There is water at the bottom of the bottomless pit. Slightly sticky water that laps around your ankles.

I know because I experienced it firsthand. If you disagree, go stand at the bottom yourself.

I had made the discovery of the century, but people still mattered more than facts. I decided to take a head count first.

I shouted into the pitch-black darkness.

"Is everyone all right? Count off! One!"

"Two!"

Callis, wound tight with tension, was the first to answer. A soldier through and through. She hadn't shaken off her military habits yet.

"Three!"

Next came the undying one, always willing to play along. After that, silence fell.

A little later, the Regressor spoke.

"... I'm fine. So are Azi, Nabi, and Tyr."

Oh, come on.

"Wow, you won't even count off? You really can't read the damn room! Can't you play along?"

"There's no need to say a number! Isn't knowing everyone's fine enough?"

By that logic, I didn't need to check either, since I was already reading everyone's minds!

As for the beasts...

"W-woof..."

"Mrowww..."

They were alive. That would do. Right. Beast Kings weren't going to fall off that easily.

I rounded on the Regressor.

"We're checking to reassure ourselves because we can't see! Honestly. Do you think we're counting off because we're idiots?"

"Wait. I'll check... Seven-Colored Eyes, Fifth Color. Blue Eyes, open."

A blue light briefly shimmered in her eyes. I regarded her with displeasure as she used her cheat of an ability to secure vision for herself alone.

"Do you really have to say things like 'Seven-Colored Eyes, open' out loud? Isn't that a little childish?"

"It's to help me concentrate! What's wrong with saying it out loud?"

"You can't bring yourself to say 'four,' but you have no trouble spouting embarrassing lines like 'Seven-Colored Eyes, Fifth Color.' Is this that syndrome second-year secondary-school kids get? But you haven't even been to secondary school."

"Hey! I'm trying to look around, so shut up!"

The indignant Regressor snapped at me, then surveyed our surroundings with her Depth-Seeing Eye. Now, then. Shall I borrow her viewpoint again? Show me what you see.

And so I read the scene she was seeing.

The first thing I saw was Tantalus, upside down and tilted at an angle. The prison building was embedded at the foot of the slope, while we dangled upside down from our ropes, somehow managing to stand with our feet on the wet ground.

The ground we had been standing on moments ago had become the ceiling. Heaven and earth had literally turned upside down, and the sight was so unreal that it felt as though we had stepped into an abstract painting.

From this alone, one might think Tantalus had tilted until it hit the bottom. But that failed to explain the boundless void we had seen below us just moments earlier.

If there had been a bottom there to begin with, it would have stopped at an angle instead of turning all the way over. Something beyond common sense must have happened the instant the land overturned. Perhaps the bottomless pit had no bottom because it was a space that could only be reached upside down.

Having finished inspecting the easily recognizable ceiling, the Regressor turned her gaze toward the bottom.

"... Huh?"

Something was there.

From a distance, it looked like an enormous mountain. Its slope was a little gentler than that of the tilted Tantalus, but it was unmistakably a mountain, with a summit and ridgelines.

A gently sloping mountain beneath the bottomless pit. Water splashing around us.

... And a strange texture beneath my feet.

Blue Eyes, the Depth-Seeing Eye, wasn't very good at distinguishing fine textures... Yet even through those eyes, there was something alien about what made up that mountain.

Why did every rock in sight... have five protrusions resembling fingers or toes?

No. No, those weren't rocks. And those weren't protrusions that merely resembled fingers.

This was.

"Awooooo!"

Azi howled. She sprang off the ground, dug her claws into the overturned Tantalus, and clung to it like a bat. Barking furiously, as though she couldn't bear to go anywhere near the ground, she hurriedly grabbed the support frame to which everyone was tied.

But no one could answer her cries.

We were too overwhelmed by what covered this land.

"... Blood. All of this is..."

I didn't need an expert's assessment to realize it. The scent of blood had already filled my nose without my noticing.

Could this even be called blood? Or was it...

"Callis. Stay still. Something is wrong."

As even the undying one murmured in foreboding, the nighttime lamps came on in place of the missing daytime lamp.

Far away, the prison embedded in the ground began to glow faintly. It was the dim light of nighttime lamps turning on throughout the building. At the same time, the searchlights mounted on the prison walls to seek out escapees began to move.

Unaware that the land had overturned, the bright yellow searchlights swung faithfully back and forth, tracking human figures far from the prison...

The circles of light trembled madly.

Madly.

"Ah..."

Someone let out a cry.

The bright yellow circles illuminating the darkness looked like the trembling pupils of someone gripped by terror. The beams zigzagged as though trying to take in the entire mountain. The circles of light wandered aimlessly.

Everywhere that light touched. Without a single exception.

There were human figures.

"The slaughter of three hundred thousand. The Overlord's deeds... A mountain of corpses and a sea of blood."

It was a tragedy that could only be achieved through sheer numbers.

Three hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand human beings thrown alive into a pit. The first person to hit the ground would have died instantly. The second and third probably died from a fall like that, too. Perhaps as many as ten thousand had died that way.

But once enough people had piled up, the distance to fall would have shrunk, and the mound of flesh below would have grown soft.

I didn't know when that happened. Probably no one did. Even the Overlord, who had pushed those people into the pit, wouldn't have cared. Once they were dropped, their lives were no longer worth checking on.

In any case. At that point.

Some would have rolled down the mountain of corpses alive. Others would have been crushed beneath the bodies raining down before they could escape. Their limbs might have snapped and bent. Their skulls would have split, and they would have suffered the agony of twisted limbs. While those three hundred thousand were being thrown in, some might have been reduced to horrors almost impossible to imagine.

Clamor and screams. Despair and terror. Hatred and rage, curses and pleas directed at those falling, or those throwing them down.

One, one, one, one. The dead and those about to die piled up.

And as three hundred thousand accumulated, the mountain of corpses became more than a mere pile of bodies.

It looked like a mountain of corpses, but that was only what could be seen from outside.

Bodies piled upon bodies created pressure in proportion to their height. Unlike those on the surface, the corpses buried within were crushed beyond recognition. Bloody liquid, filtered through their skin and clothes, was squeezed out to form a new water source. Fluid closer to bodily secretions than blood flowed from the mangled flesh, forming a shallow sea.

No wonder the splashing sounded so clear for blood.

It was a desecration of humanity that only three hundred thousand deaths, only a massacre on that scale, could produce.

"So that is what happened..."

Then one of the searchlights, zigzagging aimlessly, found something and stopped. A moment later, every searchlight spotted the most 'human' shape of all and converged on it.

Five beams illuminated the very summit of that horrific mountain of corpses.

In the bottomless pit, where there were no insects and no mold grew, in a space isolated from the entire world, neither rotting nor crumbling, a woman knelt atop the mountain of corpses and sea of blood that had endured for thirteen hundred years.

Her head was bowed, her open palms resting on her knees, as though repenting for this horrific sin, as though mourning every person who had died.

Her posture was one a burier of Mother Earth might assume, and her loose priestly robes resembled the Earth Sage's clothing. Six rings encircled her right wrist. Her jet-black hair hung long and loose, but perhaps because there was no wind, it was not disheveled and even retained a faint sheen.

A pitch-black staff lay horizontally across the corpse's palms. To anyone looking, she would have appeared to be an ascetic of Mother Earth—

—except for the cross-shaped stake piercing her abdomen.

"A cross? Why is the Holy See's symbol here...?"

Tyr reflexively furrowed her brows at the sight of her sworn enemy's symbol.

Why was there a cross in the bottomless pit, Mother Earth's hell? Why was it driven through a woman's abdomen at the highest point of this grave?

The answer came from the Earth Sage.

"Long ago, Mother Earth's faith had a Grand Master. The Grand Master of all Mother's followers, said to have been the first to use earth arts."

SPLASH, SPLASH.

While everyone else stood frozen in the pitch-black darkness, the Earth Sage walked on alone. The splashing of blood marked her footsteps.

"When the Overlord summoned buriers to bury three hundred thousand corpses, most who went were rabble seeking a fortune, willing to sully Mother's name. Cowardly, despicable wretches, like vultures circling carrion... With a few exceptions. To prevent those false buriers from insulting Mother Earth, the Grand Master went there herself with her companions."

The devotion of a few followers of Mother Earth concealed the misconduct of the unworthy majority. That had been as true then as it was now.

The time when the Victorious King and the Overlord fought each other had been the height of Mother Earth's faith. There had been plenty of rabble, but also many true buriers, who worked harder than the unworthy to comfort those who had suffered through the war.

That was how the faith had sustained itself in those days.

And the Overlord had loathed Mother Earth's faith, with its demand for rites for the dead. Enough to want to tear it out by the roots.

"I learned this when I visited Mother's temple, the cave halfway up the highest mountain. I learned that all traces of the Grand Master had vanished after that."

If the Overlord had gathered the unworthy in order to condemn their immorality, he should not have killed those buriers.

He would have needed to show the whole world how they wore grave goods and fattened themselves on others' deaths to shift outrage over the massacre onto Mother Earth's faith.

Instead, he had killed every last burier. It wouldn't be wrong to say he was a tyrant unable to control his temper. But it would be more reasonable to suppose there had been another reason.

For example, someone who buried the prisoners might have refused the grave goods. They might have displayed a nobility that no one could easily condemn.

"But no one knows better than I do that a flock of inept vultures could never have dug a pit large enough to bury three hundred thousand in just three days."

There had been too few buriers for the scale of the work, and far too little time. So people had merely assumed that the Overlord must have used his troops.

But what if he hadn't?

"Because the Master interfered. Because she used her power to prepare a grave for those who would die before the vultures drawn by the scent of corpses could act. Because the Grand Master buried all the dead herself. The Overlord was left to bear the full consequences of his deeds.

"And so, unable to achieve his goal, the Overlord... mercilessly murdered the Grand Master and the other buriers. Once he could no longer shift the blame, buriers wandering the world would have been no different from messengers proclaiming his vileness."

That was the hidden history of the bottomless pit the Earth Sage had uncovered.

Until now, she had never doubted it. Few people in the world were as deeply involved in Mother Earth's faith as she was.

"But I was wrong. The Overlord did not kill the Grand Master."

Yet now the Grand Master had appeared in the bottomless pit, with a cross driven through her back.

Considering that the Sky God's faith had been an insignificant belief not even worth setting against another in those days, the sight before us could mean only one thing.

"Those who killed her and consigned all that history to oblivion were the Sky God's lackeys. Those cowardly prophets who peer into the future. Those who sided with the Victorious King and hastened the Overlord's downfall. It was them... They brought us to ruin, killed the Grand Master, and defiled her."

That mountain of corpses might have been the Overlord's work.

But the bottomless pit, and the Grand Master impaled upon a cross atop its mountain of corpses, were the work of none other than the Holy See.