In the desert, a single person was slowly trekking along a crude path.
This person’s physique was tall and lanky unlike humans, his height was about 4 meters in total, and he had a pair of pointy sharp ears.
He had a thick cloth wrapped around his head; his steps were slow but firm as he walked with his head lowered.
If one observed carefully, they would find that he was missing a few fingers on his hands, his eyes had also been covered by cloth, and there was an insignia of a sprout on his forehead.
He was this world’s naturally disadvantaged [Protagonist], Chromie.
This desert was the site of divine revelation for one of the Seven Gods, Barren Shadow. It was called this because he was once seen wandering this place, which was why many of his followers frequently wandered this place alone.
Chromie sighed. As a captain of the Sun Shadow Church’s Saint Hunters, he was secretly assigned a mission after the occasion of Dim Silence’s advent, which was to enter the great desert and visit the temple ruins that belonged to one of the three elven Lord Gods, the Hunter.
His assignment was to retrieve a certain object from the ruins while also not exposing his identity.
Unable to reject this assignment, Chromie had no choice but to wander into the great desert by himself, using the Moonlight ring to disguise himself as a mundane scholar. In the eyes of normal people, he was a bespectacled man in his late thirties.
In the ruins, not only did Chromie successfully retrieve the item that the Sun Shadow church wanted, he had also used the Moon Tree sprout’s ability to strip authorities to retrieve a few authorities that the Hunter left behind.
This action even led to Barren Shadow descending in the ruins. If he hadn’t quickly made use of the aspect of Silence to flee, he might be playing some unspeakable ‘games’ with the exhibitionist Barren Shadow.
“A Heavenly Physique Gathering in the desert!” from afar, an excited voice could be heard. As part of Barren Shadow’s Ascetic Order, they believed that their God only existed where there was no man, and it was better for them to perceive God by going completely naked and perceiving nature.
For this reason, while they traveled to unmanned regions of the world, members of the Ascetic Order would strip bare to facilitate easier perception of nature.
Furthermore, the Ascetic Order had both male and female members, while Chromie didn’t really know what a ‘Heavenly Physique Gathering’ was, he faintly understood from the deplorable tone of the other party.
Chromie had a strange expression on his face. If that man had truly witnessed those ladies, he would most likely not be quite as excited.
After a while, having climbed across a small sand dune, Chromie finally saw the owner of that voice. The man wore a pure-white robe that covered his entire body without any supplies on him, travelling the desert in a minimalist manner while excitedly looking around as if keeping an eye out for any female travelers that might appear out of nowhere.
This man who arbitrarily showed up could very possibly be a pursuer from the Ascetic Order, those guys haven’t given up on pursuing me yet.
While keeping up his guard, the Moonlight ring on one of the few fingers that Chromie still had suddenly glowed. His body had become fully integrated into the desert itself. He didn’t enter the aspect of Silence because even though he managed to flee from Barren Shadow, every traveler he met after that had a way to observe the aspect of Silence.
After retrieving what the Hunter left behind, Chromie wasn’t actually afraid of these travelers. He might still be a bit lacking compared to a clone of a Righteous God, but other than that, he wasn’t really afraid of anything. At this point, he would be willing to attempt hunting a few particularly easy Evil Gods.
What Chromie was afraid of was being stalled by the reckless travelers and eventually lead to Barren Shadow’s descent. He might have been able to flee the first time, but he couldn’t be sure that he’d be able to do so a second time.
Just like that, Chromie hid inside the yellow sand while silently observing the white-robed man. After the other party looked around for a while, he suddenly walked up to where he was, pulled a shovel out of thin air and began digging while humming a song: “I have nothing but a little wish, just a harem full of girls. I sow the seeds in spring and harvest many girls in fall, the first was a loli, the second was a big sister-type, and the last was a… crossdressing bigshot?”
After Killer J shovelled the sand away, Chromie’s shocked face could be seen underneath as Killer J called him by the casual nickname from before: “Didn’t you wear women’s clothes to enter the Stone Furnace arena?”
Killer J’s very first statement caused Chromie to feel stunned, but he quickly regained his senses and entered the aspect of Silence to avoid Killer J’s shovel, then asked with a grim expression: “Who are you?”
“I was wondering why the boss suddenly assigned such a meaningless job to me, I was actually sent here to dig you up” Killer J mumbled in complaints.
Right before the big battle at the Grand Library, he had returned to Negary’s body, then was immediately sent out to do another mission, which was something puzzling like digging a hole in the desert.
Thinking that he couldn’t go against the boss’ orders if he still wanted a stage to perform on, Killer J hurriedly ran here to dig a hole, then unexpectedly unearthed Chromie.
Chromie furrowed his eyebrows, he refused to believe that this person had actually dug randomly, this desert was so huge, so why did he just happen to find Chromie after digging one hole?
“Found him, that blasphemer, and someone who appears to be his accomplice as well” not too far away, a sand dune abruptly parted ways to reveal several people within, who immediately sent a signal after they saw Chromie.
The light of their divine technique glowed brightly to signal all the other travelers to quickly gather towards this side.
The Ascetic Order didn’t really like to gather and preferred to enjoy the sense of being alone. Even breathing the same air as someone else they could perceive caused them to feel uncomfortable, even if the other party was also a worshipper of Barren Shadow. However, that didn’t mean that they didn’t know how to cooperate and gather, especially when their target was a blasphemer.
“What the actual hell? Crossdressing bigshot, did you poke Barren Shadow in the rear or something?” Killer J watched the group of travelers who had practically mobilized their entire force, draping one hand over Chromie’s shoulder and asked with a half-admiring, half-surprised tone.
“Stop talking, I can sense Barren Shadow’s presence” Chromie didn’t have much time to talk.
This person isn’t giving off any hostility, although his appearance is a bit strange, there’s no time to worry about that right now, fleeing is more important.
“Celestial Hunting!” Chromie raised his hand and summoned a force around his body, causing it to quickly become blurry and reappeared at another location. His speed had far surpassed what a normal person was capable of perceiving. If the others hadn’t been able to see the traces of his movements, they would have believed that he simply disappeared.
Among the three elven Lord Gods, the Hunter’s job was invading. The Dim Silence Envoy would search for other worlds through the various aspects of reality, then investigate those worlds; everything else involving the invasions that followed was the Hunter’s job.
For that reason, the Hunter’s power had to be suitable for combat on other worlds, which could be understood as ‘perceiving the stars’. The Hunter was able to link himself into other worlds through the projections of stars in the sky, as well as place himself within other worlds as one of them.
No matter where the Hunter’s subordinates were, their existences belonged to the world of the stars they chose. The interesting thing about this was that the passage of time in each world was determined by the speed at which material moved within their own closed systems.
Earlier, Chromie had linked his existence to the world of a celestial body, which made his passage of time synchronize with that celestial body, so for a very short time, this world moved at a snail’s pace to him.
