The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 75

Perfit looked down at the remains of the ancient god, whose name had been forgotten, and felt an emotion she couldn't fully explain—not fear, not awe, but something closer to pity.

The deity who once received countless prayers and offerings from travelers now lies here, its face worn smooth by time.

Those who once devoutly lit the sacred fire before this altar and prayed for a safe journey are long gone, their descendants are dead, and their descendants don't even know what gods they once worshipped.

And she stands here, before a god who has fallen many centuries ago, holding in her hand an analysis report of the sinful remnants left behind by another dead god or something similar.

This is time—fair, silent, and crushing everything.

Just then, a voice came from behind her.

It wasn't the sound of wind, nor the sound of pebbles rolling down; it was the sound of human footsteps, extremely faint, making only a very fine rustling sound when stepping on the pebbles.

Perfit's first reaction was to hold her cane horizontally in front of her, and her second was to activate the Emerald Record: All-Seeing Eye in her right eye. However, her mental strength had not yet fully recovered to the point where she could use the All-Seeing Eye at will; she only managed to catch a blurry, slowly moving outline of energy at the edge of her vision—

They are not infected; infected individuals do not exhibit this stable, rhythmic energy fluctuation.

Belfast was faster; the head maid had already silently turned towards the direction of the footsteps, her arm blade popping out half an inch from her sleeve, flashing a thin, cold glint in the moonlight.

An old woman emerged from the shadow of the stone pillar.

She was hunched over, wearing a dark gray cloak with the hood pulled low, covering most of her face except for her chin and the wrinkles around her lips.

Those wrinkles were so deep they looked like they'd been carved with a knife, each one inlaid with grime that couldn't be washed off after years of living outdoors.

Her steps were slow, but not in a weak or trembling way; rather, they were a calm and unhurried pace, as if she were completely unconcerned about her surroundings.

She held nothing in her hands; her free hands hung naturally at her sides. The cuffs of her cloak were so worn that loose threads were showing, and her fingers were as thin and dry as withered branches.

She stopped a few steps away from Perfitt and slowly raised her head.

The moment Perfit saw her face, he involuntarily held his breath.

It was an extremely old face—so old that Perfit couldn't tell how many years she had lived. But what shocked Perfit wasn't the age of the face, but the eyes that peered out from the shadows of the hood.

Those eyes were cloudy and white, with a very thin layer of gray covering the pupils, as if they were suffering from some kind of eye disease.

But when she looked up at Perfit, her eyes revealed a depth that was completely different from her appearance, as if she could see right through a person in an instant.

Perfit felt as if all her disguises had been stripped away under that gaze—not her skin, not her clothes, but something deeper, those secrets she had kept hidden in her heart and never told anyone. Before those cloudy yet sharp eyes, they seemed to have nowhere to hide.

That's something no human being could do. The old woman seemed to know this too, but she showed no boasting or attempt to hide it. She simply looked at Perfit, as if she were looking at someone who had been destined to be here long ago.

She simply stared at Perfit's heterochromatic eyes—crimson in the left and emerald green in the right—with her cloudy eyes for a long time, then a look of indescribable surprise crossed her face as if she recognized something she had seen long ago but never expected to see again.

"Heterochromatic eyes," she began, her voice hoarse and dry, each word seeming to have been unearthed from a long-sealed tomb, still shrouded in the dust of history. "The left eye is red, the right eye is green. The left eye is hers, the right eye is His."

She gave it to you, and He gave it to you too. No, that's not right...

Did you steal it? Or did it steal you? It doesn't matter. Neither does. You stand between two worlds, child.

The shadow beneath your feet does not belong to this world, but the blood on your body is a gift from this world.

How strange. How strange. But it's alright. It's good. You stand there, one foot on the ashes that have already burned out, the other on the tinderbox that hasn't been lit yet.

Perfit gripped her cane tightly. She could feel the muscles in her back tensing, but her voice remained steady: "Who are you? Who are the 'she' and 'He' you speak of?"

The old woman did not answer her.

She tilted her head, as if listening to a sound only she could hear, and then suddenly smiled.

The laughter was short, just one sound, which she swallowed back herself.

She continued, her speech fluctuating in speed and tone, as if she were repeating the words spoken by several different people at several different times: "Sin has awakened."

It didn't wake up today, it didn't wake up yesterday, it woke up a long, long time ago, but it just lay there, lay there, lay there—and now it's standing up.

It's not here, but it's nearby. You've seen its fragments, you've sealed it up, but there's more than just that one fragment.

Fragments were everywhere. They were calling out. Someone was collecting them, hammering them together with nails, welding them together with blood and fire. A madman. A clever madman…”

Perfit's heart skipped a beat.

She wanted to press him for answers, but she knew that a truly eloquent old madman was difficult to urge.

As expected, the old woman didn't wait for her to speak. She slowly raised her withered fingers from under her cloak and pointed to the spot where Perfit was standing.

In the moonlight, the lines etched by time on her hands resembled weathered inscriptions on an ancient stone slab: "The dead gods are not quite dead. They shouldn't be. They were buried too shallow. They are always moving. They are always turning over."

When sin awakens, those names that should never be mentioned again will rise from the grave—not come back to life, but simply float. Like bubbles. Like marsh gas at the bottom of a swamp.

Have you ever seen a swamp? Those bubbles rising from the black mud, one after another, one after another—you've seen them too. You've seen those bubbles. You know what they are. You do.

Perfit frowned; she had indeed seen it before.

While marching through the swamps, she had seen bubbles rising from the depths of the mud, each bursting to release a stale, sulfurous stench.

When the Jade Record was analyzing the essence of the divine evil, it once opened a memory about the structure of the seal deep in her consciousness. At the end of those overlapping seals were locked things that were no longer the seals themselves—they floated up one by one, each with a different shape. Some were incomplete, but each one was wrapped in visible soul pain.

She initially thought they were remnants of energy released during the collapse and didn't delve into their specific identities.

But now, looking back, those energy clusters marked as "unknown existences" in the Jade Record, if we take them out individually and examine them carefully, they are not nameless remnants.

They are names.

It is a forgotten name.