pales was not in a hurry to explain.

Leonard was startled, and then his spiritual intuition naturally presented his current image. His eyeball did not rupture, but a circle of translucent insects with twelve segments suddenly appeared around the center of the pupil. Seeing the familiar "worm of time", Leonard immediately understood that this was Pales suggesting that he use His person and identity to see... But what to see?
Leonard blinked curiously as it was his first time to obtain such power.

His left eye and right eye see two worlds at the same time.

The one who saw the abnormality was his left eye, while the right eye still saw the peaceful ruins of the city. It seemed that the old man was fully capable of completely transforming his vision, but in order to show the contrast and avoid Amon's characteristics, he chose to work on the eyeball.

Leonard quickly adapted to the slight stinging pain when his left eye, whose spiritual power had suddenly been strengthened, saw extraordinary things. He re-examined his surroundings, his eyes suddenly widened, and finally slowly raised his head to look at the sky above the church. He used the angelic "spiritual vision" to see the huge palace hidden in the sky where there was nothing but white clouds and blue sky.

"Temple..." he whispered in disbelief.

Whose temple is this? It belongs to the god of the Kingdom of Night, Duke Antigonus!
Not only him, but Pales also saw the entire ancient palace with collapsed walls, dilapidated state and shrouded in mist.

It seemed that a battle had taken place. Leonard observed the ruins and basically guessed the ending of the Kingdom of Darkness.

"Old man, how do we get up there?"

Since Pales had lent him his power and status, but did not show up in person, there must be something that Leonard could do. He was very familiar with Pales's thoughts, so he spoke directly.

That palace obviously does not exist in reality. Only angels can see it. A mortal like me definitely cannot enter it.

“Theft,” Pales said.

Leonard did not hesitate. Although he did not know what to do, he immediately raised his arm, aimed it at the castle in the air, and clenched it tightly and pulled it back towards himself, as if he had firmly grasped something on the opposite side in his hand.

The next moment, Leonard truly felt something was "stolen". A similar mist immediately appeared on his body. Leonard was startled by this change. He felt as if there was a thin film between him and the world around him, and the mist blocked some of the light. In the different fields of vision of the two eyes, the things seen by the left eye were clearer and more real, while the things in the right eye were covered with a veil.

Leonard understood immediately. Without wasting any time, he ran over and climbed up by grabbing the protruding bricks and window edges of the church.

With the excellent physical strength of the "Night" path, Leonard quickly climbed to the top of the church, which was about four or five stories high. Looking up, he saw the ancient and dilapidated palace right above his head. He took a few steps backwards, then jumped up with all his strength, and finally, with the help of Pales' "Stealing Distance", he successfully moved from mid-air to the main entrance of the palace, and then stretched out his hand to push it open.

Leonard suddenly felt something and raised his head.

He saw corpses, countless corpses hanging from the ceiling like bacon - what appeared before his eyes was a hall with many corpses hanging, each corpse was different, some were male, some were female, and their clothes were either gorgeous, or simple, or exquisite, or casual.

Behind each of these hanged men, there was a transparent and slippery tentacle with complex patterns. They all came from the dark mist deep in the hall, where there seemed to be a familiar high-backed chair... Leonard looked at it intently, and then his left eye was forced to close in severe pain.

He saw nothing, but Pales saw that in the deepest part of the fog of history, there was an illusory and blurry figure sitting on an ancient high-backed chair, and transparent and twisted worms were huddled together, growing wildly, and extending one strange tentacle after another to the surroundings.

Who is that?
Is it Antigonus, Klein, or the hidden "Secret Servant"?
Pales still doesn't know the answer to this question, but He knows it must be "The Fool"!
The real "fool"!
Leonard saw those slippery tentacles tremble at the same time, as if they sensed the door opening, or someone approaching from outside. Then, a scene that Leonard Mitchell, who was only Sequence 5 at the time, would remember forever and that the high-sequence "Fortune Teller" would avoid for decades to come appeared.

There was no wind, and the countless bodies hanging from the ceiling slowly moved and turned, gathering around Leonard. Leonard's scalp began to numb when he heard the rustling sound of fabrics rubbing against each other from above. His Adam's apple rolled, but in order to avoid being attacked from above by a strange enemy, he mustered up his courage and looked up.

Pairs of eyes of various colors, with dilated pupils, stared at him blankly;
A row of pale, stiff dead faces were facing him. Directly above him, a corpse's head and neck were perpendicular to its shoulders. At this moment, it was staring at Leonard from between its feet with wide eyes, swaying leisurely in the air.

This scene was deeply engraved in Leonard's mind.

The next second, Leonard, a Sequence 5, fainted due to the instinctive intimidation from his former colleague who had become an angel and was unconscious.

Of course, Klein had no idea how much psychological damage his instinctive reaction of "wanting to see who's coming" had caused Leonard. Pales stole his dizziness, and Leonard opened his eyes again the next moment after fainting, but then continued to stare at the corpses hanging and staring at him. After repeating the process of being frightened unconscious by the Sequence One Trickster five times, he finally chose not to open his eyes.

"Old man." Leonard closed his eyes and said weakly, "I don't think I have offended you recently, right?"

Pales almost laughed out loud. If he hadn't been worried about scaring Leonard silly, he would have missed this simple and unpretentious way of scaring people - after all, in the Fourth Epoch, there was no child from an extraordinary family who had not been frightened by the Antigonus, Amon, and Zaratul families.

Now, those pranks that scared me so much that my face turned pale have become a thing of the past worth remembering.

“Don’t look up. Look at the ground,” Pales said. “Then keep walking.”

"That's the seat in front."

Leonard lowered his head and looked at his toes, thankful that the floor of this palace was not made of shiny black marble that could reflect a person’s shadow. “It’s dangerous to go forward. I almost went blind when I looked at Him just now.”

“You don’t have to walk there,” Pales said. “You’ll know where to stop.”

Leonard felt that countless eyes were staring at his back, as if if he did something wrong, the countless bodies on the ceiling would pounce down and tear him to pieces. Leonard had to try his best to ignore the ubiquitous eyes and the faint footsteps behind him, and walked forward bravely.

He took a step.

There was one more footsteps coming from behind.

...Leonard stopped, and Pales thought for a moment and comforted him:

"Do you think they won't come closer if you don't leave?"

Leonard was comforted. What the old man said made sense. Maybe there was more than one corpse following him. Maybe all the corpses were behind him. Maybe the corpses were just stuck to his back! Under the huge psychological pressure, Leonard simply gave up thinking and ran forward with big strides.

The footsteps behind him also followed him and ran, hidden in his steps, appearing and disappearing.

After running a few steps, Leonard felt the fog around him getting thicker. Then he suddenly saw the bottom of the stone chair appear in front of him. The tarot card with the image of Russell the Fool and words written in starlight was lying quietly on the ground.

Just by seeing this scene, Leonard's spirit was suddenly hit hard, and he was about to collapse. Fortunately, Pales intervened in time, so he did not suffer from confusion, mental abnormalities, or stand still, unable to move.

Leonard seemed to realize something. He took a big step forward and grabbed the mysterious card that had fallen to the ground.

The next moment, Leonard's body dissipated, and the "Historical Mist" he stole was about to disappear. Pales directly distorted the distance and space and threw Leonard into the "Secret Town". The slippery tentacles seemed to have just reacted. They waved twice following the traces of Leonard's disappearance, and finally slowly retracted, allowing the "Star" to pick up the cards on the ground.

The open door then closed little by little, hiding the scene.

bump!
Leonard was thrown to the ground defenselessly. After rolling twice, he dusted himself off and stood up. He then found that his body was intact and seemed to appear in a deserted town.

"What was that just now? Could the tentacles be the form of mythical creatures?"

"If that is the form of a mythical creature, then the reason I am not going crazy now must be because of the old man's help. What on earth did He want to get by letting me enter that place?"

“Is it Antigonus or Mr. Fool? Could those corpses be the Puppet Masters? This is so terrifying…”

Unable to suppress the fear, with joy and strong doubts in his heart, he opened his palms and looked at the items he got from that horrible temple that he didn't want to recall again.

This is a Tarot card. On the card is Russell Gustave, who is wearing a gorgeous headdress, colorful clothes, carrying a cane and luggage. His eyes are full of longing for the future, and a puppy follows him.

In the upper left corner of the card, a few words were outlined with brilliant starlight:
"Sequence 0: Fool!"

TBC
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Good night! (End of chapter)