I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 461: We Came From the Ancestral Fish

The endless darkness spread outward.

Torrents of black mud welled up from beneath the earth, filling the whole street in an instant before spilling out fast on every side.

Anu stood suspended in empty air, the massive wind lizard dragon at his back.

The wind lizard dragon beat its wings, and the gale it raised held the wind and rain at bay.

But in the distance the black rain fell harder still, carrying with it every sin and every filth of the world, as though it meant to drown the whole city beneath it.

At the same time, the raging wind and rain sealed the entire city off from the world beyond.

Anu watched the vast passage keep widening, opening onto another world entirely.

He knew full well what lay beyond it, even if this was the first time he had ever truly laid eyes on it.

His face had turned grim in the extreme, and since his features were nothing like an ordinary person's to begin with, the look of it came out almost monstrous.

"The Black Mud Abyss!"

His gaze reached down to the far end of that darkness, to a realm steeped through and through in black.

A world made wholly of the Abyss's black mud.

Monsters without number or end were lifting their heads within that dark Abyss, gazing up at the mortal realm with evil and greed in their eyes.

Eagle demons wheeled upward in a black mass, and hideous snake demons let out hissing howls.

Rotted wing demons, swamp demons, and heart-burning demons crowded in all around them.

They meant to seize this world of light for themselves, and carry darkness and sin into the mortal realm.

And the woman who had just died was falling too, down through that passage in the earth and into the dark, cradled in the six-armed snake demon's arms as the two of them sank together.

Her clothes rotted and flaked away even as she fell, and tiny scales kept surfacing across her corpse one after another.

The fine scales wrapped themselves little by little around her graceful form, covering the swell of her chest and climbing all the way to her throat, as though draping her in a thin coat of scaled armor.

At last that "corpse" opened its eyes, and its gaze found the lizard person Anu's precisely, high above in the sky.

Then she smiled.

Anu could not find the words for that expression. Perhaps it was happiness. Perhaps contentment.

Not a trace of reason remained in her eyes. She had drowned herself completely in desire, giving free rein to her own sin and lust, fallen at last into the most evil of all realms.

She too had become a monster now. It was the fate that awaited every cultist of the Abyss in the end.

Splash~

She gripped the chain and wound it around her wrist, its other end still fastened to her beloved.

Wrapped in wind and rain and boundless filth, she lay in the six-armed snake demon's arms, the two of them dropping together into the very depths of the Black Mud Abyss.

And Anu's gaze followed her all the way down, to the very bottom of the Black Mud Abyss.

There he could make out a great cocoon woven of countless black threads, and inside it stood a temple, sacred and crumbling at once.

A faint, dim light shone down from the mortal world above, and she drifted along that thread of light, coming to rest before the ruined, rotting temple.

She touched down before the temple and prostrated herself on the ground, the chain that bound the six-armed snake demon still gripped in her hand.

Utterly reverent, as though awaiting someone's arrival.

No one had stepped out yet, but a shadow already stretched outward with the light spilling from inside the temple.

In that instant, a terrible dread pressed down upon every heart, both in the Black Mud Abyss and in Moonlight City above.

When that figure finally stepped out of the temple, every demon bowed its head. Throughout the Black Mud Abyss the monsters offered up their submission to that one shape, and terrible howls rolled up out of the Abyss and into the mortal world.

The voices carried every manner of tone, and yet all of them called out the very same name.

"King of Lust, Melde."

"King of Lust..."

"Lust..."

The one who had stepped out of the temple was a woman, possessed of God's Form, yet grown with four pairs of long, slender wings.

Half of her was a pure, sacred white. Half was a fallen, corrupted black.

The woman's beauty was enough to stop the heart.

She looked like some ascetic nun sworn against all desire, her face cold and full of loathing, as though she despised everything in this world.

But with every step she took, her whole body gave off an irrepressible air of desire, one that made anyone looking at her want to possess her.

Or else, to be possessed by her.

She was a being made wholly of conflict and contradiction, and the deeper the contradiction ran, the more she radiated an allure no one could possibly resist.

She made people fall. She made people lose themselves. She made desire grow wild in them.

The instant Anu laid eyes on her, he too could not help himself, and cried out that same name alongside every one of those monsters.

"King of Lust, Melde."

She carried many titles. The King of the Black Mud Abyss. The Queen of Fallen Angels. But none of them captured her power and her very nature so completely as the King of Lust.

Because that was her sin.

The sin of falling into the Abyss. The sin of blaspheming against the divine.

In the very instant he saw her, Anu understood what she meant to do, and what he himself was about to face.

This was a being unlike any other Abyss King.

"This is no ordinary sacrifice to the Abyss."

It was no standard ritual of Abyss sacrifice, and nothing like the Abyss cultists he had faced before, who fought only to plunder divine blood.

"She means to take every soul in this city with her, down into the Abyss itself."

She meant to possess this city, to corrupt it, to bring it down into ruin, and to drown every soul in it within her own desire, her own sin.

The black passage kept widening without end, and countless Abyss monsters had already begun clawing their way upward through it.

Eagle demons beat their wings in numbers that blotted out the sky, and filled the air with their clamor.

But the boundary between the two worlds had not yet broken fully open. Only a scattering of low-rank monsters came bursting out of the darkness so far, and the flames wreathing the lizard person Anu swallowed each one the instant it cleared the threshold.

Anu did not even need to move. He alone was enough to hold back these cannon-fodder monsters.

As for the truly powerful monsters, they only watched from within, eyes hungry, waiting for the moment the gate would open all the way, ready to lead their own legions charging out the instant it did.

And the eight-winged fallen angel turned her gaze upon the mortal world too. The instant her eyes fell on Anu, he felt an endless desire come welling up from within his own body.

His body swayed, and his eyes glazed over with infatuation.

He very nearly plunged straight out of the sky and into the Abyss below.

Fortunately, the fourth-rank potion seed within his body surged with power at that exact moment, and hauled him back from the edge of ruin.

Anu toppled out of the sky, drove his sword down into the black mud at once, and dragged himself backward and away.

He stared into the depths of the Abyss in horror, and the moment his wits came back he wrenched his eyes away, never again daring to meet the King of Lust's gaze.

"King of Lust."

"King of the Abyss."

However much power Anu drew upon, at his core he remained only third-rank.

The road from third rank to fourth rank was the very road by which a mortal crossed over into a life of myth.

In that moment, he finally understood the true gulf between himself and a being like an Abyss King.

Anu felt the full weight of the crisis now. If he did not find a way to stop this, every snake person in the whole of Moonlight City would turn to monsters and fall into the Abyss.

This city would be wiped from existence. His own homeland would cease to be.

That was something Anu could never accept.

"No!"

"That passage must be closed, and closed now."

Anu set to hammering at once on the passage torn open in the ground, throwing every method he had at it.

The lizard people's divine technique. Sword-light driven to its limit. His magical beast's own innate divine technique.

One attack after another crashed down upon the passage in the ground.

BOOM!

BOOM!

BOOM!

Anu tried everything he could think of, striking again and again at that ever-widening gate, a gate that looked as though it meant to swallow the whole world.

It seemed to be having some effect. The gate's opening did slow noticeably, and for a moment it even came to a standstill.

But even so, low-rank monsters kept pouring out of the passage to harass him, and within Moonlight City itself, amid the wind and rain, still more monsters kept appearing one after another.

The monsters newly born within the city were already tearing buildings apart and attacking their fellow snake people, and in doing so making still more monsters of their own.

Anu could hear wails of anguish rising and falling across the whole city.

Some had been found by the monsters already. Others fled their homes in terror, only to become new monsters themselves.

Chaos spread like a plague, passing without end from one soul to the next.

Urgency burned in Anu beyond all measure, and at last he began giving out his orders.

"Every citizen, stay inside! Do not touch the black rain!"

"Die at a monster's hand and you only die! But die in the black rain and you become a monster yourself, never again able to enter the Kingdom of God!"

Anu let out a furious roar, and his voice carried across the whole of Moonlight City.

He meant to shock everyone running wild through the streets into stillness.

But that alone would not be enough. Something had to be done about those who had already become monsters.

So he issued a second order, this one meant for the ability users and the men of the Palace Guard Corps.

"Any ability user who can call on the divine technique of stone skin, or a wind shield, out here at once. You can hold off the black rain's corruption for a short while."

"Everyone else, bring out every portable barrier ritual formation stone tablet you have, and go and help them."

"Do not come and help me. Go and save the others, and kill every monster making trouble out there."

Some of the ability users within the city heeded his command, and rushed out to put down the monsters running rampant.

The ability users inside the governor's mansion most of all had gathered together and waited this whole while for Anu's orders, ready long beforehand.

Now, at the command, they charged out one after another, and between them held the situation together, if only barely.

The monsters born from ordinary snake people were not truly strong. Beyond a body tougher than any normal person's and a will driven mad, they possessed no extraordinary power of their own. The only real terror lay in the black rain falling from the sky.

And Anu himself tried every way he could think of to keep the passage from opening fully, but whatever he threw at it, the thing widened all the same.

And he was fast reaching the end of what he could bear. His own strength had its limits too.

In that moment, Anu longed for power enough to rival an apostle, power enough even to stand against an Abyss King.

Anu's grip tightened around the sword in his hand until his knuckles paled. "The gate must be shut, and my own strength is not enough for it."

At that moment, the potion plant seed rooted deep within Anu's body began to sprout, giving off a faint glow.

In the end, he had no choice but to draw upon Kurmis's own power.

He had never wanted to borrow from Lord Kurmis this way. Things now were not as they had once been.

Every time he borrowed it, he slowed Kurmis's own healing further, and pushed back the day he would wake again.

But there was nothing else left for Anu to do now.

"Great Feathered Serpent God Kurmis."

"I beg you, accept my prayer and answer my plea."

Kurmis himself was not truly a being of myth, and Anu was the only one who could draw upon his power at all.

That special seed, the artifact, and the power of rituals wove together into a divine technique of mental projection, and through it his blessing came down upon Anu.

In that instant, Anu's mind reached across and touched Kurmis the Feathered Serpent's own.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, deep within the Dark Prison Abyss, the moment the Black Mud Abyss stirred every other Abyss felt it at once, though none took more notice than its own King of Wrath.

Dark Moon sat upon a throne of glowing red-hot metal, and the whole of the Dark Prison Abyss seemed to bear down on him, searing him where he sat.

Not a moment passed in which his body did not burn with the agony of flame, and that agony kept driving his fury toward some final extreme. Beneath skin charred black and crusted over, deep threads of fire ran like veins, as though the wrath in his heart were flowing through his very flesh.

His eyes looked calm enough, but look closely at that calm and beneath it one could make out a sea of flame vast enough to swallow the sky.

It was a fire that could burn the whole world to ash.

And yet this charred husk of a body held its own wrath in check, again and again. Pain and fury and hatred were all things that could be hoarded up.

Wrath itself could not be seen.

Only in the instant it finally erupted would anyone ever truly witness its power.

The sword was no longer in his hand, but a fresh tongue of flame had appeared within the Demon Palace, and reflected in that flame was the shadow of the lizard person Anu.

"He has reached Kurmis."

Several third-rank vengeance fire corpse guardians stood in the Demon Palace, and at that every one of them turned to look at the King of Wrath. One of them spoke up to ask.

"General, do you mean to let him exhaust Kurmis's power?"

"And then kill Kurmis, and seize the method of ascending to godhood?"

Dark Moon's eyes never left the flame. "No man can do without strength. But once a man means to reach every end by strength alone, his ruin is not far off."

"A god is not strong for the power he holds alone. He is strong for the wisdom he has gathered across ages beyond counting."

"Against a man like Kurmis, raw strength and the threat of death are not enough to make him bow."

The vengeance fire corpse guardian looked at the lizard person Anu. "But even a man like that has his own weakness all the same."

Dark Moon's gaze did not shift. "That is not his weakness. A lizard person. An heir."

"Set against the secret of ascending to godhood, set against the leaking away of his own divine power, he will make his choice."

The vengeance fire corpse guardian pressed further. "Then how do you mean to take the secret of ascending to godhood from Kurmis the Feathered Serpent's own hands, General?"

Dark Moon turned his eyes on the guardian. "He is asleep. And a sleeping man always dozes."

"He will dream. He will talk in his sleep."

"He will let an opening show."

The King of Wrath sat on his scorching metal throne, and where his hand rested on the armrest there came a faint hiss of burning flesh.

The pain sank into his very bones, wrath climbing deep into his consciousness, driving out every trace of drowsiness or despair.

In the face of a pain that would have driven anyone else mad, this Abyss King only laughed aloud.

"So upon this throne in the Dark Prison Abyss, I never doze."

"I will watch my enemy forever, and search out the faintest thread of his weakness."

As he spoke, his eyes turned toward the very depths of the Abyss.

The instant Anu's consciousness touched Kurmis the Feathered Serpent's power, he felt it stretch and pull, drawn out of his body and away toward somewhere far off.

He passed into the pyramid that stood far to the southeast.

And just then, the sun was rising over the horizon of the sea, its light falling across the Feathered Serpent's Pyramid.

Anu seemed to hear the whole of the lizard people at prayer before the pyramid.

"Great Feathered Serpent God Kurmis."

"At sunrise, Your will shall descend with the sun's first ray of light."

"Please accept our offerings. May You return soon."

"..."

At last his consciousness passed into that golden seed jar and came out inside an illusory world abloom with magical plants of every kind.

There he saw Kurmis the Feathered Serpent, a phantom form condensed out of his own memories.

Anu dropped to his knees, and spoke to that memory-form of Kurmis.

"Lord Kurmis, I have met the Abyss King, Melde. A disaster is about to fall upon my homeland, and countless people will suffer for it."

"They will be turned into monsters of the Abyss. It is a sight more terrible than death itself."

"I want to save them."

The great winged serpent coiled at the center of the potion plants opened its eyes slowly, as though searching through something in answer to Anu's words.

"An Abyss King... Melde..."

And the instant Anu looked into those eyes, everything before him shifted once again.

He felt himself pulled onward, drawn down into another memory, deeper still.

Anu was carried back to years long past, to the age when Kurmis had still been nothing more than a young guard of Maya City.

It was a clear day, the weather fine, and all was well.

The city lord's wife lay gravely ill, and the father of Shana the city lord came riding a land dragon to tend to her, a legendary figure, it was said, who had traveled the length and breadth of Ruhe Beast Island.

Outside the city gates, Kurmis was dozing, with no notion yet of what was to come.

He was only talking with his fellow guards about what to eat for their next meal, and what to buy for their families once this month's pay came in.

Then, without warning, a terrible omen struck within the castle. Every jar and vase, every painting, every candlestick inside came alive at once and cried out in voices like a living person's.

And in the next instant, the sky itself was torn open, a vast rent splitting across it.

Anu looked up, and through Kurmis's own eyes he saw a Gate of Mythology falling from the kingdom of the gods down into the mortal world, carrying with it enough power to crush the earth itself.

No words could capture the shock of that sight, nor the despair and terror it struck into Kurmis's own heart.

"The Door of Original Sin!"

"The Abyss's evil god!"

But Anu remembered at once what Kurmis had told him afterward, and took back his own words on the spot.

"Wrong. At this time he was still the winged people's Lord of Radiance. He had not yet become the Evil God of Original Sin."

"This is the Gate of Spirituality, not the Door of Original Sin."

The Gate of Spirituality had long since vanished. The Evil God of Original Sin had possessed it once, only to lose it again in but an instant.

The only trace it left behind lived on now in the memories of those who had once seen it.

And Kurmis the Feathered Serpent was one among them.

And now Anu, too, had the rare fortune to behold this same Gate of Spirituality, the gate that stood for the four Sovereign Authorities of Wisdom ability.

Anu could not help lifting his gaze, watching that Gate of Mythology drift slowly down out of the sky, his eyes fixed on the pattern carved across the Authority of Spirituality itself.

He had no intention of prying into any secret. It was only a mortal's own longing for myth.

But the moment he truly saw the pattern upon the gate, his whole mind went blank with shock.

"What is that?"

Every person who looked upon this gate received a different vision from it, and there was no holding that back.

Anu could not make sense of the tree-shaped pattern upon the Gate of Mythology, and in any case, no one could learn the secret of ascending to godhood merely by staring at a crude, hidden image.

But the gate conveyed something else to him all the same.

It was the God of Original Sin's own journey of life across the eras, the two hundred and fifty million years of Xiao's own path of spiritual rebirth.

At first none of it meant anything to Anu, and he only muttered to himself in bewilderment.

"A fish?"

"A land dragon."

"A sail beast..."

"The fish keeps evolving, evolving into every kind of life?"

"A lizard... and... a snake person?"

Not until he saw the snake person did a shiver run through his whole body, and some dim understanding stir within him.

"Is this a snake person?"

All at once he understood. This Gate of Spirituality recorded how, beginning from the Ancestral Fish itself, every living thing of the Second Era had evolved, step by step.

It recorded how fish had crawled up out of the sea, little by little, and become at last every familiar living creature they now knew.

It began with the Ancestral Fish.

It ended with the snake people.

Only, that snake person's form seemed to carry something of both Shana and the Camon Clan within it.

Anu's eyes clouded first with confusion, then with incomprehension.

And at last with shock, and with disbelief he could not shake.

"Is this where the snake people came from as well?"

Anu had always carried one doubt with him. He had never understood why his own people had become lizard people.

They were snake people. What did they have to do with lizards at all?

In the end, he had always put it down to some punishment they had brought upon themselves, for daring to touch the power of a sovereign deity.

But now, gazing upon this Gate of Spirituality and Myth, he understood everything at last.

"So we truly did come from lizards, all along."

Anu's very pupils seemed to tremble, and in that same instant he stood at the opposite extreme from Kurmis.

One of them had frozen to stone with fear. The other stood shocked half out of his own soul.

Anu's gaze seemed glued fast to that gate, and he found himself walking toward it despite himself, even as it kept falling, as though it meant to grind the whole world to dust beneath it.

He wanted to see more, to see the whole truth of life itself, to know why his people had become lizard people at all.

"No, that is not it!"

"Even before that, we were fish in the sea."

"We came from that fish, that one particular fish."

Anu's eyes fixed, unmoving, on that carved image of myth, on the fish at its very origin.

"We share the very same ancestor as the sail beasts, the land dragons, and the scaly beasts."

What Anu did not know was that this fish was called the Ancestral Fish.

It had been made by the Creator, as food for the trilobite men.

But even this much left Anu utterly at a loss, and he trembled without meaning to.

Trembling still, Anu said to himself.

"Anu!"

"You have already become a lizard person. What is there left to fear now?"

Anu had thought this would be hard to accept, but he had already become a lizard person regardless.

The outcome had already come to pass. All this vision was showing him now was the reason behind it.

At last his heart began to settle, and he looked upon the origin of life with an entirely new eye.

"So this is where life truly came from."

"The Life Sovereign created all things. She created life itself."

"Everything truly was Her creation, the Life Sovereign's own. Only, the time when She made it all was not a thousand years ago, nor even ten thousand, but hundreds of millions of years before."

"Back in that primordial, savage age, She had already shaped the very first pattern of life itself."

"When She made us, it was not in this era at all, but in the one before it."

"That is why we became lizard people, because within our own bloodline something reached back and traced what we once were."

Too much had been poured into him all at once, and for a moment Anu's mind pulled taut, leaving nothing in his head but those images.

He stared, dazed, as the Gate of Mythology kept descending from the sky.

He watched feathered serpent after feathered serpent come into being beneath the power of the once-Lord of Radiance, watched a boundless sea of blood engulf Maya City, watched the Door of Truth appear far in the distance.

At last, he watched the Fallen Angel Melde tear open a passage to the Abyss, and carry away the defeated Lord of Radiance.

And it was in that same moment that the snow-white Gate of Spirituality turned, little by little, to a filthy, dark red.

The Door of Original Sin was born. The Abyss became the Abyss, and turned at last into the true darkness of the world.

Until the King of Lust, Melde, appeared.

Only then did Anu come back to himself, and understand that he had not come here to explore the past or the origin of life, but to find some way to save Moonlight City.

And with that, he understood too the true reason Kurmis the Feathered Serpent had shown him all of this.

"The Door of Original Sin."

"The winged people's Lord of Radiance was defeated in a war among the gods, and fell into the filth of the Abyss."

Anu watched the image of Melde tearing open the Abyss, and beneath the power of Spirituality itself he saw with perfect clarity how that passage had opened, down to every single node of power within it.

"An anchor point!"

"The Abyss Covenant forbids the Abyss from entering the mortal world of its own will. Wherever it exists here, it must have an anchor point."

And now he understood completely how to close the passage to the Abyss.

The vision of days long past dissolved away, and Anu had at last both the method he needed, and the power to carry it out.

He was about to rise and go when something occurred to him, and still on his knees he said to Kurmis.

"Lord Kurmis, thank you for the sword and the power you have given me."

And in that moment, the voice that came back to him said only, "What..."

Then a jumble of voices came rushing into Anu's mind all at once, and the last of them to reach him, deep within his own heart, said.

"Use it well!"

"I could never save my own homeland. But you, Anu, you can."

At those words, all the confusion, the helplessness, the unease that seeing the Gate of Spirituality had brought upon Anu fell away at once.

As he rose to his feet, he answered back, his voice ringing strong.

"Yes!"

"I will."

When he returned to the waking world, he had already transformed into a colossal feathered serpent, the power Kurmis had lent to him.

And by then, the entrance to the Abyss had opened wider than ever.

Monsters beyond counting had already surged forth, pouring out of the Abyss, sweeping toward Moonlight City itself.

Eagle demons with their evil eyes, six-armed snake demons, rotted wing demons, all leading an army of evil, come to devour and corrupt everything in their path.

The whole of Moonlight City stood on the very brink of ruin.

Golden wings spread wide, and the vast coiled body of the feathered serpent wound itself around the whole of Moonlight City.

The dark-silver flame-light sword turned in slow circles at the serpent's back, as though it had truly become a waning moon.

With Kurmis's own encouragement behind him, he looked out over the ruin spread before his eyes.

In that instant, Anu let out every last trace of the fury in his chest in one great, savage roar.

"You wretched thing!"

"Get back into the Abyss, and get out of my homeland!"

A terrible ring of light tore across the sky.

The feathered serpent and the Moon Eclipse's Remnant Light joined their two powers into one, and shattered the black rain that filled the entire sky.

The black clouds tore apart. The downpour ceased.

And at that very moment, dawn arrived at last.

The rising sun broke into view far off, casting its light down across the whole city.

To Anu's own eyes, that first thread of morning light was salvation itself, brought by Lord Kurmis's power.

To close the passage to the Abyss that Melde had opened, the entrance on the ground had never been the key at all. The black rain in the sky was the key all along.

In the very instant the black clouds tore apart, the King of Lust within the Abyss still tried to salvage something of it.

A shadow hundreds of meters tall rose up, reaching a hand toward the mortal world.

"Open!"

She meant to keep the passage from closing.

But the medium and the ritual that had bridged her to the mortal world had already vanished. The instant her hand reached into the world above, a tremendous force flung it straight back.

The shadow, hundreds of meters tall, was flung back down as though some overwhelming blow had struck it, crashing all the way to the very bottom of the Abyss.

The great feathered serpent coiled through the sky, scattering the black clouds above until not one remained.

And with that, it was over at last.

Anu changed back into his lizard person form, standing there suspended in the sky.

"I really did it. I saved my home, Lord Kurmis."

Anu looked down below him. He had felt it only moments ago, inside Kurmis's own memory, the helplessness of watching one's homeland and companions fall to disaster with nothing to be done for them.

And because of that, he understood all the more how hard it truly was.

He looked out over the city, at the snake people who had survived it all, stepping out of their homes to cheer, and at the lizard person beast knights riding their wind lizard dragons straight toward him.

Without meaning to, his mind went back once more to the image he had seen upon the Gate of Spirituality, to the lizard that had come just before the snake person in that long chain of life.

"A lizard, and a snake person!"

The Ruined Temple, the Black Mud Abyss

Before it, a flicker of confusion crossed the face of the evil angel who was desire's own embodiment.

"That is..."

"Dark Moon's sword?"

Melde had faced every manner of enemy across her long life. She had stood against other races. She had stood against gods. She had even stood against her own daughter.

But an Abyss King's own sword turning up in a mortal's hands, and saving an entire city of mortals besides. Now that was interesting.

Upon the throne of the Dark Prison Abyss, Dark Moon too was seeing Kurmis's memory for the first time, and with it the birth of both the Gate of Spirituality and the Door of Original Sin.

"A pity."

"I did not see what I wanted. Still, I did see something interesting."

At last Dark Moon turned his gaze toward the Black Mud Abyss, and said thoughtfully.

"And at the same time, I have brought a little trouble upon myself."