Law's efficiency was frighteningly high.
Less than half an hour after Roya discovered the underground chamber with the bone altar, the entire Lower City was already completely surrounded by the Defense Force.
At every intersection, at least one combat squad was stationed to guard. At the routes connecting to other districts, checkpoints were set up where everyone was searched. Only those without contraband tied to heretical worship were allowed to pass—and even then, only to enter, never to leave.
This heavy-handed reaction, unsurprisingly, stirred a wave of unease throughout all of Pangaea Castle.
From the upper city—paradise for the elite—to the peaceful middle city, people began turning their attention toward the Lower City, a place they normally wouldn't even bother to notice.
Roya, however, did not interfere.
So far, everything was unfolding exactly along the lines set by the hidden enemy lurking in the shadows. Any unnecessary interference would only alert the snake in the grass.
And so, Roya remained seated high upon the Empty Throne, using its amplification of his spiritual perception to sweep carefully across the entire Pirate Star domain and its corresponding subspace.
The moment the enemy left even the faintest trace, Roya would seize it and hunt them down!
After sealing off the Lower City, Law wasn't content to stop there—he issued an even more aggressive order.
The Defense Force's Second Regiment, numbering three thousand, was divided into three hundred search squads. They began conducting house-to-house searches with ruthless precision.
The residents of the Lower City were driven from their homes, herded into plazas, and subjected to mass isolation and inspection.
This sudden and thorough sweep caught the cultists completely off guard.
One after another, the hidden sites of clandestine gatherings were exposed, their vile altars torn down and destroyed.
Scattered riots and clashes began to erupt across the district.
The reason was simple: most of the devout believers had truly thought they were worshipping Roya—the one who had delivered them from the grim harvest of the spacefaring death-spirits—not some strange, blasphemous altar.
Now, seeing the Defense Force—supposedly their own protectors—mercilessly destroying those altars, even the most long-suffering could endure no longer.
For to them, those soldiers were shattering the last fragments of their hope and faith.
Whether sparked by a soldier's excessive force or a devotee's sudden outburst, scuffles began flaring across many of the inspection squads.
Through his spiritual perception, Roya could feel the Lower City's unrest and defiance swelling. It was like a warehouse stuffed with powder kegs—only a few more sparks were needed to ignite an explosion.
Among the masses herded into the plazas, more than a million civilians in total, a ripple of fear and anxiety began to spread.
And in that charged atmosphere, Roya's sharpened focus picked up on something distinctly out of place.
"Hmph. So the rats can't resist anymore—they've finally come out to stir chaos!"
Roya's perception slid silently toward the suspicious movements.
Within the crowd, groups of cloaked and hooded figures were consciously converging toward a single location.
There were more than a thousand of them in total. Their steps were quick and wary, and they used the panicked civilians as cover to slip past Defense Force patrols. Like rats skittering along the shadows of the street, they moved steadily toward the central plaza of the Lower City.
This plaza was the largest open space in the district. By now, more than a million civilians had been gathered there.
Compared to that overwhelming number, the Defense Force stationed there was woefully insufficient.
It was only out of sheer faith in Roya's authority that the civilians tolerated the soldiers' presence at all.
Clearly, the Defense Force's lack of manpower was precisely the weakness the "rats" intended to exploit.
Worse still, because of the clashes breaking out between ordinary believers and the Second Regiment, a large portion of the Defense Force had already been diverted elsewhere.
The centuria of a hundred soldiers assigned to guard this colossal plaza of a million civilians now stood in an extremely dangerous, unsupported position.
But there was no way Roya would allow these rats to succeed in their disruption.
His perception spread into threads of invisible silk, slipping beneath the cloaks and binding the bodies of these interlopers in intangible chains.
And once he pierced through their coverings, Roya's eyes narrowed.
Though they retained vaguely humanoid forms, they could no longer be called human.
Tumorous growths and twisted excrescences erupted unchecked across their bodies.
These grotesque masses pulsed with a faint stench, seething with malevolent ripples of consciousness.
It was obvious—their souls had been tainted, consumed, turned into mere batteries feeding the fragmented will lurking within those growths.
"These cloaks can block ordinary spiritual scans?! No wonder they've been able to skulk in the Lower City undetected. Without deliberate focus, even I might have swept past them without suspicion."
"If not for Law's sweeping searches, these corrupted vermin would have stayed hidden indefinitely."
"But then—Law himself is clearly compromised. Why would he drive these people from their hiding places into the open?"
"Could it be… that Pirate Star is being targeted by more than one outside force? Law, Vegapunk, and even these corrupted growth-spawn—each of them might actually be puppets of different external powers?"
In a flash of realization, Roya felt he had grasped the true shape of the Pirate Star crisis.
With that, he subtly loosened some of his control threads, allowing the corrupted beings freedom of movement—yet ready to seize them again at any instant.
As their numbers grew, the cloaked figures inevitably drew attention.
Murmurs spread through the crowd, unease building toward a breaking point.
People shrank back, giving the strangers more space.
The Defense Force soldiers noticed the disturbance as well, moving in squads to investigate.
Everyone present—including the corrupted ones themselves—could feel it: something monumental was about to erupt.
And then, in unison, more than a thousand corrupted figures tore off their cloaks and hoods, revealing their mangled, hideous bodies!