The Outer God Church began the witch hunt.
However, just as they desired, they couldn’t immediately find the witch and kill her.
Considering that the current age is close to the early modern period, this isn’t so unusual.
In this world, there is magic, but it is fragmented, and unless you belong to the privileged class, you almost never see magic.
The most important factor here is the slow transmission of information.
Most information moves at the pace of a walking person.
The fortunate thing is that, even though the speed is slow, the reach was wide.
Whenever the Outer God Church exists, everyone knows about it.
Because the Holy Land is the place where all the followers of the Outer God Church gather.
The ones who spread the word are the pilgrims who visit Anselus Kingdom.
They wait to receive blessings at the Holy Land, and while there, they talk to others gathered there. Then they hear about the witch hunt and return home.
Rebecca actually planned for this, designing her words to spread far and wide by drawing inspiration from a religious system.
This time, she won the religious war. She took the opportunity and spread her message, bringing good news with her.
This 𝓬ontent is taken from fгeewebnovёl.co𝙢.
The reason Rebecca created the Holy Land and made people write in a guestbook was for this purpose.
Once, when something had entered her body and moved it, Rebecca learned this from the memories of a man.
The memory held a fascinating world.
The most notable part was the history he saw and learned.
The story of how one world flowed.
In fact, Rebecca hadn’t intended to delve deeply into other worlds.
However, the memories of the Outer God, which she glimpsed, were overwhelmingly filled with an emptiness that was almost incomprehensible. And the memory of a human going mad in a place so empty that they couldn’t even scream—it was filled with agony beyond even having their heart ripped out by strange instruments.
Seeing that, Rebecca herself almost lost her sanity. So, she forced herself to look back to when the Outer God was still human.
Thus, she obtained various kinds of memories.
Though half a year might not seem long, since her body was entirely under the control of another, she had a lot of time to focus.
In fact, it was more like she couldn’t afford to focus on anything else. If she didn’t focus on those memories, she would have to watch the memories of a human losing their mind, or worse, completely losing it.
Then, suddenly, she regained control of her body.
She knew what the Outer God was, but she spat out words that would make Yasla suffer.
When Yasla finally collapsed, and Joanna died,
She remembered a witch, but by then, she didn’t want to be anywhere near a cult, so she left.
A young girl living alone in the world finds it a harsh place.
But, with special abilities?
In her heart, she had the heart that the Outer God had created. When it fully rotated, it consumed immense energy, but it could be used to defeat not only armed bandits but even reasonably strong armies.
She thought it was strange that she had such a powerful heart but pretended to be weak as she lived her life.
But she only realized something was wrong with her body after marrying a good man and having children.
Fortunately, the child was an ordinary person, but Rebecca did not age.
People reject what is different from them.
The villagers gradually became uneasy about her. Eventually, she was forced to move to a place far from the village.
Rebecca could easily defeat dangerous beasts or bandit groups, so the villagers didn’t want her to leave.
But they didn’t want her in the village either. So, she was sent to a remote location.
Still, with her child living in the village, Rebecca didn’t care much.
As time passed, her child grew, and
her grandchild eventually reached adulthood. By then, Rebecca hardly ever visited the village anymore.
The village had grown to a point where they no longer needed her strength, and when she did visit, there were more people calling her a monster than there were people who treated her kindly.
That was fine.
But one day.
A famine hit. The forest dried up, the food for people disappeared, and strange diseases began to spread.
The famine lasted for another year.
And then another year came.
That year, one day, when Rebecca entered the village for some business, the villagers, driven mad by hunger, attacked her with the insane logic that since she was the only one still young and healthy, if they ate her, they might survive.
Rebecca, having completely lost her sense of reason due to hunger, fled, but as she did, she saw something truly bizarre.
Hanging in the butcher’s shop was what appeared to be the upper body of a person, labeled as meat that could cure all diseases.
And nearby, a pot was bubbling, with a human arm poking out of it. The hand looked incredibly familiar. She was drawn in, and when she approached, she overturned the pot.
A human corpse spilled out.
It was her child. And beneath the meat chunks, she saw the small hand of her grandchild, a hand she had once held with three of her fingers, now a tiny child’s hand.
Rebecca lost her sanity.
Rebecca didn’t think of them as monsters.
She thought it was because they were people.
Because her own heart no longer beat, she no longer considered herself human.
What lies on the opposite side of something not human is human. Therefore, they were people. She was the monster.
Monster and human.
There was no hesitation.
In less than half a day, the place that was once a village was turned into a barren field of dirt and sand.
She stared blankly at the ground, devoid of even ruins, before moving on. She didn’t return home, instead wandering like someone seeking a place to die.
She had witnessed people eating people several times.
As she roamed through the world ravaged by the three-year famine, she truly believed that people were the problem.
Logically speaking, this was absurd.
Even emotionally, after everything, it was still wrong to define someone as human just because they did whatever it took to survive in extreme circumstances.
But she didn’t think logically.
She wanted to release her hatred.
She decided to call forth the worst monster she knew. A monster that had once been human and knew people too well.
Drawing on the memories of the Outer God, she devised a plan to have the Outer God devour everyone.
This happened before Rebecca entered the Outer God Church.
And her search for Hyungkeshni wasn’t purely for vengeance.
On the contrary.
She had predicted that Hyungkeshni would interfere with her plans.
She knew that Yasla and Hyungkeshni had a connection.
She also remembered when Yasla removed the Outer God from his body.
She strongly suspected that Hyungkeshni might have a way to send the Outer God back. So, Rebecca decided to eliminate Hyungkeshni.
Moreover, since she was Dakota’s enemy, it served a dual purpose.
But where in the world do things ever go exactly as planned?
The witch hunt turned out differently than she had expected.
Most people didn’t have strong feelings about Hyungkeshni.
Every time they prayed, there was mention of the one who caused the Outer God’s suffering, and while they didn’t exactly hate her, they felt a kind of habitual disdain toward her name.
The explanation is a bit strange, but emotionally, they didn’t have any special feelings. It was more of a habitual hatred for a name that was traditionally associated with hatred.
At the start, Anselus Kingdom was far from Hyungkeshni’s domain. So, the talk of witches was limited to stories about evil witches in deep forests.
In short, it was someone else’s problem.
And the story of how the Outer God Church defeated the Holy God Church was more important.
It was more important that the Holy God had directly wiped out even those who believed in the Outer God.
The people who had been preaching morality right beside them turned out to be bad people, and now, there was a legal opportunity to beat those bad people?
The witch hunt morphed into a hunt for the Holy God Church.
Burning Holy God Church items, capturing former priests, and executing them.
Hatred spread quickly, fueled by the witch hunt festival, like a fire in the dry fields.
Within moments, the traces of the Holy God Church disappeared from the streets, and the Outer God Church took its place.
This happened in all the places east of the Scard Desert.
However, Rebecca’s intentions were not entirely buried.
Hatred is not easily erased.
People killed the Holy God Church followers in the name of punishing Hyungkeshni. It spread so widely that even those who didn’t strongly believe in God began to habitually use the phrase "punishing Hyungkeshni."
A few years later, in the west of Cogni Kingdom, once the land of the Younglan Kingdom, in the deep woods of the Adu jungle, it reached the witch’s hideaway.
Hyungkeshni was very displeased.
It was because people had held a festival in the name of punishing Hyungkeshni.
But when she finally arrived, the witch hunt festival was no longer about burning items associated with the Holy God Church.
It had turned into a festival of burning old items or things that needed to be disposed of, making a straw doll and beating it as Hyungkeshni, then burning it along with the items. It had become a festival mixed with folk beliefs.
Had it been about burning the followers of the Holy God Church, perhaps she would have been frightened. But this kind of folk belief greatly displeased Hyungkeshni.
People who didn’t even know her name would beat a doll representing her, curse it, then burn it. And around them, they celebrated the festival, claiming they had defeated the witch.
A festival for warding off evil.
The witch hunt festival had turned into this kind of simple event.
Again, Hyungkeshni was extremely displeased.
So, she cursed the village that first discovered it and killed everyone. She repeated this several times over the years.
It was just to relieve the bad feelings from that time, curse them, kill them, and forget. That’s how she had always lived, so it was nothing special.
But.
Dakota’s hatred reached Hyungkeshni.
Finally, the Outer God Church caught Hyungkeshni’s tail.
The Outer God Church sent a formal letter to the region, requesting the capture and death of Hyungkeshni. The headquarters of the Outer God Church sent an army of experts to handle such tasks.
At the head of this force was a tall beauty with blue skin and purple hair. Dakota.
She was a saint of the Outer God Church and a war hero who had survived the war with the Holy God Church. Of course, she was called a guardian saint, but the essence was the same.
She wasn’t just someone who happened to be there—she had fought directly.
A woman who had lived her life to take revenge on Hyungkeshni moved.
Now, in the Cogni Kingdom and the surrounding region, more and more people began moving to exterminate the witch.
Wherever Hyungkeshni went, information about her spread in the villages she passed through. To catch and kill her, skilled individuals from the Outer God Church began to station in those villages.
Even when Hyungkeshni tried to act as usual, people appeared to fight her off.
Her curse was slowly being analyzed and blocked from the root, and more and more people began searching for her near her hideout.
A very slight smile appeared on Hyungkeshni’s lips.