"I'm not the Pope, His Majesty the Pope has—" Isabella was about to deny it, but was stopped by Agatha patting her on the shoulder.

"The task is important, Your Majesty will not mind. ”

Seemingly unrelated words, Isabella instantly understood what the other party meant, and she also knew that this method was more convenient, but for a king who valued power, it was really a dangerous signal.

Remembering what she had seen and heard in Neverwinter, she hesitated for a moment before retracting her denial, "What do you mean by saving you?

"They ran away!"

"No, there are those who have been called away by the Holy City!"

"We committed a crime and killed the priests......"

"That's not her fault!"

"No food, no clothes...... Two whole months without supplies, are we abandoned?"

"What stupid things are you talking about, isn't Your Majesty here!"

The scene suddenly resounded with a burst of gossiping answers.

"Be quiet!" Isabella said impatiently, "just say it alone." She swept through the crowd and pointed to the nun who was taking the lead, "Come first, stand up and speak." ”

"Yes, Your Majesty. The nun respectfully touched her head to the ground before struggling to get up from the ground, "It was more than a month ago when I last heard from Hermes......

Half an hour later, Isabella finally had a general idea of what was going on here.

Since the Battle of Coldwind Ridge, the monastery's supply has deteriorated, initially with a reduction in food portions, and then halving the number of meals. Since the three compounds are all under closed management, the news is all transmitted from the outside world, and the order is quite stable. The clergy and inquisition warriors on duty encouraged them to pray diligently and be strong through this difficult time, saying that the situation would soon get better.

But that's not the case.

The so-called last news of the other party is that the church has taken out all the inquisitors and priests a month and a half ago.

The nuns did not know what orders they had received, only that the non-transferred members came out of the hall as if they had lost their souls.

After that, the monastery became a place of calamity.

According to the principle of self-substitution, they proclaimed themselves the new priests, but they no longer led the people in prayer and did not want to follow the draconian diet established by their predecessors. Not only did they eat the few food stocks in the warehouses without restraint, but they also further deprived the orphans of food.

When the nuns went to negotiate, they learned that the heavens had collapsed, namely the collapse of the Hermes Cathedral.

The church has come to the point of life and death.

In order to fight the enemy to the death, the higher-ups decided to abandon the old holy city and transfer all the full-time personnel back to the plateau. The final order left to the monastery was to fend off the invading enemy on its own and dedicate its life to the gods until the last moment.

As unbelievable as these changes may sound, the closure of the passage connecting the Church of Reflections seems to confirm their claims.

In the face of this tragic news, the nuns also split into two factions, some of whom were completely disappointed and joined the "new clerical faction", while others were hesitant and did not know what to do—according to the lead nuns, the Church used to be so powerful that they hardly had to think about it and never thought about their fate...... Because of this, the news almost threw them into complete chaos, as if the world they had known before had collapsed abruptly.

What broke this situation was the intensification of the new priests.

Originally, they were only low-level cultists, and their status in the convent was only slightly higher than that of the nuns, and they were usually responsible for assisting the administrators in the affairs of the monastery, and there was almost no possibility of promotion—those who were truly capable would not be assigned here at all. Now that I have finally tasted the sweetness of power, and I have lost the supervision from above, I am naturally out of control.

For example, the "blessings" of choirs and ceremonies.

In fact, this kind of thing is forbidden in itself, but the Holy City does not strictly manage the monasteries, so it is not a secret in the compound that people with special hobbies often come here to have fun. It wasn't until the exodus of the transcendents that the Church tightened its grip on this.

But now they have no worries.

"Blessing" went from pulling people individually to forcing obedience for the whole class, and even eventually evolved into a trade in exchange for food. Not only was this a complete violation of the Church's laws, but it also pushed the hesitant nuns over the side of the orphans.

Although these girls of all ages were all scavenged from the Four Kingdoms, it was not without emotion to teach them to read, read, and sing rituals for a long time. Coupled with the orders given by the church, the nuns began to resist the orders of the new priests and secretly took out the food from the storehouse and distributed it to the hungry children.

It's just that no matter how much they shrink their clothes and diet, they can't conjure up food out of thin air. As the storehouse became scarce and the priests became aware of the nun's "mutiny", a conflict erupted when they caught and executed two nuns on the spot during a smuggling of food, which was intended to frighten the crowd but provoked the rest of the nuns. After some planning and tandem, the leader launched a counterattack one night and another. The priest who was addicted to pleasure was caught off guard, and was caught off guard by the orphan coalition army, which had an absolute advantage in numbers.

Not only that, but the leader also connected to two other monasteries through tunnels, and dealt with the ugly cultists in the same way.

Just as everyone was trying to send a representative to find a way to cross the walls of the compound and report the plight of the place to Hermes, the army of the Dawn Kingdom appeared on the border of the Old Holy City.

Now that it has been abandoned, there is no other way but to resist on its own. Everyone knew that once the enemy captured the monastery, even if they didn't resist, the end would not be much better, hence the scene Isabella saw in the first place.

......

After listening to the nun's statement, great doubts rose in Isabella's heart.

She had heard of the bad habits of the monasteries, and it was not uncommon for the incompetent to corrupt quickly after gaining power, and to her surprise were the orders proclaimed by the Church.

In order to fight the enemy to the death? If that were the case, it would be impossible for them to ignore the surveillance of the mountain trails while abandoning the outer walls, and what was the difference between doing so and giving up the first line of defense?

Even if he took 10,000 steps back, the Holy City was really short of manpower to the extent that even the ladder in the clouds could not be taken care of, and it was impossible to say such words as "abandon the old Holy City".

Because most people don't know the secrets of the church, but she knows it all clearly—neither the new holy city on the plateau nor the old city at the foot of the mountain is the core of the church. There is only one true core of the Church, and that is the Privy Council hidden deep underground, whether it is the mining of the Divine Stone, the study of the magic stone rune, or the transformation ceremony of the Divine Punishment Army, all of which are carried out in this secret institution built four hundred years ago.

In the Old Holy City, there were secret passages to the Privy Temple, and even the main exits. How could such an important position be so easily abandoned?

This command is completely full of loopholes and outright lies!