FWF Chapter 718 Red Moon World
Chapter 718 Red Moon World
Chapter 718 Red Moon World
Foreword (written in the first year of the Truth Calendar)
We always look up at the red moon in the sky and ask ourselves, where do we come from? What happened to this ancient land?
We pray devoutly every day, listen to divine pronouncements, and try to find our way forward.
We are bewildered, we are lost, we are afraid, we are hysterical...
Lin Xiaohe opened the first page.
Part 1: The Beginning
(1) The same story is told in the five oldest families.
Legend has it that long, long ago, we lived on a giant tree.
The sun and the moon live at opposite ends of a large tree, never meeting. We work at sunrise and rest at sunset.
The divine tree bestows upon us magic, sword energy, and holy light. We have magical chariots that can fly to other stars, and holy water that can cleanse impurities and calamities.
We live a peaceful and happy life.
It will not set again until a red moon rises.
From that moment on, the sacred tree withered, and we fell from the sky to the ground.
No one knows how long this story has been passed down, whether it has been altered along the way, or whether it is related to our origins.
But I think, since it has been passed down, I should continue to pass it on with my pen.
(2) The first sign (5 BC)
In that year, deep wells around the world simultaneously stopped producing water.
The source of life had transformed into something else, and anyone who drank from this water disappeared within seventy-two hours. Their beds were left with intact human-shaped skins, empty inside.
This anomaly brought us a terrible disaster.
We prayed to the gods, but they did not respond.
On December 17th of the fourth year of the Truth Calendar, at Charité Hospital in Berlin, patient number 134, was in labor at 31 weeks of gestation, and her amniotic fluid was black.
When the uterus is cut open during a cesarean section, what comes out is not a baby, but a grayish-white, wriggling, filamentous substance.
Each filament was about the thickness of a pencil and covered with barbs. They writhed under the operating lights for about ten seconds before simultaneously shooting at the seven medical staff present, burrowing into their bodies through their nostrils, ear canals, and even hair follicles.
The host's body underwent a complete transformation within three minutes. Bones protruded to form bony armor, and the skin faded to become translucent.
Two weeks later, parasites broke out simultaneously in various parts of the world.
We suffered heavy losses.
Merritt said they didn't come in from the outside. They've always been there; we just couldn't see them before.
Lin Xiaohe reviewed Hao Jiejie's memories again but found no information about the Red Moon or the Divine Tree.
In other words, the Red Moon World arrived even earlier than Hao Jiejie.
Lin Xiaohe circled the divine tree and the red moon before continuing to read.
Part Two: Humanity's Struggle and the Birth of the Five Major Powers
God bears witness that we never give up! Even though ten years ago in the Truth Calendar, we were beaten like drowning dogs.
During this period, humanity lost 61 percent of its military strength and 87 percent of its government institutions.
Our prized guns and cannons are ineffective against the Otherworldly Demons. (Addendum: These guns and cannons are utter garbage!) The first true force of resistance belonging to humanity finally appeared in January of the tenth year of the Truth Calendar!
That is our incomparably brave, guardians of light and justice—the Knights! (Applause is appropriate here.)
They originated from the Gdansk shipyard in Poland.
With the blessing of the Archbishop of St. Petersburg, workers and veterans forged the first batch of "silver-plated weapons" from shipbuilding steel plates.
According to the library researchers, silver can disrupt the stability of otherworldly existence. (Yes, that's us, full of wisdom!)
The first commander, Jarosław Kowalski, single-handedly held off three Type III Otherworldly Demons for forty-seven minutes at the gate of the Gdansk shipyard, buying time for the evacuation of three thousand civilians.
His weapon was a silver-plated forklift. He lost his left arm, right eye, and half of his jaw in the battle, but he survived.
In a later interview, he only said one sentence: "For the world!"
Upon seeing this, Lin Xiaohe frowned deeply.
Will silver affect the stability of the Otherworldly Demons? Why? Are the Otherworldly Demons here members of the Underworld? Or are they from the earlier Witch Clan?
With these questions in mind, Lin Xiaohe continued reading.
Yes, the second force to emerge is us!
We were only a tiny bit later than the Knights.
Our predecessor was the Vatican Secret Archives.
Following the Pope's disappearance, the College of Cardinals activated the Noah's Library emergency plan, transferring all forbidden documents from the seventh underground level to the surface and beginning a systematic study of the demons.
The core theory proposed by the first curator, Abraham von Hewitt, is: one cannot fight against it, but only understand it. Understanding to its fullest extent is mastery.
(Rumors suggest that his understanding actually originated from a mysterious space. Some later speculated that he was the first person to enter or come into contact with the space of destiny.)
The library's initial collection consisted of only 3,700 books, all of which were banned books, heretical doctrines, and occult manuscripts confiscated by the Inquisition.
By the twelfth year of the Truth Calendar, the library had exceeded four hundred thousand volumes, seventy-three percent of which were copies of materials recovered from the Destiny Space. (A hymn to the heroes!)
The third force is the Blacksmith Brotherhood.
They came from the Ruhr industrial region of Germany. Miners and steelworkers discovered in underground mines that the alien demons had a significant aversion to high-temperature, high-pressure steam.
They modified the mine's steam engine, increasing the boiler pressure to four times the normal value, and created the first Purifier Steam Gun.
Using compressed steam as the launch power, the projectile, which is a mixture of silver powder, salt particles, and holy water, is accelerated to subsonic speed.
The disadvantages are that the boiler water needs to be refilled after every three shots, and the barrel life is no more than one hundred rounds.
Its advantage is that it can indeed kill Type I and Type II Otherworldly Demons. More importantly, it provides ordinary people with a weapon to resist.
The fourth force is the Stargazers, originating from the Bern Psychiatric Hospital in Switzerland. The attending physician, Carl Jung, discovered while treating patients with dream corruption that some of them, after being invaded by demonic entities, not only did not go insane, but instead gained a kind of 'perceptual distortion' ability.
Stargazers artificially develop this ability through drugs, hypnosis, and brain surgery (with an extremely low success rate). They do not participate in direct combat but instead function as radar and jammers behind the battlefield.
The fifth force is the Silent Sisters, who come from Lourdes, France.
When a group of nuns were besieged by demons at a pilgrimage site, they all knelt down to pray.
They prayed to be vessels for the divine to descend. Their prayers were answered by something. (I'm not sure if it was our deity, but they firmly believed it was.)
After the first Sister Margaret sealed away the Weeping Mother, a Type IV obsessive entity, her body transformed into a two-meter-tall stone statue that constantly dripped black slime.
The stone statue still stands on the site of Lourdes Church.
(While I am proud of humanity's resistance, I must admit that at this point, humanity was nothing more than a disorganized mess.)
Upon seeing this, both Lin Xiaohe and Chen Ying noticed something strange!
(End of this chapter)