I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 472: Void's Mold Mother

In the temple, Shelly turned to Yin Shen and asked, "God, but once you've worked out all these future shapes of life, what use will they be?"

Yin Shen said, "When the next era arrives, it will be the Age of Life."

"Everything you hold to be perfect may yet come to birth in that era."

Shelly's eyes shone with anticipation. "The next era!"

The Life Sovereign, Shelly, reached next for her own glass tank.

Pressing her eye right up against the glass, she caught the voices of the Void's Mold inside.

"We're supposed to follow the laws of the world and the rules of nature."

"We're the rule, we're the law, we're the cycle."

"We're one of the rules of this world. And being rules ourselves, we've got to keep the rules. We don't just get to do as we please."

"You can't break down the living. That's the law."

"To hell with the law, we ARE the law. Ruhe is the world."

The Void's Mold was still in session, and showed not the faintest sign of wrapping things up.

Shelly was thoroughly displeased. "You useless lot, you're still squabbling!"

One by one, under her stare, the Void's Mold inside the tank fell still. A council that had looked set to run for a century dropped away into dead silence.

Shelly looked at this Void's Mold, which seemed to know nothing all day long but how to bicker, and never did a lick of real work.

Let them drag every single question out like this in endless argument, and there would never be a conclusion, never an answer at all.

And so the Life Sovereign, Shelly, resolved to finish the idea she had been turning over, and to set it in motion.

"Void's Mold, you should have one collective consciousness, one strongest consciousness born of the fusion of every mind among you, one consciousness to govern the whole mimicry world."

Her words carried the weight of law, and with them she made her choice.

"My glass tank, you are the vessel of the Void's Mold. I make you king of the Void's Mold, and the mother who will one day bear every other Void's Mold to come."

"You are the unified consciousness of the Void's Mold."

Shelly cupped her hands around the glass tank, and a great surge of power poured into it.

The glass tank changed at once.

Clump after clump of foam ate into the tank, the white of it gnawing away at the glass walls.

Little by little the tank itself broke down, and the power of the Void's Mold began to take its shape.

The tank turned to foam, swelling larger and larger without pause.

Right after, the foam beneath the tank went on spreading outward as well, as though shaping a base to hold the tank up.

Or perhaps it was a living being coming into the world for the sole purpose of bearing that tank.

It shifted through one form after another, never settling, yet every shape it took stayed true to the tank riding above it, true to that mimicry world.

It understood this well. It existed because of that tank. It was the Life Sovereign's own sand table world.

First it became a huge white horseshoe crab, big enough to fill half the temple, its carapace turned into that great glass tank, the mimicry world held inside.

The white horseshoe crab soared through the air, drifting and wheeling.

Then, just as quickly, it dissolved back into foam.

This time it became a towering tree, hollow through the trunk, and in that hollow floated the world island.

Shape after shape, it changed.

At last the Void's Mold settled, there before Shelly, on the form of a colossal mushroom.

The mushroom took on a human shape, though atop its head sat something like a wide conical hat, a dome-shaped shell that held the mimicry world within it, a miniature Ruhe Beast Island.

It carried the mimicry world balanced on its head and knelt down before the Life Sovereign.

Its form was immense. Standing upright, it would nearly have brushed the temple's own ceiling, and yet, prostrate at the feet of the little girl before it, it dared not stir so much as an inch.

"My master, the Supreme Life Sovereign, your servant comes before you to pay respect."

Void's Mold Mother's voice sounded nothing like any voice a person could make. It seemed to echo up from somewhere deep inside the glass tank itself.

Layered and overlapping, it rippled with a hollow, unearthly quality.

It was like an echo rolling through an empty valley, like the tide stirring in the deep of the sea.

Shelly looked at the mimicry world balanced on its head and nodded, thoroughly pleased. From now on she would not even need to carry her own glass tank about. It would simply follow along after her.

Shelly reached out and patted the great mushroom, thought it over for a moment, and said,

"Well then, the name Void's Mold doesn't suit you any longer, because you're no ordinary Void's Mold."

"How about Void Mold King?"

Shelly shook her head. That did not feel quite right either.

"Void's Mold Mother!"

And just like that, Shelly had given it a name.

With the name Void's Mold Mother settled, Shelly fixed in place, once and for all, the power of the Tenth Ruhe Seal, and fixed its duties along with it.

"Void's Mold Mother, you sense the world, you mimic all things, you evolve life."

"You are a single whole made up of countless individuals. You are the cycle of the world itself, and so your own life, your death and your rebirth are unlike any other Ruhe's."

Shelly reached out and touched it, running her hand over the Ruhe prostrate on the ground before her.

"And so I now grant you the power to evolve life."

"Every single time you evolve a life, working out a race's origin and its extinction alike, it will be one full turn of the mimicry world's cycle, one round of life and death."

"When you have turned through cycles enough, you shall ascend to true myth."

Of course, not every life worked out this way would ever actually be made, because the answer such a working-out arrived at in the end was not always the right one.

The path of life's evolution was lined with countless forks, and out of a huge quantity of workings-out, only a handful of useful answers might ever be found.

Void's Mold Mother bowed its great head. "I thank you for your gift, my master."

The Void's Mold had originally been formless, scattered across the whole of the world, great beasts of the void.

But Shelly's glass tank had gathered their many wills together here, giving them a body in concept if nothing else, though in truth they remained only a base for carrying the mimicry world.

Void's Mold Mother did not mind in the least. To become the base of the Life Sovereign's own glass tank was an honor beyond measure.

Once she had finished granting it power, Shelly told Void's Mold Mother,

"Work out your evolutions in earnest for me, and leave more life templates behind in my Mother Conch of All Things."

"I'll be needing every one of them someday."

As a sovereign set high above all else, she needed only to set the goal and the expectation. Everything that remained would, naturally, be carried out by a servant in her place.

"Your will is the whole of my being. I shall spare nothing to carry out the duty and the mission you have given me."

Void's Mold Mother rose, and little by little dissolved away into foam.

It turned back into void once more, and slipped behind the curtain of the world.

And in that microscopic world, the microbes stirred with a commotion like the tide itself.

Above the heads of those countless microbes there now rose a presence, scattered through heaven and earth alike, a being that bore the mimicry world on its own head.

It walked through every corner of the world, gathering up every last scrap of the world's data moment by moment, mimicking the world and every living thing in it, and working out the future of life all the while.

But so long as Shelly gave a single summons, it would appear before her once more, the god's own glass tank balanced atop its head.

Moonlight City

For days now Anu had tossed and turned through the night without sleeping, and what dreams came to him held nothing good in them any longer, only nightmares.

He kept dreaming of that lizard person who had died. "Chief Anu, you shouldn't have sent me to tidy the storerooms."

He saw countless dead snake people pointing at him, saying things he could not make out.

The plague only grew worse.

Bad news kept pouring in from every corner of Moonlight Province, and the whole thing looked to be spiraling entirely out of control.

The plague had, by now, earned itself a brand new name.

People believed it to be a curse born of death and demons, and so they had come to call it the Death Demon Plague.

Panicked rumors of the plague ran everywhere, through every street and every alley.

"It's the curse of death itself, a sickness not even death can escape." Everyone knew by now that the corpse of anyone who died of the plague became a source of infection in its own right, and that not even burning could stop it spreading to others. It lent the whole plague an even more terrible cast.

"It's evil power out of some evil god. It's the demons invading the mortal world." No one had any idea where the plague had truly come from, so they could only lay the blame on demons.

"Great divine beings, please save us." Faced with the plague, faced with death, mortals gathered once more before the halls of their gods.

That morning, Anu set out from the governor's mansion, watching the chaos unfold around him the whole way.

Everywhere he looked there were corpse collection teams, and the sick lay wailing across the ground.

He came once more to the Medical Fortress. Outside its walls a great crowd of the sick had gathered, people who could not be treated at all and could only wait here to die.

The moment those waiting to die nearby caught sight of Anu's carriage, they rose one after another and crowded toward it. Some could not even stand, and dragged themselves forward across the ground instead.

"My lord Governor!"

"My lord Governor!"

"Save us! Please, save us!"

"Aren't you the god's own voice on earth? Please, save us!"

"We don't want to die."

Black blotches covered every one of them and a foul stench rose off their bodies, a sight dreadful beyond words.

Among them were the old, men in their prime, women, and children too. Anu looked out through the gap in the carriage window.

One figure chasing after the carriage was smaller even than Anu had been when he first became Kurmis's servant, thin as a rail, a great terrible black blotch spreading across their neck and weeping foul pus.

They chased after Anu's carriage, crying out, "My lord Governor, please, help me be rid of this demon's curse!"

"I'm a follower of the Lord of the Harvest. I'm a follower of the Feathered Serpent God."

But the people around them quickly held them back, and still they shouted after Anu's carriage. "My lord Governor..."

Anu lowered the curtain. He could not bring himself to look at them any longer.

Because there was nothing he could do for them, not now.

There was nothing for it but to go straight inside and ask the Chief Physician of the Medical Fortress how things stood of late.

Unsurprisingly, things had only grown worse.

The Chief Physician asked Anu, "My lord Governor, do you know where this sickness has truly come from?"

"Have you found any answer at all on that first infected body?"

"Is this the demons' doing? Is it cultists inside the city stirring up trouble? Is there any way we might think of to catch them?"

That first lizard person infected with the plague, and of late Anu had come to examine the body almost every single day. That was exactly why the Chief Physician could not help but ask. They could sense, however faintly, that Anu already knew something.

Anu did not know how to answer. He had found one, in truth.

But the answer was that the sickness had begun as something that changed within a lizard person's body, and had, in the end, evolved into the Death Demon Plague.

Anu was an honest man. He had always despised lies and deception.

But this was, without question, an answer he could not speak aloud, one he could never tell to everyone.

"None of this has anything to do with demons. It was we who brought this plague about."

"Even though it was never what we wanted."

Saying so would solve nothing. It would only make matters worse.

Anu could only lower his head and pat their shoulder, hoping to set their mind a little at ease.

"Rest easy. I will find a way to put an end to this plague, without fail."

The Chief Physician, too, had grown exhausted beyond measure of late, watching thousands upon thousands die before their own eyes with no power to stop it. For a physician who had always taken such pride in the work, it was a blow past imagining.

They looked at Anu, not quite able to believe it. "Truly?"

Anu nodded. "I will do everything in my power!"

The Chief Physician shook their head. "This is a calamity of nature. All that any of us can do is our utmost."

To face down the plague, Anu had already tried every method he could think of.

He had even gone so far as to try, through sheer sophistry, to talk the Tenth Ruhe into handing him a way to end the plague.

Anu came once more to the place where the body was kept, and reached out with his own mind to touch that white foam, hoping for some response.

Unlike the past two days, this time the white foam multiplied along the ground at once and wrapped itself around him.

Anu's eyes went blank, and in an instant the world was spinning around him.

Before his senses could even return, he heard a hollow voice.

"You have come!"

This time the voice came from a single being, yet it still carried that same hollow, valley-deep echo, resounding on and on like the tide rolling over the sea.

Anu did not see that same hollow white world as before.

He lifted his head and saw a white living being, an immense presence shaped roughly like a person, standing tall in the empty void.

Its form was tall and slender, and yet it carried a strange, graceful quality all the same. Atop its head sat something enormous, like a wide-brimmed hat or perhaps a hood.

That "hat" was nearly as wide across as the white being itself, and half-transparent.

Anu strained his eyes to look, and could just make out that something seemed to be sealed away inside it.

Anu could not help but ask. "Who are you?"

The lizard person reached out with his senses, but could no longer find any trace of the countless mimicking shapes from before. "Why is there only one of you?"

What stood before Anu now was none other than Void's Mold Mother. The council had already ended, and it had become the unified consciousness, so naturally there was no longer any need to argue certain questions out.

"I am Void's Mold Mother!"

"Lizard Person Anu, when life dies it rots, it breaks apart, it returns once more to nature."

"This is the law of nature. This is the rule of this world. No one at all can escape it."

"Whether you are willing or not, whether you offer it up or not, none of it means anything at all."

"But should you wish to stop the natural order from breaking down this body, neither shall we punish you for it, because you too are a link in nature's own cycle, a part of its order and its law."

"The condition is that you hold the power to stop the natural order forever, the power to halt what is destined to perish and be broken down."

"And yet this is nothing more than an ordinary corpse, and you are no myth. You cannot do it."

In the empty void, that vast white being turned its weightless body, looking down upon Lizard Person Anu.

"So... your request is denied."

Anu knew then that the small hope he had carried, the gamble he had tried to make, had failed.

Anu let out a sigh. "Is there truly no way?"

But just then, Void's Mold Mother spoke of another matter entirely.

"The dead are broken down in the end. They return to nature in the end. This is a law that cannot be changed."

"But you are still alive. You may trade with me, using the self that lives, using the things that are your own."

Anu looked up, astonishment plain in his eyes.

"What you have said... what does it mean?"

Void's Mold Mother told Anu, "I must carry out an experiment, to learn what is possible in the evolution of living things."

"I want to know which of the two is the more perfect, life evolved out of nature's own disorder, or life evolved under the sway of a deliberate will."

A Ruhe and still only an aspiring divine being, the white figure held out its hand, as though extending an invitation to Lizard Person Anu.

"You are a lizard person. You are Kurmis's own servant and heir. You hold the chart of life's evolution in your keeping, and you are the maker of beast knights and any number of magical beasts besides."

"You are an exceedingly fitting choice."

Void's Mold Mother seemed to know every single one of Anu's secrets.

That was hardly strange. Void's Mold Mother held authority over every microbe there was, and to it, most of the secrets in this world were no secrets at all.

Anu asked Void's Mold Mother, "What is it you need me to do?"

Void's Mold Mother said, "Lizard person, is it not a way to end the Death Demon Plague that you are seeking?"

"I can, within the course of that evolution of life, show you every last secret the Death Demon Plague holds."

"You need only take part in that process of life's evolution, and help us drive forward the story of a race of living things from its origin to its end."

Anu felt this was not quite reassurance enough. What if he took part in the whole process and still found nothing?

What if, even knowing every secret there was, he still found no way to solve the plague? Knowing a thing's secret, after all, did not always mean one could solve it, or wipe it away.

It was like holding the blueprints for a demon spirit's flying craft without necessarily being able to build it the way a demon spirit could, simply because one lacked the demon spirit's own miracle ritual.

He asked Void's Mold Mother, "Can you not simply wipe the plague out directly?"

Void's Mold Mother said, "We could. But we have no wish to reach out and destroy a piece of nature's own cycle ourselves, because we ARE nature's cycle."

Unwilling, not unable.

A mere lizard person like Anu simply was not worth the Void's Mold going to such lengths for.

Anu asked, "This experiment in life's evolution you speak of, what exactly is it?"

Void's Mold Mother told the lizard person, "We shall work out the future shape of a race, its origin, its rise and fall, and its final extinction."

Anu stared, dumbstruck. "An entire race? Then how long a span of time is that?"

Void's Mold Mother replied, "A million years. Or ten million."

"Perhaps even longer."

It hardly needed that "even longer." The first two figures alone were already enough to stun Anu speechless.

"A million years?"

"Ten million years?"

Anu suddenly thought of that chart of life's evolution, and of the gods of the mortal world.

The gods had crossed the whole distance of an era to arrive at this age. They had crossed more than two hundred million years, and passed through a million cycles of rebirth.

And could he himself truly endure a span of time so terrible?

Void's Mold Mother seemed to see through Anu's hesitation, and added one more thing.

"It is only time as your consciousness experiences it, not true time at all."

"You will not die. It is nothing more than an illusory experience, much like a dream."

"And within the course of this life's evolution, you may gain far more than merely a way to master the Death Demon Plague."

"You may perhaps also find the future path of your own power as a beast knight."

It sounded wonderful. It sounded entirely safe.

And yet Anu sensed something was not quite right, and for a long while he said nothing at all.

Anu walked out of the Medical Fortress looking dazed, his thoughts adrift.

Before, it had been the Void's Mold that needed to hold a council and hash things out. Now it was he himself who needed to hold a council with himself.

At this very moment, it felt as though any number of different minds were arguing and quarreling inside his own head.

"You must be joking. A million years?"

"What million years? It is ten million, or longer even than that."

"Anu, can you really bear that?"

"Void's Mold Mother has already said it. You will not die. It is nothing more than a dream."

"However long these Ruhe gods have existed, their thinking is nothing at all like a mortal's. You cannot judge it by ordinary reason."

"Anu, you are a third-rank beast knight, with a bright future ahead of you. Why pay a price like this for a crowd of ordinary people?"

Anu felt a headache coming on. The pressure of recent days, the toll of night after night without sleep, had begun to show itself in him.

He walked on out of the Medical Fortress, meaning to climb into his carriage and find somewhere quiet.

But before he could climb aboard, he saw a line of masked corpse bearers coming around the corner, carrying bodies.

"Throw it up there!" A few corpse bearers, their own bodies wrapped tight from head to toe, hoisted a body up.

"It goes out this afternoon," a physician standing nearby cautioned them.

"Cover it with cloth, wrap it well, and mind yourselves." The physician took out a length of cloth, laid it over one of the carts, then moved on to do the same for the next.

Anu's sharp eyes caught the whole scene.

One of the bodies lay there, its hollow eyes turned toward the sky. It was the very same child he had seen that morning, the one who had shouted after him from the roadside.

The abscess on their neck had been torn open, and then they were simply gone.

In death they had been tossed onto the cart like nothing more than a lump of rotten meat, pressed in together with the other bodies, ready to be hauled off to the place outside the city where the dead were gathered and dealt with.

The people nearby seemed to have gone numb to it all long ago. Faced with a heap of piled bodies, they showed not a flicker of feeling, as though what was being hauled away were not snake people at all, but head after head of livestock.

And once again, the voices inside Anu's head began to shift.

"Anu, you should do this, because this plague began with a lizard person, because it broke out from the governor's own mansion."

"Anu, you bear the responsibility, because you are the Governor of Moonlight Province."

"You could give it a try, this working-out of life. Does it not fit perfectly with your own plans for the Ancestor Totem Pillar?"

"I am not doing this for power. I am doing it for everyone."

"Anu... Anu... Anu... Anu..."

Anu stood at the gate of the Medical Fortress, and all at once he understood.

He had little time left for hesitating, because every moment he wasted now cost another life.

He could choose not to care. He could look away and see nothing, because however far the plague spread, it would never reach him. He had a bright and beautiful future ahead of him, and so long as he hardened his heart a little, none of this needed to be a problem for him at all.

But that was the crux of it. Anu was simply not that sort of man.

If he had been that sort of man, Kurmis would never have chosen him in the first place, and he would never have won the standing he held today.

"Were Lord Kurmis here, he would surely not hesitate."

Anu turned and came once more before Void's Mold Mother.

"I agree. I can be your test subject."

Anu made one request. "But I do not want to evolve."

The great white being asked him, "Then what is it you want?"

Anu told Void's Mold Mother, "I want to travel back against the current of time, to reach the very beginning of life."

"I want to recover the many abilities we have lost, the ancient power hidden deep in our own bloodline."

Void's Mold Mother answered, "You have no right to decide how this begins, or how it ends."

"But your own will shall decide the direction your evolution takes. If you set that direction toward recovering what was once lost, I will not stand in the way of your success."

Anu nodded, and in accepting Void's Mold Mother's terms, sealed the bargain between them.

In the world of the void, Void's Mold Mother's body poured forth a clear, radiant light, unfolding itself gently, blossoming with an endless pull.

Anu was drawn helplessly toward Void's Mold Mother.

Void's Mold Mother swelled larger and larger before his eyes, until it was so vast that Anu could no longer take in its full shape at all.

He could no longer tell whether it was growing larger, or he himself shrinking smaller.

At last he dropped into that wide brim, or perhaps translucent white hood, resting atop Void's Mold Mother's head, falling like a single speck of dust through the clouds, until the strange mimicry world came into sight within.

This time, at last, he saw what was sealed away inside that hood.

An entire continent lay sealed within.

In that moment, fear rose in Anu's heart, but he spoke to himself all the same.

"It does not matter!"

"If the gods of old could endure it, then I can bear it too."

And Void's Mold Mother's voice came drifting down from above.

"Let the evolution begin."

"Specimens. A lizard person. A wind lizard dragon. The Death Demon Plague!"

"Begin the working-out!"