Not to mention that in the future he might also seize two other visages of the God of Light, deprive the world of two-thirds of its daylight, and tear open the Abyssal Rift. So she had to quickly pull in the only priest teammate who might be able to break the deadlock.
And that was where the real trouble lay. Who the hell was the priest, the saintess Dawn?
Compared to other targets in the original story, who at least had names and obvious traits to search for, this one truly had nothing but a title. It was mentioned only in passing, at that level.
How was she supposed to find someone like that? Fei'er Li had thought about gathering all candidates and slowly filtering them out, but the problem was that the saintess selection had an extremely broad scope due to the nature of the faith.
Almost anyone in the church could be selected. In that situation, it was like searching for a needle in the ocean.
In the novel, it only said that Dawn was already finished long ago. But after investigating herself, Fei'er Li realized that this thing should have been finished even earlier.
The decline was not just due to weakened Holy Light and the refusal of the Gold Rank faction to cooperate. Countless forms of corruption had grown, with the upper levels lining their pockets and the lower levels exploiting layer by layer, ruining the reputation completely.
Even the selection for the crucial position of saintess had been tainted. All kinds of families threw huge piles of Gold Coins into it, either to profit from the position or to gild the resumes of younger members with a candidate slot.
Over time, this led to the bizarre phenomenon of Gold Rank faction popes being elected continuously for thousands of years. If this continued, no one would even remember the saintess position in the future.
What was worse was that even after investigating halfway, Fei'er Li still had not figured out how the selection mechanism actually worked. She pinched her nose and checked the so-called key candidates one by one, and each was more outrageous than the last.
She even caught two members of the Abyss Church along the way. "If the original plot also went this way, then this broken world is really doomed."
Once again paying her respects to the original story's ultimate stress-resistant king, the Chosen Hero, Fei'er Li could only be grateful that she had come in on easy mode. Still, it was not impossible to find the real saintess.
Since the mysterious book in her hand had a mechanism to identify members of the Hero Party, she could just rush over during the selection and press it to each forehead. Whoever could receive the mark would be the one.
"But I'll need to plan the trip. Still, when exactly does that selection start and end?" "The fact that I couldn't find this out at all is really ridiculous."
While sighing like that, she bound the materials in her hands using Reorganization and casually stored them in the Pure White Book. As for the so-called Abyss Church riot from the original story, she would watch the situation when the time came.
If it was just an ordinary Abyss Church disturbance, she would shut the door and let Icelis handle it. But if it was really Elfido pulling strings in the dark, she would try to save people depending on the circumstances.
After more or less deciding what to do next, she slowly closed the book. In a corner she did not see, a faint mark formed of light flashed past.
A trace of light fell from the sun, and from an angle no one noticed, the visage of the former god became blurred and unclear, almost unknown to all. "Hoo… ah…"
"Hoo…" Belial slightly opened his eyes, and large shards of Crystal Shard fell like rain from the gaps between his eyelids.
With a simple breath, the vibration he casually released shattered his bed and all nearby obstacles into fine Shard. A massive Great Dragon rose from a dim forest of glass-like, fragile Crystal, spreading its wide wings as white air currents expanded outward.
All the dull Crystal were ground into Shard, and a blockbuster-scale storm like flying snow was stirred up. A giant chunk of Crystal nearly the size of a moon had almost half its mass peel away and shatter into Shard due to Belial waking up, drifting through the endless Void.
"Crap, I couldn't hold back and ended up sleeping for a bit." "By subjective time, it should only have been a few days. That's fine, there should still be time to find people."
The time Belial needed to completely cover a planet far larger than Earth, almost entirely made of piled metal, with ecology and then compress and devour it was only a few days. That part was unexpected, because in such an energy-rich environment he had subconsciously entered sleep mode.
That was not really his fault. After all, he did not expect there to be so many good things inside the planet.
There were all kinds of energy reactors, high-energy storage folding blocks, huge reserves of dense radioactive material, and even rare nuclear resources. Since taking this form, aside from eating King Ghidorah, this had been his most satisfying meal.
Now Belial's size had already exceeded two hundred meters and was still growing further. If his wingspan and other factors were counted, his overall scale even looked a bit larger than Gen Urobuchi.
Of course, it was not calculated that way. A height of three hundred meters was the form potential granted by the planetary template, which in theory still had room to grow.
As for what level it could ultimately reach, it could be roughly estimated. If Gen Urobuchi were multiplied by Space times darkness plus the values and potential of King Ghidorah, then evolved and devoured half a planet in the Solar System like a sea cucumber on a binge, that would be close to the true height potential.
"But cheating and overtaking on a curve really does feel better." "Cultivating slowly step by step is just way too slow."
Even though it felt a bit off to use a planetary template to do the things of a Gold sea cucumber, he did not care. Eating happily was all that mattered.
"I'll mark this place first. The remaining materials here might be useful later, since this ghost of a place has nothing at all." After casually setting up a base station and finishing that, Belial began to recall the information he had obtained by devouring and dismantling the target's soul and memories.
This was the first time Belial had done something like this. Breaking down the soul memories of something this large was extremely difficult and left him flustered, because it was far too chaotic and fragmented.
It was no easier than trying to pick out a slice of pineapple pizza from concrete spaghetti number forty-two. If you say that is impossible, then exactly, it was basically impossible.
After carefully studying this kind of soul structure, he found it quite peculiar. First of all, this reddish soul was not a single soul at all, but an aggregation of countless, massive numbers of soul light points.
It looked somewhat similar to the red soul he had once pulled out of the core of that radish-like thing. But at the same time, it felt different.
As for knowledge about souls, Belial clearly did not truly understand it, since he was a Black Dragon and not a White Dragon. However, by relying on the Diablo template to devour resentment and taking a crooked path, it was like eating too much food. Even if he did not know how to cook, he at least knew what could not be eaten.
After opening the target's configuration, he fell into silence for a while. It was hard to even compare this kind of soul to anything familiar. It was questionable whether it could even be called an individual at all.
It felt like stuffing every user on the world's network, along with all activities, software, and accounts, into a single cramped phone. Ignoring what kind of advanced technology that phone would need, what would happen if everyone logged into the same account at once? It would obviously be complete chaos.
Yet Belial seemed to notice something like a central core within it, though he had no idea how such a thing was formed. Thinking back, he wondered whether the monsters he had fought before were also like this. He pushed those thoughts aside, since the important part was the small piece of information he had managed to extract.
By directly browsing the most recent data, he barely pulled out a relatively complete image. He was curious and wanted to see what kind of thing the other side actually was. Everything beyond that point in the memory lines was tangled into a mess, cut into Shard and mashed together like clay, and not even from a single person.
Countless aggregated points of soul light were mixed together. It could not even be called memory, just a pile of trash. Fortunately, the recent fragments were still viewable, which was the good news, and he did find a trace.