"I'm not the Pope; His Holiness has already..." Isabella was about to deny it, but Agatha stopped her with a pat on the shoulder.

"The mission is the priority; His Majesty won't mind."

The seemingly unrelated words made Isabella instantly understand the other party's meaning. She also knew that this method was more convenient, but for a king who valued power, it was indeed a dangerous signal.

Recalling what she had seen and heard in Neverwinter, she hesitated for a moment and retracted her denial. "What do you mean by 'rescue you'? And where are the Knights of Judgment and the priests?"

"They ran away!"

"No, some were summoned away by the Holy City!"

"We committed crimes and killed priests..."

"It wasn't her fault!"

"No food, no clothes... no supplies for two whole months. Were we abandoned?"

"What nonsense are you talking about? His Holiness has come!"

A chorus of replies immediately erupted.

"Quiet!" Isabella said impatiently. "One person speak." She scanned the crowd and pointed to the leading nun. "You go first. Stand up and speak."

"Yes, Your Holiness." The nun respectfully touched her head to the ground before laboriously getting to her feet. "The last time we received news from Hermes was over a month ago..."

Half an hour later, Isabella finally had a rough understanding of what had happened here.

Since the battle of Coldwind Ridge, the monastery's supplies had steadily deteriorated. At first, food portions were reduced, and later, even the frequency was halved. Since the three large courtyards were all under closed management, news relied entirely on external sources, so the order was still relatively stable. The stationed clergy and Knights of Judgment encouraged everyone to pray diligently to overcome this difficulty with a strong attitude, claiming that the situation would soon improve.

But that was not the case.

The so-called last news was that the Church had transferred away all the Knights of Judgment and priests a month and a half ago.

The nuns didn't know what orders they had received, only that those who had not been transferred out of the church looked ashen when they came out of the hall, as if they had lost their souls.

After that, the monastery became a land of disaster.

Based on the principle of automatic replacement, they proclaimed themselves the new priests but no longer led the people in prayer, nor were they willing to follow the frugality system established by their predecessors. Not only did they indulge in the few remaining supplies in the warehouse without restraint, but they also further cut the orphans' food.

When the nuns went to negotiate, they learned earth-shattering news: the collapse of Hermes Cathedral.

The Church had reached a critical moment of survival.

In order to fight the enemy to the death, the higher-ups decided to abandon the old Holy City and transfer all full-time personnel back to the plateau. And the final order left to the monastery was to resist the invading enemy on their own, dedicate their lives to God until the very end.

Although these changes sounded unbelievable, the closure of the channel connecting the Shadow Church seemed to confirm their claim.

Faced with this bad news, the nuns were also divided into two factions. Some were completely disappointed and joined the "New Priest Faction," while others hesitated and didn't know what to do—according to the leading nun, the Church used to be so powerful, so powerful that they almost didn't need to think, and had never considered their own fate... Because of this, the news almost completely threw them into confusion, as if the world they knew so well had suddenly collapsed.

What broke this situation was the increasing excesses of the new priests.

They were originally just low-level followers, and their status in the monastery was only slightly higher than that of the nuns. They were usually responsible for assisting the administrators in managing the courtyard affairs, and there was almost no possibility of promotion—those who were truly capable would never be assigned here. Now that they had finally tasted the sweetness of power and lost the supervision from above, they naturally became uncontrollable.

For example, the "blessing" of the choir and the etiquette class.

In fact, this kind of thing was itself a prohibited act, but the Holy City's management of the monastery was not strict, so powerful figures with special hobbies often came here to enjoy themselves, which was not a secret in the courtyard. It was not until the escape incident of the Awakened that the Church strengthened its supervision in this regard.

However, they now had no scruples.

The "blessing" went from pulling people alone to forcing the entire class to obey, and even evolved into an exchange of body for food. This not only completely violated the Church's laws, but also pushed the hesitant nuns to the side of the orphans.

Although these girls of different ages were all scraped from the Four Kingdoms, teaching them to read, write, learn etiquette, and sing hymns over a long period of time was not without emotion. In addition, the orders given by the Church made the nuns begin to resist the new priests' instructions and secretly took food from the warehouse to distribute to the starving children.

However, no matter how frugal they were, they couldn't conjure food out of thin air. The food in the warehouse was dwindling day by day, and the priests also noticed the nuns' "rebellion," so a conflict broke out—during a grain smuggling operation, they caught and executed two nuns on the spot. This act was intended to deter everyone, but it aroused the unease of the remaining nuns. The leader, after a series of planning and coordination, launched a counterattack one night. The priests, who were immersed in pleasure, were caught off guard and wiped out by the combined forces of the orphans who held an absolute advantage in numbers.

Not only that, but the leader also contacted the other two monasteries through underground tunnels and solved those ugly followers in the same way.

When everyone tried to select a representative to find a way to get over the high walls of the courtyard and report the plight here to Hermes, the army of the Dawn Kingdom appeared on the border of the Old Holy City.

Since they had been abandoned, there was no other way but to resist on their own. Everyone knew that once the enemy captured the monastery, even if they didn't resist, the outcome wouldn't be any better, so there was the scene that Isabella initially saw.

...

After listening to the nun's account, Isabella felt a huge doubt rising in her heart.

She had heard about the bad habits in the monastery, and it was not uncommon for those incompetent people to quickly become corrupted after gaining power, but what surprised her was the order announced by the Church.

To fight the enemy to the death? If that were really the case, they would not have ignored the surveillance of the mountain paths while abandoning the outer city walls. What was the difference between doing so and giving away the first line of defense?

Even if she took a step back, even if the Holy City was so short of manpower that it couldn't even take care of the siege ladders, it would not have been possible to say the words "abandon the Old Holy City."

Because most people don't know the secrets of the Church, but she knows them very well—neither the New Holy City on the plateau nor the old city at the foot of the mountain is the core of the Church. The true core of the Church is only one, that is, the Secret Agency hidden deep underground. Whether it is the mining of divine stones, the research of magic stone imprints, or the Transformation Ritual of God's Punishment Army, they are all carried out in this secret institution built four hundred years ago.

And the Old Holy City has a secret passage leading to the Privy Temple, or even the location of the main exit. How could such an important position be abandoned so easily?

This order is full of loopholes and is a complete lie!