The Battle of the Vatican finally came to an end.
Before the battle began, everyone from all over the world thought that the Roman Curia would rise after fighting that battle.
The two notable fighting forces that the Roman Curia put forth shocked everyone in the entire world as well.
They were both at the Divine Treasure Realm, the realm above that of the Airborne Realm.
The combat prowess they had displayed was nothing short of being impressive.
That two-winged angel alone was more than capable of forcing over 100 Airborne Realm fighters to take it on with all they got, yet they still failed in the end.
One could easily tell just how wide the gap between the Airborne Realm and the Divine Treasure Realm truly was.
Even so, both of those Divine Realm entities fought Lu Xuan one after another but still ended up defeated.
The defeat of that two-winged angel, who was considered to be a representative of divine authority, hit everyone especially hard. The death of such an entity in the hands of Lu Xuan was seen by many to be the utter death of divine authority.
Times have changed now.
That was what Lu Xuan had said, which was also the only notable thing remaining in the minds of many people.
Times have truly changed now.
Due to the advancement of contemporary technology, fierce religious devotion was quickly becoming a thing of the past. The number of such devotees was dwindling, especially after they all witnessed the angel’s downfall.
Even if they were not able to see it in person, what happened was clearly seen in the videos circulated all over the internet.
The faiths, beliefs, and worldview of many people shattered right there and then. All manner of suicides took place all over the world.
The theory about Lu Xuan being the legendary devil raged all over Europe and the Americas for quite a while. Many of the typical white, far-left lunatics lamented that Lu Xuan was the cause for so many suicide cases after having completely obliterated people’s beliefs.
Such a way of putting things was quite popular in Huaxia as well. Many people’s demands for Lu Xuan to apologize to the dead and quit being a cultivator were found all over the internet.
Then again, some quite many people sided with Lu Xuan and spoke on his behalf.
“Hey, it was not like he was the one who went looking for trouble in the first place! The Roman Curia was the one that messed with him and yelled about killing him. Are you telling me that Lu Xuan is wrong to fight back?”
Those who spoke in Lu Xuan’s defense spoke just as brazenly, saying that it was the Roman Curia who wanted to demonstrate their authority and reestablish the rule of the divine by killing Lu Xuan in the first place.
Even so, the Roman Curia bit off more than they could chew. As a result, Lu Xuan became the one to end them instead.
The notion of going about killing others being entirely fine but not allowing others to do the same to them was deemed utterly ridiculous.
Those people deemed that the Roman Curia had simply gone too far. They wondered if those at the Vatican believed that they were still in the middle ages.
People all across the internet got into heated arguments all over the place, with supporters of Lu Xuan and those who were against him racking up hundreds of pages with just their heated exchanges alone.
On the other hand, Lu Xuan, who was supposed to be the center of attention, disappeared without a trace instead.
He was sitting cross-legged in a training room deep in the Yunxuan Villa while glittering all over in golden light.
He was working hard to read all that power of faith.
Given how knowledgeable he was, there was no way he couldn’t have known just how troublesome such powers were. The power of faith was a type of pure spiritual energy originating from biological entities, which was something completely different from the ambient energies existing all over the world.
Such power contained all kinds of thoughts and will.
Regular folks had no way of generating such power of faith. It was something that could only be conjured from extremely powerful faith.
It was a form of very intense spiritual and mental energy.
One could end up having their mental state affected by taking in too much of such power.
It could even get to the point that the one absorbing such energies would be compelled to fulfill all of their feverish thoughts contained within just to clear off all of their impure thoughts if they were unable to simply clear them on their own.
Then again, when compared to the myriad of complicated and convoluted wishes by devotees in the east, those from the west were far simpler: all they wished for was to go to heaven.
That was the only thought that all devout ones had in their minds after all.
All of the messy thoughts and will contained within the power nearly broke Lu Xuan’s mind.
However, he quickly went on to chant mantras for clearing and calming the mind right away, suppressing all of those thoughts and will in him.
What he needed to do now was purge all of those unwanted thoughts and will, reducing the power of faith to the purest form of energy.
The power of faith was fundamentally a form of energy after all. The very reason why so many avoided taking in such energies was that it was, unfortunately, one that contained too many impurities.
Conventionally-speaking, the only way to clear those impurities was to use the secret arts of the Roman Curia. Once such a method was employed, however, one would be assimilated by the Roman Curia. The only thought left in their minds afterward was their utter devotion to God.
Even the other factions and sects that splintered from the Roman Curia remained devoted to God after all. The only thing they were against was the rule of the pope in the Vatican City.
One could tell just how fearsome such secret arts were by that fact alone.
However, Lu Xuan had other secret arts in his arsenal for ridding that power of its impurities.
When he took on the stars back in his past life, he encountered many religious sects and factions that were very knowledgeable in the way of faith. From them, he learned several secret arts for ridding the power of faith in such impurities.
Then again, even if he were to have learned no such methods from them, his own profound knowledge of the fundamentals of cultivation would have allowed him to easily create a set of secret arts on his own. That was hardly a concern for him.
The only thing that remained behind after purging all of those messy thoughts and willpower was pure energy, which was even purer than spirit qi.
Even though the current state of the world was unfit for making further progress, Lu Xuan could nonetheless make use of such external resources to grow his power.
There was no end to cultivation, and he needed greater power to face foes of greater power in the future.
Furthermore, he wouldn’t be the only one to benefit from such energy; they would also boost the power of the Lu Clan’s power by a significant margin. As one of the sacred cities of the Roman Curia, the Vatican City had stockpiled massive quantities of power of faith over the ages.
That quantity was so massive that there was no way Lu Xuan could consume all of them on his own. Whatever was left would serve well to fortify the Yunxuan Villa, making the place practically impregnable. Being powered by the power of faith of such magnitude meant that the villa could survive even nuclear bombs being dropped onto it, as long as they were not coming in quick succession.
All that power had no doubt rid Lu Xuan of any worries he had for those he considered his own.
There was a variety of uses for the power of faith.
It was a form of energy that was so ubiquitous that it was considered a superior source of energy to spirit qi.
Then again, that would only be true if one was able to rid the power of all those thoughts and will that it contained.
All that commotion that Lu Xuan caused, however, had yet to cease.
Representatives from various countries were received by the guards of the Special Task Force’s base near the capital city as they entered the base.
Those representatives consisted of top-notch cultivators from all over the world, the brightest of scientists as well as government and military personnel.
One could say that those people came from all walks of life within their respective nations.
They were all gathered there for one specific purpose: to study the two-winged angel’s corpse.
The body of the two-winged angel was brought back to Huaxia by Lu Xuan, to which both the Italian and the Vatican government protested feverishly.
Then again, Huaxia gave only one response to all that protest: take the body from Lu Xuan if you so dare.
Government personnel of both Italy and the Vatican City were dumbfounded by that reply, as none of them would be bold enough to mess with Lu Xuan. If they actually dared to do so in the first place, they would not have just watched Lu Xuan spirit that dead angel’s body away without doing anything.
Lu Xuan did what he always did in such cases when he brought that two-winged angel’s body back; he sold the body to the Special Task Force.
