I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 452: The Final Chapter and the Origin of the Divine Cup

The storm lashed the sea in a wild frenzy.

A shadow taller than the dark clouds pressed down from above. Behind that blackness a colossal face flickered faintly, its red eyes flashing in time with the thunder.

The Scarlet Goddess reached out and plucked the enormous sealing flower.

"Hm?"

But when she looked inside, the goddess found her quarry already gone.

That left the Scarlet Goddess astonished. Only a moment before, she had clearly locked onto it.

"It got away?"

"How did it get away?"

For the moment, only two beings in the mortal world knew that the Door Spirit Realm existed, and only they held the key and the power to create the door.

One was Ray, the ancient puppet demon spirit. The other was the ceramic figurine. Even the Scarlet Goddess, then, had no knowledge that a thing called the Teleportation Gate existed.

For a long while she turned it over in her mind, and could make no sense of it at all.

A flicker of regret ran through the Scarlet Goddess. In the end it had not been a complete victory. She had failed to keep hold of both the little figurine and whatever contingency Xiao had left behind.

Ever since she learned the ceramic figurine carried Xiao's treasury on its person, she had grown all the more certain that it carried some further scheme of his as well. What that scheme might be, she had no idea.

"That will do."

"At least I have reclaimed the Final Chapter."

The gorgeous crimson flower dissolved away in the goddess's hand. Her form sank back behind the dark clouds and the storm, drawing gradually further off.

With the sealing flower undone, the ship frozen inside it slid loose and down, drifting once more upon the surface of the sea.

One by one the men aboard woke. All they saw on opening their eyes was the sky-blanketing storm already scattered, and a smear of red at the far end of the sky.

Soaked through and shaking still, the sailors came back to themselves one by one on the deck and in the cabins, staring blankly about them as though they could not believe they were still alive.

"We're still alive?" At first, not one of them dared believe it.

"We're still alive!" Then came certainty, and with it, cheers.

"Thank the gods for Their forgiveness!" Every man there flung himself down upon the deck, knocking his head against the boards over and over in prayer.

"O Great Scarlet Goddess, thank You for Your mercy." Right up until that moment, the captain of the Royal Navy ship had been certain that the gods had uncovered some past misdeed of his own, and that this was what had called the divine punishment down. Now he had knocked his head bloody against the deck, so badly frightened that his face had gone bone white.

The Storm Sea

The God of Desire and Alchemy had taken possession of Oran's body. The Kingdom of Knowledge and Truth had risen above the sea of clouds. The Scarlet Goddess had taken on the body of a demon god. And atop her Demon Spirit Pyramid, the God of Demon Spirits watched the mortal world through the Dream Realm.

Together the gods pressed down every wind and every ripple across that stretch of sea, until the surface lay flat and still as a mirror, with not so much as a school of fish in sight.

Now that they had recovered the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo, the next step, naturally, was to trade with the spirits to win back the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline.

A single silver leaf drifted down from high above and settled upon the tranquil surface of the sea.

Ripple after ripple rose and spread outward.

That power ran on at last into the Dream of the Lake Nymph, the Barter Emissary, and words rose to the surface of the dreamscape.

One barter listing after another shifted and changed. The Scarlet Goddess reached out and chose one among them.

【Barter: Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline】

【Quantity: 1】

【Origin: An artifact from the Age of God-Given Island at the Dawn of the First Era...】

【Price: The Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo, or the Bone Book of the first volume of the Yinsai Epic, inscribed by Saint Tito.】

On the other side, Iva, the God of Desire and Alchemy, let the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo down out of his hand, letting it sink into the Barter Emissary's Dream.

But the instant the Scarlet Goddess chose to trade for the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline, the Barter Emissary's power carried word straight to the carving's current owner.

God-Given Land, Sun Cup Flower Sea

Within a fairy-tale kingdom woven of yarn balls, a great spirit turned her gaze toward the mortal world.

"Ah, found it!"

The great spirit had been sitting on a traveling performance wagon. Delighted, she sprang to her feet at once and leapt down from its roof.

She turned into a streak of starlight, bound for the mortal world.

But back on the surface of the Storm Sea, before the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo could fall into the Barter Dream, a brilliant burst of golden light erupted outward.

Layer upon layer of it gilded the whirlpool the leaf had stirred up, and a figure tore out through the vortex to catch the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo in her hand.

The figure spun once through the air, then came to stand upon the sea, holding the stone carving high.

"Sure enough, it's still here."

"I knew you'd come home again, Lord Polo's carving."

One by one, the beings gathered above that stretch of sea turned their gazes toward the figure.

What they saw was a figure with golden hair and brilliant golden eyes, wrapped in the distinctive cloak of the spirit race, its surface shimmering with the sigil of wishing light.

On her back she carried a pack stuffed full of yarn dolls in every color, and they seemed to speak to the very nature of her power.

There was something unreal about this strange form of life, as though she did not belong to reality at all, and the golden light only deepened that sense of a power eternal and indelible.

The spirit race had long since become the Spirits of Wishes of the Dream Sovereign, Hila. Being so often close to the Creator, Yinsai, they naturally carried a part of that near-eternal aura.

Standing before the Door of Truth, Polik said, "A spirit."

The God of Demon Spirits, Elena, went further. "A creature that dwells in the Sun Cup Flower Sea."

Vivien seemed to recognize her. Long ago, it appeared, this spirit had come down to the mortal world once before, and had even met her teacher, Lan. "Is that the Divine Messenger of the Creator?" she asked.

Iva looked to the spirit and knew her at once. "It is Simila!"

The one who had descended into the mortal world was none other than the great spirit, Simila.

Simila cradled the stone carving in her arms, overjoyed beyond words.

Spirits, by their nature, lost themselves easily in their own world, blind to everything outside it, and even a great spirit was no exception.

So for a good while Simila did nothing but fly above the sea, holding the carving aloft, beside herself with joy, before she finally came to a stop.

At last she settled herself.

She looked around at everyone present, calling out their identities and names one by one.

"Iva!"

"Scarlet Goddess, Vivien!"

"God of Demon Spirits, Elena!"

"And the Ghost, Polik."

Then Simila rummaged through her pack and drew out the oldest stone carving of all, born in the primordial age, at the very dawn of the First Era.

"Ta-da! This is the one you want, isn't it!"

Its appearance carried none of the earth-shaking spectacle of a divine artifact. It came instead wrapped in the calls and prayers of countless trilobite men.

In that same instant it stirred every heart present, and all those gathered stood solemn and still.

"God has spoken~"

"God has spoken~"

"The Royal Bloodline... divine-granted kingship..."

"God gave us everything. The king granted us the wisdom ability..."

"The Great Beast itself was the throne..."

The voices of the First Era's trilobite men echoed in their ears, carried across the primordial ages.

Looking at the outline of that stone slab, they seemed to see the wild, primordial God-Given Land itself, seemed to see the Pyramid Temple.

They saw the Divine King and his sons standing on the far shore of time's river, gazing at them. They saw generation after generation of the Kings of Yinsai and their ancestors. They saw the origin and the ending of all wisdom.

Every face there wore a different expression, and none more so than the God of Demon Spirits, Elena, and the Scarlet Goddess, Vivien, who found themselves drawing closer without meaning to.

Holding the carving, Simila asked, "But who should I give it to?"

It was a deeply thorny question. They could use the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline as a witness to seal the Contract of the Gods, but who, in the end, would keep the carving itself?

And who among them even had the right to keep it?

The Final Chapter was different. That was a saint's possession, and so it belonged, naturally, to the Temple of Truth.

But the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline did not belong to the Temple of Truth. It had come into being before the first-generation Saint ever drew breath, and the Great Poet Tito was not born until the age of Queen Star.

And to obtain it, everyone here had played their part.

The God of Desire had first proposed the Contract of the Gods and reached out to the other gods. The Door of Truth had cut off the ceramic figurine's escape. The Scarlet Goddess's believers had run it into a corner. The God of Demon Spirits had provided the compass.

The God of Desire and Alchemy proposed, "Once the contract is sealed, we ought to send it back to the Sky Temple."

God Iva glanced at the God of Demon Spirits, Elena, before his gaze settled at last on the Scarlet Goddess, Vivien.

"The Sky Temple that King Yesael built, where every king of ages past and their ancestors beyond counting lie buried."

"There lies the Yinsai Epic. There lies the Hymn of the King of Wisdom. And there lie the written stone tablets the saints brought back from the God-Given Land."

"It has always been enshrined within that temple. It is time it went home."

But the Scarlet Goddess's gaze had never once left the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline. Only when Iva finished speaking did she come back to herself, turning sharply toward him.

"Send it back?"

The Scarlet Goddess seemed to grow agitated. She could not accept Iva's proposal at all.

"We only just managed to welcome it home. We only just managed to find it at all."

"And we are to send it back, just like that?"

"It bears witness to our past. It bears witness to who we are."

"It can prove where we came from. It bears witness to the birth and glory of the trilobite men. It records our very origin."

The more the Scarlet Goddess spoke, the more agitated she grew, and something of the fear and obsession buried in her heart spilled out through her words. "I became a Life Seed. You became the Cup of Desire. Asai became a single wisp of a ghost in the wheel of reincarnation long ago. And Xiao, that wretch, threw away the dignity of the trilobite men and everything else along with it."

Vivien looked around at everyone gathered there, studying each of them in turn. "And you as well, Lady Elena. Long ago, in the passing of the years, you and the People of the Abyss became nothing more than a puppet doll."

"What do we have left?"

"Tell me. What do we have left?"

"We have lost everything. There is nothing left of us at all."

"Besides these, what do we have?"

At last, the Scarlet Goddess pointed at Iva.

"Iva. Or should I call you Prince Weishi of the Hosen family, of the Royal Bloodline?"

"Of course you do not care."

"You have all become gods already. Nothing of what once was need matter to any of you any longer."

The Scarlet Goddess's voice turned cold. "So all of it ought to be forgotten?"

"Just set it down in the Sky Temple and let it be, as good as buried in a grave?"

"Yes, of course!"

"In any case, the trilobite men are no more. The bloodline is severed for good."

By this point, the agitation in her was almost impossible to contain.

"But I cannot forget! And the Temple of Truth will not forget, either!"

"We are the trilobite men! We are Yinsai!"

The gods had not even sealed the Contract of the Gods yet, and already discord had broken out among them, all over the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline.

Set beside this, it seemed, the Contract of the Gods and every affair of the mortal world hardly deserved mention at all, nothing worth taking seriously.

The God of Demon Spirits, Elena, listened quietly to the Scarlet Goddess's words. Both pairs of her eyes turned toward Vivien, sharp as blades.

Elena's answer came flat and level. "Who said I do not care."

Like Vivien, Elena too wanted to keep the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline.

The carving recorded not only the ancestors of the trilobite men, but the ancestors of the People of the Abyss as well, kneeling there in the Wisdom Palace to receive the primordial Bestowing of Power.

More than anyone else, Elena longed to look upon the scene carved into that stone, to see the likeness of their ancestors, to witness the story and the very image of how it had all begun.

To witness that they, too, were descendants of the King of Wisdom.

Proof that the blood of Redlichia ran in their veins.

At the thought, the God of Demon Spirits, Elena, could not help stepping forward, drawing closer to the mortal world.

Her two faces, the real and the illusory, overlaid one another, one cold as iron, the other proud and imperious.

When she spoke, two voices wound together as one, lending her words an air of mystery.

"You are not wrong. It should be kept."

"Leave it here in the mortal world. Let me be the one to keep it."

"This carving bears witness to the true origin of the People of the Abyss. It proves that we too are descendants of the Divine King. We need it."

"As for the Contract of the Gods!"

"However great a land of faith you desire, it is yours."

Elena was the God of Monsters and Demon Spirits. The Contract of the Gods had never meant much to her. The stone carving was all she cared about.

The Scarlet Goddess would not yield an inch. "No. This is a holy relic of the trilobite men."

"You already have the Final Chapter," the God of Demon Spirits, Elena, returned.

For a moment, the standoff held.

Beneath the Door of Truth, the Ghost, Polik, spoke up as well.

The Scarlet Goddess was a god, yes, but she was not Polik's god.

Polik had once been a student of the Temple of Truth himself, cast out long ago. Over certain forbidden experiments of his, the temple had even stripped away his Ability at the time.

"The Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline is not the property of the Temple of Truth. It belongs to the line of the Royal Bloodline itself."

"And even if someone must keep it, it should not be you."

"Lady Vivien. You have never held royal authority, and you are not a direct descendant of the King of Wisdom."

"Never mind that Asai is asleep," the Scarlet Goddess said, her voice hard. "Even if he woke, would he dare admit that he is of the Royal Bloodline?"

"Would he dare admit that he is that Anhofus?"

"Does he even have the right to hold the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline?"

"Would he dare face the things he once did?"

The Scarlet Goddess had been born into an age after Anhofus, an age in which everyone said Anhofus was already dead.

Set against Anhofus, a dead man buried in history, it was Xiao she hated the more deeply, Xiao whose crimes weighed heavier on her. But that did not mean she felt any kindness toward Asai.

For a moment it seemed the gods might truly draw their swords, ready to come to blows over the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline.

The great spirit, Simila, watched all this for a while and seemed to grasp, dimly, what was happening.

"Are you all going to fight over this slab of stone?"

The moment the spirit spoke, most of the drawn-blade tension went out of the air.

Only then did everyone remember that the spirit, the Divine Messenger of the Creator, was still there, watching them.

The great spirit, holding the carving, could make no sense of it at all. She did not understand how these beings could have come to this.

Puzzled, the spirit tucked the carving away and spoke to the gods and their representatives gathered there.

"It looks like you haven't made up your minds yet."

"Then come find me again once you have."

The spirit Simila opened a door, preparing to return to the Dream Realm.

But before she left, she turned her head back to look at the gods of the mortal world.

"Do you really still remember that you're descendants of Redlichia?"

"I met Sandean. I met Tito and Stan."

"They were nothing like you."

And with that, the spirit was gone.

The gods fell silent, and it was the God of Desire and Alchemy who spoke next.

"Very well, let us leave it at that. Everyone, go back and think it over."

"Once we have decided, we shall seal the Contract of the Gods."

One by one, the gods withdrew, and the disturbance above the sea slowly settled.

A sea wind came in from the distance, stirring up one small ripple after another.

The Blood Kingdom of the Deep Sea

The red-haired deity sat upon her divine throne, staring vacantly at the four walls of the Temple of Truth.

She looked at the reliefs set into the walls, one after another, and at the bone books.

These were what generations of the Temple of Truth's disciples had left behind, the trilobite men's search, generation upon generation, for power and Ability.

In those bone books and stone carvings one could trace the legacy of the trilobite men, handed down generation after generation, one after another, as though it would never break, never come to an end.

Vivien believed herself the heir to the Will of the Saint, the guardian of Yinsai.

She was, at the same time, a devout believer in God Yinsai.

She believed she had always walked the right path. And she had, in truth, given everything of herself to Yinsai and the Temple of Truth, placing the legacy of Yinsai and the trilobite men above herself.

She had sacrificed almost everything, just to carry the trilobite men into this era.

Even if it was only in the form of a Life Seed.

But that was already the very limit of what she could do, the end of a road she had reached only by giving up everything.

Once a person grew still, the thoughts came, and with them, memories of the past.

And lately, what weighed most on the Scarlet Goddess's mind was, naturally, the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline, the legacy and continuation of Yinsai, the reincarnation of Anli.

There was also the matter of the Creator's own carriage. She had passed within reach of it and still failed to see the Creator at all.

It was this last that left the Scarlet Goddess, Vivien, unsettled, even fearful, anxious and troubled.

"Why?"

"Why could I not see the Creator this time?"

She kept turning it over. Had she done something wrong?

Or did she simply lack the qualification for it? Had she fallen short somewhere?

All at once, she remembered what the spirit Simila had said.

"Do you really still remember that you're descendants of Redlichia?"

"I met Sandean. I met Tito and Stan."

"They were nothing like you."

The Scarlet Goddess rose from her throne, murmuring one ancient name after another.

"The First-generation Sage, Sandean."

"The Saint who brought miracles, Stan!"

"The Great Poet Tito!"

The first had founded the Temple of Truth, while the latter two were recorded not only in epics, but in myth itself.

They even knelt beneath the Pyramid Temple, within the Temple of Truth's own genealogy of the supreme divine being.

They were saints who carried the myth and the faith forward.

Saints the Creator had acknowledged.

The Scarlet Goddess made her way out of the Temple of Truth, step by step, descending the stairway below.

The whole Blood Kingdom was in an uproar. Every trilobite symbiote had already gathered beneath the lighthouse, watching the light pouring from the holy relic enshrined once more atop it.

"The Great Poet Tito's Final Chapter. Lady Vivien has finally brought it back."

"Do you hear it? That voice?" one of them asked.

"Have you ever heard that voice before?" said another.

"That is the voice of generation after generation of the Temple of Truth's scholars. That is the Will of the Saint."

Not until the Scarlet Goddess came walking up from behind did the trilobite symbiotes notice her at all.

"Lady Vivien!"

"Lady Vivien is here."

The trilobite symbiotes parted, clearing a path, and Vivien said nothing. She simply lifted her head to watch the light, and climbed the lighthouse step by step.

Vivien reached the very top of the lighthouse and, with her own hands, picked up the Final Chapter.

In her memory, this thing had always been enshrined atop the lighthouse.

Because it was a holy relic, because it recorded a secret of the Creator, no one had ever dared to touch it, let alone take it down.

So this was the first time Vivien had ever opened it herself.

She wanted to seek out the world of the saint, to seek out the Will of the Saint.

She wanted to know what a saint had truly been like, what the saint of old had once said to God.

And how had God answered?

She thought about it for a long while.

Slowly she untied the cord and unfolded the Bone Book, and looked down at this ancient chapter, pieced together out of the Wisdom Script of a primordial age.

The story began at a garden hermitage beside the sea, the place of Queen Star's passing.

That was the final destination of her journey with Polo.

And the protagonist of the story was a poet who believed deeply in fate.

The Great Poet Tito was born into a family of cartographers, his mother an illegitimate descendant of the Xilong family, of the Royal Bloodline. But he had no wish to inherit the family trade. He wanted, instead, to become a poet.

And so he began to write the Yinsai Epic, setting out to record the history that ran from Yesael to Queen Star.

He too was a devout believer, one who trusted in fate beyond all measure, certain that the Creator had already arranged everything, unseen.

He read through every divine precept in the Redlichia Covenant, and in them came to see the greatness and the wisdom of the divine.

Everything that was fated to happen and everything that was not, God had foreseen it all long ago, and had sent down warnings well in advance.

And so he came to believe, with absolute conviction, that his own becoming a poet was itself an act of fate.

Everything was a choice made by fate, which was to say, the will of Yinsai.

Fate would guide him to finish his work. Fate would lead him back to the vanished past of Yinsai, back to everything the trilobite men had lost.

Reading this far, the Scarlet Goddess found herself at a loss.

She had suddenly glimpsed her own shadow in the figure of the Great Poet Tito.

Both of them were searching to recover the past, searching for what had once been lost.

"Great Poet Tito."

"O Saint! Did you find it, in the end?"

All at once the Scarlet Goddess felt certain that opening this book had been exactly the right thing to do.

Perhaps, unseen, fate itself was guiding her as well.

Vivien read on, and watched the Great Poet Tito meet Queen Star, meet the Divine Messenger Polo.

But Queen Star died on the night before the poet Tito finished writing his story, and in the end it was the Divine Messenger Polo who confirmed the final chapter of Tito's Yinsai Epic.

All of this she had heard before. But the story that came next was not quite what she knew.

Once he finished reading the Yinsai Epic, the Divine Messenger Polo asked Tito whether he wished to write a myth about Redlichia.

And it was from this moment that Tito first conceived the wish to journey to the God-Given Land.

Tito believed, without doubt, that this was God's own guidance, leading him toward the homeland and origin of the trilobite men, toward the Creator's Domain.

Only now did Vivien understand. "So it was the Divine Messenger Polo who first gave the Great Poet Tito the idea of writing the Hymn of the King of Wisdom."

What came after was something she had never heard of before.

Because of Queen Star's passing, the Divine Messenger Polo's Dream shattered.

A spirit, being a creature of Dream, held a lifespan of almost unimaginable length and power that bordered on the miraculous. But for a spirit's Dream to shatter meant that it had set out upon the road home.

The Bone Book recorded that the Divine Messenger Polo, holding Queen Star in his arms, turned into the starry sea of the Milky Way, and that Polo left behind the Dream Queen Star became after her death. Perhaps it was the oldest Life Dream of all, the very first Life Dream ever to exist.

Reading the story of these two, Vivien felt a stirring of emotion rise in her chest.

She could not help but read the Bone Book's words aloud.

【I saw the Divine Messenger Polo become the sea of stars, and a murmuring voice drifted down from the sky. "What a pity. I never got to see God one last time."】

【But then, all at once, the voice rose higher, as though carrying a smile of quiet satisfaction. "I am sorry, God. In the end, Polo could not travel on with You after all."】

Vivien ventured a guess. "What did He see? Was it the Creator?"

The book did not say. Even the Great Poet Tito himself did not know.

Perhaps only the Creator and Polo himself ever knew.

Vivien read on, but the scene the Bone Book described next made her rise straight to her feet.

Shock struck her hard. She could hardly believe what she was reading.

The Bone Book recorded that after his passing the Divine Messenger Polo became a divine artifact, a golden cup engraved with a Dream motif and the marks of the sun and the stars.

The Great Poet Tito's journey to the God-Given Land, to seek an audience with the divine, had not been only to recover the past and set down the Hymn of the King of Wisdom. It had also been to carry the Divine Cup into the Creator's own hands.

"The Divine Cup?"

"The Divine Cup was born from the body of the Divine Messenger Polo?"

Vivien lifted her eyes from the page and looked out past the lighthouse.

In her eyes there was shock, and there was thought.

"Why would the Root Divine Artifact of Dreams be born from the body of the Divine Messenger Polo?"

Vivien sensed something at the edge of understanding, or perhaps had uncovered a truth lost somewhere in the ancient ages.

Perhaps the Divine Messenger Polo had never been an ordinary spirit at all. Every spirit was called a divine messenger of the Creator, but perhaps he was the singular exception among them all.