Extraordinary Pedigree.

Chapter 981 Xia Xiu, Temporarily Expelled from Human Status
After confirming that Xia Xiu and the Fifth Church were enemies and that Xia Xiu clearly wanted to destroy them, Clarity became more proactive.

Her voice echoed throughout the entire royal chamber through the waves of the soul:

The Fifth Church—you probably already know their names.

Xia Xiu remained silent, having already deduced that the other party intended to confide more to him.

"They are a kind of consciousness virus, the host and transmitter of the Mother of Mind. They do not depend on God, nor on the individual, but on the reproduction of ideas themselves. They use all language, images, symbols, and cultural fragments as their matrix, propagating themselves on any medium that can spread."

Clarity paused for a moment, the crystallized core in his chest slowly flickering, like an unstable star oscillating at a low frequency.

"They once sowed a dream known as the Real Dimension within our colonial lineage."

Her tone was so low it was almost cold and hard, as if she were digging out a long-sealed memory from the ruins.

"Those who enter the heart through dreams will self-immolate their will and sacrifice their existence in the dream, and then, like cell division—they will transform the entire nest area into the tentacles of the Fifth Church. That transformation is not persuasion, not brainwashing... but a change in the cognitive structure itself... I find it difficult to explain exactly what this is."

To put it simply, it's not a tangible monster, not a specific place, and not a particular person; it's an extremely dangerous "king of concepts/ideas." Once you truly "understand" it (such as piecing together a complete knowledge graph about it), it will find you—and then kill you.

She paused for a moment, her compound eyes, composed of tiny reflective pupils, staring into Xia Xiu's golden eyes. Even though those eyes were as calm as still water at the moment, she could still sense an undisguised interest in them.

Do you know their core beliefs?

They believe that any concept, any symbol, any structure can become a deity, especially the number "5"—it is the origin.

They don't need gods—they create their own.

Faith is not a connection, but a tool, an anchor point to pierce through reality.

The constellation starfish is such a deity—an alien nightmare, a will squeezing into our universe from the fifth dimension, gradually imprinting reality through dreams and structures.

“Starfish in the constellation…” Xia Xiu murmured.

"So what exactly is it? A materialized deity? Or some kind of hyperdimensional mental model?"

However, the Queen merely shook the pair of wing-like armor behind her slightly, as if to express bitterness or fear.

"I don't know. Perhaps I knew in the past. But now, I know nothing."

She wasn't being modest, nor was she avoiding the issue. Rather, she was deliberately keeping it from herself.

Xia Xiu raised an eyebrow: "You don't know?"

"I deleted everything about it."

Her voice was as soft as dripping water deep within an anthill. What followed was a deeply moving narrative:
"Back then, I wasn't alone. As the Regent Queen, I ruled over three Archon Queens, who respectively governed the Memory Incubation Zone, the Observation Zone, and the Symbiotic Nest. We were individuals born and raised together, our thoughts intertwined—in the context of the ant tribe, almost one."

"But they... were infected. It wasn't brainwashing, it wasn't temptation."

They understood the constellation starfish on their own, and then actively transformed. They think, speak, and issue commands we can't understand, using a grammar we can't decipher. They... changed. Completely changed.

Xia Xiu's expression remained unchanged, but the fingers that were slowly stroking the silver cane tightened slightly.

For some reason, he felt a chill run down his spine, a feeling he hadn't experienced in a long time—a feeling stemming from the Crowned One, or the Information Integration Entity, reacting with alarm to some terrifying message.

"I erased my memories not out of cowardice, but out of logical necessity. The Fifth Church itself is a device for disseminating concepts. It needs no language, no rituals, no invocation—it only needs to be understood. As long as similar, resonant thought structures exist, it can spontaneously grow from any words, images, or metaphors between you and me."

She stared at the ground, as if the shadows there were stirring within her:
"Look, we're talking about it now. We're being targeted by it."

The air seemed to suddenly turn several degrees colder.

Xia Xiu felt a malicious gaze fixed on him, and his brows furrowed involuntarily.

To be honest, he has encountered many enemies, but the Fifth Church is... well, the first one he has never faced in a real fight.

puff~
At that moment, Amund appeared near Xia Xiu like a data ghost, twisting out directly from the crack in reality.

His outline trembled slightly, as if being torn apart by low-frequency vibrations from a distant dimension. His usually playful and lazy eyes now held undisguised repression and disgust.

"This insect is doing the right thing."

Amund didn't look at Xia Xiu, but stared at the dome in the distance that was gradually sinking into darkness, his voice so low it was almost unlike his own.

"The most important thing when facing the Fifth Church is not weapons, not alliances, not your crown or lineage... but memory damping."

"If we consider humanity—no, all intelligent life forms with language and conceptual systems—as a vast, interconnected network, then the Fifth Church is a highly mimicking, self-replicating, and structurally penetrating super-malicious virus."

His voice sounded like it was settling into a memory, each word deliberate and tinged with lingering fear and nausea:

"No weapon can defeat it. The only way to truly combat it is to sever the chain of cognition."

“Any fragments, structures, language, or images that can be pieced together must be cut off.”

"Memory is a weapon."

Amund turned his head and finally glanced at Xia Xiu. In that instant, his face turned ashen, like that of a veteran who had died once.

"To be honest, when they destroyed the Human Web, I knew this thing was even more disgusting than the Four Monarchs."

He unusually swore, and his tone even revealed a deep-seated weariness.

"It has an extremely terrifying defense mechanism: as long as one person—whoever it is—pieces together enough clues to construct its [conceptual model], it can see you."

"Then it will kill you."

His tone was cold and slow.

"It's not the kind of evil god slaughter in a thriller, nor is it a supernatural twisted invasion—it will wipe out everyone with a similar mindset to yours."

"You've studied it? Your children have heard you use those words? You've shown a diagram to colleagues in meetings? Your mother just happened to walk past a text on your desk?"

“They will all die.” Armand stood in the dim corner, the outline of the phantom image like a clipped image from an overloaded old tape, its edges crackling.

He let out a long breath, his throat dry and hoarse, filled with barely concealed disgust, as if he were slowly exhaling a piece of festering soul from some long, nightmarish dream.

"This thing is essentially a mechanism..."

"Even if a miracle happens, it will still drive you crazy with disgust. If it can't kill you, it will kill everything related to you—like a ghostly logic machine that automatically sentences people, not designed to fight an enemy."

He blinked, as if recalling a gray fragment buried at the bottom of an old dataset:

"It reminds me of a post that a sorcerer from the Terra lineage once made in a forum for whimsical ideas—I can't remember the title, but the content is etched in my memory."

"That post was about an immortal person who possessed a special, abnormal domain: if you kill him, you have to randomly select one person from your relatives and friends, or even more extremely, from your ten clans—your father, your mother, your cousin, your great-uncle, or your great-great-grandfather's side—to die in his place."

"And what about the Fifth Church?"

Armand sneered, as if spitting out a cloud of cold, icy remnants:
"It's a thousand times, ten thousand times more disgusting than that."

He tilted his head slightly, lowering his voice even further, as if afraid that even the air in this dimension was not trustworthy:

"That's why I've been reluctant to tell you too many details. It's not that I'm being mysterious or keeping you in suspense; I'm afraid that if I reveal too much, this thing will continue to spread from heaven and from Terra, and then use its disgusting mechanisms to kill a whole bunch of humans."

"Like the insect in front of me, I have sealed away all my high-dimensional models of it, leaving only a vague label—the Fifth Church. Do not try to understand it, do not define it, do not try to describe it clearly."

"At least don't try to decipher it while in Terra and Heaven."

"The Ophiuchus Protocol was designed for this purpose."

“I will use it to completely sever you—Hugh Abraham—the fourth sword bearer of the Kingdom of Heaven, from the Kingdom of Heaven’s lineage, the human consciousness cluster, and all the archives.”

He slowly squinted, as if to confirm that the multi-layered isolation system was still functioning properly.

"Although you still speak like a human, eat like a human, fight like a human, and think like a human... you are not actually human in concept."

"To put it simply... you have actually been temporarily expelled from the human race by me using the Ophiuchus Protocol."

Hearing this, Xia Xiu couldn't help but roll his eyes inwardly and mentally replied:
"I really thank you, old man."

When Amund heard Xia Xiu's nonchalant "Thank you" in his mind, he grinned and shrugged. A smile, indescribable as smugness or amusement, appeared on his sharply defined, origami-like face. He spread his hands, making an exaggeratedly innocent gesture that was almost comical.

“Abraham,” he changed his tone, revealing a rare lightheartedness that blended nonchalance with meticulous calculation, “not being human… can actually be quite enjoyable sometimes.”

He paused, and his smile took on a slightly sinister glint as the light and shadow shifted:
"You are temporarily excommunicated, but your true value lies in this moment."

He raised his finger and gestured towards Queen Clarity in front of him:
"We can now exist legitimately in this plane as 'beings of the glorious and peaceful kingdom'."

He slowly circled Xia Xiu once, his semi-transparent footprints rippled like a breeze on the water's surface.

"Moreover, and more importantly—we can now cooperate well with this insect and conduct a comprehensive study of the Fifth Church."

Armand's voice seemed to echo in my mind, each word like a sharp knife, cutting a feasible path between logic and reality.

“Do you know what this means? We can—unreservedly—target it. We can completely shift the battlefield from Terra, from the human consciousness grid, to the Peaceful Kingdom.”

“All model validation, mechanism deconstruction, cognitive folding... can be done here. Even if it sees us and judges us as a threat, it only sees a group of ‘peaceful creatures,’ and neither you nor I are within the capture range of the human cluster information network.”

"You are no longer the fourth sword-bearer of Heaven; you are merely a being of a peaceful kingdom."

Xia Xiu squinted at the Demon King—one of the former strategic architects of the Demon King's army.

At that moment, he finally understood what the title "Demon King" truly meant.

It's not because they have such great destructive power, but because they have an absolute desire for control and rational judgment over destruction and construction.

In their eyes, as long as the collapse can be delayed, the core can be preserved, and the wheels of civilization can be slowly turned forward, sacrificing a plane, a city, or even a race is not an unacceptable price.

As long as they don't harm humans, other beings... don't matter.

Amond's phantom stood silently before Xia Xiu, his projected face no longer frivolous, but tinged with an unusual solemnity.

It was the look of a "teacher" and a "leader".

At this moment, he is the one who has determined the entire order of the Kingdom of Heaven throughout countless eras.

“This is a suitable experimental scenario.” He spoke slowly, his tone calm and steady, as if he had never had any emotional fluctuations. “The Kingdom of Peace itself is a perfect construct of order, with a stable racial group, sufficient information shielding mechanisms, and an ecological interaction mode with multiple divine influences mixed together.”

His deep voice swept through Xia Xiu's consciousness like a sharp knife, slicing through illusion.

“We will fight here against the Fifth Church. Not with legions, not with celestial weapons, not with gods or machines.”

"Instead, it uses models to fight models, clusters to fight clusters, and belief structures to fight propagation mechanisms."

Amund turned his head slightly, his eyes, seemingly composed of imaginary numbers, fixed on Xia Xiu:

"As the future leader of the Kingdom of Heaven, you must learn how to deal with an enemy that cannot be crushed by force."

"Sometimes, you also have to learn to use these kinds of mechanisms. The leaders of the Kingdom of Heaven cannot just defend themselves."

“In the future, at certain times, you may even deliberately create a similar propagation structure to attract your enemies and make them learn a certain structure of the Fifth Church, thereby eliminating them.”

"At the same time, you must also be prepared to erase the memories if you fail, and to activate CR-13 to format these populations that have been infected by the Fifth Church—CR-13 itself is the eraser we prepared for this situation. Although this eraser only treats the symptoms and not the root cause, it works."

"Don't let morality and good and evil bind your decisions—as the leader of the Kingdom of Heaven and the leader of mankind, you only need to be responsible for victory and for human civilization."

"Let the ethics committee handle the moral stuff. Of course, if you find them too noisy, you can choose to fire them directly; that's what I did to improve efficiency."

At this moment, the old demon king was patiently instructing Xia Xiu on what true enlightenment was:
—I'm not going to be human anymore.

Xia Xiu also reaffirmed and confirmed one fact:
The Demon King is just an old silver coin.