The Outsider Church started a witch hunt.
But they couldn’t immediately find and kill a witch like they hoped.
Considering the era is close to modern times, it’s not that surprising.
Magic exists in this world, but it’s fragmented, making it almost invisible except to a privileged few.
The key point here is the slow speed of information transfer.
Most information travels at the speed of someone walking.
The good news is that, although slow, the range of spread is wide.
If there is the Outsider Church, everyone knows about it.
This is because the holy site is a place where all the followers of Outsider gather.
The ones spreading the tales are the pilgrims visiting the Ansellus Kingdom.
While waiting for a blessing at the holy site, they converse with those gathered there. That’s when they hear about the witch hunt and return home.
Rebecca actually planned this, creating a system inspired by a certain religion to spread her word far and wide.
This time, she won the religious war. Taking the chance, she spread her news along with her joyful tidings.
The reason Rebecca built the holy site originally and wrote the visitor log was for this purpose.
Once, while something entered her body and moved, Rebecca learned this by viewing the memories of a man.
Inside those memories, there was a fascinating world.
The most interesting part was the history he had seen and learned.
A tale about how one world flowed.
In fact, Rebecca didn’t intend to delve deeply into other worlds.
But the memories of the Outsider she peered into were mostly filled with an overwhelming emptiness of nothingness.
And among the memories of a person losing their mind, unable to even scream in a place void of everything, there was a coldness more painful than having one’s heart ripped out by a strange device.
Watching it made Rebecca feel like she might go mad. So, she forced herself to see memories of the Outsider when they were still human.
Thus, she gained various types of memories.
Six months is a short time, but with the body’s control completely taken away, she had plenty of time to concentrate.
No, she desperately clung to those memories without a break, fearing if she didn’t, she’d have to see the memories of a slowly going insane human.
And suddenly, she regained her body.
Knowing what the Outsider was, she unleashed words that would make Yasle suffer.
In the end, as Yasle collapsed and Joanna was also killed, she recalled a witch’s face but no longer wanted to be near that cult, so she left.
The world is a harsh place for a girl to live alone.
But if she has special abilities?
Within her chest lay a heart created by the Outsider. Once fully activated, it could unleash an enormous amount of heat and generate enough strength to defeat armed bandits and even a powerful army.
Thinking it was ridiculous to act weak while holding such a heart, she lived her life.
But she only realized something was odd with her body after finding a good person to marry and giving birth to a child.
Luckily, the child was an ordinary person, but Rebecca did not age.
People reject what is different from themselves.
Gradually, the villagers viewed her with suspicion. So, she was eventually forced to move to a place a bit away from the village.
Rebecca could instantly take out any dangerous beasts or bands of thieves if they attacked. So the villagers did not want her to leave.
Yet, she wasn’t someone they wanted to see in the village. Thus, they sent her to a remote area away from the village.
Still, since her child lived in the village, Rebecca didn’t think too much about it.
As time passed, her child grew up, and her grandchild became an adult, she hardly ever went to the village.
The village grew to a point where her strength was no longer needed, and visiting would bring her more disdain than warmth.
That was fine until one day.
A drought struck. The woods dried up, food for people disappeared, and a strange disease spread.
Another year of famine hit.
And once again the same thing happened.
That year, one day, while Rebecca went into the village for some matters, the villagers attacked her, claiming that since she alone was young and healthy, eating her would allow them to survive, a crazy logic.
While fleeing, Rebecca saw something very strange.
Hanging in a butcher’s shop was what seemed to be the upper body of a person, labeled as meat that could cure all diseases.
Nearby, an arm of a person floated in a boiling pot. Yet that hand looked vaguely familiar. Drawn in a trance, she approached and overturned the pot.
A flood of corpses spilled out.
Including that of her child. And beneath the pile of flesh, she saw the tiny hand of her grandchild, the same tiny hand that had once held three of her fingers tightly.
Rebecca lost her sanity.
She didn’t think of them as monsters.
She thought they were people.
Because her heart no longer beat, she believed she was no longer human.
On the opposite side of being non-human is humanity. Hence, those were people, and she was a monster.
Monsters and humans.
There was no reason to hesitate.
It took her less than half a day to turn the place that was once a village into a plain of dirt and sand.
Staring blankly at the ground, devoid of ruins, she moved on, wandering like someone searching for a place to die without returning home.
She witnessed people eating other people multiple times.
While traversing a world struck by three years of famine, she truly believed humans were the problem.
Logically thinking, that’s odd.
No matter how emotionally one viewed it, seeing a person do anything to survive in extreme circumstances and defining that as humanity is illogical.
But she wasn’t thinking logically.
She wanted to release her hatred.
She decided to summon the worst monster she knew. A monster that once was human, so it knew humans too well.
Referencing the memories of the Outsider, she devised a plan for the Outsider to devour everyone.
This was before Rebecca had entered the Outsider Church.
And what she sought was not pure vengeance against Hyungkesuni.
Rather, it was the opposite.
She anticipated that Hyungkesuni would disrupt her plans.
She knew Yasle was connected to Hyungkesuni.
And she remembered Yasle removing the Outsider from their body.
She speculated it was highly probable that Hyungkesuni had a way to return the Outsider. So, Rebecca decided to eliminate Hyungkesuni.
By chance, Hyungkesuni was also Dakota’s enemy, so it was a two-in-one deal.
But where in the world do things ever go as people wish?
The witch hunt transformed into something different than Rebecca had intended.
Most people held no strong feelings for Hyungkesuni.
Every day, someone who inflicted suffering on the Outsider appeared in their prayers, so they could hate them without truly feeling hatred.
It’s a strange expression, but emotionally, they felt no special emotion, yet they were habitually inclined to hate for the namesake.
In the first place, the Ansellus Kingdom was far from Hyungkesuni’s realm of activity. Therefore, the tales of witches were hardly more than stories of a wicked witch living deep in the forest.
In other words, it was someone else’s affair.
The story of the Outsider Church defeating the Seongsin Church was far more important.
The fact that the Seongsin directly erased even a few believers in the Outsider Church was far more urgent. Those preaching morals right beside were actually the bad guys. And getting a legal chance to smack down those bad guys?
The witch hunt transformed into a purge of the Seongsin Church.
They burned Seongsin Church items and captured and executed priests.
Hatred quickly spread like fire across the dry plains during the witch hunt festival.
In an instant, the traces of the Seongsin Church disappeared from the streets, leaving the Outsider Church to take its place.
This unfolded all over places in the east, centered around the Skad Desert.
However, Rebecca’s intentions were not completely buried.
Hatred does not easily fade.
People justified killing Seongsin followers under the pretext of punishing Hyungkesuni. Not only the followers of the Outsider Church but even those who did not particularly believe in deities habitually used the phrase of punishing Hyungkesuni.
Years later, in the west of the Kogni Kingdom, in the Ahu Jungle where the Yeongyang Church Nation once was, they reached the witch’s sanctuary deep within the woods.
Hyungkesuni was very displeased.
They held a festival pretending to punish Hyungkesuni.
However, by the time it reached her, the witch hunt festival was not an event solely about burning items related to the Seongsin Church.
Instead, they made a mixed event by putting old items or disposables in the middle of the village, crafting makeshift straw dolls called Hyungkesuni, striking them, and burning them along with the items—a blending of folk beliefs into a single celebration.
If they were burning Seongsin followers, it might have terrified her. But this kind of folk belief left Hyungkesuni feeling quite offended.
Unfamiliar people struck dolls bearing her name, cursing them, before setting them ablaze, drinking and feasting, celebrating as if they had defeated the witch.
A festival warding off calamities.
The witch hunt festival had transformed into this kind of simple event.
Again, Hyungkesuni was very displeased.
Thus, she cursed the first village that discovered this and killed them all. And over the years, she repeated the process several times.
Solely to vent her displeasure, cursing and killing to forget—nothing special, as she had lived that way all along.
However.
Dakota’s hatred reached Hyungkesuni.
Barely, the Outsider Church seized Hyungkesuni’s tail.
And they sent an official document to the Outsider Church in that area, intending to kill Hyungkesuni. The Outsider Church headquarters dispatched a legion of experts dedicated to capturing such beings.
At the forefront was a tall beauty with blue skin and purple hair—Dakota.
She was the saint of the Outsider Church and a war hero who survived the conflict with the Seongsin Church. Of course, she’s referred to as a guardian saint, but the essence is the same.
It means she wasn’t just someone who happened to be there but someone who fought earnestly.
A woman who lived solely for the sake of vengeance against Hyungkesuni was now on the move.
Now, in regions including the Kogni Kingdom, there were more people mobilizing to vanquish witches.
Wherever Hyungkesuni went, rumors of her would circulate in the villages she visited. And skilled individuals began to station themselves at the Outsider Church to hunt her down.
Even when she tried to wreak havoc as usual, people dedicated to vanquishing her appeared.
Her curses were gradually deciphered and blocked at their root, leading more people to search for her near her sanctuary.
A faint smile graced Hyungkesuni’s lips.
