Bloodborne Eternal Beast - 39/40 (Patreon)

Chapter 039: Old Hunter Bone

The bell rang hollow and urgent, piercing the dense fog. A moment later, two identically dressed emissaries emerged from the gate above and to the right, like phantoms answering a summons.

Their cloaks billowed in the unnatural currents, resembling the vast wings of night owls. The Lanterns in their hands flickered with an ominous phosphorescent flame, casting a ghastly blue light that made their faces look like those of drowned men.

The leader asked coldly, “Why did you summon us?”

“He entered illegally! He has no pass badge, and he killed the guards at the Tomb of Oedon!”

“What?!”

The color instantly drained from the other two men’s faces. Only their terrified eyes remained, stretched so wide that their sockets seemed ready to split.

The leader paced several circles around Charles as though closing in on prey. His nostrils flared as if sniffing out some invisible evidence of guilt. At last, he delivered his judgment in a strange, chant-like cadence.

“Yes. He reeks of sacrilege and has been tainted by Beast Blood. To protect the Upper City, a purification ritual must be carried out. In the name of the Healing Blood and the gods, you are sentenced to death by fire.”

From beginning to end, the Church emissaries behaved like puppets following a fixed set of commands. They gave Charles no chance to explain himself and tried to bind him to the smoke-blackened cross with coarse hemp rope soaked in holy oil.

Standing beneath the cross, Charles remained unnervingly calm. He even counted the charred marks upon it. There were twelve in all.

A few scraps of linen still clung to the newest mark, their edges curled and blackened. Several dying embers drifted down on the wind and brushed past the tip of his nose, carrying the pungent odor of pine resin, grease, and something indescribably similar to burning bone.

“The holy fire will cleanse you of your sins.”

The lead emissary brought the Torch closer. Its wavering flames illuminated the twisted smile splitting his lips, a smile filled with morbid madness. He seemed to draw some perverse nourishment from the duty of burning others alive and clearly took pleasure in his work.

The next instant, however, the cold gleam of death replaced the heat of the flames.

Charles moved faster than the eye could follow. There was only the faint scrape of leather against metal before the seemingly refined Threaded Cane snapped straight and became a streak of silver lightning that pierced the emissary’s throat.

“Splurt!”

His ruptured carotid artery sent a magnificent yet brutal arc of blood spraying through the light of the setting sun. The scalding blood, still warm with life, splashed across the cold iron cross and immediately began to sizzle, releasing a searing crimson mist heavy with a sweet metallic stench.

Before the first body had even struck the ground, while strands of broken hemp rope still drifted through the air like desperate moths, Charles flicked his wrist.

The Threaded Cane changed form once more. The serrated whip hissed like a living creature as it wrapped around the second man’s ankle.

Charles yanked hard. The man’s shinbone broke with a crisp snap, and the barbs tore mercilessly through his Lantern. The unidentified corpse oil inside burst outward with the flames and engulfed his cloak with a roar.

His scream had barely escaped his throat when his burning vocal cords twisted it into something inhuman. The sound dissolved into a thick cloud of smoke carrying the stench of scorched flesh and died in the air.

The final man had already lost all composure. He collapsed before the bronze gate and hammered frantically on the knocker.

“Open the door! Hurry, open it!”

The bronze-plated doors did not move in the slightest. His useless pounding only tore open his palms, leaving them slick with blood.

Then the Threaded Cane, precise and merciless as the finger of Death, pierced the back of his skull. Blood and brain matter splattered across the already stained knocker, coating it with a fresh layer of the same warm color.

The raised designs upon the door depicted some unnameable ritual. As blood soaked into them, they seemed to come alive, flickering with a faint ghostly light as they greedily drank in the final offering.

Charles crouched down and unhurriedly wiped the blood from his weapon using the fine lining of an emissary’s cloak. Only then did he notice the womb-shaped oval crest embroidered in dark thread inside it, the emblem of a Pthumerian family that symbolized fertility and secrecy.

He rose and crushed the scattered confession documents beneath his boots without hesitation. The brittle parchment broke with a faint sound like a mournful cry. Written upon them were the names of numerous residents who had been sacrificed.

These Church emissaries were mixed-blood descendants of Pthumerians and Yharnamites. They belonged to an ordinary noble class within the Church, outwardly prestigious but ultimately insignificant.

They relied on inherited privilege and the authority of the Church, yet possessed no real ability of their own. That was why Charles had subdued them so easily.

Charles had no fear of retaliation.

During the Night of the Hunt, everyone feared for their own survival. Had their families or the Church truly valued them, reinforcements would already have gathered outside. Instead, there was only the cold bronze gate, tightly sealed.

Unfortunately, Charles still had no way to enter.

Perhaps that was for the best. At least he would not have to worry about more frenzied Beasts passing through here and invading the relatively safe Oedon Chapel.

As he departed, the sharp tap of his Threaded Cane against the ground awakened the Carrion Crows sleeping in a nearby alley.

Without so much as looking at them, Charles picked up a Lantern whose flame had not yet gone out and hurled it with a flick of his arm.

Oil splashed across the alley. Flames erupted with a roar, and the entire flock was instantly reduced to a cloud of crackling ash that filled the air with a rancid stench.

Charles then collected the Madman’s Knowledge whispering ominously from the corner as casually as though he were plucking wild fruit from the roadside.

After confirming that no hidden dangers remained in the courtyard, he turned toward the opposite side and quickly disappeared into deeper shadow.

When Charles emerged from the chapel’s side door, he found more Church emissaries patrolling the area. He had no patience for another pointless exchange. Combat had already become instinctive to him, so he attacked without warning.

The icy gleam of the Threaded Cane swept through the air like a crescent moon.

The two emissaries had only just placed their hands on their weapons and had not even managed to draw them when their heads, still wearing exaggerated top hats and frozen in astonishment, slid from the smooth cuts at their necks.

They rolled away and fell into the filthy gutter with two wet splashes.

The holy water flasks at their waists shattered soon afterward. The so-called holy water mingled with the still-warm fat spilling from their bodies and flowed across the blue-gray flagstones, forming a grotesque and ironic blasphemous pattern that resembled a mockery of the Eucharist.

Beneath a withered tree in the corner of the courtyard, Charles unexpectedly discovered the body of a well-dressed Hunter.

The man who should have been guarding the chapel had died in a baffling and unexplained manner.

There were almost no wounds on his body, yet his face was frozen in an expression of absolute terror. His eyes bulged from their sockets, their pupils unfocused, as though he had witnessed some horrifying truth in his final moments, something capable of destroying all reason in an instant.

As Charles bent down to inspect the corpse, he noticed a corner of parchment clutched tightly in the dead man’s stiff, curled hand. His knuckles had turned white from the force of his grip.

Charles pried apart the cold fingers and removed the fragment.

Only a few hastily scrawled words were written upon it, almost too illegible to read. They appeared to have been scratched down with a fingernail dipped in some dark brown liquid.

“They are not trying to purify the Beasts...”

The rest of the sentence had been obscured by a large spray of blood that had long since dried and blackened. It was as though an invisible hand had covered the words, forever concealing the horror beneath them, a horror that might have shaken all of Yharnam to its core.

...

Chapter 040: The Mysterious Black Hole

Charles dropped to one knee and cautiously reached toward the Hunter’s corpse, hoping to find more clues.

The instant his fingertips touched it, there came a faint crack.

It was not the sound of flesh tearing, but of ice crystals shattering. The corpse suddenly burst apart, scattering no blood or gore. Instead, it blossomed into an eerie cluster of transparent crystals that refracted every color of the rainbow.

Sealed within the crystals like ancient insects trapped in amber were twelve pairs of miniature eyes, silently weeping. Their pupils were all different colors, yet each shed glittering tears, as though burdened with endless suffering and curses.

The “gifts” of the Great Ones always appeared in the cruelest and most incomprehensible forms.

Charles jerked his hand back as though stung by a venomous scorpion. The bizarre vision vanished the moment contact was broken, as if it had never existed. Only a cold, stabbing pain remained in his fingertips, like the lingering sensation of touching metal frozen far below zero.

“Was it an illusion? Or...”

He murmured to himself. His voice sounded unusually clear in the deathly silent courtyard, carrying the faintest trace of uncertainty.

Reality gave him no time to think. A deep roar that defied all reason, as though it had come from the depths of the cosmos, tore through the stillness of the cemetery.

The entire courtyard began to distort. It folded inward like a sheet of parchment seized and crumpled by an invisible giant hand.

Above him, the sky that had resembled blood-soaked gauze split open with a deafening crack, revealing a vast, irregular, blasphemous eye whose edges shimmered with murky, unnatural colors.

Countless slick, pitch-black, shapeless tentacles extended from the depths of the fissure like ravenous pythons. Wherever they passed, the air wailed as though being corroded, and the structure of reality melted like wax.

More terrifying still, an entire galaxy seemed imprisoned within the heart of that writhing darkness. Billions of stars struggled and flickered in despair inside it.

This was no ordinary black hole. It was a devouring abyss filled with malice, cast into this fragile dimension by some supreme being slumbering in another plane.

As it expanded, its unnatural and terrifying gravitational pull intensified rapidly.

Twisted human faces bulged from the surfaces of the Headstones beneath Charles’s feet. Their stone lips opened and closed stiffly, reciting blasphemous, mind-shattering prayers in a long-lost language, their voices mingling with the grinding of sand and stone.

A nearby coffin burst apart under the strain before falling into the abyss. From the shattered burial shroud, pale finger bones reached out as though alive, clawing frantically at what remained of reality. They resembled the final, futile plea for help from someone drowning in the depths.

An invisible ripple of gravity swept past.

Agony tore across the back of Charles’s hand. When he looked down, he saw his skin splitting open on its own, forming a precise and cruel rose-shaped pattern of cracks. Beneath it, the muscle fibers snapped one after another like strings plucked by invisible fingers, producing faint popping sounds.

Worse still, his soul had begun to resonate dangerously with the black vortex.

With every turn of the whirlpool, he felt his consciousness and soul being drawn out like threads pulled from his body, ready to abandon his flesh and fly into that eternal darkness.

This was the prelude to digestion by a higher-dimensional being.

Unless he escaped immediately, he would share the fate of the Hunter on the ground. His body and soul would be dismantled, assimilated, and reduced to part of that horrifying stellar abyss, condemned to wander within it forever.

His survival instinct overwhelmed everything else.

Without hesitation, Charles lashed out with the Threaded Cane. Its tip shrieked through the air and embedded itself deep in the wall of a nearby disused well. Gripping the whip, he fought against the gravity threatening to tear him apart and hauled himself forward with all his strength.

Under the tremendous strain, the serrated edges of the Threaded Cane bit back into his palms, tearing deeply into the flesh. His warm blood spilled into the air and, distorted by the gravitational pull, traced broken and unnatural blood runes behind him.

Charles clenched his teeth and did not hesitate.

At the last possible moment, he gathered every ounce of his strength and threw himself into the deep well, which reeked of age and something unknown.

From the space above came a mournful sigh filled with disappointment and hunger. It echoed directly inside his mind.

Holding his breath, Charles plunged downward as quickly as he could, desperate to put as much distance as possible between himself and the all-consuming danger.

The bone-chilling water soaked through his clothes at once.

In the dim light, he was horrified to discover that the pale walls of the well were not built from stone. They had been formed from the curled spines of countless pilgrims, packed tightly together in postures of kneeling prayer.

As he climbed, a jagged bone spur protruding from the wall like a living thing suddenly bit into his wrist.

There was a sharp hiss as it branded his forearm with a clear, burning Sacrifice Number written in Pthumerian script.

More disturbing still, the blood flowing from his wound did not disperse through the water. Like living ink, it crawled across the walls and began drawing a succession of flickering prophetic images.

Millions of corpses bearing the same number and the same face were repeating his fall across different times and dimensions, without end.

Rumble!

Immediately afterward, the gelatinous nebular matter within the well seemed to awaken. It seeped through every pore of his body and forcibly reshaped his cells, bringing a sensation that was at once painful, numbingly itchy, and strangely full.

Charles endured the discomfort of being altered against his will. He had no time to investigate its cause. Relying only on his stubborn will, he climbed upward with all his strength.

When he finally dragged himself out of the well, soaked and disheveled, some will from beyond the stars projected a perfectly distinct, searing star-wheel mark onto his wet skin.

It was a mark of dominion, branding him with the ownership and attention of an incomprehensible higher-dimensional creature.

The strange events continued without pause.

A deafening hum suddenly filled his mind, like billions of insects beating their wings at once.

“This is bad... It feels just like taking in too much Madman’s Knowledge...”

A vast flood of chaotic fragments filled with maddening whispers threatened to burst his mind apart.

To escape the mental torment before it drove him insane, Charles instinctively seized a Throwing Knife and plunged it into his thigh without hesitation, hoping that extreme pain would drag his consciousness back from the brink.

“Ngh!”

The sharp agony surged through his body like an electric current, as though every cell were screaming.

Only after he twisted the handle a full ninety degrees inside the wound did the soul-rending pain finally allow him to reclaim a shred of himself from the raging torrent of collective consciousness.

He had no time even to bandage the wound. Ignoring his injuries, he limped as quickly as he could toward Oedon Chapel.

At that moment, an icy whirlwind carrying the stench of grave soil and decay struck without warning.

Boom!

A massive Hunter Axe, as broad as a door and gleaming with an ominous cold light, crashed down beside him. Fragments of stone flew like bullets and battered his body.

The overwhelming aura of death and decay surrounding the Hunter Axe nearly suffocated Charles.

He spun around and saw a colossal figure dressed in filthy, tattered white robes. Like a Nightmare crawling from beneath the earth, the giant advanced with earthshaking steps, carrying a terrifying battle axe more than two meters long.

“Nothing good has happened since I came here. It’s been one strange disaster after another!”

Charles’s heart sank.

His brutal battle with Father Gascoigne had already cost him much of his equipment. He had also lost the Threaded Cane while escaping the black hole’s terrifying pull.

There was only one sensible choice left.

Run.

Drawing out the last of his strength, Charles desperately shoved open the familiar, heavy doors of Oedon Chapel. He stumbled inside in a panic, nearly crawling across the threshold.