The devotee violently convulsed, his entire body seizing up as he crashed face-first onto the marble floor.
The sudden, brutal collapse sent an immediate shockwave of panic through the surrounding ranks.
Although Yoon Seoho had locked these people under a dense hypnotic seal, the hypnosis didn’t strip them of their human agency or turn them into literal, thoughtless puppets.
Stripped of the mental blocks regarding the cult’s hierarchy, they were still fundamentally emotional, individual human beings—which made them nothing more than highly volatile fanatics trapped in an extremist cult.
“What—what just happened?”
“Why did that brother suddenly collapse like that……?”
“What on earth is going on?”
A frantic wave of hushed whispers and sharp murmurs rippled violently through the worship hall.
Amidst the swirling confusion, Yoon Seoho was the singular entity who didn’t betray a single flicker of panic.
He watched the chaotic spectacle unfold before his eyes without an ounce of disturbance, his countenance completely passive—looking as though he had fully anticipated this exact reaction from the very start.
As Seo Yuan whipped his head back, his face completely pale and frantic as he sought his companion’s gaze, Yoon Seoho simply offered him a serene, perfectly smooth smile.
The moment that comforting look locked onto him, Seo Yuan managed to steady his breathing and turned his eyes back down to the collapsed man.
The initiate, who had been thrashing across the polished floor like a rabid, dying dog while gasping frantically for air, finally managed to push his upper body off the ground after what felt like an eternity.
The transformation was absolute.
The face that had been completely hollowed out by terminal illness just moments prior was now flushed with a vibrant, exploding surge of raw vitality.
The sheer brilliance of his healthy, restored complexion instantly struck the whispering crowd completely dumb.
Every single eye in the auditorium locked onto the man, thoroughly transfixed by a display of transformation that bordered on the impossible.
No matter how thoroughly Yoon Seoho had overwritten the minds of the senior devotees to believe Seo Yuan had always been their supreme sovereign, bearing witness to a literal, living miracle in real-time was an entirely different tier of psychological impact.
It was glaringly obvious which stimulus would leaving a deeper scar: a fabricated memory implanted in the brain, or a reality splitting open right before one’s own eyes.
“Ah…… Aaaah…… AAAAH!”
Having tasted the overwhelming, cataclysmic weight of Seo Yuan’s stabilizing power for the first time in his life, the devotee let out a manic, completely unhinged shriek.
No, it was closer to a guttural roar of absolute liberation.
His eyes completely rolling back in a frenzy of euphoria, the man remained frozen on his knees, throwing both arms straight up toward the heavens.
Then, another piercing cry tore from his throat, sounding like a frantic shriek of agonizing joy.
“My—MY GOD……!”
Though his entire frame was trembling and shaking violently as if he had been struck by a literal bolt of lightning, the man utilized every ounce of strength in his muscles to prostrate himself before Seo Yuan’s feet.
He looked completely intoxicated by a surge of pure, unadulterated ecstasy, reacting as if Seo Yuan were the singular, definitive savior capable of rescuing his soul from the pits of hell.
It was the living embodiment of fanaticism.
No, it transcended mere fanaticism; a dark, unnamable brand of absolute madness was practically hemorrhaging from the man’s presence.
Behind him, a young male initiate who had been next in line stared up at Seo Yuan with a completely stunned, wide-eyed expression.
Having stood directly behind the collapsed man, he was intimately aware of just how close his predecessor had been to terminal cellular collapse.
They had been grouped together during the intake processes, and he had personally watched the older man violently cough up thick sheets of blood while shivering in a corner.
Even when they had been ordered to stand and ascend the steps toward the altar, the man’s gait had been so heavily uneven it was a miracle he hadn’t tumbled backward.
It was a state of decay so advanced it was impossible to ignore.
Conventionally, an Esper exhibiting a corruption metric that severe was strictly barred from entering any public facility or private establishment.
No sane organization would ever willingly harbor an Esper whose corruption levels were hovering on the razor-edge of a cataclysmic rupture.
It was a matter of basic survival; even a low-grade Esper would completely vaporize an entire city quadrant the moment their core destabilized.
Consequently, no one was unhinged enough to remain anywhere near a ticking time bomb.
But Exalted was a definitive anomaly.
The word on the street claimed that simply crossing the threshold of this order was enough to receive a miracle that temporarily stabilized an Esper’s erratic neural pathways.
Furthermore, the administration accepted even the most volatile, terminal cases without a single word of protest.
Under those circumstances, it was an absolute inevitability that the cult’s numbers would swell at an exponential, explosive rate despite its recent emergence.
The young man currently staring up at the altar was no exception to the rule.
He had spent his final days dragging his broken body through the gutters of the city like a vagrant, and the moment the rumors of Exalted reached his ears, he had crawled straight to the grand headquarters to complete the registration protocols. In truth, he hadn’t harbored any real expectations.
He had already liquidated his entire life’s fortune, throwing every cent he possessed into experimental drugs and high-tier medical procedures, yet nothing had managed to even put a dent in the agonizing side effects of his anomaly.
He had run himself completely ragged until he was left sitting on the pavement with absolutely nothing to his name.
“The light…… The true light has found meee……!”
But look at the reality before him now.
This was nothing short of a deity splitting the heavens to personally reach a hand down into the mud to pull a worm out of the dark.
No, the pristine figure standing atop the altar was undoubtedly the physical avatar of God himself.
One look at that blindingly beautiful, utterly regal silhouette was enough to solidify the truth.
The power that had cascaded from those soft, delicate fingertips was an absolute marvel.
With a single, casual touch, the black, foul mass of corruption that had been festering deep within the older man’s core had been completely washed away into nothingness.
It was as if his entire biology had been reset to its pristine origin.
Having witnessed a level of restoration that surpassed the state of his body before he had ever even awakened as an Esper, the young man completely severed his connection to sanity.
“Ahahaha!”
He stared up at the Cult Leader with a gaze that was thoroughly drugged with absolute adoration.
Even the tiny, minute crease forming between the deity’s gorgeous eyebrows due to his slight bewilderment looked impossibly noble and divine.
The illegal narcotics he had abused in a desperate bid to numb the agony of his corruption couldn’t even begin to compare to this sensation.
No matter what extreme measures or substances one utilized, they could never hope to scrape the absolute heels of the miracle this entity had just casually deployed.
Attempting to draw a comparison was a literal insult; the figure before him was pure, unadulterated salvation.
“For the rest of my life—I will devote every single breath to your worship! Cult Leader! Sovereign!”
The entire congregation held its breath as they bore witness to the exploding display of madness.
Aside from the manic, broken babbles of the restored man, a dead, suffocating silence gripped the auditorium.
In that exact moment, the young initiate who was scheduled next in line suddenly broke formation, lunging forward to throw himself flat against the floor.
“Cult Leader! Please, I beg of you, grant the light unto me as well! Please, I beg you!”
The youth scraped his body across the marble like a thoughtless insect, weeping and begging frantically at the absolute tips of Seo Yuan’s feet.
