Chapter 344: Emergency Meeting in Western Continent
While the Eastern Continent has turned into chaos and was completely subdued by the Church, it is night time in the western continent and the emperor had an extremely solemn face.
He called for an emergency court meeting and the rest of the imperial court officials and the nobles could see how serious he was.
There are even the four-tower heads and four former tower heads who are currently running Sam's network.
He called everyone important.
"Tonight, I called you at this wee hour, because I have an extremely important matter to tell you guys.
Approximately a week ago, we found an anomaly in the communication network, I am pretty sure that Sam's city hub might have also noticed this, and we also sent the technicians, but there is no response from them ever since.
I sent troops to investigate the matter and the news I got is extremely grave.
There are some weird people who are claiming themselves to be followers of the Church and are converting the normal people into cultivators forcefully.
A common man turned into a Novice overnight and since then the growth rate of their strength is extremely high.
They transformed twenty-one villages and, in every village, whoever was an eyewitness was robbed off of his memory and the rest of them are subdued forcefully.
Their target age groups are common men between fifteen years old and forty-five-year-old.
The troops I sent caught them red-handed and stopped their invasion forcefully. They captured the twenty-one heads and brought them back to the Imperial Palace today evening."
He paused and looked around to get the reactions of the court and it seemed like he really got the undivided attention. They are all looking solemn.
"We used the Imperial family's secret methods to extract information from the soul and complied with all the data gathered through these twenty-one people.
The result is horrendous.
We discovered that the main aim of this church is to change all the common people into these cultivators, but they wouldn't be cultivators for long.
The leaders we caught all wore masks and these masked people are considered as priests within their system and the person who wears a golden mask will be a High Priest.
The people who are converted are called followers. This is their hierarchy"
Arc stopped his speech to let all of this sink in.
But someone spoke.
"Your highness, what is the purpose of gathering us this late at night if they are all caught and imprisoned. This sounded like a cult and from what you said, you already seemed to have subdued that cult, so what is the purpose of this meeting?"
"I will tell you that after I am finished with explaining about this church.
Even though we caught them, this is not their entire population, they are only spreading slowly because, they are extremely vigilant about the communication network, but actually there is another reason for them to tread this slowly and that is because their original network was actually eradicated by the empire before."
Everyone exchanged glances. They didn't know that there is this sort of network existed and they even eradicated this before.
"The Blackwater." Everyone was stunned.
"You heard me right, the underworld organization that spread throughout the empire was actually the base work for the church and all the twenty-one people who we caught now are the strays that escaped the previous crackdown. All of them are peak-stage Grand realm cultivators.
The main aim of their network is not to get their hands, on power, or to just earn some money.
Just imagine, if the Blackwater which has the former network and strength tried to deliberately force the commoners to eat these pills and made a move, the whole empire will be usurped before we knew it.
I am saying this, not because of the army they would obtain from this, but what they can do with the army.
The cultivators who are created with these pills will have certain qualities.
They cannot be killed without being decapitated, will be healed as long as they have an intact skeleton, which includes the scenario of them being able to regenerate the whole arm even when it was completely skinned to the bone.
They don't use spiritual energy when attacking, they would only use pure and brute physical force without any aid of spiritual energy.
They don't listen to anyone, for them, anyone who is not a follower or a priest is actually a sinner and according to them every sinner must be either cleaned or destroyed.
But these are not the worst things about them. The main purpose of the whole followers is to act like food.
They are nothing but a means for the priests and the high priests to absorb and increase their cultivation at an extremely rapid pace.
Just imagine, there are more than a million people who belong to that age group. If all of them are converted and were absorbed, the results would be disastrous.
There are two things for us to worry about and that is there are still four people who are still out there and the scale of this church is not just limited to the Western Continent.
From the information, we gathered the Blackwater belongs to an organization formed with the other three under-world networks all over the world.
And they are all doing the same, lucky for us the Blackwater was cracked down, but the other nations are not so lucky, so there is a reason for me to believe that there are already wars taking place within other nations.
But one thing we are not sure is, from one of their memories, the organization seemed to have another boss. They are not sure about that.
If there really is another boss and someone is controlling them to do all this, then stopping them would be the least of our worries, we have to find out who the boss is and find a way to stop his actions completely.
If there was any kind of backup plan, then we would be screwed."
He stayed silent after finishing his speech. The crowd was also silent and slowly digested the information.
This is too much to take in, they are actually feeling lucky that the Blackwater is gone and also the presence of the network was a huge hindrance to the Church.
None of them thought that the emperor is bullshitting for a second, the reason for that being, Arc only invited who take shit seriously. There will always be snobbish characters in any kind of serious situation, so he decided to completely avoid their attendance.
"What does your majesty intend to do?"
Arc is waiting for this question, he cleared his throat and started giving his orders.
"From now on, activate the communication network's emergency line monitoring. Feed-in the words church, follower, priest, Guide, faith, fairness, liberty, and truth. Listen in to all these calls and pinpoint their location every time they spoke.
Declare a siege order in all the cities and villages. No one is allowed to leave or enter any city or village.
Search for any remnants of the church and their followers, their key features being the weird behavior of the spiritual energy around them, there would be some sort of spiritual energy scarcity around them.
From the info, there are still four priests, and this situation will continue until the four priests are caught, but do not mention the word church, or priest, or any other related words while executing this.
Create check posts and temporary camps at every village or city entrance. I want everyone to be examined.
Tower heads, you might not come under my jurisdiction, but I ask for your cooperation in these difficult times, please go through the same type of searches with your towers and report to me if you find anyone related to this."
He then turned towards the former tower heads who are in charge of the network and said.
"I hope you guys put the conflicts behind for the moment and manage the network, the network is really tight-knit and hard to penetrate but it is also hard to find out once it is penetrated and corrupted.
So, I ask you to skim through the network and find out if anyone is involved in it.
I will be leaving for the thunder-god temple, first thing tomorrow morning and I am going to talk about this situation to the thunder god temple head and see if he will react to this.
I just hope he could believe this and take action regarding this.
If he doesn't, and this turned into a global crisis, we need to find a way to create a safe place for the people of our empire.
So, our priority is to kill the traces of church within our empire and the next will be to create the safety measure required."