Past the liquefied blast door, Caspian led the two women onto a rusted metal catwalk suspended above the main hall.
When Victoria looked down over the railing, her eyes initially glazed over with a familiar, fanatical reverence. "Master..." she whispered, her voice trembling with conditioned awe. "This is the Holy Sanctuary... Do you see the golden light? The altars..."
Caspian stopped. He didn't look at the hall; he looked at Victoria with a gaze full of absolute, chilling pity.
To the eyes of a mortal infected by the purple miasma, this place was a glorious, golden cathedral. The filthy floor felt like soft clouds, the stench of sweat smelled like divine incense, and the brutal violation felt like spiritual fulfillment. It was a flawless [Cognitive Distortion Array] built on the stolen scraps of his past-life Laws.
But to the [Genesis Core] of a high-dimensional Sovereign, this pathetic illusion didn't even register as smoke.
"A cheap filter built on stolen scraps," Caspian sneered coldly. "Let me show you the true face of your 'god', Vessel."
He didn't cast a spell. He simply extended a black-gloved finger and tapped Victoria lightly on the forehead.
CRACK.
A sound like shattering glass echoed directly inside Victoria's brain. The hallucinogenic laws bound to her synapses were instantly, violently obliterated by Caspian's absolute, high-dimensional authority.
The golden light in her eyes vanished. The divine incense turned into a suffocating stench.
Below them, the "holy sanctuary"—a place revered by the elite of Sancta Lodo—finally bared its nauseating, authentic skin to her entirely unprotected senses.
Victoria took one look over the railing and her pupils shrank to pinpricks. She clamped both hands over her mouth, biting her lip until it bled, desperately swallowing a visceral scream. Elena simply turned her head away in sheer disgust, her cold eyes flashing with physiological revulsion.
This was not a cathedral. It was an underground slaughterhouse built on cheap lust and degraded flesh.
Cold, buzzing industrial fluorescent lights mercilessly illuminated a massive concrete floor. There were no statues of deities, no altars for prayer. The rough walls were adorned with foul-smelling leather restraints, iron shackles, and crude implements of bondage. The floor was littered with discarded cheap jackets, muddy boots, and the detritus of chemical aphrodisiacs.
The air, thick with the diluted, purple Sovereign mist they had sensed outside, was now violently entangled with the stench of sweat and cheap lubricants—a toxic miasma designed to rot mortal rationality.
Sprawled across the center of this "den of iniquity" were over a dozen naked young women.
Caspian's gaze swept over the biological specimens with the temperature of a surgical scalpel. He saw no aristocratic beauties, no aesthetic value—only chunks of meat drained of their worth on an assembly line. They were all trapped in the so-called "sacred slumber," entirely oblivious, like slaughtered pigs. Their once-flawless skin was now marred by violent bruises, bite marks, and fingerprints.
At the edge of the pile, Caspian spotted a familiar specimen: Isabella.
Days ago, this "false maiden," worshiped as a pure goddess at Sacred Heart Academy, had tried to seduce him with fake sanctity. Caspian had seen through her [Fuel] nature and used [The Omega Exchange] to violently strip away her supernatural camouflage. Now, the once-arrogant girl was discarded on the cold floor like a used rag, her thighs covered in filth. She was just the lowest-tier plaything among the violated.
Victoria's body began to tremble uncontrollably, broken whimpers escaping her throat.
She neurotically scratched at her own collarbone—where a fading purple bruise still lingered. That was the "mark of purity" she had proudly flaunted to her ex-fiancé Tyler, her prized divine grace. In this agonizing second, cold reality slammed down like a rusted hammer, shattering her pathetic faith and dignity into irreparable shards.
There was no holy ritual. There was no descent of a god in the dark. The crushing weight that made her feel "spiritually fulfilled" was nothing more than a pack of nameless, feral men taking turns violating them while they were paralyzed by hallucinogens!
"Look closely, Vessel."
Caspian's voice did not travel through the air. It pierced directly into Victoria's brain like a spike of absolute zero telepathy.
"This is the god you worship. Under the guise of divine right, they are nothing more than bottom-feeding reptiles who haven't even touched the threshold of the [Flesh Path], wringing out whatever residual value you fools possess." A cruel curve touched Caspian's lips. "Decorating your purity with mortal excrement. Tell me, how does your 'divine grace' taste?"
That sentence was the final blow to Victoria's psyche.
She didn't scream. She didn't break down crying. She simply collapsed onto the rusted grating, pressing her cheek dead against the edge of Caspian's immaculate oxford shoe. Her moral compass, her class superiority, and her self-worth were entirely erased. In their place bloomed a twisted, pathological relief—she was thankful that she had been stripped of her humanity, thankful that she was now nothing more than a [Vessel-Class] pipe belonging exclusively to Caspian. At least her master was a true Sovereign who didn't hide his monstrosity behind a mask, unlike the maggots below. She willingly opened her soul, ready to accept the violent baptism of his [Destruction Toxin] at any moment.
Just then, the heavy grinding of metal echoed from below.
A concealed door behind the altar was pushed open. The first round of "grace" was clearly over, and now, it was time for the scavengers' feast.
Several men staggered in. Their eyes were bloodshot and feverish. They wore no priestly robes, and their bodies lacked even the faintest pulse of a [Tier 1-3: Awakened] aura. They eagerly unbuckled their grimy belts, barking crude laughter as their greedy eyes locked onto the unconscious heiresses—ready for the second round of violation.
"Caspian, facial recognition is complete," Elena's [Spirit-Rhyme] voice crackled through the earpiece, dripping with disdain. "Database cross-referencing shows these aren't clergy. They're fugitives, vagrants, and heavy addicts from the slums. The Temple is using the absolute lowest societal trash to defile and control upper-class resources."
However, Caspian's attention never landed on their nauseating faces.
His dark golden eyes, colder than the vacuum of space, zoomed in with telescopic precision, piercing the dim light to lock onto the thick nape of the lead thug.
There, burned crudely into the flesh like a brand from a hot iron, was a dark red tattoo.
It was absolutely not the hypocritical starlight cross of the current Temple.
It was a shattered scythe, tightly bound in chains.
The instant that emblem registered, the faint ripple of murderous intent around Caspian vanished, freezing into an eerie, absolute stillness.
That was not just any mark. That was the exclusive slave brand of the lowest tier within [The Shadow Court]—the ultimate intelligence and assassination syndicate he had personally forged when he stood at the apex of all realms in his past life!
His terrifying legacy had been stolen, corrupted, and downgraded to run a cheap blood-sacrifice brothel using diluted fragments of his own laws.
Yet, Caspian was not blinded by rage. Instead, his [Genesis Core] began to pulse with an extremely cold, calculated frequency.
A massive, cross-incarnation labyrinth of suspense had just revealed its first corner.
These bottom-feeding addicts couldn't possibly know how to brand the Shadow Court insignia, nor could they extract law fragments to brew that purple miasma. There was an invisible thread attached to them, leading straight to the true mastermind who had usurped his past-life authority.
Slaughtering these reptiles would take nothing but a snap of his fingers, but it would be utterly meaningless. A Sovereign's duty was to follow the thread and uproot the biggest rat hiding in the sewer.
Caspian slowly straightened up from the shadows, elegantly raising his right hand to smooth a microscopic wrinkle on his obsidian suit cuff with his thumb.
"Elena," Caspian spoke softly, his voice devoid of anger, echoing only with a spine-chilling, absolute rationality. "Cut the camera feeds in this room. Hijack their communication frequencies."
"We aren't clearing the room?" Elena paused, surprised.
"Clearing the room only startles the hand behind the mousetrap," Caspian looked down at the men hungrily approaching the unconscious girls, observing them like fungi in a petri dish. "I want to see exactly whose hand these marked roaches are eating from."
He had no need to throw a punch. A high-dimensional tyrant had his own methods of interrogation.
Caspian extended his black leather-gloved right hand and pressed it gently against the empty air above the hall.
[Localized Gravity Subjugation].
There was no sound. No explosion.
The air in the hall below instantly became ten million times heavier than liquid mercury! The lecherous smiles on the men's faces froze. Before they could even utter a gasp, they were violently "nailed" to the floor by an invisible, terrifying gravitational weight.
Their bones let out a pathetic, teeth-aching groan. Their internal organs were squeezed so hard they nearly ruptured through their throats. Their eyeballs bulged from their sockets, yet they couldn't twitch a single pinky finger. The entire underground space instantly transformed into a tomb of absolute stillness.
Caspian descended the rusted metal stairs like a king taking a leisurely stroll through his backyard garden, elegant and completely silent.
He walked straight up to the thug leader bearing the scythe brand. Under the absolute gravitational suppression, the leader could only roll his bloodshot eyes in sheer terror, staring at the flawless man in the suit who had descended like the Grim Reaper.
"Forging my insignia with a cheap branding iron," Caspian's eyes were indifferent. He drew no weapon; he offered no torture.
He simply extended two long fingers and gently pressed them against the thug's cold, sweat-drenched forehead.
System Skill Triggered: [Forced Memory Extraction].
Accompanied by the thug's silent, agonizing, and violent convulsions within the gravity field, streaks of pale blue neural currents flowed upward from Caspian's fingertips directly into his [Genesis Core].
Three seconds. That was all it took.
Caspian pulled his hand back in disgust. He withdrew an expensive silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped the leather glove that hadn't actually touched any physical filth, and casually dropped the silk square over the face of the leader, whose brain had just been completely fried into a vegetative state.
He had exactly what he needed.
"Found it," Caspian turned his head slightly, the phantom light of a predator flickering in his golden eyes. "Elena, locate the 'Crimson Club'. It seems our true prey is hiding much deeper within high society."
He turned his back, not sparing a single glance at the pile of naked, unconscious women on the floor. Their fate was irrelevant to his path. He issued a cold command to Victoria, who was still trembling on the stairs.
"Hound, keep up. The game has just begun."