The Ascension Ritual. The Church's most important ceremony.

  The Papal States' biggest holiday was the weekly Mass. Its most significant ritual was the Ascension. These weren't contradictory statements—just different categories of importance.

  Norton sat on his bed and opened the two books.

  The Ascension. The Revival.

  Same slightly greasy covers, likely human skin. Contents he'd never seen before. Curiosity stirred—not about the content itself, but about how many of these doctrinal books the Church actually possessed. Why drip-feed them one by one instead of releasing everything at once?

  They weren't exactly state secrets. Eden already covered vampires. Handing these out wouldn't leak anything sensitive.

  Norton figured the higher-ups had to be mentally compromised. His earlier theory: not crazy from isolation themselves, but from constant exposure to the isolation-crazy. Contagious stupidity.

  He flipped open The Ascension.

  Predictably, it contained another story about God Caesar. And like The Covenant, it showed his less divine side.

  The Ascension read:

  Kuba was cast out. He drank the blood of living things. His teeth sharpened. His eyes reddened. His form withered and grew impure. To escape death, he grew wings to block the sun. His temperament turned increasingly savage.

  God walked in Eden and coupled with lambs until deep night. The scent of blood drew Kuba from his cave. He traveled ten thousand miles through the sky and slew God above the heavens. God's blood soaked the earth, awakening life in all things.

  In his anger, God's son beheaded Kuba and scattered his limbs to the four corners. Then he hung God's body on a wooden cross, exposed it to the sun's scorching, and called this The Ascension.

  The book ended there. Just those few lines. But they made Norton's eyebrows dance.

  Jesus Christ. If a missionary hadn't delivered this—if this were officially sanctioned Church literature—he'd assume some heretic wrote it.

  Read what it says: God had sex with sheep. Got too into it. His youngest son ambushed and killed him.

  Then his oldest son nailed him to a cross to bake in the sun and called it ascension.

  A few sentences nearly burned out Norton's CPU.

  Yes, earlier texts mentioned God crossbreeding things. But those framed it as divine creation. This book did nothing but depict God's filth.

  Exactly. Filth. In this version, God shed his divinity and wore human desire.

  That should be impossible.

  Every theological text shares one fundamental assumption: gods possess only divinity. Divinity manifests through creation, love, destruction. God sees human greed, so He floods the world. God says "let there be light," so the sun appears. These acts don't involve human reasoning or desire. Humanity shows up in depictions of sex and want.

  But this book gave God human desire. The urge to mate.

  The Covenant mentioned God mating too, but framed it as creation—species born from divine union. It depicted origins, not urges.

  The Ascension showed God coupling with lambs purely for pleasure. No creation. No divinity. Just raw want.

  If The Covenant qualified as legitimate Church literature through its creation narrative, then The Ascension was outright heretical—stripping God of divinity, slathering Him in humanity.

  In a faith-based institution, such a book should be forbidden, impossible to exist.

  That's what really burned Norton's processor.

  Simplified: the Church wrote a book undermining its own foundation. Like a capitalist country publishing a Communist manifesto as official doctrine.

  But that wasn't even the strangest part.

  What really baffled him was Poyin's subsequent actions.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Nailing God's corpse to a cross for sun exposure? What kind of insane move was that?

  Sure this wasn't an MVP celebration screen?

  The Covenant established that God created death and hung it in the sky. The sun represented death.

  Now God's body baked under that same sun. That didn't look like resurrection prep. More like using death to suppress God's revival.

  A human-like God, killed by His son, then hung on a cross to rot in sunlight. If this wasn't a forbidden text, what was? How could this exist in official Church canon?

  Norton felt his understanding of this "Church" crumbling.

  Their actions seemed brainless on surface, but the deeper he dug, the more disturbing it got. This place was a walking contradiction.

  "I really need to find a way out," Norton muttered. Soon.

  This place was too strange.

  He set The Ascension on the table and picked up The Revival.

  The Revival read:

  Death divided the divine body. Gods never truly die. God's corpse hangs on wood. His consciousness revives in Heaven.

  The Messenger laid waste to earth. Yona was imprisoned in the sun. Poyin used God's hanging corpse. Eden sealed off Heaven.

  The book held barely anything—just those few lines across three and a half pages. Big characters. Vertical layout.

  But the information density was terrifying.

  First: Heaven exists. Second: God isn't dead—His consciousness revived there. Third: Yona, the original Death God, appears for the first time, but God's Messenger—angels, presumably—imprisoned him in the sun. Fourth: Poyin used God's corpse to seal Heaven off from Eden.

  If Norton understood correctly, that was the gist.

  His brow furrowed. He'd lost the thread completely.

  The Church served God, so they'd side with Him. Poyin was God's eldest son, yet he'd nailed God's corpse to a cross, called it resurrection, left it to bake. So Poyin should also be on God's side.

  But then Heaven's Messenger sealed Yona in the sun, letting death itself slowly erode him. And Poyin used God's corpse to wall off Heaven from Earth.

  What did any of this mean?

  Norton couldn't untangle these relationships anymore.

  But none of that mattered, because neither book explained tomorrow's Ascension Ritual procedures!

  He'd read both cover to cover and still had no idea what he was supposed to do. Come tomorrow, he'd stand there like a confused goose and probably violate some Church law.

  He really didn't want that greatsword taking his head.

  Fine. He'd ask the knight at his door.

  Norton set the books down, stood, walked to the entrance, and nervously pulled open the door.

  If his life weren't literally at stake, he'd never voluntarily interact with those Church knights.

  Creak...

  The wooden door's movement instantly drew the church knight's attention. His cold gaze snapped toward Norton. Steel armor clinked. The greatsword rose.

  Norton's scalp tingled. He quickly pulled the door mostly shut, leaving only a crack, and whispered to the knight outside: "Wait! I just wanted to ask—there were no books about the Ascension Ritual procedures! These two only explain its origins, not the actual rules!"

  "You don't need to know more." The voice behind the steel helmet emerged cold and rasping, as frigid as the armor itself. Pure, mindless violence.

  Norton closed the door, defeated.

  What did that mean? He was participating in the Ascension Ritual! Why wouldn't they show him the procedures?

  Was it just gathering to chant scripture?

  Or some small-scale reenactment of the Ascension story?

  It couldn't be they'd actually hang him up there to ascend.

  No. Impossible. He'd just been ordained a missionary—officially promoted to Church laborer. They wouldn't burn him already.

  Most likely, a small group of missionaries would gather around a symbolic fire representing the Ascension and recite scripture.

  The more Norton thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed. Either that, or he'd stand in some corner as an irrelevant extra watching the whole thing unfold.

  He'd only just become a missionary. They wouldn't assign him anything important.

  Plus, he'd never even heard of this ritual before. That meant it must be a small, quiet affair. Definitely not something where he was the sacrifice. He'd just been promoted, for Christ's sake.

  If they wanted to kill him, they'd just do it. No need for a whole ceremony. Too much work.

  Norton comforted himself with this logic. It felt solid.

  He relaxed slightly and sat back on his bed.

  A day and a half of confinement didn't bother him. Twenty-plus years of isolation meant he excelled at lying or sitting still while his mind wandered elsewhere.

  Except for the hunger. That part would suck.

  While Norton lay in his room thinking cow thoughts, the Church had already mobilized for the Ascension Ritual two days away.

  St. Peter's Cathedral housed several thousand Church members within its sprawling walls. Its largest section? The cemetery out back.

  Here lay every priest and bishop from the past centuries—the ones who'd ranked above mere tools. Back when Norton was still a low-ranking believer, he'd come monthly to clean this place.

  He'd always thought the Church took memorializing the dead seriously. Every month, he'd find ash piles smoldering among the graves.

  What little Norton never realized: those ashes weren't from offerings. They were firewood, burned clean during past Ascension Rituals.

  And the next body to feed those flames? His.

  Ascension. You had to die to ascend. That's why they held it in the cemetery. And also—using pure faith and sacrifice to cleanse the graveyard's filth, preventing unclean things from spawning. Like vampires.

  So two days ago, preparations had already begun.

  A wooden cross stood planted in the cemetery's central clearing. Beneath the soil lay endless black residue—soot from countless fires, staining the earth permanently.

  The cross's vertical post rose tall and sturdy. At its base, firewood stacked high in layers.

  A bucket of oil sat nearby. Fuel for the flames. Also considered a holy object.

  Past rituals hadn't used oil. Wood burned hot enough to kill, which was sufficient for ascension.

  But Norton's impure soul set him apart from previous sacrifices. If he didn't burn completely, he might rise as a vampire. At least, that was the excuse. The real reason? Father Mia didn't want to see Norton's intact corpse. It would pain him, seeing that beautiful boy reduced to charred remains.

  Such a handsome child, blackened into unrecognizable human-shaped charcoal. Such a waste.

  Ashes fertilized soil beautifully. Hence the cemetery's lush grass and trees—like a carefully tended garden.

  So the Ascension Ritual had benefits. Fallen petals nourish the earth, as the saying went. Little Norton's ashes would enrich the ground nicely.

  Missionaries bustled about, decorating the scene with flowers. Fresh blooms—the Church's most effective tool for masking feces and covering stench.

  Father Mia stood in a small pavilion within the cemetery, watching the preparations unfold.

  Beside him, as always, stood Bishop Rosen, sipping wine from a glass goblet.

  On the stone table before him lay a book Norton had never seen.

  Vampires.

  The Holy Church had existed for millennia. The Papal States? Only three centuries old. Vampire research had begun when the Church first formed, compiled over nearly a thousand years by generations of members. They'd probed fairly deep.

  But only surface-deep, really.

  Something about vampires being God's adversaries made research difficult.

  The main obstacle: the Church couldn't cultivate vampires for observation.

  Still, a millennium of study gave them confidence they'd identified the key factors for vampire emergence. (Confidence only—not actual fact.)

  One: No faith. No belief in God. Extremely impure thoughts.

  Two: Death by extreme means.

  Three: Deep, abiding resentment.

  According to Church records, every confirmed vampire case involved these three conditions. Yet when they tried manufacturing vampires experimentally, success eluded them completely. Perhaps their souls already belonged to God, immune to impurity. Or perhaps divine protection kept their corpses from transforming.

  Useful passive ability, certainly. But the higher-ups found it terribly inconvenient. Vampires lived forever. Ugly, sure. Blood-drinking, absolutely. But immortal. That appealed to the powerful.

  Many bishops, facing death, tried converting themselves. None succeeded. Only faithless wretches, slaughtered in agony with hearts full of hate, might possibly rise as vampires. (Might. Low probability.)

  Apparently, becoming a vampire required purer hatred than serving God required faith?

  Norton's faith wasn't pure. He had his own thoughts. The torture of burning alive would spark genuine resentment. But his Church membership should still prevent transformation.

  Still, who could guarantee those research records were correct?

  Safer to burn Norton completely. Ensure he never rose as one of them.