I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 453: We Are the Descendants of Redlichia

Vivien stood atop the lighthouse for a long, long while.

She had lived a very long time. Few in this world had lived longer.

She was an ancient divine being, one who seemed to know every secret this world held and every event in its past, and yet even now so much of it felt not quite as she had imagined.

Those ancient myths, those tales that seemed to tell of creation itself, were they truly as they had heard them told?

How many secrets, how many stories lay buried inside them that they had never known at all?

Perhaps everything was just as the Creator had once said.

"This is only the myth of the trilobite men."

It was the myth of the trilobite men, yes. But it was also only the myth as the trilobite men themselves saw it.

"The stories we have heard, the faith we hold so devoutly, God as we picture Him."

After a long while, Vivien lowered her head at last and read on.

This time she did not pause. She read every story through to its end.

What followed unfolded just as the legends told it.

The Great Poet Tito reached the Sal Domain of the Demon Abyss Kingdom, where he was bound in the end and left to die on the Island of the Dead, until the first Demon Abyss King saved him.

The Great Poet and the first Demon Abyss King passed through Yesael City, crossed the Bottomless Abyss Trench, and braved every danger along the way.

In the end, they reached the God-Given Land.

Only, the legends say they reached the God-Given Land under God's guidance, while the Great Poet Tito's own record is the more precise one. It was the Divine Cup, held in his hand, that let him find the God-Given Land at last.

Wounded and ailing, the first Demon Abyss King fell into an eternal sleep within the Sun Cup Flower Sea. The Great Poet Tito, guided by a spirit, came at last before the Creator.

【I saw a boundless sea of golden flowers swaying, the ruins of the ancient God-Given City drowned beneath that sea of blossoms, and colored bubbles blinking in and out of being, drifting past the edge of God's Island. It was a dream more resplendent than any I had ever seen.】

【Old Stone Helm found the answer he sought before the stone tablet, and I looked upon God.】

【To God's left sat the Mother of Life, who commands the Mother Conch of All Things, upon the divine platform. To God's right, the Divine Messenger cradled the Dream Egg, asleep atop the sea of stars. Below the platform knelt King Redlichia, facing Yinsai.】

【I looked up, and saw eternal stars, ancient beyond ages, cast down their light from atop the divine platform, and the long river of years flowed on beneath His feet.】

【God asked me, "Tito, do you still believe in fate?"】

【I answered, "I do, because fate lies in our own hands."】

Vivien read that far and froze outright.

Gooseflesh crawled over her whole body before she could stop it, and yet deep inside her a chill like ice took hold.

Give her all the courage in the world and she still would never have dared say such a thing before the Creator.

Fate lies in our own hands?

And said to God Yinsai, no less?

Vivien's face drained of color. "How could the saint dare say such a thing? Why would he say it at all?"

"How could he dare speak like that... to the Creator?"

Vivien read on. She seemed desperate to know how God Yinsai had answered.

Was it to be punishment? Or something else?

Somewhere in her heart she seemed to know the answer already, and yet she dared not believe it.

Her gaze dropped, and there on the Bone Book stood the Great Poet Tito's own words.

【God laughed.】

【It was a laugh of approval.】

Slowly, Vivien read the last page of the Bone Book through to its end. Then she closed it and tied the cord back around it.

Dazed, as though her soul had gone out of her, she came down from the lighthouse. Every trilobite symbiote there seemed to sense how far her mind had drifted, yet not one of them dared step forward to speak.

Vivien walked on and on, all the way to the deepest heart of the Blood Kingdom, to the farthest end of the Temple of Truth.

She came at last to a halt before that cliff wall and looked up at the mythological genealogy chart carved into it, of the Creator and the Supreme Three Gods.

Now that she had finished the Final Chapter, so much that had once eluded Vivien came clear all at once, and she grasped at last the deeper meaning buried within those ancient epics and myths.

She studied the painted sacred reliefs on the wall, and she caught every small detail that differed from the Saint's Chapter. They were nothing more than the trilobite men's own imagination and embellishment.

Suddenly, she began to recite.

"God said to Yesael."

"Your belief in me is no concern of mine."

She recalled the saint's Hymn of the King of Wisdom.

"The Hymn of the King of Wisdom."

"The final chapter."

"God withdrew His grace, yet in that same act He loosed His hold upon the fate of the trilobite men."

"The end of the God-Given Age was also the sign that the history of civilization had begun."

In that instant, Vivien fell into a deep spiral of self-doubt.

She found that nothing she had thought, nothing she had known, was anything like what the saint had understood.

She had called herself the heir to the Will of the Saint, and yet never once truly understood what the saint had meant.

"Is what I have inherited truly the Will of the Saint?"

"Or only the Will of the Saint as I imagined it to be?"

"King Redlichia handed royal authority and power down to His own sons, and God Yinsai loosed the hand that had held fast to the trilobite men's fate."

"The Creator placed our fate into our own hands, and yet we have always longed to hand that fate straight back to Him, waiting on the Creator's own guidance."

"There was never truly any God-Forsaken Era at all. We were simply always waiting for God's salvation, and so let slip one chance after another to shape our own fate."

Now, it seemed, she understood at last why God had never come to see her.

"He is the eternal God, and He is also the father of King Redlichia."

"We are the descendants of King Redlichia. Believer, so called, is only an identity we fastened upon ourselves out of our own imagining."

"He has no need of our faith, nor any need of our devotion."

"In His eyes, we are only the descendants of King Redlichia."

"Nothing more than that. Only that, and nothing else."

Vivien felt just like Tito before he ever set out on his journey. Neither of them had ever truly known the will and the greatness of God Yinsai.

That greatness lay not in His power alone, but even more in His willingness to let fate go.

Only, Tito had needed no more than a single journey to understand it all.

She herself had needed an entire era, and even then had come to see it only slowly.

Vivien gazed at the Eternal Stars carved into the wall, and spoke.

"O God! You have no need of some so-called devoted believer, and so You will never pause Your steps for my sake."

Vivien could not help a rueful, astonished laugh.

She laughed at herself, at all that panic and unease and dread of hers, laughed at how small she was, to have presumed she could guess at the will of the divine.

All of a sudden, Vivien felt a surge of power reach her from within the Dream Realm.

She turned to look deep into the Dream Realm, toward the heart of the Divine Technique Kingdom.

There, the Blood Mist Cup that carried a new life within it was unfurling, a little at a time.

"Is she about to be born?" Vivien breathed, joy and astonishment breaking over her at once.

The Divine Technique Kingdom

One by one, divine technique spirits stepped out from within the diamond-faceted mirror, gathering before a single Blood Mist Cup.

They cheered. They sang out loud.

Around every divine technique spirit fluttered swarms of divine technique seeds, swirling like shooting stars.

"An apostle from the primordial age!"

"An apostle of the Creator!"

"Come home... come home across a hundred million years of time and distance..."

"The twin gods of red and blue... shall be reunited at last, in this very era..."

They too, it seemed, understood what was coming. The ancient living being nurtured within the flower cup was about to be born into the world.

And in that moment, a passage within the Divine Technique Kingdom suddenly opened.

The Scarlet Goddess emerged from within the passage and came to stand beneath the towering Blood Mist Cup. At once the divine technique spirits gathered close around her.

Vivien looked up at the Blood Mist Cup with excitement bright in her eyes, and a trace of unease there too.

At first she reached out a hand, meaning to do something, only to draw it back again at once.

In the end she only watched in silence while the flower cup unfolded, little by little.

The flower cup spread itself wide to its fullest, then began to peel away layer by layer, and within it a child slowly came into view.

Born already in an apostle's God's Form, she lay curled into a small ball within the light, her legs folded beneath her. Her ice-blue hair had not yet grown in, only a faint down of pale color.

Her small fingers moved, slowly, and then, just as slowly, her eyes opened.

The instant her gaze fixed upon the empty air, a violent storm rose up out of nothing.

Three Law Imprints turned in circles around her, their power reaching into every change across the whole Divine Technique Kingdom. Had this happened out in the wider world, it might have shifted the heavens themselves.

"Hehe!"

The child did not cry on waking. Instead, she laughed.

She had not come into this world wrapped in fear and confusion. She seemed to know already why she had been born, and to know, too, that someone was waiting for her arrival.

Though she did not remember what had come before, and had not yet fully awakened the power that had once been hers.

Vivien reached out her hands and slowly lifted the child up from the now-bare flower cup.

The child looked up at her. Her eyes were as pure as clear ice, her pupils glinting like gemstones.

The child smiled up at her, and Vivien found herself smiling back.

"Heh heh~"

"Hahahahaha..."

She drew a deep breath, and let it go.

The Great Poet Tito's Final Chapter had given her a dim grasp of the will of God, and of the Will of the Saint besides, and it had loosened the greatest fear and confusion that had gripped her heart.

And now this child's birth had let her see hope.

"We are the children of King Redlichia, the descendants of King Redlichia."

"What God cares for is not whether we believe in Him. It is what we are doing, and what we manage to achieve."

Everything she had once clutched at and could not let go, everything she had once been unable to release, seemed all at once a stone that had finally settled to the ground, and the old obsession loosed its hold on her at last.

The Scarlet Goddess pressed a deep kiss to the child's forehead, then carried her, step by step, down from where she had been born.

"Anli! Go, and become a god of the new age. Go, and claim the Wisdom Fruit."

"Go, and bring truth down to the mortal world. Go, and forge a new glory."

"Tell God Yinsai."

"We hold fate in our own hands. We are the ones who build civilization."

"We shall linger and hesitate no longer. We shall go forward, and never look back."

"We... shall become worthy of the Divine King's bloodline."

Carrying the child, she came to the edge of the Divine Technique Kingdom. Here too grew a tall, many-colored flowering tree, a strange hollow set into its thick trunk.

No one could say when a Rainbow Tree had grown up here as well. Perhaps it was simply a product born of the Laws.

Or perhaps, just as easily, some wood nymph had passed by and planted it there without a second thought.

The Scarlet Goddess waved her hand, and a sheet of white paper rose into the air. Across it, words written in the Wisdom Script slowly began to appear.

It was a letter the Scarlet Goddess was writing to Iva.

In it, she agreed to send the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline back to the Sky Temple.

At the same time, she offered Iva her apology. After all, some of what she had said before had gone a little too far.

Iva was indeed connected to Weishi of the Hosen family. He had said as much himself, once, to others.

The first time he left the Divine Kingdom of Creation, he had told King Smerkel of his own origin and history, telling him the story of the two brothers, Weishi and Henir.

But Iva and Weishi were not, in the end, quite the same. He had only inherited one of Weishi's nightmares. In spirituality, in wisdom, in desire, and in memory alike, the two of them were worlds apart.

"The Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline records how King Redlichia gave royal authority and power over to His sons, and it also marks the beginning of the wisdom ability."

"That was the Divine King of Wisdom's greatest gift and greatest mercy, and it belongs to no single person."

"It belongs to every trilobite man, to every descendant of Redlichia, to every Wisdom Seed there is."

"Whether of the past, the present, or the future."

"Our past needs no proof. Everything is recorded upon the long river of years, and recorded, too, within our own minds."

"We shall not forget, and we shall keep moving forward."

"Let us seal the Contract of the Gods!"

"The Age of Gods has already arrived. This is the Age of Wisdom, an age that belongs to every Wisdom Seed."

In the end, the Scarlet Goddess agreed to Iva's proposal. Once she had finished writing the letter, she placed it inside the hollow of the tree.

A streak of colored light spun and turned, and the letter folded itself into a paper airplane, crossing the distance of space to fly off toward some far horizon.

And Vivien, cradling the child in her arms, walked step by step away from the Divine Technique Kingdom.

Endless Desert, Demon Spirit Pyramid

The Demon Spirit King and the Demon Spirit Queen climbed to the top of the pyramid, and there found the God of Demon Spirits, Elena, sitting alone before the temple.

The king and queen stepped forward to pay their respects, addressing her with reverence.

"Lady Elena," the queen said.

"Great God of Demon Spirits!" the king declared.

Elena only sat where she was on the balustrade outside the temple, motionless, leaning against a pillar.

She might as well have been nothing more than a puppet doll.

Her gaze was fixed on the darkness beyond her domain, and her voice drifted down from somewhere high above.

"A god?"

"Since when did even I become a myth?"

There was something mechanical in Elena's voice, and yet beneath it a trace of confusion could just be made out. That was a rare thing indeed.

She paused a moment, then leaned back, straight and still, against the wall of the Yinsai Temple.

"Am I truly still awake? Why can I feel nothing real at all?"

"Is it because of this body of Abyssal Magic Gold?"

"Or is it that I never truly woke up at all?"

Elena leaned against the pillar. Carved into it were the myths and history of the people of the Abyss, and, alongside them, a single line from the Redlichia Covenant.

"God does not care, but I do."

It seemed that the moment the Divine King spoke those words, the Wisdom Seeds' obsessions and attachments were born out of them, rose up out of them, and began turning in a cycle without end.

"Perhaps we truly are only dreaming, dreaming a dream that never ends."

"Perhaps this is simply a Life Dream. My own beautiful Life Dream."

"We clutch at everything we cannot bear to let go of, at the dream we cannot bear to release, and circle round and round without end."

"The dream is beautiful. But it is not real."

"The dream is beautiful. But it has no future."

"The people of the Abyss are long since gone. All that remains is a scatter of puppets called demon spirits, bewildered actors in a play that none of us know how to begin, or how to end."

No one could feel what Elena felt on hearing Vivien's words, could take them so deeply to heart, could carve them so completely into her very bones.

Vivien had cried out those words, "There is nothing left of us at all."

And the one whose heart truly trembled, whose heart truly broke, was Elena.

Compared to the trilobite men, it was the people of the Abyss who had truly, genuinely, nothing left at all.

In the First Era, the people of the Abyss had sacrificed everything to raise this Demon Spirit Pyramid, forging puppets of Abyssal Magic Gold out of their own divine blood. Generation after generation, they had then imprisoned their own ghosts to kindle those puppets' power, sealing those ghosts away for an entire era, until Elena's return finally set them free.

The Elena of old had not wanted to begin so cruel a plan, and had chosen to abandon it. But the king and queen before her now had chosen to carry it on.

Everything had already begun. The price had already been paid. And so there was no possibility, now, of ending it.

In the end she paid the price of turning her own self into an artifact, and together with every ancient demon spirit puppet she kept alive that dream called the people of the Abyss.

The Demon Spirit King did not know what to say, but the Demon Spirit Queen kept her eyes on Elena.

"Lady Elena! If it truly is only a dream, then at least within that dream, we are still together."

"And if it is only a dream, if all of us are inside that same dream together, then where is the harm in that?"

Elena looked at Sal, and said nothing.

The Demon Spirit King finally found his chance to speak, and told Elena the reason for their visit.

"God! God Iva has come."

Elena knew perfectly well, of course, that God Iva was just outside. For beings like gods, that little distance made hardly any difference from standing face to face.

Elena called out toward the world beyond. "You have come this far already. You may as well let yourself in, God Iva!"

No sooner had she spoken than a figure appeared at the edge of the mythic domain.

Step by step he made his way up toward the pyramid, and when at last he had climbed onto its topmost step, he glanced inside the temple.

There was little ornament within. The only thing that caught the eye at all was the ancient statue of Yinsai.

Everything about it was as plain and simple as the First Era itself, and yet it carried within it a sense of towering grandeur, and of ages long passed.

After that single glance, Iva turned his gaze away.

"Lady Elena! The Scarlet Goddess has already given up her claim on the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline. I have come to settle the sealing of the Contract of the Gods with you."

He called it settling the matter of the Contract of the Gods. In truth, he had come to persuade Elena to give up the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline as well.

The God of Demon Spirits stepped down from the railing, and her height stretched upward at once, tall enough to be genuinely daunting.

As she moved, the hilt of the Ruhe Sword at her waist slipped free from the soft folds of her robe.

That hard-edged bearing and manner made even Iva feel a flicker of pressure, though he knew well enough that she meant no true malice by it. It was simply her nature.

The God of Demon Spirits stood before the God of Desire and Alchemy, and the two divine beings looked one another in the eye.

"She does not want it anymore?"

"She says she does not want it, and that is the end of it?"

"She does not want it. I do."

Elena had heard clearly enough that the Scarlet Goddess, Vivien, meant to give it up. But she herself had no intention of doing the same.

Her heart was as hollow as Vivien's own, and she wanted, just as desperately, to find something to fill that emptiness.

The Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline, this sacred relic, might well be the very best thing to fill it.

It could prove the past of the people of the Abyss. It could prove that they had truly, once, existed. It could prove where their glory had come from.

God Iva looked into Elena's eyes, and shook his head.

"You are already of the divine race, already descendants of King Redlichia. You need nothing at all to prove it."

"The Sky Temple is the temple that Yesael, the second King of Wisdom, once raised. That is its rightful home, and that is where it should have been all along."

"We have a Yinsai Temple of our own," Elena said. "It can be enshrined here just as well."

"It belongs to the Divine King, Redlichia," God Iva said. "It belongs to the seven Divine Children, Yesael, Hosen, Samo, Xilong, Sele, Boon, and Ense."

"It is the very origin of the wisdom ability, and it should not belong to any single person."

"Nor is there anyone fit to hold command of it."

"You are a god now, and even so you cannot speak for the King of Wisdom. Nor can you speak for the seven Divine Children."

Iva's words, at last, brought Elena to silence.

Those names carried too much weight, weight so heavy that even she did not dare take it upon herself.

Only then did Iva go on.

"The Age of Gods is about to begin. We should not fix our eyes on the past. We should look, instead, toward the future."

"Lady Elena! There will come a moment when the demon spirits, too, walk fully into the mortal world. No, that is not quite right. You have already begun to walk there."

God Iva looked to the Demon Spirit King and the Demon Spirit Queen. "There is no need for you to shut yourselves away in here forever. Go out. See the world for yourselves."

"This world is vast, and it is beautiful."

"On my way here, I saw no small number of demon spirits already living alongside the snake people in the Yellow Sand Kingdom. That is a fine beginning."

Having said this much, God Iva addressed her directly by name.

"Elena! Let it begin here. Let it begin with the Contract of the Gods."

Elena had been able to become myth at all only thanks to Iva's help. He was the one who had given her the means of becoming a god, and only through that had Elena been able to ascend to her divine seat.

To Elena, that was a debt of gratitude in its own right.

Now God Iva had come to her door in person, hoping Elena would give up her claim to the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline. With someone like Elena, who set such store by keeping her word, that carried real weight.

For a while afterward, no one spoke. Elena, too, seemed to waver, unable to decide.

And it was just then that some other stir broke the quiet.

At the foot of the pyramid, a many-colored flowering tree suddenly began to glow, its branches swaying.

Within the mythic domain of the Demon Spirit Pyramid there grew a Rainbow Tree of its own, as though every myth came standard with one, the way every doorstep comes with its own mailbox.

A letter drifted out from the hollow of the Rainbow Tree, and came to rest before the God of Demon Spirits, Elena.

Elena glanced at it, and seemed to recognize at once whose letter it was.

She waved a hand to open it, and a greeting from beyond the known world rose up to meet her.

"Dear Lady Elena. It's been a long while now since I left you and the Abyss Royal City. I miss you terribly. I wonder if you've missed me at all."

"I've run into all sorts of interesting things lately. I..."

Reading those words on the page, this Knight of the Abyss, hard as steel, actually let a trace of a smile show on her illusory, ghostly face.

"Ray!"

God Iva, hearing that name, knew of him as well.

More than once he had heard Oran, his own companion and follower, speak of him, a truly fascinating person, one who dreamed.

Everyone dreams. But he did not merely dream. He soared for the sake of dreams.

So Oran had said.

He was a demon spirit puppet like thunder, like cloud, like something adrift in the open sky.

His feet were planted firmly upon the earth, and yet what he yearned for was the light, and the open sky.

"Is that a letter from your student?" Iva asked.

Elena held the letter close. "He says he may have found the place where the sun rises."

When this divine being spoke of her student, a trace of pride actually crossed her face.

Ray had told his teacher that he had flown to the very end of the eastern sea, and there had seen a boundless, sprawling "Great Island."

That, perhaps, was the very place where the sun rose.

Reading Ray's letter, Elena felt, somehow, as though she were waking from a dream.

In truth, she had tumbled out of an old dream and into an entirely new dream of the future.

If Anli was hope and the future to the Scarlet Goddess, Vivien...

...then Ray was exactly that to the God of Demon Spirits, Elena.

The God of Demon Spirits, Elena, studied Ray's letter closely, and the corner of her illusory mouth curved very slightly upward.

"Perhaps this is not my Life Dream after all."

"If this were nothing more than a dream, then no dream of mine could ever hold the place where the sun rises."