I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 462: Is That Really a Fish?

Moonlight City

When it was all over, the city set about counting its dead and its wounded.

The Abyss Black Rain had come down over only a small area, and it had left many people missing. Some had turned into monsters. Some had been devoured by monsters. Others had simply vanished in the chaos, never to be seen again. Even Anu's own Palace Guard Corps had not come through without losses.

The square at the heart of the city had been given over to the tending of the wounded, and wails of anguish rose from every corner of it.

Countless bodies lay side by side, ordinary snake people citizens and Palace Guard Corps soldiers together. Among them lay the corpses of earth-piercing beast knights, temple divine servants, and even lizard person beast knights.

Meanwhile, more and more bodies were being carried in from further off, one after another, and laid out across the square.

Anu had saved this city. But he could not save everyone in it.

The cloak on Anu's shoulders hung in rags from the fighting, and he looked wretched and worn. He walked on past body after body, and most of the faces were strangers'.

But when he reached the place where his own Palace Guard Corps soldiers had been laid out, he stopped where he stood.

Here he knew every face. And every face he knew meant more than the death of one person. It meant that a soldier under his command, a living, breathing person once, had been reduced at last to nothing but a gray memory buried deep in his mind.

He looked down at those faces, caked in blood, some of them twisted by mutation, and image after image rose unbidden in his mind.

"The Palace Guard Corps, that's the one that guards His Majesty the King, isn't it?" Anu looked down at the young soldier lying at his feet, eyes closed, one he had recruited with his own hands, out of Maya Province.

"What an honor." Anu moved on and found that young soldier's younger brother. The two of them had joined the Palace Guard Corps together back then. The younger brother had fallen in battle as well, and at the sight of it Anu could not help but close his eyes.

"Lord Anu, you're one of the nobility now." He could not bear to look, and turned his head away, only to find a dead lizard person there instead. They had been one of the companions he brought with him out of the Volcano Forest.

"Commander of the Palace Guard Corps, now that's a real somebody in the kingdom." Every lizard person had been overjoyed back then, their eyes bright with hope.

"A beast knight. I want to be a beast knight too." Anu walked on, then crouched to brush the hair back from a corpse's face. Underneath it was a very young boy. He remembered this one, a soldier who had always trained hard, striving to become a beast knight.

Anu looked at them, and slowly his eyes turned red.

Whatever joy he had felt at saving this city had drained out of him now.

"They should never have had to die."

"So many people should never have had to die. This was never the ground they were meant to be buried in."

Anu stood in the middle of his fallen comrades and turned to look back across the square, over all the bodies scattered the length of it. He swallowed hard.

His voice, when he spoke again, had gone hoarse, and he could not have said why.

"Drought, flood, famine, plague, these are disasters of nature. There is no escaping them."

"But this was no disaster of nature. This was a sin born of a moral's desire and ambition."

Behind him the other Palace Guard Corps soldiers watched, and heard his voice pass from calm to grief and at last to fury.

"Lord Kurmis brought the brown ball vine into this world. He did not want to see famine rise up again. It grieved him to watch people struggle so bitterly under disasters of nature, and he never wanted to see the sin of man devouring man again."

"But when those people had eaten their fill, what did they do?"

"They stirred up war. They betrayed the kingdom. They conspired with the Abyss Cult. They are man no longer, and still less do they deserve to live."

Anu gave the order on the spot. Several earth-piercing beast squads among his Palace Guard Corps soldiers were to muster at once and hunt down the nobles who had conspired with the Abyss Cult.

Inside the city and out, everything began to stir. Everyone knew that Moonlight Province was about to be turned upside down.

Just then a figure came speeding in out of the distance.

The stranger moved fast, like someone who had crossed a great stretch of country to reach this place, and he came down at last atop the city wall.

Anu felt it, and turned his head toward the wall in the distance.

One look at the blood-colored power surging through the newcomer told him at once who this was.

"The Most Ancient Race."

"The Divine Race."

Standing atop the wall, the trilobite symbiote took in the state of the city at a single glance. "So it is already over?"

At last his gaze came to rest on Anu. Word had reached him far away and he had set out that same instant, never expecting to arrive and find that someone had already solved the problem. "Was this your doing?"

Anu came quickly to the foot of the wall, and nodded. "Yes."

The stranger said, with a note of admiration, "Well done."

Anu opened his mouth, and all at once something in his eyes changed.

"Well done?" he said.

Anger rose in Anu's chest, and he could not have said why. Perhaps it was the lingering touch of the Abyss's presence still on him. Perhaps those words simply felt far too light for what had happened.

"You came all this way, and all you have to say is well done?"

"It came within a hair of taking every soul in Moonlight City. So many people were about to die."

"If I had not happened to be here, if I had not happened to be able to borrow Lord Kurmis's power, would this disaster not simply have broken loose in full?"

"The Scarlet Goddess is the protector of Suinhor, and you are her Divine Blessed One here in the mortal world. Do you not feel that you have failed in your duty?"

To Anu's mind, the people of Suinhor had given the Scarlet Goddess their faith, and she owed them protection from the Abyss's corruption in return.

Those poor souls should never have had to die as monsters, not like this.

The stranger answered, "It was the divine being's own will that brought me here."

No god who dwelt among mortals could watch over everything happening across this continent at every waking moment. All-knowing, all-powerful gods were nothing more than a fantasy mortals told themselves.

Even a god's power had its limits, and even they needed a medium in order to descend into the mortal world.

"Is this always how you come, only once it is all over?" Anu said.

The trilobite symbiote did not stir. "That depends on how far away we happen to be."

"So the scripture's promise that the gods watch over mortals," Anu said, "comes down to how far away you happen to be."

"So the gods cannot protect mortals at all. What the scripture promises is nothing but empty words."

"Mortals offered up everything they had to you. In their despair they cried out your names."

"And in the very moment mortals needed your protection most, all you could do was stand and watch them fall into darkness and despair."

It was true that if a single divine being spread the whole of their power into every corner of the world, such a thing might be possible.

But it could never truly happen. Divine beings had their own conflicts with one another. Divine beings had their own enemies.

Divine beings had their own matters that came first, and their power had to be spread across many places at once. They could not watch over the mortal world every single moment.

The stranger looked at Anu, and asked, "Are you turning your anger upon the divine beings?"

Anu said nothing. What the man had said was the truth.

His emotions had gotten the better of him.

He simply could not understand it. Under the protection of the gods, disasters like this still kept coming one after another.

The stranger put another question to him. "What are the divine beings, in your eyes?"

"What the divine beings want is the continuation of civilization, the future of civilization. And a god has done exactly that. They have already fulfilled the promise made to mortals."

"If every small disaster mortals face, every small crisis, needs a god to come and save them..."

"If the divine beings had to answer every last demand a mortal makes..."

"Then would they be a god to mortals, or merely their tool?"

"They cannot meet every need a mortal has. They have other and more important things to attend to."

Anu looked at the man. He understood well enough what the trilobite symbiote meant. He simply could not bring himself to accept it.

"A small disaster?"

"A small crisis?"

"So the ruin of an entire city, the deaths of tens of thousands of people, none of it matters, not to civilization, not to the gods."

"But have you ever stopped to think that the disaster you call small, the crisis you call minor, is a pain that thousands upon thousands can never forget and never wipe away? It is countless souls cast down into an eternal darkness."

The trilobite symbiote replied, "A god is not a machine. Nor is a god a tool."

"A god can only be the god they see themselves as, not the god you imagine them to be."

But Anu found himself remembering something the Scarlet Goddess herself had once said. "Divine beings have their own desires too. Divine beings have their own positions to hold."

At the time he had only half understood it. Now, at last, he saw what she had meant.

Divine beings, too, had their own positions to hold and their own ends to serve. Everything they did belonged to some plan of their own, and mortal need or expectation shaped none of it.

He did not dare say it aloud, but in his heart, he did not much like divine beings of this kind.

Because he was a mortal.

The divine being he longed for was one like Lord Kurmis, kind and gentle, loving lizard people and snake people alike, willing to give everything for the sake of mortals.

Atop the city wall, the man met Anu's eyes for one moment, and then slowly faded from sight.

Anu watched the figure of the Most Ancient Race vanish, and all at once a new understanding took shape in his heart.

"The gods cannot save everyone. Sometimes people must save themselves."

Just then his deputy commander came over. "That was a god's own Divine Blessed One. Commander Anu, you shouldn't have talked to him like that."

Anu the lizard person looked a little lost. "When I was small, the divine servants in the shrine were always preaching out in the streets."

"He would say that the god loved all mortals."

"The scripture says, whatever is in your heart, the god will surely answer it."

"I used to really believe it. My whole family believed it."

"But little by little I came to see that it was not so. The only ones who truly believed were the people sunk in suffering. Those great and powerful ones up above, they did not believe it at all."

"Even the divine servants who preached it to us, perhaps not even they took it for truth."

Anu lowered his head, as though something from those old days in the slums had come back to him.

"But the people who had fallen into despair, the people who had nothing left at all, they took it for truth."

The deputy commander looked at him. "The world in your eyes is far too ideal. It's just not possible."

"But I like that ideal world," Anu said.

Anu looked down at the matte longsword in his hand, then swept it up high, cutting a crescent of sword light across the sky.

He settled at last into a knight's opening stance, straight-backed and tall, and spoke to his deputy commander.

"Lord Kurmis once said that one must grow strong. Only by growing stronger still can one protect what one wishes to protect."

"I did not understand it before. But today, I suddenly do."

"Without strength, I would be no different from Lord Kurmis, forced to sit and watch ruin descend, powerless to stop it."

"Only with strength can I protect my homeland. Only with strength can I protect Lord Kurmis."

"Only strength can turn an ideal into reality."

Anu looked toward his deputy commander. "What do you think?"

The deputy commander shook his head. "I don't know."

"I'm just an ordinary man. I don't have the strength to turn an ideal into reality."

"No, that's not right. I don't even have the courage to turn an ideal into reality."

The deputy commander shrugged. "Changing reality, changing the world, that's not something a mortal like me can do."

Anu opened his mouth, then closed it again. All at once he saw that he did not think the way ordinary people thought. He dared to imagine things ordinary people would never dare imagine. The rules and constraints of this world seemed to mean nothing to him at all.

This was not a mortal's way of seeing things.

When had he changed?

Was it when Kurmis the Feathered Serpent first told him all those stories? Was it when he became the first beast knight? Or was it, perhaps, the moment he laid eyes on the gods themselves?

---

Anu's childhood home had once stood in Moonlight City's fresh market.

"Fresh goods," more often than not, simply meant fish.

So the whole quarter reeked of fish, thick and rank, and those who lived nearby were the lowest of the poor. Not far from the fresh market stood the execution ground.

Today the nobles of Moonlight Province were marched to that execution ground in droves.

Overhead, wind lizard dragons wheeled in flocks, hanging like a threat over everyone below.

The poor of the surrounding streets came to watch the executions, and there they saw the lizard person who commanded the army and pronounced the nobles' crimes.

"See that lizard person over there?"

"That's Anu!"

Word of who he was went through the crowd. A few of them had laid eyes on him before, once upon a time.

"Anu? The kid from that family at the end of the street?"

"How did he end up like this?"

Anu looked down over the dense mass of heads below him, and there was not a trace of warmth in his eyes.

Only the day before, he had made a point of ordering rope, and plenty of it, afraid there would not be enough for today.

Anu gave the order. "Kill them!"

The deputy commander standing beside him asked, "How many?"

"All of them!" Anu said.

The deputy commander had expected as much, but asked anyway. "Kill them all? They're oath-takers."

He wanted to counsel restraint, to kill only a handful and bring the rest to heel with the warning, the way such things had always been done.

But Anu had no use for that old way of doing things. He told his deputy commander, "Do wrong, and punishment follows. What does it matter who they are?"

The deputy commander leaned in close and lowered his voice. "Anu, this isn't about right and wrong. Have you thought about what comes of killing this many nobles? You'll make yourself the enemy of all Suinhor."

Anu laughed. "If killing a little scum makes me the enemy of all Suinhor, then Suinhor still has far more scum left to clean out."

The deputy commander grew anxious. "Even so, you should wait for the King's order, not just hang every last one of them like this."

Anu looked at his deputy commander, and asked him something.

"Do you really think the King would ever give that order?"

The deputy commander froze. Anu went on.

"The King wants them dead. But he cannot be the one to give that order."

"As it happens, I want to kill every one of them."

"Because killing them will let countless souls rest in peace, will make this nation better, will make Suinhor more stable."

Anu walked past his deputy commander and stepped out to the very front.

"Since the King cannot kill them himself, then let me do it!"

The deputy commander looked at Anu and swallowed back everything else he had meant to say.

He realized that Anu was not blind to what might follow. He had simply decided to go through with it anyway.

All he could do was let out a sigh. "Ahh."

But in that same instant, the deputy commander's admiration for Anu, his reverence for him, rose higher than it ever had before.

Anu was only a lizard person, and still the breadth of his heart and the force of his will struck the deputy commander to the core, leaving him almost ashamed of himself by comparison.

He understood, too, all at once, why the King had sent Anu here. Only a man like him could have carried out a task like this.

Anu straightened up, raised his hand, and gave the order.

"Carry out the execution."

Then, through gritted teeth, he spoke the words that followed.

"Hang them all."

The words hang them all rolled like thunder over Moonlight City, loud enough that more than a few of those present clapped their hands over their ears.

Anu was the King's own envoy to Moonlight Province, and command of its armies rested in his hands.

In this moment he was the highest power in all of Moonlight Province, its single strongest man. Whatever order he gave carried the weight of the King's own will, and no one could defy it.

At that one command, row upon row of nobles were led up to the gallows and left hanging there like so much cured meat.

With that one word, hundreds of nobles, perhaps into the thousands, were put to death on the rope.

Terror struck the nobles senseless, and even the citizens of Moonlight City had never seen a sight like this before.

With death in front of them, the nobles cried out in desperate roars and curses before the executions began.

"We are nobles! We have the right of immunity!"

"You, a lizard person, a monster, you are not fit to punish us!"

"You have no authority to judge us!"

"If we're guilty, then let the King judge us! Let the King judge us himself!"

"I was wrong! I'll pay whatever fine you ask, any amount at all!"

Anu listened to their voices and showed not the slightest mercy.

Because he had never once been one of the nobility.

He was a slave. He was a believer. He was a knight.

The one thing he had never been was a noble.

Anu watched as, one by one, the nobles who had plundered the common people, driven them to revolt, conspired with the Abyss Cult, were hanged. And in his heart he spoke.

"Rest in peace!"

He said it for the farmers driven to their deaths in this rebellion, for the innocent who had died, and for the soldiers of his own who had fallen.

---

City of Fire Protection

Anu had truly frightened every noble to the bone. No one in Moonlight Province dared rebel again.

In truth, there was no one left to rebel. Everyone capable of raising a revolt was already hanging from the gallows.

The nobles of the other provinces were frightened out of their wits as well, and tucked away whatever small schemes they had been nursing. One after another they came to the City of Fire Protection to pay homage to His Majesty the King and declare their loyalty, and nothing like it had ever happened before.

But at the very same time, the City of Fire Protection was in an uproar from end to end. Nearly everyone had turned on Anu, and the criticism came from almost every side.

Among the nobles, on the one hand there was terror beyond measure at what had happened, and on the other a hatred taking root in their hearts.

"This fellow's as good as wiped out the nobility of a whole province."

"How dare he?"

"Without so much as the King's authorization, he dared to kill oath-takers. Where does he get the nerve?"

"Since the days of King Alpens, the oath-takers have ruled this kingdom alongside the royal family. What does he think he's doing, wiping out every last one of them?"

"Do you think this was His Majesty's own wish?"

"King Morabi must have given the nod. And besides, these people conspired with the Abyss Cult, so nobody could fault His Majesty for putting them to death."

"But King Morabi never gave the order."

The nobles came from every corner of the land to pay their respects to the King, and one after another they turned to attacking Commander Anu of the Palace Guard Corps.

Their complaint was never that he had killed the nobles. It was that he had killed them without His Majesty's command, acting entirely on his own authority.

Undercurrents churned beneath the surface, and they even managed to win over one of King Morabi's own senior ministers.

Since King Morabi's rise there had been no Prime Minister at all, only the office of Royal Steward.

The Royal Steward was reporting the matter to King Morabi at that very moment. He offered no judgment on right or wrong, and turned the conversation instead toward the threat the lizard people posed.

"He is a threat."

"The lizard people can never truly become one with us. Given time enough, once they have bred themselves into numbers enough to form a people of their own, they will surely become a threat to us, a threat to all of Suinhor."

"The weak cling to the strong."

"But one who is strong will never bow to anyone."

King Morabi did not seem troubled by any of this. He only said, "But the lizard people are weak."

The Royal Steward did not give ground. "Your Majesty, are the lizard people truly so weak?"

"They have bodies stronger and hardier than any snake person's, they have wisdom that yields nothing to a snake person's own, they have a complete system of extraordinary professions all their own. They can grow potion plants. They can raise magical beasts."

"And more important still, they have Kurmis the Feathered Serpent."

"The one weakness they have is that they were born too recently, and nothing more."

"If we let them go on multiplying, the day will come when they stand as equals to the snake people."

"Yes, and not merely equal to Suinhor. Equal to the snake people as an entire race."

King Morabi laughed. "Are you not exaggerating, just a little?"

The Royal Steward pressed on. "Your Majesty, in truth you have known all of this from the start, have you not?"

"Otherwise you would never have sent so many promising seeds to serve as divine servants in the Harvest Temple."

"You saw all of this long ago. There was truly no need for your servant to say more."

The Royal Steward raised his head. A dark, brooding look crossed his eyes, and there was something pointed beneath his words.

"The lizard people have only the one god, the Feathered Serpent God."

"But the Feathered Serpent God's followers are not only the lizard people."

At that, King Morabi turned to look at the Royal Steward with an expression so suddenly severe that it struck fear into him.

The Royal Steward was prostrate on the ground before he knew it, not daring to say another word.

King Morabi asked, "Just how much money have you taken from them? Or what have they promised you?"

The Royal Steward answered, "Your Majesty, the nobles who came to the capital did indeed come to me first."

"But I took nothing from them. Nor do I say any of this for my own sake. These dangers are real."

"Your Majesty, we dare not leave ourselves unguarded against the lizard people!"

King Morabi held him under a hard look for a long while before his gaze finally softened, whether because he truly believed him or simply could not be bothered to press the matter further.

"Anu is my right hand. I will not have you speak such words again."

"It is precisely because of what he accomplished in Moonlight Province that the lawless have been struck with fear."

The Royal Steward rose to his feet and said to King Morabi, "Your Majesty, I understand."

King Morabi went on. "Commander Anu of the Palace Guard Corps has rendered great service in putting down this rebellion, and he must be rewarded for it."

"Let him be named the new governor of Moonlight Province. Tell him I am placing his own homeland in his hands, and that he is to govern it well."

"Moonlight Province has many posts standing empty now, and it must be short of hands as well. Send officials from the royal capital and elsewhere to assist Anu in governing it."

The Royal Steward nodded. "I will set people to it at once."

Having said all this, King Morabi waved a hand and dismissed the Royal Steward.

But just as the Royal Steward reached the door, the King called him back.

And gave one more order.

"Now that the rebellion is put down, it is about time the Palace Guard Corps were recalled. The royal city cannot do without the Palace Guard Corps to defend it, and I have no peace of mind without them."

"Let the former deputy commander be promoted to commander. He should know the corps better than anyone, and be the most fitting man for it. Let him take charge of the Palace Guard Corps from here."

The Royal Steward's head snapped up, and something shifted at once in his eyes.

"Yes, Your Majesty!"

---

Moonlight Province, the Governor's Mansion

Anu the lizard person was deep in training. Just now that meant tending to his magical beast companion, the wind lizard dragon.

Anu held out food and fed the wind lizard dragon from his own hands. Once it had finished eating, it let out a satisfied hiss.

Hiss!

Then the wind lizard dragon's body began to shrink.

Little by little it shrank down to under a meter, until at last it spread its wings and settled onto Anu's shoulder.

Since reaching the third rank, Anu had discovered that his magical beast companion had gained more than just a second Spirit Fusion form. The wind lizard dragon had also gained a Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint, and it could change its own size at will.

It could go from a massive form with a wingspan of twenty or thirty meters down to a size small enough to perch on his shoulder.

Anu took the wind lizard dragon out like this and sent it soaring through the sky at his command.

Again and again he practiced the Mounted Form and the Fusion Form alike, unleashing all manner of divine techniques.

At night, Anu wrote in his own training journal.

"The power of a third-rank beast knight. First, there is the Fusion Form, which lets one merge completely with one's magical beast and unleash its greatest power. But the form where we fight apart, and the Mounted Form as well, are not without their uses either. They add variety to how a beast knight can fight."

"Second, there is the Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint. But a beast knight cannot hold a complete Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint. We can only use it to fuse with one particular substance, and once chosen, it cannot be changed again."

"Third, there is the power to change size. This can spare a magical beast's strength and stamina, and if put to use well, it can play a decisive role in battle too."

"..."

Anu was the very first superior beast knight, and the founder of the beast knight profession itself.

Naturally he meant to set down his own experience in training and draw his conclusions from it. Only this way could the system of this extraordinary profession be gradually perfected.

As Anu kept writing about the powers of the third rank, his thoughts drifted, unbidden, toward the fourth.

If a beast knight reached the fourth rank and became an apostle beast knight, what kind of power would they hold then?

Anu did not know. Then, all at once, his mind turned to a vision he had once seen inside Lord Kurmis's own memory.

The chart of life's evolution, carved upon the Gate of Spirituality.

Anu leaned back in his chair and found his head tilting up, his gaze on the ceiling.

Before his eyes, that towering Gate of Mythology seemed to rise again, vast enough to pierce heaven and earth, drifting slowly down out of the kingdom of the gods, stirring up endless clouds and roiling waves of air.

On the gate an ancient story was told, a story about life itself.

In that story, the countless species of the animal world all shared one single beginning. They had not simply appeared out of nothing. They had a whole lineage behind them, a complete family tree.

Snake people, lizards, sail beasts, land dragons, whatever they were, they all shared the very same ancestor.

Anu's gaze sank once more into that overwhelming vision, and he murmured to himself.

"Life is forever evolving."

"And we are tracing it back to its origin."

"Snake people, lizards..."

One ancient species after another slid past before Anu's eyes, creatures so old he could not even put a name to them.

"We have not turned into monsters. We have returned to what we truly were all along, reclaimed the power hidden deep within our own bloodline."

A sudden thought struck Anu. "If we can trace ourselves back to the very origin of our bloodline, then could a magical beast not do the same, drawing on the Power of Spirituality to change, to trace itself back to the power and the form at the source of its own bloodline?"

"Back to the primordial, savage age, back to the very origin when the Mother of Life first created us."

Anu rose from his chair without meaning to, his head still tilted back, staring up at the heights above.

His eyes cleared, little by little, and he spoke aloud.

"Yes, that is it. Seeking out the power hidden in our own bloodline, that is a gift bestowed on us by the highest of the gods."

"This is the power an apostle-rank beast knight ought to have. This is what such a knight ought to be doing."

In the eyes of Anu the lizard person, in the eyes of every mortal.

The older a thing was, the more powerful it was.

And the thing that had evolved into countless species must, in his eyes, be the mightiest form of all.

The Most Ancient Race belonged to the divine race. In Anu's eyes, they were a people descended from the Divine King, come down out of the kingdom of the gods. That fish must be the ancestor of every beast alive, and the insects and every other creature besides were, perhaps, nothing more than extensions of the Ruhe Great God's own power.

Anu's gaze followed the ancient carvings on the Gate of Spirituality, followed the countless species one after another, until at last it came to the very beginning of it all.

The very peak of the pyramid.

It began with that crude, ancient fish carved in stone.

"The very life where it all began, the origin from which every race evolved!"

"What is that thing, really?"

"Is that really a fish?"

Anu had never seen a fish like it. Its shape was ancient beyond description, and one glance told him it was not a thing of this era.