This was a quiet place. The air was filled with a faint fragrance of flowers, and someone had deliberately used perfume, trying to conceal the smell of blood lingering in the room along with the heavy scent of disinfectant.
Beds were lined up in neat rows, yet only the one in the middle was occupied. Piles of books were stacked beside it, seemingly meant to help the patient pass the long hours.
Lloyd lay silently on the soft mattress, staring blankly at the ceiling. His left leg was wrapped in layers of bandages, secured within a brace and lifted high above the bed. One arm rested loosely at his side, its skin dotted with countless needle marks left by injections.
It had been a week since the night Bishop Lawrence appeared.
The chaotic slaughter had ended with Lawrence's escape. According to reports from personnel outside the battlefield, the bishop had attempted to kill Lloyd—who had already lost the ability to move due to erosion. But just as he was about to strike, a war airship drifting across the night sky lost control and came crashing down, burying everything on the battlefield beneath its ruin.
They found Lloyd within the wreckage of that airship.
His body had been mangled beyond recognition, flesh torn open and impaled by steel. His left leg had suffered the worst of it, riddled with fragments of metal driven deep into the bone and muscle.
And so when Lloyd awoke again, he found himself here.
This was a psychiatric hospital secretly controlled by the Purging Agency. Soldiers who had been touched by erosion were sent here to recover.
During that time Arthur had visited once.
The so-called super soldier no longer looked particularly super. He leaned heavily on a crutch, his body wrapped in bandages. The sword Lawrence had struck him with had nearly taken his life. On the battlefield he had forced himself to remain standing purely for Eve's sake—otherwise he would have collapsed unconscious long before.
In that battle, Lloyd had lost.
The Purging Agency had lost as well.
Post-battle investigations revealed that when Bishop Lawrence activated the Secret Blood, the erosion it unleashed far exceeded all predictions—and spread across an immense area. A war airship flying low overhead was caught in the effect. Most of its crew lost consciousness, and the uncontrolled vessel plunged straight down from the sky.
Fortunately, it had carried only a small amount of ammunition. Had there been more, the secondary explosions would likely have left no survivors at all.
Even a week later, the aftermath had not been fully dealt with.
The influence left behind by Lawrence still lingered, gnawing at the surrounding districts. Investigations showed that residents within several kilometers had begun suffering from relentless nightmares, while some had developed severe psychological disorders. The psychiatric hospitals of Old Dunling were nearly overwhelmed.
Inside the battlefield perimeter, heavily protected Scavenger units were handling the cleanup. The entire Salicado Manor had been reduced to ruins. Fortunately, during the battle Lloyd had held back most of the demons and Lawrence himself, allowing some of the nobles to be evacuated in time. The casualties, while grim, had not reached the level of utter catastrophe.
Then there were the questions from the public.
Many residents had witnessed the war airship falling from the sky, its flames illuminating the entire night.
Erosion and panic spread together, and the security of Old Dunling had grown noticeably unstable. Fortunately, the Scavengers were well practiced in handling such matters. Explanations involving gas explosions and pilot error were quickly released. They even hired a few writers to craft conspiracy theories. With enough embellishment and speculation, the waters were muddied so thoroughly that the truth became impossible to grasp.
Yet the feeling remained unpleasant.
At the moment he collapsed, Lloyd had experienced a strange sense of familiarity—as if, for an instant, he had been dragged back to that night.
The Night of Sacred Descent.
All the effort in the world had meant nothing.
Some things had long been destined.
With a creaking groan, the iron door slowly opened. A doctor entered, pushing a small cart filled with medical instruments.
"How do you feel?"
"Not bad."
Lloyd continued staring at the ceiling.
"Hm… Let me take a look."
The doctor lifted Lloyd's leg down from the brace as he spoke. It was this very doctor who had performed Lloyd's surgery. He was likely medical personnel from within the Purging Agency itself. During the operation he had attempted to remove the fragments shattered deep into Lloyd's flesh—but Lloyd's body had continued healing itself, constantly interfering with the procedure.
It was the first time the doctor had seen a human with such overwhelming vitality.
If someone had not warned him that Lloyd's blood was mixed with Secret Blood—poisonous and fatal to ordinary people—he might already have begun collecting samples from him.
"What monstrous vitality," the doctor muttered. "I thought you were completely dead. Yet in just a few days you've healed like this."
He gestured for Lloyd to get up and walk.
Lloyd said nothing. He slowly rose to his feet. Aside from a lingering pain when he stepped forward, nothing seemed abnormal.
"You look capable of walking freely now."
"Perhaps… Can I be discharged?"
Lloyd's eyes drifted toward the door of the ward.
Since waking up, he seemed like a different person. Or perhaps more accurately—he had returned to the person he once was. His gaze carried a cold indifference, and no one could tell what thoughts lay behind it.
"I'm afraid that won't be possible, Mr. Holmes."
A voice came from outside the door.
Arthur's weary face appeared in the doorway.
The old man had not had an easy few days. Not only were there the injuries to his body, but the waves of consequences from the incident demanded his attention. Even the long-silent Platinum Palace had summoned him once again.
Since the Radiant War, this had been the most devastating incident within Old Dunling in terms of casualties—an event with far-reaching and deeply troubling consequences.
Lloyd said nothing and simply walked out.
Arthur sat in a wheelchair, with Joy pushing him from behind.
This time the senior knights had suffered little injury. Positioned on the outer edge of the battlefield, they had successfully avoided the area where the airship crashed.
Joy, however, had been rather unlucky. He was struck by falling wreckage and had remained unconscious in the hospital for several days. In fact, when Lloyd first awoke, the bed beside his had belonged to him.
Eve and Seriu had been protected by the soldiers and escaped without serious harm. Lancelot, who had fallen with Lloyd at the core of the battlefield, seemed to have been taken away by the Perpetual Pump. The armor of the Old Century had protected him—though badly wounded, his life was not in danger.
"How are things?"
"A complete mess. Fortunately, in recent years we didn't reduce the Scavenger units just because demon activity declined. Otherwise I would have worked myself to death."
"To accelerate the fading of the erosion, we've injected all our stored neutralizing solution into the Furnace Pillars. The primary steam outlet has been set at Salicado Manor."
The neutralizing solution was another alchemical product from the Perpetual Pump. Its only effect was to accelerate the dissipation of erosive contamination in a region. Normally it was injected into the Furnace Pillars, spreading through affected areas along with the rising steam.
The report continued with the destruction of several large Geiger indexers. In that single instant, the surge of intensity had shattered the observation instruments completely. The surrounding district had slipped beyond the surveillance of the Watcher System, though patrol forces had since been reinforced.
As information passed between them, almost without noticing, the two men had begun to stand on the same side of the battlefield.
"We must gather our strength as quickly as possible," one of them said gravely. "Archdeacon Lawrence is carrying something extremely dangerous. If that thing fully spreads within Old Dunling… then all we can do is hope the Evangelical Church still has the strength to organize another Eastern Crusade."
The Eastern Crusade—a term belonging solely to the Evangelical Church. On the surface, it was a historical phrase describing the greatest religious war ever recorded. But in truth, it meant the total mobilization of the Demon Hunter Order. Every hunter would march to war, and the entire Holy Evangelical Papal State would place all its priorities in service of them.
In Lloyd's memory, the Demon Hunter Order had launched such a crusade once, centuries ago.
The result had been simple and terrible in its finality:
for a time, demons vanished entirely from the world.
"What exactly is he carrying?" Lloyd asked.
"A Messiah-class containment artifact," came the reply. "The Apocalypse, which contains the technology of Secret Blood."
Lloyd had nothing left to hide. He understood clearly now that he could not kill Archdeacon Lawrence by himself.
He needed allies.
"That sounds like the sort of thing that brings endless trouble," Arthur muttered, pressing a hand to his temples. A dull headache throbbed behind his eyes.
In truth, he envied the previous Arthurs. When those old fossils had held his position, the worst outbreaks of demonic activity had barely reached the scale of the Ender Town Incident.
But now that the mantle had fallen upon him, the entire world had shifted straight into hell mode.
"Arthur, do you have any ideas?" Lloyd asked quietly. "This is Old Dunling—your home ground."
"Give me some time to think," Arthur replied slowly. "Like I said earlier, the problem isn't limited to Old Dunling anymore. The new Pope is seeking an alliance with us… but I'm not certain he truly means it. The situation is far more complicated than it appears."
The reconstruction of the Demon Hunter Order.
The rise of a new Pope.
And then, one after another, the monsters that had already died in history began returning to the world.
It felt almost like the end of days—
as if everyone had gathered for a grotesque celebration, singing and dancing beneath rising flames and endless screams.
Arthur was exhausted.
As though arranged in advance, every fragment of chaos in the world had ignited at the same moment.
The three men fell into silence.
Dark clouds hung heavily over Old Dunling, refusing to disperse.
Then suddenly, a face flashed across Lloyd's vision.
Expressionless.
Lloyd remembered the man—Baron Eberle.
Yet the notorious playboy now looked utterly vacant. His eyes were hollow and unfocused, his head slumped loosely to one side, as if his soul had already abandoned him. Seated in a wheelchair, he was pushed away by a physician, completely unresisting.
"What… happened to him?" Lloyd asked instinctively.
Normally he would not care in the slightest about someone like Baron Eberle.
But the moment he saw those empty eyes, a strange chill crawled down his spine—as though something unspeakable were staring back through them.
"He simply became a fool," Arthur answered quietly.
"What do you mean?"
"Let me explain slowly, if you don't mind. Archdeacon Lawrence nearly sliced open my windpipe earlier. I'm afraid coughing would be a bad idea right now."
Arthur pressed a hand against his chest; every word caused his face to twist faintly in pain.
"This was one of the earliest discoveries made by the Purification Agency."
In the empty corridor, Joey pushed Arthur's wheelchair forward as the three of them walked and spoke.
"We discovered that demonic corruption unfolds in several stages.
The first stage amplifies negative emotions.
The second stage brings hallucinations—confusion of consciousness, even outright madness.
And the third stage… is full demonic transformation."
Arthur's voice echoed slowly down the corridor.
He did not say where the data had come from.
Acts that discarded humanity entirely did not need to be dragged into the sunlight.
Test subjects and demons had been locked inside the same cage—separated only by iron bars.
Researchers had watched with their own eyes as the subjects sank into despair, then madness, and finally transformed into monsters identical to the demons themselves.
And those experiments had not been conducted only once.
Sometimes, to save humanity… one must first abandon it.
"We discovered something very interesting," Arthur continued. "The critical point of corruption lies in the third stage. As long as the process never reaches that stage, a normal person will only become insane—not a demon."
"So we conducted many experiments. At one point, we even ran out of death-row prisoners in Old Dunling."
He paused.
"And eventually we discovered a theorem:
When demons cannot be observed, corruption stagnates."
"What do you mean?" Lloyd asked.
"Let me put it another way, Mr. Holmes," Arthur said, noticing Lloyd's confusion. He guided the thought carefully, though he gave Lloyd no time to answer.
"How do you observe the world?"
"Through sight, touch, hearing, taste—through all the organs of perception. It is precisely because we possess these senses that the world becomes real to us."
He leaned slightly forward.
"But consider the opposite. If we perceive nothing at all… then in a relative sense, does the world still exist?"
"Existence depending on observation?" Lloyd frowned. "A few centuries ago, people like you would have been burned as heretics. The kind of execution personally carried out by Demon Hunter Michael—until not even ashes remained."
Yet despite the absurdity of the idea, Arthur's theorem carried a strange and unsettling logic.
"So your Demon Hunter Order refuses to embrace the new age," Arthur replied calmly. "You attribute everything to God. We are different. We believe in science, in technology—things that can be expressed through formulas. They do not come from divine grace. They belong only to us."
"The data observed by our senses is transmitted to the brain. Under normal information, nothing unusual occurs. But what if the information we receive is the corruption of demons?"
"That force is contaminating, incomprehensible—utterly absurd and unacceptable. Yet it uses those channels as a medium to invade the human mind."
"Through repeated dissections, we proved it. All demonic transformations begin in the brain. Open the skull, and you will find the diseased tissue within."
The corridor had become unbearably silent.
So silent that each person could hear the rhythm of breath and heartbeat.
"So… what does that imply?" Lloyd asked slowly.
Just as he had suspected, the Purification Agency knew far more than it ever revealed.
But he had never imagined the truth would be this horrifying.
Arthur raised his head and looked directly at him.
"It means that if we sever every channel through which information reaches the brain—before the third stage begins…"
His voice carried words that bordered on blasphemy.
"If the bridge connecting the mind to the outside world is cut—no sight, no sound, no smell… if all information is rejected…"
"Then perhaps the corruption of demons can no longer advance."
"Or perhaps, from the victim's perspective, demons simply cease to exist."
He smiled faintly.
"Perhaps the entire world ceases to exist."
"Seal the brain away completely…"
Arthur's smile widened just a little.
"If it cannot be observed—then it does not exist."
"Allow me to introduce you to one of the most brutal operations in human history."
"The prefrontal lobotomy."