I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 471: Shelly, You Are the Ruler of Life!

Moonlight City

Anu strode through the governor's mansion, his steps hurried.

Everyone in the mansion, from top to bottom, was hard at work. Not a single person had stopped.

The whole of Moonlight City had been sealed off completely. Still the plague spread on without pause, and inside the Medical Fortress the patients grew more numerous by the day, yet to this point no cause and no cure had been found.

Panic had the whole city in its grip, and every heart inside it was filled with fear and dread.

From morning until night, Governor Anu of Moonlight Province moved from one part of the city to another, settling one endless problem after another. He did everything he could to keep order within the city, and mobilized resources and manpower to fight the plague.

Sure enough, the moment he returned, an official of the mansion came up to meet him.

One glance was enough to tell that the official had come to report.

Anu looked up. The official's expression alone told him this was no good news. But so much bad news had come these past few days that one more hardly stirred a ripple in him.

The official stood before the desk and told Anu, "My lord Governor, the plague has already spread beyond the city."

"A number of towns outside the walls have broken out with it as well. In every case, dreadful black blotches rise on the body, and then the sufferer falls unconscious and does not wake."

"It has been confirmed. It went out from inside the city."

Anu shot to his feet the moment he heard it. He had braced himself for bad news, and still this left him stunned, and in the next instant the shock turned to blazing fury.

"What has happened?"

"Did I not give the order already? No one enters and no one leaves without my command, and every patient and every body is to be dealt with in one place."

"How did the plague get out?"

The official answered in a low voice, "I have heard from below that of late a number of nobles and merchants have been slipping out of the city. It is likely through them that it spread beyond the walls."

Anu slammed his hand down on the desk, and roared, "Damn it!"

"Every last one of them deserves to die."

"It is always their sort who ruin things. Famine, war, plague, there is not one of them these people do not have a hand in."

"Not even the demons of the Abyss come close to them. They are the true cancer of this world. They are the true plague of this world."

Anu understood at once that the problem lay below him. It was not only those nobles. Others across the city were defying his orders too.

But it was too late now to do anything about it.

Even if he had every last one of them rounded up and dealt with, there was no putting the plague back in its cage.

He felt utterly overwhelmed.

Anu couldn't sit still any longer. After giving a few more orders inside the mansion, he went straight to the Medical Fortress.

Anu changed into the robes worn inside the Medical Fortress, put on that distinctive mask of his, and found the Chief Physician there hard at work. "How many died today?"

The Chief Physician told Anu, "My lord Governor, twenty-one died inside the Medical Fortress. But several dozen more bodies have come in from outside, and we have not finished the counting or the handling of them. The Medical Fortress is short of hands."

Anu gave them another piece of bad news. "The plague has appeared outside the city as well. We must send people out to deal with that too, or teach them at the very least how to guard against the plague and how to handle the bodies."

The physician let out a sigh at that.

"More and more are dying. There will likely be more still to come."

Anu asked, "Have you found any way to solve this?"

The Chief Physician shook their head. "All we know for now is that this plague can pass through water and through bodily fluids. The city's drinking water must be treated without fail and examined for contamination, and precautions must be taken between one person and another as well."

Anu nodded. "I gave that order some time ago, but so far it does not appear to be working very well."

The Chief Physician nodded. "Which brings me to what I must tell you now, my lord Governor. It is a discovery we made only today. After one who has taken the sickness dies, strange growths rise upon the body."

"Those growths give off a kind of dust that carries on the air and infects others in turn."

Anu said at once, "Should the bodies the plague leaves behind not all be gathered together and burned?"

"Burn them and the trouble should be at an end, should it not?"

The Chief Physician stopped him at once. "On no account. That is precisely one of the reasons the plague has gone on spreading of late. Once a body is burned, great quantities of ash drift out and infect more people still."

"I worked that much out from the districts where the plague has struck hardest of late."

"And so, only a little while ago today, I have already had the burning of bodies forbidden."

Anu was stunned. He never would have guessed that burning the bodies, a way of fighting the plague, had instead become a reason it kept spreading.

His expression, already grim, grew darker still.

"This... But if the bodies are not burned, and these plague-ridden corpses turn into ghouls, then matters truly will pass beyond all control."

This was no ordinary world. This was an extraordinary world, where the dead could turn into monsters at any moment and crawl back out of their graves.

Anu didn't know how to put it into words. Even calling it one disaster on top of another would be putting it lightly.

Faced with monsters, Anu could cut them down without a shred of fear.

Faced with rebellion, Anu could put it down, or at least maneuver and scheme his way through it.

When famine struck, he could redirect supplies to relieve it.

But when plague struck, Anu felt himself grow utterly powerless. This formless thing that could still take a life left every ounce of his strength with nowhere to land.

Anu suddenly turned to look at the Chief Physician, a thought forming in his mind.

"Tell me. Could this plague have some connection with those ghouls?"

"Some connection with the dregs of the Silver-White Church?"

The Chief Physician didn't know how to judge that either. "This sickness is far too strange. There is no telling at all where it came from. By the look of it, it is not the work of any hand, and yet neither can it have come out of thin air, can it?"

"I do not know the answer. Perhaps you alone could find it?"

In the end, the Chief Physician could only lead Anu to the back of the Medical Fortress, the place where this group of physicians had been studying the plague.

Here, the body of the very first person infected still lay.

Dressed all in black, his mask on, Anu entered an empty, dim, sealed-off underground chamber. The cold here cut almost to the bone. The physicians had set a special ritual array in the room to preserve the body.

The instant Anu stepped inside, his eyes went straight to the body laid out on the table. Through the coarse white cloth draped over it, he could make out scales, limbs shaped much like a person's, and a tail.

Sure enough, the first person to die of the plague was a lizard person.

In the corner lay the body of a magical beast as well, likewise covered in a sheet of white cloth, and it too looked to have no breath left in it.

The moment the lizard person had died, the wind lizard dragon bonded to him had died as well.

Wisdom ability users wielded tremendous power, and yet their bodies stayed fragile all the same. Sickness could still take their lives, especially a plague as strange and unprecedented as this one.

Anu stepped forward and drew back the white cloth. Many of the scales on the lizard person's body had rotted away and peeled off, and in their place had grown patch after patch of black matter. Some of the black lumps had even pushed their way out through the gaps between the scales, as though some kind of plant had sprouted straight out of the corpse.

The physician warned Anu at once. "My lord Governor, do not touch that black substance."

"The moment it breaks open, it turns into a cloud of fine dust that drifts into the air. We have already had physicians infected that way."

Anu nodded, and waved a hand for the physicians to leave the room.

He was a third-rank ability user. So long as he took precautions in advance, his power could seal such things out easily enough and keep them from ever entering his body.

Anu looked down at the lizard person's body, a swirl of emotion in his eyes.

"What was it, in the end, that let this plague take hold of you?"

"Was this the work of someone's hand? Or only an accident?"

Anu set his hand upon the corpse's head, and the light of a divine technique stirred at his fingertips.

"My kinsman, if your death was the work of someone's hand, tell me who the culprit was."

"And if this was a calamity of nature, tell me too the reason it all came to be."

Anu meant to read the memories out of the corpse's own brain.

He had used this power before, but even reading memories didn't always mean seeing whatever one wanted to see.

More often than not, what came out was only a scattering of broken, useless fragments. To see what one actually wanted meant trusting to luck, and the odds there could well be imagined.

And this person had already been dead so long that whatever might still be read from him hardly needed saying.

Anu kept his hand in place and worked the divine technique again and again, but still he saw nothing of what he was after, and several times the technique failed outright.

But on the very last attempt, Anu caught a glimpse of a scene from the lizard person's life. The person had gone into the storerooms of the governor's mansion, sorting and tidying the things kept inside.

Things like fossilized horns that needed to be kept soaked in water for preservation, and all manner of amber.

And those very things were gifts the Avel had given Anu before.

"The Avel?"

Confusion crossed Anu's face, and for a moment countless thoughts surged through his mind, but he shook his head at once.

"No. It cannot be. There is no reason for it."

"They have not the slightest reason to do such a thing."

Just as Anu wavered between doubt and suspicion, he suddenly noticed a patch of white on the lizard person's body.

Once infected with the plague, a lizard person's whole body turned black, covered in black blotches, with strange black lumps growing out of the flesh.

Against all that, this one spot of white stood out sharply, and it drew a puzzled sound from Anu.

"White?"

"What is this?"

Looking closely, it seemed almost like foam, or perhaps the spore of some plant.

Looking again, more carefully, it seemed instead like a smooth patch of pale flesh.

Anu didn't touch it directly. Instead he meant to use his mental power to peel it away for a closer look.

But before his mental power could even reach it, the white thing moved on its own.

The white foam multiplied at astonishing speed, spreading fast along the scales of the corpse, as though it meant to swallow the body entire.

Anu's expression changed. His guard shot up on the instant, and he watched the "white foam" on the corpse, braced and ready.

"What is going on here?"

All the same, he could not stand by and watch the foam devour the body. He needed it to trace the plague back to its source.

Anu cast a divine technique at once, aimed squarely at the thing on the corpse.

He meant to clear the "white foam" away, and then contain it.

But the instant his divine technique, his very spirit, touched the "white foam," it was as though he himself were a single drop of water falling into the sea.

GONG!

Anu felt as if his skull had been struck hard by a great hammer, and the whole world spun around him.

He had meant to use his divine technique to contain it, and instead the sea swallowed him. He was an insect trying to stop a wheel bearing down on it, and in the end he tasted the bitter fruit of his own doing.

That white foam itself was a being whose station towered far above Anu's own, nothing he could ever hope to move.

In an instant, his consciousness was dragged into an unknown world.

This was a world of pure white, where countless motes of white mythical mold packed densely together, taking on every shape imaginable, watching Anu, and giving voice to every kind of sound.

Those white flecks of foam had taken the shape of all creation, and looked down on the Lizard Man Anu from high above.

"A mortal!"

"A lizard person!"

"A living lizard person."

"The living cannot be broken down."

"Such is the law of nature."

"How did he get in here?"

"He touched the lizard person specimen we are breaking down, analyzing, modeling."

What Anu was looking at was in fact Void's Mold, breaking down the body of this dead lizard person, studying the shape of lizard person life, the secrets of their bloodline and their reproduction.

Just as it had once broken down the body of a horseshoe crab and gained the ability to mimic one.

Anu felt as though he had taken a heavy blow, and only after a long while did he come back to his senses.

His consciousness was bound fast within the void, unable to move so much as an inch.

He reached out with his own awareness to sense what lay around him, sweeping it in every direction and upward as well, and there, looming high above, he saw the Ruhe that mimicked all creation.

He saw snake people, he saw winged people, he saw great trees, he saw every kind of animal, even insects.

Every one of them was built from that same white substance.

Anu understood at once that he had stumbled onto something extraordinary, but no matter how he searched through his memory, he found no description anywhere of a being like this.

Bewildered, he asked, "Who are you?"

In an instant, it seemed as though many voices answered him all at once, each telling him its own name.

That chorus surged like a river bursting through mountains and seas and exploded inside Anu's mind. He could not help wanting to clap his hands over his ears, and only then did he realize he was nothing here but a body of pure consciousness.

"I am Void."

"I am Void..."

"Void... Void... Void..."

Every one of them called itself Void, as though they all shared a single name between them.

They gave voice through countless different organs, some even through the vibration of insect wings and thin membranes, producing tones that resembled speech.

The sound left Anu reeling, his head spinning, but he still shouted up at the sky, "Did you cause this plague?"

The Void's Mold answered him, "It was not we who brought the plague. It was another thing entirely."

One of those living beings shaped like white foam dropped down before Anu, and in an instant formed itself into a strange, tentacled, sticky little creature.

"This is it."

At the sight of that tentacled creature, something suddenly surfaced in Anu's memory.

The Avel had given him many gifts, and among them had been something that looked like a long "stone unicorn horn."

He had asked the Avel representative at the time, "What is this?"

The representative had told Anu, "That's not stone at all. It's the shell of a sea creature from a very long time ago, the kind you won't find anywhere these days. Look at that long horn on it, just like a weapon."

The shell had been kept in water, and the Avel representative had said only that way could it keep its shine.

When Anu had taken the gift in hand, he had glanced down and seen, sitting in the bucket, a creature with two tentacles, sticky-looking to the eye.

"I have seen it before."

Anu never would have imagined that the thing behind the plague could be such an unremarkable little creature.

"So this was the thing that brought the plague, all along."

Anu asked those shadows made of white foam, these beings that mimicked all creation.

"The Avel brought this here. Why then has no harm come to them?"

The Void's Mold said, "Inside the body of this creature there is something, something that none of you can see."

"That thing does the creature itself no harm, and in the beginning it did the snake people no harm either."

"But once this lizard person was infected, the thing altered within his body, and in the end it became what you now call the plague."

Anu finally understood the true cause of the plague. This secret touched the deepest workings of the world, the kind of thing he might have spent a lifetime thinking on, a lifetime searching for, and still never found the real answer to.

Yet here, right in front of him, these beings seemed to look straight into how the unseen workings of the world truly turned, and had explained the whole of those changes to him outright.

Anu was thoroughly baffled by them. What exactly were these white flecks of foam before him, and why did they mimic the shapes of all creation?

"Just who are you?"

"How do you know all of this so exactly?"

Every last one of the Void's Mold turned toward Anu, giving voice through a thousand thousand organs, describing its own identity to him once more.

"We are the Tenth Ruhe, made by the Life Sovereign, and our name is Void."

"We break down all things. We mimic all things."

"We are nature's own cycle, its own turning wheel."

At this, the voices of all the Void's Mold gathered together and surged toward Anu as one.

"Lizard person, you have disturbed the work by which we break life down."

Ordinary people could not see the Void's Mold, nor could they ever touch it.

Though Void's Mold existed everywhere without exception, all that ever showed itself before people were its tendrils, those ordinary microbes.

This lizard person was the first of his kind to die since the Void's Mold had come into being, and that alone was why the mold had come here at all, to break down his body, to learn the secrets of his life, and at the same time to model his complete form.

And Anu had interrupted the Void's Mold in the very act of breaking the lizard person down, which was why it had dragged him here.

"Ruhe?"

Anu understood the words at once. This being was, of all things, the tenth Ruhe god made by the Life Sovereign.

Perhaps it had not yet truly become a divine being, but it already held the authority of one.

Fear and unease flickered through Anu. Never had he imagined running into a being such as this. A moment later, though, the lizard person's thoughts turned, and he wondered whether this might not also be an opening of a kind, a chance.

"Forgive me, I pray, for my rash intrusion."

"It was not done on purpose. We are facing that very plague, that calamity of which you speak, and so we have had no choice but to seek out its cause."

"Since you know the true cause of this plague's birth, may I ask whether you know also the way to put an end to it?"

"Servant of the Life Sovereign, Great Void Ruhe, I pray to you!"

"I beseech you in your greatness to grant your help to mortals."

The Void's Mold said, "Of course I can put an end to this plague. But why should I help you?"

Anu tried to move them. "Because it would save people beyond counting. People beyond counting would hold your greatness in grateful remembrance, and some would even become your followers."

Unfortunately, the Void's Mold could not grasp any meaning at all in what Anu called saving lives.

"Save people beyond counting?"

"Why should they be saved?"

"Followers?"

"What is a follower?"

"Why should we want followers?"

Anu said, "Because they were never meant to die like this. They could be living better lives. Their families ought not to suffer such pain. They could still be together with their wives and their children and their parents."

"Great Void Ruhe, have mercy upon these mortals, I pray you. Save them!"

"And a follower is your servant here in the mortal world, one who goes forward according to your will, and gives a whole life over to your worship."

Anu had never understood those divine beings of the mortal world, and understanding a being like Ruhe was harder still.

Those gods of the mortal world had once been mortals themselves, and most of them still carried some shadow of what they had been.

But Ruhe was not like that.

They were the sea of clouds and the sky, they were the boundless earth, they were the ocean and the desert wastes.

Anu's argument might well have moved one of the mortal world's own gods, but to Ruhe it meant nothing at all.

In that world of hollow white, the white mold of myth that had taken the shape of all creation told Anu, in a thousand thousand voices, "Birth and passing are the law of life, they are the cycle of the world, they are a part of nature itself."

"Green plants rot away and turn to withered ash. Winged insects come down to the ground in the deep of winter. Animals are buried in the earth when their span reaches its end."

"Out of the withered ash new green things grow. When spring opens, the insects take wing once more. Before they grow old, the animals bring forth the next generation."

"Death is the one law that ten thousand ages have never changed. Why should they be saved out of death?"

As for the matter of followers, the Void's Mold paid it no further mind, as though it wasn't even worth answering.

Anu still tried to make his case. "But, Great Void Ruhe."

"They have not yet come to the last hour of their natural lives. They were never meant to die at this time, not like this. This is an unnatural calamity."

The Void's Mold said, "Floods make the land vanish. Great fires make the forests vanish. Life too vanishes in calamities of every kind."

"All of it, still, is the cycle of nature."

The Void's Mold was utterly unmoved, and seemed to find Anu's whole argument baffling.

Anu suddenly understood something too.

He remembered what the Scarlet Goddess had once told him, that even divine beings had positions of their own.

If he stood for mortals, then every divine being stood for something of their own.

And this Void Ruhe before him, then, stood for the cycle of nature itself.

It could never reach out a hand simply out of pity for mortals.

In the eyes of the Void Ruhe, even if every snake person, every winged person, every lizard person vanished from the world entirely, that too would be nothing more than nature's own choice.

It was the destined end of a life, of a race, and in time new life, new races, would naturally rise up to take their place.

Urgency stirred in Anu. He sensed he had already missed his chance, and that any other way to end this plague would be hard to come by now.

The plague had already spread far and wide. On the surface it had reached only two or three cities and a dozen or so villages and towns, but there was no telling how far it had truly gone in secret.

Something suddenly turned over in his mind, and he lifted his head and called out to those shapes that mimicked all creation, "Void Ruhe, I understand now."

"Forgive my unreasonable request. It was not for a mortal to measure your greatness by his own guesswork."

But just as he said this, Anu's tone suddenly shifted.

"But this body belongs to a lizard person. He is my kinsman. He is family to us."

"You cannot simply carry him off like this. There is no justice in it."

The Void's Mold fell silent, and only after a long while did it speak again, telling the Lizard Man Anu, "As to your question. We have decided to hold a meeting and discuss it. When the meeting is over, we shall give your question an answer."

Anu was taken aback. A meeting, over this? What could that possibly mean?

A moment later, his consciousness was cast out of that world of white, and returned once more to his own body.

And the Void's Mold, left behind, plunged straight into a fresh round of arguing.

"Breaking things down is what a microbe is for. It's part of nature's cycle and its turning, it's our job. Every last body belongs to us."

"That's right. When we break down anyone else's bodies, how come nobody from those races ever comes and objects to us?"

"We don't have to ask anybody's opinion about anything."

"This time's different. None of those others were wisdom seeds. How's something with no wisdom supposed to object?"

"What about the snake people? They never objected either!"

"That's because the snake people haven't got one single king, and haven't got one single god."

"This Anu looks like he's a king of the lizard people. He's got every right to make a demand."

"We don't have to care what he..."

"We ought to ask him first..."

Inside the glass tank, the Void's Mold started arguing all over again. This was, once more, a council unlikely to reach any answer.

Lava Mountain, Glass Temple of Black Rock City

Beneath the altar, Shelly crouched, head bowed, looking into her own glass tank, her small face cupped in her hands.

"Hm!"

"Hmm hmm..."

She had thought about it for a long while, and still hadn't come up with any other use for the Void's Mold.

It seemed it could only ever serve as a sand table, much like Hila's mirror, but Shelly wanted it to be capable of something more, something stronger.

Beneath the divine statue lay King Redlichia's shed remains as well, and just then, of the two of them, one knelt while the other crouched.

Shelly turned her head to look at those statue-still remains, and felt a resentment she could not quite let go of.

Feeling a little dejected, she suddenly turned back, pouting, toward the figure standing at the center of the temple, and said,

"God, if You'd chosen me to be Wisdom back then, I'd definitely have been cleverer than him."

The white-robed divine being within the temple spoke, and told her, "Then you would no longer be Shelly."

"You are Life, and that is exactly why you are Shelly."

Shelly seemed to understand, seemed to grasp something in it, but she was downcast all the same.

God spoke again just then, "The Crown of Wisdom is the source of Wisdom, the beginning of all Wisdom."

"Think of your own Mother Conch of All Things. To hold it, does that not mean you can make any life you wish to make?"

"These two divine artifacts stand for beginning and origin, for the foundation stones of Wisdom and of Life. Without them, all things would fall to ruin."

"The Life and the Wisdom you have brought into being would all vanish."

"But that does not mean they mark the limit of Life and Wisdom. How high a tower, how tall a temple, can still be raised upon that foundation, no one yet knows."

Shelly, too, thought of her own Mother Conch of All Things, and of the time she had made the winged people.

She ran to God Yinsai's side, and told Him, "Right at the start I wanted to make that winged race out of Your Dream, God, and what I ended up with was a whole flock of funny-looking winged people."

"But in the end those winged people used the power of Wisdom and turned into the very shape I'd wanted to make them in the first place."

"Isn't that strange!"

God Yinsai told Shelly, "So you are the foundation stones of Life and of Wisdom. But Life and Wisdom go on seeking out their own limits, go on creating the miracles that belong to them alone."

The white-robed divine being took the girl's hand and led her over to the glass tank. Shelly lifted the tank off the ground and set it on the altar, and then she and the divine being looked at it together.

Yin Shen told Shelly, "The future cannot be predicted, but there are some things that can be worked out."

Shelly knew God was about to give her the answer, and asked eagerly, "God, what is it?"

In her eyes, God held the answer to everything in the world, if only He wished to share it.

Yin Shen said, "The evolution of life, for instance."

Yin Shen pointed out at the world beyond the temple, at the whole of the earth itself.

"You cannot control the future of this world, but you can control the evolution of life, because you hold the secrets of every living thing."

"Shelly, you are the Ruler of Life."

"A billion lives come into being through your authority, and evolve through your power as well."

The Creator held the little girl's hand and laid the world bare before her, and all its possibilities with it.

At the same time, He told her the true power of the authority she had inherited from Him.

The two of them seemed to be standing in the temple still, and yet the whole of the world had risen up before them, all things in it laid out beneath them.

God's voice reached Shelly's ears, and it was as though a great door had opened before her.

"And so you may know, before the time comes, what shape the future of life will take!"

The words fell, and with them the whole course of the world turned that much further forward.

Shelly looked to her own glass tank, at Ruhe Beast Island within it, and at all the shapes it had mimicked.

A smile spread across her face, and she said happily, "God, I understand now!"

Void's Mold could mimic the world. It could mimic every setting, every corner of nature.

By breaking down the body of a single species, it could learn every secret that species held, and mimic its living form completely.

If, inside this glass tank, she gathered her power and worked out the whole course of one species' evolution, choosing it to be the one at the center of it all.

Might she not then see just what that species would become, in time to come?

Might she not then see the very limit that one species could ever reach?

At the very least, she could glimpse one such possibility.

Shelly had found the true power of the Void's Mold. In truth, she had learned how to use her own power.