I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 463: Shelly and Her Tenth Ruhe Seal

Moonlight Province, the Governor's Mansion

Anu had been living here all this while, a standing threat hanging over every evil and monstrous thing still lurking within the province.

The rebellion had only just been put down, after all, and nothing was fully settled yet. He had already shown his strength. What remained now was the governing.

So Anu did the work a governor was meant to do, and waited, for the new governor to arrive and for King Morabi's order recalling him.

A stretch of garden behind the governor's mansion had been cleared out. For the time being it housed Anu's companion, the wind lizard dragon, and served as Anu's own research base besides.

Mornings, Anu handled the province's various affairs of state out front. Afternoons, he went back to the garden to train his companion the wind lizard dragon in all manner of powers, and to work alongside the other beast knights on research into magical beasts, magic crystals, and the power of the Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint.

Roar~ In the back garden of the governor's mansion, a terrifying, monstrous beast wound about with chains flung a furious howl off into the distance.

Thud, thud! Iron cages stood about the garden in no small number, and inside each was some magical beast Anu had produced with ordinary potions. Every so often one of them stirred, and a sound of one kind or another rang out.

Whimper~ In the corner beneath the wall, a small, delicate magical beast let out a whining cry, trembling under the sheer force pouring off the other, fiercer beasts.

None of these beasts could be bonded through a pact. A beast knight's magical beast companion had to be raised with care from the potion seed onward, through the careful blending of a potion formula, all the way to the final shaping of the magical beast itself.

And where a potion formula had once needed only a single potion, it now called for a blended formula of two or three, while the cultivation of certain special magical beasts had grown steadily more complicated besides. The magical beasts produced this way were no longer as stable as they once had been.

That was why mounts like the earth-piercing beast, the wind lizard dragon, and the water magical beast remained the mainstream choice. The key reason was simple enough. Their method of cultivation was the most stable of all.

Anu stood beside the pool, and called out to one of the beast knights.

"Open the cage. Let it out."

The beast knight opened the cage at once. Clank.

He reached in and undid the sealing chain binding the magical beast.

Out came a magical beast strange in shape, spines bristling down its back, and it went wild the instant it was free, running amok and lashing out at everyone nearby.

Anu gave a wave of his hand, and the wind lizard dragon on his shoulder swelled at once from under a meter to several meters across.

Boom!

Hiss!

Anu's wind lizard dragon shattered the creature's defensive innate divine technique in a single bite, then forced it to draw on every last bit of its power, until its very limit had been laid bare.

In the end, the wind lizard dragon tore it apart with its claws and killed it.

The magic crystal was dug out of its body, and the wind lizard dragon, shrunk back down small again, carried it over to Anu in its mouth.

Anu pinched the magic crystal between his fingers and held it up to the sunlight to look it over.

He called the other beast knights over at once to look at it with him. "Look here, the color of this magic crystal is an earthy yellow."

The other beast knights crowded in, looked it over a while, and nodded. "It's probably got the power of earth and stone fused into it. That'd be why it's coming out this color."

Someone else reasoned from the snake people's own innate powers and worked out a trait of magical beast power. "A magical beast doesn't crystallize a Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint until the third rank, but that power's been buried inside it since its lowest ranks. So whatever power it'll hold after the third rank, whatever it can fuse with in nature through the Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint, that was all settled long before."

When the snake people were born, the Mother of Life, Shelly, had fused a God's Grace Stone, taken down from God's Moon, into them. Within it lay the power of the Clay Seal Imprint, also called the Stone Seal Imprint.

That was why they were born with the power to control earth and stone, and why they naturally crystallized a seal imprint after the third rank.

Anu laid it out alongside his other magic crystals and studied the differences between them.

A magical beast's power came from its magic crystal. From the crystal stones alone, one could work out the nature and origin of the power behind each different magical beast.

And magic crystals had another great use besides. They served as material for forging artifacts, and alchemists and artificers alike sought them out now. Plenty of people paid a steep price to buy up magical beast crystals, and that had brought no small trouble down on the Volcano Forest.

But these days the lizard people, the beast knights, and the Harvest Temple all watched over the Volcano Forest, among other powers, so no one could stir up much trouble there anymore.

Anu put the question to the group. "Why does it have a talent for sand and stone?"

The other beast knights had no answer, so Anu simply laid out his own recent research.

"Because of the potion formula!"

"Every extraordinary power a magical beast has comes from the potion."

"Different combinations of potion formulas produce magical beasts with entirely different powers."

"And from what my own trials show, the more kinds of potion go into the formula, the more elemental properties the resulting magical beast tends to have."

"There was even one, once, that held all four properties at once, wind, earth, thunder, and fire. A pity it happened only that one time."

"This method of cultivating magical beasts is full of uncertainty. More often than not, it cannot be reproduced."

The moment Anu said it, the beast knights present fell to talking among themselves, and all sorts of ideas began to take shape.

But Anu added one more thing. "Though more elemental properties does not necessarily mean greater power."

"Whether the magical beast that results is truly strong or not still depends on how all these factors come together."

The beast knights present wrote his words down, and in that moment they looked for all the world like Anu's own students.

And at that moment, Anu raised a question.

It was a question even Anu himself had not worked out.

"The magic crystal gives a magical beast its extraordinary power, and the root of that extraordinary power can be traced back to Lord Kurmis's own Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint."

"So why does a wild beast's form change so drastically once it becomes a magical beast?"

"Some grow spines, some can breathe underwater, some grow other organs entirely, some grow wings."

"Where does the power behind that change come from?"

"What is its root?"

Anu looked again at the magical beast the wind lizard dragon had just killed. The moment it died, its body had shrunk down several times over, and every trace of its monstrous, twisted look was gone. What lay there now was nothing but an ordinary, common wild beast.

"And the instant it loses its magic crystal, it loses the form of a magical beast too, and turns back into a wild beast all over again."

"Why is that?"

None of the other beast knights could puzzle it out, let alone understand the reason behind it.

Only one person said something that sounded like nonsense. "Well, I guess that means their outward form changes because of the magic crystal too."

Everyone else looked at him, at a loss for words, but Anu clapped him on the shoulder.

"Well said!"

"An answer is not a matter of how shallow or how profound it sounds. It is a matter of whether it is right."

"Walk the right road, and you will always find the deepest answer in the end."

Today's experiment had come to an end, and the other beast knights left, one after another.

And once Anu had worked out, little by little, the connection between the magic crystal and the Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint, he pushed the focus of his research on to why the magic crystal caused a wild beast's form to change at all.

But the magic crystal itself gave up no answer, however he looked at it. He watched the change between magical beast and wild beast over and over, and still came away with nothing.

It left Anu more than a little troubled. He needed to understand the very foundation of a beast knight's power, and of a magical beast's power, before anything else. Only on that could he raise the tower he wanted to raise, and reach the destination he meant to reach.

"Is it the bloodline?"

"Does the magic crystal alter a magical beast's bloodline?"

"That cannot be right. If the bloodline were truly fixed in place, how could losing the magic crystal turn it back into a wild beast again?"

"So their change in form is not caused by the bloodline at all. Then where does this change really come from? Out of nowhere?"

Just then Anu thought of the fourth-rank potion seed within his own body. He had never quite understood why this seed alone could turn him into a feathered serpent.

To explore the power of a fourth-rank apostle, Anu began to study this special seed of his.

He reached out to touch the power of the seed, and at the same time called up the memory of what it had felt like to transform into the shape of a feathered serpent, setting it all down with his pen.

Lord Kurmis's own power was, of course, nothing a magical beast could ever compare to. That seed seemed to lay bare before Anu some of the deepest secrets touching on the Authority of the Divine and the Wisdom Seed.

This time, he finally settled on something for certain.

"It is mimicry, not a change to the bloodline."

"The Power of Spirituality is not the bloodline itself. Making life, altering a bloodline, that is the power of the Life Sovereign, and it is not a power we could ever hold."

"But the Authority of Spirituality can reach in from the level of the mind, from the very source where spirit and flesh meet, and shape a person's own physical form, letting it take on the likeness of any other form at all."

"Hold power enough, and it can let us mimic any other form at all. The stronger and more perfect the being we mimic, the stronger we ourselves may become."

He had worked this question out, but a larger puzzle had appeared in its place.

"But where does this mimicry come from in the first place?"

"Is it something we simply imagine out of nothing?"

"Something shaped by each individual's own expectation?"

Anu set down his pen, thought it over, and rejected the idea.

"Impossible."

"If it were purely imagined out of nothing, how could it produce something as stable as the wind lizard dragon or the earth-piercing beast? Every magical beast's form ought to be different then."

Anu thought of the feathered serpent and the sky messengers. "The sky messenger is the perfected form the winged people take on through mimicry. The old myths record a legend that the Mother of Life once despised how ugly the winged people looked, and it is said that when She made them, what She truly meant to make was another appearance entirely. Could that appearance have been the sky messenger's own?"

"The Feathered Serpent form is a mimicry born under the Lord of Radiance's own power, a mimicry the Lord of Radiance himself arranged. At the time he needed them as puppets to stand against other divine beings, and so he crafted for them a form both strong and perfect."

"Both these kinds of mimicry were born because of divine beings."

"But what about a magical beast? A magical beast is only ever born because it ate a potion."

"And a magical beast can take so many different forms, no two quite alike. Where does that really come from?"

Deep in the night, in his bedroom at the governor's mansion, Anu had not yet gone to sleep. He was still looking over the chart of magical beast kinds he had compiled himself, studying these creatures, gazing at the traits marked upon them.

He looked, for all the world, as though he had fallen into some kind of trance.

Something suddenly occurred to him.

"A magical beast is not born of any single race. Magical beasts are born out of every kind of wild beast there is, and each of them has its own separate origin."

Anu got up at once, crossed to the corner of his room, and took a bead out of his storage bracelet.

The bead let off a glow, and in an instant it unfurled a painting that seemed to have no end at all.

Unfurled, the painting filled the whole broad space of the mansion's bedroom, burned into every corner of it.

And even so, this vast, boundless painting had not fully unfolded yet. All that showed for now was its very lowest portion.

The painting showed a chart of life's evolution shaped like a pyramid, running from the Ancestral Fish all the way to the snake people at its end.

But for now, only the portion covering the last million years could be unfurled, one obscure corner of it.

Anu held up the image of his magical beast, and within that corner he found what it had looked like before it became a magical beast.

"Here."

Then, following the pyramid, Anu traced his way steadily upward, searching across the whole chart of life's evolution.

At last, he found something.

Anu held the magical beast's image up against this ancient species he had found, born a million years before, and a portion of the magical beast's own traits matched it almost exactly.

"Look!"

"Just as I thought."

Anu seemed thrilled beyond measure, and his voice rose several notches.

"This magical beast must be an atavism."

"The mimicry of the feathered serpent and the winged people was born out of divine beings' own imagining. But a magical beast is born by eating a potion, so it can only mimic through its own bloodline."

"It cannot turn its own bloodline back to what it once was. But the memory preserved within that bloodline still records everything that came before, still records the very beginning and origin of its own line."

"So once it became a magical beast, it mimicked back a portion of its own ancestor's traits as well."

Anu seemed to have found the secret behind a magical beast's change in form at last. He grew so excited he could hardly hold still, dancing about as though he had lost his mind.

At last he could begin the work in earnest, exploring the powers of the fourth rank for beast knights.

He opened his own training journal, packed dense with writing, where he had already set down his summary of the powers of the first three ranks.

"First rank of the beast knight. In its early stage, one gains a strengthening power from the Mounted Form. In its middle stage, one can draw on a magical beast's own power to strengthen one's own body, gaining great physical strength, endurance, and speed. In its later stage, one can perform a handful of first-rank divine techniques."

"Second rank of the beast knight. In its early stage, one's own consciousness can fully bond with a magical beast's magic crystal, allowing remote control over it. In its middle stage, one no longer needs the Mounted State to perform a magical beast's basic innate divine technique. In its later stage, one can develop wholly new divine techniques, learning and growing alongside one's magical beast."

"Third rank of the beast knight. One gains the Spirit Fusion Seal Imprint, and gains a Second Form, the Fusion Form. After training the fusion, one can change the size of one's own body."

Anu flipped quickly to the very back of the journal.

Here he had already written down all manner of conjectures, about the origin of a magic crystal's power, about the change in a magical beast's size and form. Now he added what he had just discovered to the rest.

At last, after weighing his words a while, he wrote.

"At the fourth rank, a beast knight will gain the Mimicry Mental Domain."

"One can follow the bloodline back to trace its source and take on that form, reshaping one's own magical beast into it, gradually recalling every power lost or forgotten across generation after generation."

"By that point a beast knight is no longer an ordinary beast knight at all, and ought instead to be called an apostle."

"And by that point a magical beast is no longer an ordinary magical beast either. It will trace itself back to the very origin of life, and perhaps it ought to be called a sacred beast instead."

Anu had finally worked out, in his own mind, the power an apostle-rank beast knight would hold.

But for now, Anu himself was only third rank. He had not yet taken that step.

And that step was dangerous in the extreme. Anu had no intention of using himself as the test subject.

Every experiment carried danger. For every being who had gone from snake person to lizard person, the memory of it was cut into the bone.

Anu made his decision. "I ought to forge an extraordinary artifact that holds the Mimicry Mental Domain. A fourth-rank artifact."

Anu was commander of the Palace Guard Corps, after all, and had a Volcano Caravan at his own disposal besides. Even so, trying to forge an artifact of apostle rank came close to wishful fantasy.

A thing like this, even the full strength of a whole nation might not be enough to produce.

Of course, the greatest problem was not really the cost at all. It was that not even the King himself possessed a sacred text like the Art of God's Grace.

And the office of commander of the Palace Guard Corps was a kind of constraint in itself. In many matters he had no freedom at all, and no way to simply act on his own ideas.

Difficult as it was, though, Anu felt it was still very much necessary.

If the extraordinary profession of beast knights was ever to give rise to an apostle, this was a step that had to be taken.

The next morning, King Morabi's envoy arrived.

The envoy brought with him the appointment of the next governor, and announced it before the assembled officials and the citizens of the whole of Moonlight City.

"His Majesty the King appoints, as the new governor of Moonlight Province, the Oath-Taker of the Kingdom of Suinhor, Grand Duke of Volcano, Anu."

Anu felt a little stunned, but he accepted the letter of appointment all the same.

And everyone around him cheered for Anu, calling out to him.

"Lord Governor!"

In anyone's eyes, the office of provincial governor was as good as being a petty king over one's own domain, a position of true power and standing.

Anu had climbed up from the very bottom, had lived through crisis after crisis, and now at last he was governor of his own homeland, of the whole of Moonlight Province.

With this, he finally had funding enough, power enough, and freedom enough to carry out the experiment he wanted to run.

---

The Contract of the Gods had been sealed.

Believers of every faith rushed out in every direction to open new lands of worship, and temple after temple rose up in their wake.

Even Apostle Oran had left the Land of Sunrise, searching everywhere for seeds fit to become tower keepers and hoping, at the same time, to raise still more alchemy towers across the land.

But an alchemy tower was not a thing many nations were even qualified to build. For now, only the White Tower Alchemy Alliance, the Executive Nation of Ten Thousand Serpents, and the kingdom of Suinhor could manage it at all.

So Oran's main destinations were Suinhor and the land of Ten Thousand Serpents.

Oran went first to the Executive Nation of Ten Thousand Serpents, and from there traveled onward along its length, passing through Moonlight Province on the way.

And there Anu, governor of Moonlight Province, stopped him at once and invited him to be a guest at the governor's mansion.

The moment Oran entered the mansion in his God's Form, every snake person there was struck with such awe that they threw themselves to the ground, not daring to lift their heads.

Only Governor Anu stepped forward to bow, and he spoke with his head lowered.

"Master Oran, we meet again at last."

Oran rode upon a magic carpet, and on it sat a potted plant, a peculiar Cup of Desire. Look closely, though, and one would see growing inside the Cup of Desire's blossom, unmistakably, a human head, more than a little unsettling to see.

Oran floated in midair upon his magic carpet, and a voice came from within the Cup of Desire.

"A lizard person!"

"A lizard person who wants something from someone."

The Cup of Desire was always like this, pointing straight at the desires and wants buried in a person's own heart.

The words cut too close, and left Anu more than a little embarrassed and flustered.

Oran looked toward the lizard person. "Anu, it looks like you have something you want me to do!"

Anu respectfully invited Oran down, welcomed him into the great hall, and only once they were both seated did he speak.

"Master Oran, there is indeed something I would ask of you."

Oran neither agreed nor refused, but only asked. "Anu, you are already a provincial governor. What is left that you would need my help with?"

Anu said, "I would ask you to help me forge an artifact."

Anu had called in old connections and old favors, hoping to invite Oran, once the greatest alchemist upon Ruhe Beast Island.

Though he had since become a reincarnator and taken up the profession of tower keeper, his alchemy remained the strongest on the whole island even now.

Oran asked again. "What sort of artifact?"

Anu brought out a drawing. On it was an enormous pillar, covered over with all manner of patterns and images.

Oran took it from him and glanced first at the name written at the very top.

"Divine Artifact, the Ancestor Totem Pillar."

Oran had never seen an artifact of this shape before, and what mattered most was its sheer size.

And with an artifact, small did not necessarily mean weak, but the bigger one was, the stronger it almost always turned out to be.

The bigger it was, the more extraordinary material it must have consumed, and no one spent an unimaginable fortune in extraordinary material only to forge something useless.

"Ancestor?"

"Totem pillar?"

Oran asked, "Why call it that?"

As a rule, an artifact's name stood for its power.

Anu held nothing back before this apostle. He told him everything he had seen upon the Gate of Spirituality, all the information it had revealed to him.

He also told him his true reason for forging this artifact, that it was meant to carry him along the road to the fourth rank as a beast knight.

"A beast knight's power comes from the Power of Spirituality. A magical beast traces its own bloodline back to its source through the Power of Spirituality, and little by little recovers the power its ancestors once lost."

"I want to make an artifact that holds this same power."

"In the end, it will form a Mimicry Mental Domain, a domain whose power can reach into the form of other living races, and carry their form back through one act of atavistic tracing."

"It can help a third-rank beast knight cross into the fourth rank, and it can help a magical beast step into the realm of the sacred beast."

"That is why I am calling it the Ancestor Totem Pillar, because we are seeking to reclaim the power of the ancestor."

Oran already knew a few secrets of his own. He did not know how life itself had come to evolve, but he had heard from God Iva that the snake people had been made by the Life Sovereign, out of a lizard.

It had been hard to accept at first, but the more he thought of it, the further beyond his reach the power of the sovereign deity seemed to lie.

But just now, he had heard something even more staggering.

"So you are saying."

"Every living thing in this whole world evolved from one single source, one single species?"

Anu hesitated a moment, then answered with some care.

"Perhaps not quite. It is only that most of the species I saw were shown upon it."

"But I never saw insects on it, and some of the sea's own creatures were missing too."

Anu ventured a guess. "I have heard that the silk-weaving spirit insect was found in the Endless Desert, said to have been born of the Desert Giant God's own power."

"And the curled ball fern our ancestor Alcina once found was born from somewhere beyond the Moonlight Jungle."

"Perhaps some part of this world's species and races were born from the power of the great gods instead."

"But however it may be, every species we ourselves have ever seen should have been born from the power of the Life Sovereign."

Oran sat in silence a long while, and the more he thought about it, the more staggered he grew.

"The Life Sovereign!"

"So She truly is the creator of every living being."

She might not be the creator of this world itself, but where life was concerned, she was, without question, the highest of gods.

But once Oran had steadied himself somewhat, past his shock at this story of life's origin and evolution.

He realized something.

The thing Anu wanted forged, of all things, was a fourth-rank extraordinary artifact.

Apostle Oran hesitated. The birth of an artifact at apostle rank was never a simple matter of one person gaining power. It would shift the balance of an entire nation.

Oran put it to him. "To forge a fourth-rank extraordinary artifact, you must have a way to gather a God's Grace Stone."

Anu said, "Once I reached the third rank, Lord Kurmis granted me his own recognition."

Oran rapped his knuckles on the table. Even without his help, then, Anu would walk the road to the fourth rank regardless.

And in truth, he found himself more than a little interested in this Mimicry Mental Domain Anu spoke of, and in this power of atavistic mimicry through the bloodline.

Oran was the Apostle of Desire, and this was the first time he had ever heard of the mysteries of the Authority of Spirituality.

It might let him glimpse just the tip of the iceberg, the deepest secret at the very root of wisdom ability.

Oran went on to his next question. "And the material? The material needed to forge a fourth-rank artifact is beyond imagining."

"And you also want to gather a fourth-rank Mimicry Mental Domain besides. That alone will call for material both extraordinarily strong and highly unusual."

Anu told Oran, "I do not plan to forge it all at once. I need only an embryo to begin with, and I will go on adding every kind of magical beast totem onto it, bit by bit, until it is finally complete."

"As for how the Mental Domain itself will come into being, I have already worked out the final step."

"It is only that I have no gift at all for forging artifacts myself, so I can only ask for your help."

Anu was full of anticipation for the artifact's making, and he added, "Perhaps one day we will even be able to use it to let the lizard people take on the shape of the snake people once more."

Since it would only be mimicry, the change would vanish the moment the power of ability failed, and the next generation would simply revert back regardless.

Still, a power like this held no small allure for many a lizard person, at least for that first generation.

Oran said to Anu, "By your own account, the snake people came from lizards."

"So if an atavistic mimicry were performed, it ought to turn a snake person back into the shape of a lizard person."

---

Lava Mountain, Black Rock City

Inside a fantastical temple built entirely of colored glass, a little girl went dashing down a corridor, holding up a large glass tank.

Mirror after mirror of glass along the walls threw her reflection back, until it looked as though hundreds, even thousands of her were running at once.

Ah!

She loved this corridor dearly, and let out a bright, happy sound as she ran.

Inside the glass tank was a single horseshoe crab, and the girl ran so fast that it sloshed clean out of the water.

Smack!

It landed hard on the floor, with a sharp, crisp sound.

The girl came to a stop at last, though she did not seem to care in the least. She grabbed the horseshoe crab roughly by the tail and stuffed it back into the glass tank, which by now held hardly any water at all.

Then she carried it along with her, ambling outside at her leisure, looking for something.

Shelly had lately been wondering how she ought to create her tenth Ruhe Seal, and what kind of power that brand ought to carry.

At present, the beings who held and commanded a Ruhe Seal were the seven Ruhe Great Gods, together with the Scarlet Goddess and the Mother of All Snakes. The Ruhe Great Gods were by far the strongest among them, having touched some part of the true meaning of the Authority of Life.

The Sky Beast held dominion over the clouds, the thunder, and the rain. The Burrowing Demon Worm had become the mountains, the earth, and the veins of ore beneath it. The Sele Sea Spirit had become the glaciers, holding dominion over the seas and rivers. And besides them there was Volcano, Desert, Forest, and more.

They were the world itself. They were its living order. They were every being in it.

As for the other two, they were still far too weak for now, their power and the true meaning of the Authority of Life not yet showing through at all, so there was little more to say of them.

Running through the sea of Blood Mist Cup blossoms, the Life Sovereign looked up at the sky, as though remembering some piece of life she had once made.

"Maybe give it a pair of wings, and let it control hurricanes and tsunamis too?"

She shook her head at once. "Nah, that's boring."

"And anyway, you could just blow at it and get the same thing! What kind of power is that?"

She circled around to the other side and caught sight of the volcano again.

The girl stopped in her tracks, tilted her head back, and imagined big fireworks bursting out of the horseshoe crab's mouth.

Shelly shook her head again. "Already got that one, and they won't even let me set it off. No fun."

Then Shelly thought, what if she just made a whole new star, and hung it up in the sky?

It never once occurred to her to wonder whether the world could even stand her rearranging it like this.

Luckily, that one already existed too.

"Nope, there's already a moon up there."

Shelly came circling back with her glass tank cradled in her arms, and crouched down in front of the temple.

She looked at the horseshoe crab in her glass tank, trapped in that cramped little space, and gave it a hard poke.

"You're so useless! You can't do anything right."

In the end, Shelly laid every bit of blame and fault at the horseshoe crab's own feet.

Hmph~

"Maybe I'll just chuck you in the volcano and cook you up."

"This thing's so ugly, too. I wonder if it even tastes any good."

Just then the spirit race's great writer and sage came walking out from behind her.

"Shelly, what are you up to?"