My Wonderful Second Life

Chapter 78- A Golden Prayer

Smoke engulfed the room, and even though I had covered my nose and eyes, tears rushed down my cheeks. Coughing, I tried to breathe slowly to avoid the worst of the effects of my bullet.

While doing it, I ventured close to the smoke, always protecting my nose and with my eyes half closed, trying to find Cedric.

However, after taking a few steps, everything grew bright, the smoke dissipated and the musket in my back grew hot. In pain, I threw it away before it could burn through my clothes and into my flesh. During my panic, the pistol fell from my hand, clashing against the hard floor. In the overall chaos, I noticed letters glowing in the marble ground, golden and ancient. A blessing circle.

Confused, I turned around, trying to grasp the situation. Blessing circles could only be activated by intensive prayer. However, in the beginning, I had seen and heard nothing. A seethed dread built up inside of me. But then, whispers rose from the darkest corners of the room, outside the blessed circle, and I could finally gather that the statues I had passed before were, instead, real people. Priests prayed slowly and almost inaudibly, yet their power could be felt in the room.

The words of the goddess hummed, mixing images in my head and voices in my ears. I tried to shake myself out of it, to feel whole again. To remember something that was now on the back of my mind, hiding itself from me.

My eyes landed on Cedric, chained and unconscious, twitching in suffering. Such heavy blessings could be deadly to the Moon people.

The memory of the first time I had heard of a blessing circle came in as an uninvited guest. It was as big as this one but in a different place and time. And I did not hear about it, I read about it. Outside of this world in the comfort of my old, torn armchair. It was a blessing circle made of holy water, commissioned by the Mountnero Duke for Cedric's son.

Slowly, but surely, I walked my way to Cedric, gritting my teeth at the unwanted struggle. My feet seemed made of bulky stone and my will of feathers dancing in the wind. I reached close enough to try calling for him, though there was no sign that he had heard me. I tried then to reach his chains, golden like those that had chained Wolff in that awful prison. However, before I could even touch them, I felt something sharp on my back and I fell to the ground in pain.

I remembered then what had been hiding in the back of my head. The Empress.

Blood spilt from the gushing wound in one of my ribs, obscuring some of the glowing letters, as the voice of the Empress filled the room with hate. "Rat."

I turned my blurry eyes up to see her, her hair and dress perfect and her face twisted in disdain. Her hands burned as she held a strange syringe, smeared with blood on its thick tip. It was as if she felt nothing besides an intense hatred for me.

The syringe, as big as my lower leg, was made of copper and a shiny material that reminded me of the weird glow of Lady Bianca's cane. It burned her like my musket did to me... No. Like my bullets did. I noticed them, not far off, fizzling against the glowing letters.

The blessing circled warded against magic. It made my musket burn as it had one of my bullets inside, while my pistol, which had no bullet, was fine. However, if my assessment was right, it meant that the Empress was holding an alchemy object, just like Lady Beatrice back then.

The realization opened the door for a panoply of questions. Yet at that moment, I had to focus on a way out. Those questions would have to wait until this ordeal ended.

Without the possibility of using my weapons, escaping wouldn't be feasible. I looked around at the priests still praying, their eyes closed in deep concentration, while I grasped the situation. The blessing circle was a powerful tool, albeit limited in its scope. The priests needed to avoid moving and ensure their prayers never halted or frayed from their rhythm, if not the circle would lose its power.