I fabricated myths to guide the revival of spiritual energy.

The terrifying heat emanating from the ground above baked the tunnel like a steamer, even through the thick layers of rock. The dull thuds of collapse and the agonizing screams of thousands being burned alive distorted into chilling wails as they traveled through the intricate ventilation shafts.

Bart was breathing heavily, sweat and mud mingling and streaming into his eyes. He gritted his teeth and, with his only remaining left hand, carried the deeply unconscious Eve on his back, running desperately through the rugged cave.

"Hurry! The landslide is catching up!" Tieyan shouted hoarsely from behind.

Several severely wounded miners, knowing they couldn't run any further, resolutely stopped in the darkness. They gathered the scattered remnants of fulminate crystals from the mine tunnel and used their bodies to block the only passage. With several deafening explosions, a terrifying shockwave, carrying millions of tons of debris, completely collapsed that section of the tunnel, sealing off their escape route.

Meanwhile, on the surface of the mine.

The platinum divine fire still burned in the sky. The Chief Judge of the Judgment of Broken Faith hovered expressionlessly in mid-air, striking the Purification Bell and using the remaining echoes to sweep across the entire mine ruins.

After confirming that there was no sign of life on the surface and that the abandoned underground mine tunnels had been completely sealed off by the high-temperature divine fire and violent collapses, the judge put away the Staff of Judgment.

"All prayer threads have been burned. The heretical echoes in this area have come to an end." He coldly issued the order to retreat. "Report to the main temple that all survivors have been wiped out and the contamination has been eradicated."

……

When Bart and Iron Rock led the remaining thirty-odd miners back to the dark gold temple in the border wasteland, dawn was already breaking.

The hundreds of believers who remained in the temple immediately rushed forward. However, when they saw Eve being carefully placed on the broken altar by Barth, they were all filled with horror.

Eve's condition was appalling. Her body was almost shattered by the terrifying cleansing of the Purification Bell, and her entire body was covered with fine, blood-red cracks. The Dao Lord's divine rune on the back of her hand, which carried the dark gold pledge, had also become extremely dim, flickering like a candle in the wind.

"Priest... is he going to die?"

Suppressed whispers of fear rose from the crowd. The hard-won network of faith in the Dark Gold was violently shaken at this moment. In the subconscious of these mortals, the First Priest represented the power of the new god.

"Shut up! Don't cry!"

Bart abruptly stood up, his only remaining arm gripping a nicked broadsword, and glared angrily at the wavering believers with bloodshot eyes.

"Do you think those scum from the Radiant Parish want us to kneel before them while we're alive?" Bart gritted his teeth, his voice rough like sandpaper scraping. "They don't just want us to kneel while we're alive, they want us to be burned as fuel for them even after we're dead!"

He stood before the altar, pointing at the gloomy sky outside and roaring, "Thousands of people from the Seventh Mine, they did nothing wrong, yet the Archbishop burned them all to ashes! Because in the eyes of the Old Gods, we don't even deserve to be suspected! The High Priest fell to fight for our survival!"

These harsh words, however, were like a heavy hammer, shattering the remaining fear in the hearts of the believers.

The fear did not disappear, but at this moment it was completely twisted and transformed into a deep-seated hatred and a fanatical will to survive.

"Iron Rock!" Bart reached out his hand.

Tie Yan stepped forward, his hands trembling as he untied a tattered cloth bag from his waist. He carefully opened it, revealing a handful of grayish-white powder that emitted a faint burnt smell.

"This is the ashes we scraped from the ventilation shaft during our escape. It's what was left after thousands of our brothers and sisters were burned to death at Mine No. 7."

Tieyan solemnly scattered the packet of ashes onto the altar, onto the face bearing the dark gold short prayer runes.

A miracle, or rather, an anomaly, occurred at that moment.

The moment the divine rune touched the handful of ashes, an extremely rough, painful "ember faith power," carrying the memory of thousands being burned alive at the stake, surged back into the temple's faith circuit!

The lingering power of the embers violently surged into Eve's dying body.

Eve convulsed violently in her unconscious state, her face contorted in extreme agony. This was not merely treatment; it was agonizing torture. The lingering power of the embers, carrying the agonizing screams of thousands of miners whose souls were burned in flames before their deaths, materialized into countless tormented faces, tearing madly through her mind.

The Dark Temple was still too weak to heal her instantly. It could only forcibly stabilize Eve's shattered heart meridian in this way, using the hatred of its followers to keep her life hanging on the edge of a cliff.

At the same time, on the mottled stone wall of the temple, below the divine runes bearing the dark gold covenant, as stone chips crumbled away, a line of extremely simple prayer text, emitting a dim, fiery glow, slowly solidified:

"I don't seek forgiveness, I only seek a way to survive."

……

At the same time, thousands of miles away, in the Radiant Main Hall.

In the center of the main hall, the "Pure Faith Bell" that had been brought back was being sealed layer by layer by dozens of high-level holy light chains.

Suddenly, the previously silent bell began to tremble violently. Under the horrified gaze of the twelve cardinals, a chilling, hoarse whisper, like a ghost, seeped from the indelible dark gold crack on the bell's echo chamber:

"I don't ask for forgiveness... I only ask for... a way to survive..."

This was the first time the archbishops had ever heard this blasphemous heretical prayer in the main sanctuary!

"Insolence!" Archbishop Hermann swung his scepter with his remaining left hand, and a massive beam of holy light slammed into the Bell of Faith, forcefully suppressing the final syllable. Veins bulged on his forehead, and cold sweat soaked his back.

"Bang!"

The side door of the main hall was suddenly pushed open. A cardinal priest responsible for monitoring the diocese's donation channels stumbled in, his face ashen.

"Archbishop! Something...something's happened!"

The cardinal priest collapsed to his knees with a thud, his voice filled with barely concealed despair: "The Seventh Blackrock Mine... the faith gap in that area hasn't disappeared; instead, it's become a node of dark gold embers that's frantically polluting the surrounding loopholes!"

"What?!" The judge, who had severed all ties with the faith, whirled around. "All the living things there have been burned to ashes! How could the dead possibly offer sustenance to the faith?!"

The cardinal priest, trembling, raised a scroll of divine power projection. "It is the collective resentment, rebellious prayers, and lingering echoes of those thousands of people before their deaths, forming an extremely difficult-to-purify source of lingering pollution! Although it cannot generate infinite faith power like the living, it is frantically interfering with the surrounding prayer environment, and even triggering a hidden resonance among the living in the nearby mines!"

A deathly silence fell over the main hall.

For the first time, the Radiant Diocese truly realized that their proud massacres had not purified the pollution at all, but instead had created an inextinguishable fuel for the faith of heretics!

"Abolish all large-scale public trials and executions by burning at the stake against this heretic." Herman took a deep breath, a ruthless resolve flashing in his eyes. He was no foolish fanatic. "From now on, use 'Silent Purification.' Any miners or slaves found to be suspicious, have their vocal cords severed and drag them into the Silent Holy Prison. Let them vanish in absolute silence."

The Old Gods did not sit idly by; faced with this plague of faith, they began to quickly adjust their strategies, revealing even more ruthless and merciless fangs.

……

Border wasteland, dark gold temple.

Pulled by the embers of faith day and night, Eve, who had been unconscious for two days, finally opened her eyes slowly amidst excruciating pain.

She didn't get up immediately, but listened wearily as Bart whispered to her everything that had happened in the past few days: the burning at the mine, the deaths of her brothers, and the birth of the Ember Faith.

Eve remained silent for a long time. Her once clear eyes welled with uncontrollable pain and deep self-reproach. Thousands of lives had been lost because of her uttered prayer.

But after only a few seconds, she forcibly suppressed that pain, which turned into a bottomless coldness.

She knew very well that grief couldn't save the living. Only by turning this burning at the stake into a raging inferno that would burn through the entire Kingdom of Radiant Gods could the deaths of those at the Seventh Mine not have been in vain.

Eve, supporting herself against the broken altar, slowly straightened up. She stopped before the dark gold prayer, turned, and divided the embers of the burning altar into dozens of small packets, handing them one by one to the fanatical believers before her:

"Send these ashes to every mine, every slave camp, and every slum abandoned by God in the Radiant Diocese. Let them see that the fire of the Old Gods cannot extinguish the hope of mankind."

"Every time the Radiant Diocese kills someone, it adds an inextinguishable ember to their path of sustenance."

……

a few days later.

Thousands of miles from the border wilderness, in the heart of the Radiant Diocese, lies a vast slave camp.

In the darkness of night, the rain poured down.

Tieyan pulled his tattered straw hat down and mingled among a group of laborers being escorted by black market miners. Using an abandoned sacrificial path, he hid under the floorboards of a truck transporting fulminate crystals and followed the black market merchants' convoy. It took him three whole days to finally infiltrate this unfamiliar area.

He carried a small packet of dark gold embers in his arms. The lingering resentment within these embers glowed faintly in the darkness, guiding him to the place where the aura of despair was most intense.

A slave, nearly dead from being whipped during the day for working too slowly, lay waiting to die in a leaky straw hut. According to the parish law, he had to make a final confession to the Lord of Light before he died.

His chapped lips trembled as he tried to utter the name of the god.

Suddenly, a rough hand in the darkness handed him a small piece of black ash that was wet with rain.

The slave was stunned. In the daze of impending death, he did not feel the radiant forgiveness, but from the rough ashes, he heard an extremely faint, yet seemingly resonant, hoarse whisper:

"I don't seek forgiveness, I only seek a way to survive."

That faint whisper shattered his tamed soul in an instant. The slave swallowed the radiant prayer in his throat, clutching the black ash tightly, and with the last ounce of his strength, silently and desperately repeated the dark gold syllable in his heart during the stormy night.

In the mud of the slave camp, Tieyan had already turned and disappeared into the deeper darkness.

The spark has been quietly planted in the mud.