I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 467: This Land Has Received the Blessing of the Gods

Noon had only just passed, and the sunlight still came down fierce.

In Moonlight City the Harvest Temple was holding a festival of sacrifice to the gods, and because this was the hour when the city had the most time on its hands, no small number of people had come out to see the spectacle.

Farmers from outside the city had come in as well, no end of them, to take part in the festival.

The Harvest Temple had none of the flat roofs and domes common to other temples. It rose instead in soaring, pointed spires, and triangular motifs ran through much of its structure.

All of it set the Harvest Temple apart from every other temple and gave it a mysterious, foreign air.

That was because the Feathered Serpent had once dwelled long beneath the ice fields, and had seen the savage tribes of the north, the witch kingdom upon the wastelands, and the Yellow Sand Kingdom, and had even reached the Abyss Royal City deep in the Endless Desert. Traces of the architecture of every one of those places were woven into the temple.

Whoosh!

A divine servant called out a fire demon and sent it up onto the altar.

The extraordinary flame leapt up, crackling and popping, and announced that the festival had begun.

Drums followed at once, beating in even rhythm across the plaza beneath the temple, keeping time with the ritual dance of the snake woman attendants.

One after another the ravishing snake women swayed their hips and chanted from the Harvest Scripture the faithful had composed, and the sunlight struck their snow-white skin and seemed to throw itself back again, dazzling enough to make onlookers squint.

Several divine servants of the Feathered Serpent, dressed in yellow robes, stood in the plaza beneath the blazing flames of the altar's fire demon, their faces solemn.

As the ritual dance ended, the divine servants began preaching their doctrine to the mortals gathered there, offering prayers to their god.

"Kurmis, Lord of the Harvest. Kurmis, the Feathered Serpent God."

"He has brought the harvest to the mortal world, and new crops besides, and glad tidings to all people."

"He is a good god, a true god, the protector of mortals, and He shall redeem mortals out of their suffering."

The Feathered Serpent had not yet become a myth, and yet faith in him was already spreading through the mortal world.

The lizard people called him the Lord of the Harvest, the Feathered Serpent God. It was the Feathered Serpent, they said, who had brought the harvest to the mortal world, sparing its people the suffering of hunger and keeping mortals safe from disaster.

So long as one believed in him, one could find good fortune and happiness, and leave every suffering behind, never to feel pain again.

This line of preaching had real power to stir a crowd.

Many in the city were hearing of the Harvest Temple for the first time. Others had come rushing here because of what the divine servant apprentices, working the streets and alleys beforehand, had told them of the Harvest Temple's teachings.

They had come to see for themselves just what kind of god this was, one who could bring good fortune and drive away suffering.

"The Feathered Serpent God Kurmis, I've heard that name before. Years back, I remember it, way before that even, there was a being by that same name who came to Moonlight Province and called up a whole flock of great winged serpents and finished off the scourge of the green ground vine." Even after all these years, some still remembered the name Kurmis.

"The divine servants said it themselves, those winged serpents were the Feathered Serpent God's own avatars, walking the mortal world." With the Harvest Temple's own preaching to prompt them, more and more people found the past coming back to them.

"Word is even brown ball vine was made by this very divine being, and He gave it to King Osis, wanting King Osis to plant it all through the kingdom." Someone brought up a piece of hidden history few of the locals knew.

"Really?" Even now, most people in Moonlight City knew only that King Osis had ordered them to plant brown ball vine. As for where the vine had come from in the first place, no one really knew.

"So He really is just like the divine servants say, a great god!" At the mention of brown ball vine, every face in the crowd changed.

Mortals did not measure a god's greatness by how powerful that god was. They measured it by what that god had given them, by whatever let them truly feel that god's presence in their own lives.

But most of those who had gathered beneath the temple were paupers and farmers, ragged and threadbare.

Their eyes were fixed with naked longing on the sacks piled at the edge of the temple plaza.

They were farmers who had traveled long roads from the villages and towns outside the city, workshop laborers hurrying in from slums large and small, and not one of them had come here out of gratitude or faith.

They had come because word had gone round that the Harvest Temple would be handing out food and seedlings at the festival.

That rebellion had cost Moonlight Province countless lives, and though it had been put down, the troubles it left behind were far from over.

So many dead, fields that had missed their planting season entirely, granaries stripped bare, villages and homes burned to the ground.

Together it had left masses of people without homes, thousands upon thousands of refugees sinking into hunger.

Their shadows could be seen everywhere, inside the city and out.

The ritual dance came to its end.

Everyone surged forward at once, as though not one of them could wait a moment longer.

Anu, governor of Moonlight Province, had put on a yellow divine servant's robe himself, and stood at the very center of the crowd.

Anu handed out the grain with his own hands, and it was plain to see that many in the crowd were a little afraid of the lizard people, afraid of those somewhat fearsome faces.

For the sake of the grain they made themselves come forward all the same, heads down, not daring to look a lizard person in the eye.

Sack after sack of grain went out from his hands, and with each one he called out Kurmis's divine name, and each person who took a sack echoed it straight back.

"Thanks to the Lord of the Harvest!"

"Thanks to the Lord of the Harvest!"

"Thanks to the Feathered Serpent God!"

"Thanks to the Feathered Serpent God!"

People came and went in an endless stream, heads packed close together.

One man, skin and bones, his hair dry and brittle, took hold of his sack and found it so heavy that he nearly toppled over. Anu caught him at once and steadied him.

In his fright the man thanked him, and Anu took the chance to ask him something.

"You have come in from outside the city, have you not?"

"How are things with you? Has this year's replanting gone into the ground yet?"

The man lifted his head, and looking into the lizard person's bright eyes, so full of human feeling, he set his fear aside at last and could not keep himself from speaking.

"The last couple of years weren't bad. We had a good run of it."

"This year, so many died. They killed my son too. They burned the house, and the fields all went to waste."

"There's not a living soul left in the village. It was too late to replant by then, and waiting on a crop, I'd have starved long before it ever came in."

Anu asked, "And what did you do then?"

"So I took my little girl and made for the city, thinking I'd find work here," the man answered. "There was a whole group of us on the road, all headed the same way."

"Then halfway there I woke up one morning and found my little girl had died too."

The man was wiping at his tears as he spoke, and before long he broke down into open, wailing sobs.

"I don't know if she starved, or if the cold took her in the night!"

"I wanted to bury her, but the others running with us said... they said..."

"They said she'd turn into a ghoul that way."

His tears would not stop now, and it was a long while before he could choke the rest out through the sobbing, "I couldn't have my child defiled after she was dead, shut out of the kingdom of the gods. There was nothing for it but to burn her."

He went on to tell what had happened since he reached the city. "The pay in the city's too little, and there's hardly any work going. Everywhere I try, they say they've got hands enough and they don't want me."

"And the price of grain's gone up so bad there's just no living at all!"

"Lord Divine Servant, if you weren't handing out grain, I honestly don't know how I'd have kept going."

Anu listened with his hands trembling, and for a long moment not a single thing came to him to say.

At last he told the man, "Grain is being brought in from the other provinces and will arrive soon, and the price is certain to come down. When it does, relief stations will be set up outside the city as well."

"Once we are through this stretch, everything will be better."

The man had no idea that the lizard person divine servant before him was the governor of Moonlight Province himself. To his eyes one lizard person looked much like any other. "Oh, Lord Divine Servant, is it true, what the Lord of the Harvest promises, that believing in Him can free a person from every suffering, that it can bring salvation?"

Hope shone in the man's eyes. For people sunk this deep in suffering, salvation from the gods was the thing talked of above all else.

Anu opened his mouth, and something shifted in his eyes.

Once he would have said yes without a moment's hesitation. In this moment the words simply would not come.

"We will do all that we can."

The man could not see what a god's promise had to do with this divine servant before him saying only that they would try.

But in the end he threw himself down on the ground and knocked his head against the earth, thanking Anu, thanking the temple, thanking the Lord of the Harvest.

Then, sack in hand, he vanished back into the surging crowd.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about him, only one more face in that sea of people, a symbol of the countless mortals struggling under the weight of their own suffering.

Anu watched the man walk away with an uneasy weight settling in his chest. He finished handing out all the grain, then sent word for still more to be brought from the governor's residence.

As for himself, he went inside the temple.

He looked upon Kurmis's statue, upon the mural of the Feathered Serpent coming down into the mortal world with brown ball vine held in his jaws, and all at once a conversation came back to him, one he had once had with his own master, Kurmis.

Anu, still only a snake person youth in those days, had held a book in his hands and put a question to Kurmis.

"Lord Kurmis, what is it like, that world you speak of?"

"That perfect world."

Kurmis had told him, hope and pride shining in his eyes.

"Most of the suffering in this world springs from there not being food enough. Every conflict comes of a want of food and resources."

"Only let brown ball vine be spread across the whole world, and more crops be found."

"When every person can eat their fill, the whole world will be overturned, and the deepest root of all conflict will vanish with it."

"They shall be free to develop every kind of technology, free to win far richer stores of goods, free to make more of everything, enough to meet the need of every single person."

Kurmis sat in the great hall and spoke to Anu, whose head was tilted back, his face bright with wonder.

"Because there is brown ball vine, from this day on there will be no hunger, and so there will be no more fighting."

"Because every person can eat their fill, every person may do what they wish to do, and every person may make their own ideals real."

"Given time enough, every person in this world will live as the nobility of old once lived."

Kurmis clapped Anu on the shoulder and spoke in dead earnest.

"Just as the Most Ancient Race once lived!"

"Just as the Divine Race lived."

Kurmis knew certain secrets of the most ancient race, and he had once seen the demon spirits perform a miracle ritual, a power he would never forget for the rest of his life.

And in the very instant Anu heard Kurmis speak those words, Kurmis grew without limit in his eyes.

In that moment he became, in Anu's eyes, a god for all eternity.

But now Anu found himself shaken. He looked up at the statue and asked.

"Lord Kurmis. Does such a world as the one you spoke of truly exist?"

And in that moment the statue seemed to speak, and it said to him, "Do you long for such a world?"

The tension went out of Anu a little, and he lowered his head, mocking himself for his own wavering resolve.

"Of course I long for it."

He lifted his head and answered, looking at the statue.

"And so I want to see it for myself, whether the future you spoke of will ever come."

"Perhaps it needs someone to push it onward before it can come at all."

"Lord Kurmis, you can be that someone. And so can I."

In Anu's eyes the statue seemed to smile, and he smiled back.

Leaving the Harvest Temple behind, Anu made his way to the hall outside his own office at the governor's residence.

There he found several of the Avel who had come from the New World, and they had not arrived empty-handed. They had brought cartloads of gifts with them, filled with all manner of things, even living creatures among them.

Anu came up to the carts, drawn by sail beasts, and looked over the gifts inside. Most of them he had never seen in his life, had never so much as heard of.

One of them opened a box, and Anu saw a single white feather inside.

He could not help but ask, "What is this?"

"That's a feather a sky messenger sheds now and then," the representative answered. "They're exceedingly precious."

Anu's eyes went wide. "What?"

"A sky messenger's feather?"

Anu asked at once, "May I pick it up and take a look?"

The representative bowed low at once. "Of course. It was meant as a gift for you from the first, Your Excellency the Governor."

Anu picked up the sky messenger's feather. He had never even laid eyes on a winged person, let alone a sky messenger.

With the feather in his hand, he found he could almost picture the beautiful shadow of that legend in his own mind.

Anu set it down with great reluctance. "This is far too precious a thing."

These Avel seemed to know a good deal about Anu, and to know what he would like. Their gifts had been chosen with real care.

Anu's eye fell on a cut of meat sitting in a bucket of ice, a witch spirit's sealing technique laid over the bucket itself.

He asked the representative, "And what is this?"

"That's fish dragon meat," the representative answered. "A great beast that lives in the deep sea."

"This is the cut from beneath the ribs, the sweetest meat on it. On the Avel Peninsula only the royal houses are entitled to eat it."

"We had the luck to take one as we passed along the edge of the Storm Sea, and we cut this from it to give to the most honored person we could find."

"You are the governor, you are the Feathered Serpent God's own voice, you are a mighty beast knight. Of course you are the most honored person in our eyes."

Anu went on through the rest, and found they had brought all sorts of beasts, plants, and even insect specimens that existed nowhere on Ruhe Beast Island.

The representative said, flattering him, "I hear you've long made a habit of collecting rare and unheard-of beasts, and as it happens, I've got a few of them right here."

Anu spotted an egg. "And what is this?"

"That's a color-shifting lizard's egg," the representative said. "They nest up in the jungle trees, and they can change the color of their own bodies. Extremely precious."

Anu was certain that no such lizard existed anywhere on Ruhe Beast Island.

Then something else caught his eye, a strange thing sitting in a bucket that looked for all the world like one long horn of stone. "And this?"

The representative picked it up. "It isn't stone at all. It's the shell of a creature that lived in the sea long, long ago, and I doubt you'd find one anywhere now. Look at that long horn on it, just like a weapon."

Anu took it in hand, and noticed something else in the bucket besides, a slimy-looking creature with two feelers. Whether it had been in the water bucket from the start or had only fallen in afterward, there was no telling.

Looked at closely, it bore some resemblance to what later ages would call a snail.

Next the representative brought out a number of unusual specimens, rare and beautiful insects, every one of them sealed inside amber like so many gemstones.

Among them was a beetle of pure gold, and a spider whose back bore what looked like a human face.

Amber of this kind was rare on Ruhe Beast Island, but far more common in the New World, and the Avel treated it as a kind of precious gem.

Anu finished looking everything over, then said, "I am deeply grateful for your kindness, but I cannot simply accept all of this!"

"What is it that you want?"

The Avel exchanged glances, and then one of them stepped forward and spoke plainly.

"We want the method for growing brown ball vine, and seedlings. We've heard it's the Feathered Serpent God who made brown ball vine, and that the lizard people hold the finest seedlings and the finest planting texts anywhere."

"That's why we've come to seek your help, hoping to trade with you for them."

"Your Excellency the Governor. The moment we set eyes on brown ball vine in Suinhor, we were struck dumb. We had never seen a divine thing like it in our lives."

"This land really is the Origin Site of the gods, just as they say. There are miracles here beyond counting."

"We beg you, let us carry some of it home with us!"

Anu understood exactly why they had come. He thought it over a moment, then nodded.

"That is no trouble at all. I can give you seedlings, and I can give you the texts we have compiled as well."

The Avel were overjoyed, and thanked him at once.

"Your generosity and your mercy will be sung on the Avel Peninsula for all time."

Anu said, "All of it is a gift of the Life Sovereign, and a blessing of the Feathered Serpent God."

The representative nodded quickly, over and over. "Thanks be to the gift of the god!"

Only then did Anu accept their gifts with an easy conscience, and he had them carried into the governor's residence storehouse to be sorted and dealt with properly.

The bloodlines of these strange and unfamiliar species could be gathered up, and might even be combined with magic potions to make new magical beasts. That was indeed just what he needed next.

That color-shifting lizard especially had already set any number of ideas turning in Anu's mind.

Having taken the gifts, Anu invited the Avel into the governor's residence with him.

There was still a long list of things he wanted to ask them, questions about the New World.

Once they were seated in the great hall, Anu spoke up at last and asked, "Do you all come from the old Kingdom of Avel?"

But the representative told him, "There's no Kingdom of Avel any longer. I come from the Green Forest Witch Kingdom."

"King Sidi's female descendants ended the royal authority that was theirs in a bout of internal strife, and now the Avel Peninsula holds some hundred kingdoms, large and small. The Green Forest Witch Kingdom is one of them."

Anu knew the story of King Sidi. He knew it was that very king who had led the Avel away from Ruhe Beast Island and off to the New World. "What is the New World like? Just how vast is it?"

"I don't know that myself," the representative answered.

Anu, thoroughly puzzled, asked, "Why not?"

The representative told him, "None of us know how big the New World really is, because the place we live in is only one peninsula."

The representative used their hands to show Anu just how vast the New World truly was. "The Avel Peninsula is enormous. Even with a hundred kingdoms large and small packed into it, it still looks desolate."

"Cross land enough and you'll come to a boundless desert, a wasteland with no end to it."

"That wasteland runs on for thousands of miles. The old legend says it was made when the sun fell there, and the ancient Avel named it the Desert of the Fallen Sun."

Anu asked again, "And the winged people?"

The representative said they had only ever heard of the winged people through stories and old texts, but traces of their having once lived there still remained all across the Avel Peninsula, along with the things they had left behind.

The sky messenger's feather they had given Anu was one such thing.

"The winged people left long ago, back in the Abyss Demon War. They say they flew clean out over the Desert of the Fallen Sun and crossed thousands of miles to the other side, a distance none of us could ever hope to cover."

"The New World is just too big. We've never known the whole shape of it, and we don't know how large it really is."

Anu the lizard person listened to their account, and already he could sense the boundless scale of the New World.

"By what you are telling me, then, the New World is larger even than Ruhe Beast Island?"

The representative told him, "It's larger, and no mistake!"

"In the old myths, the place where the Mother of Life came down was the New World itself."

"She came to the shores of the Avel Peninsula and sounded the horn, and Ruhe Beast Island rose up out of the sea."

"The Avel Peninsula shouldn't be much smaller than Ruhe Beast Island. We've no way to measure it, of course, and can only go by rough comparison on a map, but at the very least it must be half the size of Ruhe Beast Island."

"But set against the New World entire, the Avel Peninsula is no more than one corner of it."

The representative went on, drawing on all the knowledge and history they possessed, and laid it all out for Anu.

"The Avel Peninsula has sea on three sides. Only in the northwest does it join the main continent, and where they join is the Desert of the Fallen Sun, an absolute land of death that nobody wants to go deep into."

"After the Abyss Demon War, people took ship again and again along the island chains off the west coast, and most of them were lost or died in the wind and waves."

"It wasn't until a hundred years and more had passed that someone finally got across those west coast islands, crawling with monsters and full of freak winds and freak waves, and found another peninsula joined to the New World's main continent."

"That peninsula was near enough as large as the Avel Peninsula, and they named it the Witch Mountain Peninsula later on, because there's a great mountain range across it."

"There's still not a soul living there to this day. Most of what does live on it are exiled evil witch spirits and fallen wretches."

"And further southwest than that, all I've ever heard are rumors, and I couldn't tell you if they're true or not."

"The rumor says someone once crossed that peninsula, put out from the sea on the far side of it toward distant parts, and found that the whole of that ocean was ringed round by land."

"And going on through that strange sea locked inside the land, they came out the other side and there was still boundless land and desert waiting past it."

"That's the whole of what we know."

The Avel representative from the New World spread their hands, helpless.

"Nobody knows how large the New World really is, because nobody has ever reached the end of it."

Anu listened to their account, unable to picture just how vast that world truly was, and said, in utter astonishment.

"So the New World is that vast."

In Suinhor people would fight to the death over even a small patch of farmland, and here were people with endless land waiting to be claimed. Anu's imagination could not help but run wild at the thought.

Anu looked at the Avel before him and could not keep himself from speaking, envy plain in his voice.

"A world so vast as that must hold resources beyond counting. You have land to open up and no end of it."

"Then why come back at all? Why come to Ruhe Beast Island?"

"And you came the very moment the Black Storm broke apart. Getting here must have cost you dearly, did it not?"

"And what is it that made you all so desperate to come?"

But the Avel representative from the New World looked back at Anu with eyes full of boundless envy, even jealousy.

At Anu's words they could not help rising to their feet.

"Your Excellency the Governor. Need you even ask?"

"This is the true Origin Site of the gods."

"You live in the Origin Site of the gods, and so you can't grasp or understand how rich it is. This is the holy sanctuary, the paradise that every person living on the Avel Peninsula dreams of."

They pointed up at the sky as they spoke.

"You don't know how barren the Avel Peninsula is set beside this place. You don't know how terrible the wind and rain and the disasters there can be."

"Here the wind and rain come just as they should. Here the seasons turn as though someone had arranged them. Here there are mineral riches beyond counting. Here there are resources beyond imagining."

"And that's not even the half of it. Here there are extraordinary resources that will never run out. Here countless extraordinary beings can be sustained, and here is the legacy of the gods themselves."

"Because this is the private garden of the Life Sovereign Herself, and this is land sheltered under the protection of the Great Gods."

"This is the Origin Site of the gods, and this land has received the blessing of every single divine being."

The Avel representative from beyond, their face full of yearning and longing, spoke to Anu with a look of awe and bewilderment.

"My lord, do you know?"

"Before I came here, I'd never in my life seen so many ability users, never seen so many cities or people packed so close, never seen a city as prosperous as this one."

"Here you can dig straight down into the ground and pull artifacts out of it. Here there are crops like brown ball vine. Here there are alchemy workshops of every sort, one after another after another."

"Here there are alchemists, tower keepers, beast knights, every extraordinary profession there is, and demon spirits, and lizard people, and magical beasts!"

"This place is beyond belief."

Anu looked at the representative before him. Never had he imagined that this continent could look like this in the eyes of these Avel who had once left Ruhe Beast Island behind.