I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 474: The Giant Dragon and the Dragon People

The Void Continent

Wrapped in animal hide, a short weapon in hand to drive off the man-eating beasts that crossed his path, a young lizard person made his way toward the legendary Flying Dragon Mountains.

Deep within those mountains and the forest beyond, so the stories went, lived a flying dragon dozens of meters in length, and with it a knight who could master it. Together the two wielded tremendous power.

That power was what he had come for, and with it, some way to cure the Death Demon Plague.

Back in his home village the plague broke out anew every so often, sweeping wide and taking lizard people with it. He meant to put an end to it.

At last, rolling mountains rose up before him, and with them a forest thick with towering ancient trees.

Head high, the young lizard person strode deep into the forest, showing not a trace of fear at its dark depths or at the roars of the man-eating beasts within.

He could not say why, but he always felt that something in the forest was calling to him.

He cut his way through thorn and bramble until at last he reached the very heart of the mountains, and there he laid eyes on the legendary totem pillar.

But when he hurried closer, all he found was the rotted carcass of a wind lizard dragon, and with it the bleached bones of a lizard person.

The young man looked at it all, startled, and yet somehow unsurprised.

"So they died long ago after all?"

"Nothing strange in that. It has been over a hundred years, after all."

He stepped closer without quite meaning to, one hand reaching out to the weathered totem pillar while his eyes went over the patterns on its surface. Seven parts curiosity to three parts excitement in his voice, he said, "What an enormous pillar. There is nothing ordinary about this thing."

"Some secret must be hidden away inside it."

Just then he noticed a sword at the foot of the pillar, and he reached out and drew it free.

"This sword!"

"Why does it feel so familiar?"

The moment his hand closed around the sword, a powerful sense of familiarity welled up inside him.

And the instant the blade came loose, the towering totem pillar before him stirred.

The pillar shook violently, throwing off ray after ray of light. A vast shadow burst free on outspread wings and began to wheel about the pillar and the boy alike.

The young man gripped his sword and shouted, "Who are you?"

But looking at the shadow, he suddenly caught himself and changed the question. "Are you even human?"

The shadow told the young man, "I am the totem pillar's consciousness. Once, I was your companion."

"Anu!"

The Anu on Ruhe Beast Island had already fallen asleep, waiting for everything to come to its end.

What had arrived now was the Anu of the Void Continent.

The young man was utterly astonished. "How do you know my name?"

"You know me?"

The totem pillar's consciousness answered easily. "Of course I do. You've just forgotten a few things."

Anu asked, "Why would I have forgotten? And how am I supposed to remember?"

The totem pillar's consciousness told him, "Only once you become myth will you ever find your true self again."

The Void Continent's Anu echoed the word. "Myth?"

"My true self?"

Seeing that the totem pillar's consciousness meant him no harm, and that it seemed very friendly, already familiar with him, Anu lowered his sword and began asking questions of every kind.

Their conversation ran from daylight clear into night, and by the end of it Anu understood at last. He himself was the corpse lying there on the ground. Passing through the cycle of rebirth had simply stripped away everything of his past life.

That explained the pull that had driven him here, and why everything around him, this sword included, had felt so inexplicably like something he already knew.

And this totem pillar's consciousness before him was the very flying dragon of legend.

Even terms that looked impossibly complex and obscure made perfect sense to him after a single hearing.

Anu asked the totem pillar's consciousness, "So, going by our plan."

"You become the totem pillar's spirit, the core artifact behind the power of magical beasts and beast knights."

"And when I pass into the cycle of rebirth, I will come back here in this era to wake you again, and then breed vast numbers of magical beasts."

"After that we will offer up the magic crystals harvested from those beasts to nourish you in return, until at last you become a mythical artifact."

"And I will pass through the cycle of rebirth and walk the true Path of Mythology, all while guiding the lizard people to grow ever stronger. Is that not the plan?"

He stood beneath the totem pillar, mouth hanging open, his eyes churning with excitement and disbelief.

Anu could hardly contain himself. He had never imagined that he himself was the legendary dragon knight, that such a great mission rested on his own shoulders, or that so brilliant a future lay ahead of him.

Set beside those words, beside the plan of generations and rebirths the two of them had laid down for a civilization and a race, even the stars scattered overhead seemed to dim.

Because this was a plan that concerned godhood, that concerned civilization itself, and that would span ten thousand years at the very least.

"That's right!"

"Right now the pillar holds just the one totem spirit, the wind lizard dragon. We could churn out an endless stream of wind lizard dragons this very moment, but that was never what we're after."

"What we're after is a sacred beast, the first magical beast ever to hold fourth-rank standing, a magical beast whose lifespan stretches on and on."

"That is a sacred beast."

Saying this, the totem pillar's consciousness gave the word special weight.

"A giant dragon!"

Anu glanced at the huge wind lizard dragon carcass lying nearby. "Were you not a dragon yourself, before?"

The totem pillar's consciousness replied, "That's only a wind lizard dragon. It doesn't come close to a true dragon."

Anu asked, "A giant dragon. How large would a thing like that be?"

The totem pillar's consciousness said, "Wings spread, a hundred meters across at the very least. Standing upright, it'd top the tallest tree in this forest. The shadow it throws down from the sky is enough to cover a whole village."

"One beat of its wings turns into a storm. One breath of flame turns a whole forest to ash."

Anu could hardly picture something so terrifying, and yet excitement and eagerness rose in him all the same. "Could it put an end to the Death Demon Plague?"

The totem pillar's consciousness answered, "It'll live a thousand years. In all that time, you're telling me it can't put an end to one plague, one disease?"

"And for you, if a thousand years isn't enough, then spend another thousand."

"Get power enough and a lifespan that never runs out, and there's nothing in the end you can't do."

Anu rose to his feet. He had no need to say it aloud. He wanted that power for himself.

The totem pillar's consciousness went on, "Only when a fourth-rank giant dragon works in concert with the totem pillar's Mimicry Mental Domain, the chart of life's evolution, and the power of its totem spirits can it keep tracing the power buried deep in its own bloodline, and unearth the power of its ancestors."

"In this way it perfects itself over and over, and gains ever more powerful forms."

"In the end it might even shed the giant dragon's shape once more, and become a dragon of myth."

"And every time you undergo mimicry, the chart of life's evolution inside the Ancestor Totem Pillar lights up a little further, giving rise to more totem spirits still, so that ever more kinds of magical beasts can be bred."

Anu could not wait to ask. "What do I need to do? How am I to bring all of this about?"

The totem pillar's consciousness surfaced as a shadow, and touched a claw to the point between Anu's brows.

He began laying out their whole plan for Anu, explaining exactly how it was to be carried out, from becoming an ability user, to breeding a sacred beast, to commanding the power of the totem pillar itself.

"Not good. I can't hold on."

Even as he spoke, the totem pillar's consciousness felt a crushing weight settle over his heart, and a wave of drowsiness came sweeping in on the depths of him.

He understood. He was about to fall back into sleep.

All those years of sleep had won him barely any power at all, and this fundamental power was never meant to be spent this way to begin with.

What with the explaining, the passing on of knowledge memory through his own power, and the waking of Anu's power all at once, he was gradually reaching the end of what he could bear.

He hurried things along. Some of the finer details never made it across, but Anu had the essentials, and that, he judged, ought to mean no real trouble.

Still passing on knowledge and rousing Anu's power both at once, he pressed the warning home. "This is our plan. I have to go back to sleep now."

"I haven't become a true mythical artifact yet. I can't stay awake for long, so from here it's all on you."

"I..."

He meant to say more, but his consciousness was already slipping away into stillness.

At that moment, Anu asked one thing. "So we are to breed a sacred beast, and then go through mimicry again and again, until at last we have bred still more magical beasts?"

The totem pillar's consciousness said, "That's right... more magical beasts... stronger forms still... cycle after cycle of rebirth and evolution."

After that, there was no sound at all.

The totem pillar's spirit sank back into sleep once more, while Anu stood beneath the pillar, hands clenched tight, his whole body burning with excitement.

In the forest, Anu followed the method the totem pillar's consciousness had taught him, drawing out his own divine blood, passing it through the totem pillar to be transformed, and granting it back to his own body.

Light surged, and one corner of the chart of life's evolution flickered into being.

A lizard lineage chart surfaced, and upon it a totem spirit evolved into being.

The wind lizard dragon's totem spirit emerged, fused with Anu's Blood of Myth, and then stamped itself onto Anu's own body.

Then, little by little, a stone began to grow from the top of Anu's head.

That's right. A magic crystal was growing directly out of his skull.

In an instant, violent change swept through Anu's whole form.

He did not become a beast knight at all. Instead, he turned himself into a magical beast.

He began to mimic the shape of a wind lizard dragon, but because his original form was not a swamp flying lizard but a lizard person, the wind lizard dragon template did not quite fit him.

And so his form twisted by degrees, and became a strange black lizard dragon.

In that moment, history swerved onto a different road, and strayed from the plan the two of them had once laid out.

Sprawled on the ground, Anu, now a black lizard dragon, was thrown into utter panic.

"What is happening?"

"How could it turn out like this? How could I have become this?"

His new shape was strange to him, his new body no less, and he crawled across the ground frightened and half wild.

Not knowing what else to do, he shot up into the sky and flew off into the distance. Skimming low over the water, he caught sight of his own reflection.

"I have become a monster?"

"Did I do something wrong, or has something gone wrong somewhere else?"

Anu was terrified beyond words, afraid beyond words.

He could not tell whether he himself had gone astray somewhere, or whether this was simply how things were always meant to turn out.

Days of panic passed before his feelings finally began to settle, and he set himself to looking for a way through.

"No matter. By what the totem pillar's consciousness told me, I can still become a sacred beast."

"Once I reach fourth rank I will be able to change my form. I will be able to take on God's Form."

In Anu's mind, God's Form had to be some magnificent, towering shape of a lizard person.

Deep in the forest, Anu cultivated day and night without rest.

It did not take him long to reclaim the power that had always been his. It had been there inside him the whole time. He had simply forgotten how to use it.

A few years later, he reached the very peak of third rank.

And with the power of the totem pillar behind him, Anu began his attempt to reach fourth rank.

Beneath the Ancestor Totem Pillar, the instant he used the Art of God's Grace to reach fourth rank, his body began to change. His whole form twisted, and the magic crystal within him twisted along with it.

Anu embraced the totem pillar's power, and took command of the ritual.

"Mimicry Mental Domain!"

"Trace the bloodline of my ancestors, and grant me power."

A powerful mental domain poured outward, and Anu's black lizard dragon form twisted again and again, gradually taking on the shape of something like an egg.

More important still was the change within the magic crystal itself. The wind lizard dragon's brand once stamped inside it was wiped clean away, and something far greater was written in its place.

What he mimicked now was no wind lizard dragon, but a more perfect form.

Inside the magic crystal hung the reflection of a black shadow.

It was a giant dragon. A black giant dragon.

Within the Mimicry Mental Domain, the egg-like shape swelled all at once, and transformed into a black giant dragon whose wings, spread wide, measured over a hundred meters across.

Black Dragon Anu opened his jaws, and terrible flame poured out from within.

Wind and fire twisted together, and became a whirling column of flame.

Whoosh!

Such was the harvest of this round of mimicry.

Inside the black dragon's neck a strange organ had grown, one that could secrete a substance like black oil.

There was no telling which of his lizard person ancestors this power had once belonged to, but strengthened by mimicry and wisdom ability alike, it let the black dragon command and breathe a strange dragon fire.

Black Dragon Anu let out a satisfied sound, his wings flashing in the sky.

"Very good!"

"This is the power of dragon fire."

He tested it. Rain came down out of the sky, and the flame did not so much as waver.

"Not even afraid of water. Rain cannot put it out."

He did not rush into the next round. Mimicry was not something that could be used without limit.

Every time it was used, the mimicry information inside the magic crystal shifted, and more was written into it.

It would take on an entirely new face and form, and gain some new innate ability of its own.

In a certain sense, every round of mimicry amounted to a rebirth.

He decided to hold off, and use his next round of mimicry only when he reincarnated through the Four-Part Secret Technique a hundred years from now.

That way he could also see, a hundred years on, whether the totem pillar's consciousness had woken again.

Once he had become a black giant dragon, Anu could not wait to begin another ritual.

"Ritual of God's Form!"

"By this ritual, I can take on the shape of an apostle."

Standing atop the ritual's stone altar, Anu went from black dragon to man, stark naked, though not quite the legendary God's Form. A dragon's tail trailed behind him.

But having taken on the shape of God's Form, Anu found himself far from pleased.

He looked at his own reflection in the water, and made a sound of confusion.

Never had he imagined that the God's Form he had waited so long for would turn out to look like this.

"What kind of monster is this?"

Much as he disliked it, this form did suit him well enough for everyday use, since the black dragon's body was simply too enormous for that.

Well satisfied, Anu set off flying toward home. He had power now, and the next step was to go change his own homeland.

But when Anu came back to his home village, he found every last member of his tribe already dead.

Black Dragon Anu looked over the ruined, silent village, the unburied bones scattered about, the wilderness overrun with beasts, and turned his gaze toward the horizon.

"The calamity of the Death Demon Plague!"

Time slipped by, and a thousand years passed.

The totem pillar's consciousness woke again at last.

And the black dragon curled beside the pillar, his bulk like a small mountain, lifted his head and made a sound.

"You are awake at last."

The Flying Dragon Mountains of old had become the Devil Dragon Mountains, and every manner of dragon beast now roamed within them.

Across that thousand years, Anu had gone through mimicry eleven times.

His black dragon form had changed enormously, too. Horns had grown from his head, a strange jaw had grown in, armor like solid steel had grown over him, and organs of every strange kind had grown inside his body.

His form grew steadily more perfect, his power steadily greater, and he held more than a dozen fourth-rank innate divine techniques.

Along with his rounds of mimicry, the divine artifact, the Ancestor Totem Pillar, gained eleven new kinds of magical beast of its own. Because they all sprang from a lizard bloodline, they came to be called lesser dragons.

Hum~

Waves of light rippled outward without pause, spreading to cover nearly half the mountain range.

A tremendous force killed the magical beasts throughout the mountain range, and the power inside their magic crystals was drawn out and folded into the totem pillar.

Countless magical beasts were devoured by the totem pillar's spirit. A thousand years of waiting, a thousand years of gathering strength, harvested in a single instant.

But even that was not enough. It fell far, far short of what he needed to rise to a mythical artifact.

Then, the totem pillar's consciousness stirred fully awake.

The totem pillar's spirit looked around. Nothing here seemed to have changed much. It was still the same quiet valley, thick with green growth.

Only now a black giant dragon lay curled beside the pillar, watching him.

The totem pillar's consciousness sensed Anu through the ripple of his awareness, and asked in a lazy voice, "How many years has it been?"

But when his gaze actually settled on Anu, the look of him brought the totem pillar's consciousness up short.

"Hold on, that's not right. You're Anu?"

"How did you end up looking like this?"

The black dragon's voice came out deep and heavy. A thousand years had passed, and it had turned cold, worn down by them.

Through all the turning of the years, through all the changes the world had seen, he had long since ceased to be the person he once was.

"Looking like this?"

"The sacred beast you spoke of. Is this not exactly what a giant dragon was always meant to look like?"

The totem pillar's consciousness said, "You became the giant dragon yourself?"

The totem pillar's consciousness sensed that something might have gone wrong somewhere, but to his mind this was only an experiment, and hardly a serious problem.

Even if something truly had gone wrong, the two of them had long ages in this world in which to turn it around.

"Going by the plan, you should be king of the lizard people by now. A god in their eyes, even!"

"And the beast knights. There should be plenty of them by now, shouldn't there?"

To the totem pillar's spirit, an Anu with such tremendous power at his command should have managed all this without the slightest difficulty.

Black Dragon Anu lifted his head and looked at the shadow behind the pillar. "Beast knights? What beast knights?"

Only then did the totem pillar's spirit realize something was wrong. "You never received it?"

Black Dragon Anu had already sensed something was off, long before now. "So the knowledge you passed on to me back then was never complete?"

The totem pillar's consciousness did not try to hide it. "Before I become myth, every time I wake, I only have so much time. Passing on knowledge costs no small amount of power, and I had barely any stored up to begin with."

"The last time, the moment I finished passing on the essentials to you, I fell straight back into sleep."

Anu stared hard at the shadow behind the pillar, and said nothing for a long while.

At last, the black dragon lowered his head, and told the totem pillar's consciousness, "It has been over eleven hundred years since we last met."

Even the totem pillar's consciousness felt a pang of something like wistfulness. "In the blink of an eye, over a thousand years have already passed?"

The black dragon asked, "Is that long?"

The totem pillar's consciousness said, "Long enough."

The black dragon only shook his head. "You never actually lived through it. You were only ever asleep inside this pillar."

Silence fell between them. It held a long while before Black Dragon Anu finally began to speak of everything that had happened across that thousand years.

More than a thousand years had passed, and the lizard people had built a great civilization for themselves, raising nation after nation across the whole of the Void Continent.

"When I went back home, I found the plague had broken out again, and everyone there was dying of it."

"Away from the totem pillar, all I could become was this black dragon, or God's Form."

"Wherever I went, everyone feared me. They saw me as a monster, as something not of their kind."

The totem pillar's consciousness said, "How could God's Form be..."

All at once, the totem pillar's consciousness went blank, struck speechless.

He had suddenly realized that this world had no snake people, no gods at all, and certainly no concept of God's Form.

To them, what was called God's Form was nothing more than the shape of an ugly monster.

Black Dragon Anu, beside him, had no idea what was passing through his companion's mind. He went on speaking to himself, as though lost somewhere within his own past, somewhere in those thousand years of memory.

"But it is no great matter. I believe that with effort enough of my own, one day I will win everyone's acceptance."

"I believe that once I put an end to the Death Demon Plague, everything will fall into place, exactly as we planned."

The totem pillar's consciousness asked, "So, you've already put an end to the Death Demon Plague?"

This, after all, had been Lizard Person Anu's very first goal upon arriving in this world.

Black Dragon Anu said, "No. Because there is no longer any need."

The totem pillar's consciousness looked puzzled. "What do you mean by that?"

Black Dragon Anu told him, "Because the Death Demon Plague has become a kind of extraordinary power now. Every extraordinary being on this continent commands the plague to work all manner of divine techniques."

"They no longer fear the plague at all. Some of them even treat it as a divine being's own gift."

"And these extraordinary beings who wield the plague's power call themselves Abyss priests."

The totem pillar's spirit went entirely still. "Abyss priests?"

Never had the totem pillar's spirit expected to hear that name spoken in this world of all places.

Black Dragon Anu went on, "The Death Demon Plague is not merely a sickness. It is alive. I can feel it, and behind it stands something tremendously powerful."

The moment the totem pillar's spirit heard the name Abyss priest, he already had some inkling of who stood behind it.

"Then have you found that being?"

Black Dragon Anu said, "I never did. It is as though she does not exist at all, or else she is everywhere at once."

"But I can feel her growing stronger all the time. This plague itself keeps changing."

"She is devouring this whole world through the Death Demon Plague."

"How could the young man I once was ever have tolerated something like that?"

"This creature had already used the plague to kill my family, to kill my people, and now she meant to use it to enslave every lizard person alive."

"So I fought her. I tried everything I could think of to destroy her, to save everyone from her hands."

"Every time our powers clashed, I came out the worse for it."

"There was nothing I could do to touch her. We fought more than once, and I never even laid eyes on her true face."

"Her very existence, her very form, was too strange for words."

"It was as though she belonged to some other world entirely."

As he spoke, Black Dragon Anu's words stayed flat, carrying not a trace of feeling.

Nothing like the young man he had once been, the one his own words described.

The totem pillar's consciousness asked, "So the beast knights we planned for never came to be, and the Death Demon Plague took hold of this world instead?"

Black Dragon Anu nodded, and went on to tell what happened next.

"Time and again I fought the plague's master, and time and again I lost, until everyone began turning their backs on me, even hating me for it."

"I lost to more than just the Death Demon Plague. I lost to every soul on this continent too."

"Because little by little, things reversed and changed. The Death Demon Plague was no longer the problem. I was."

"The Death Demon Plague brought power. What I brought was death, was disaster."

"Until the day came when I realized that every nation on this continent, every lizard person alive, was doing everything in its power to kill me."

"They meant, in their lord's name, to kill me, the evil black dragon, and to kill every lesser dragon that served under me."

Somewhere in the telling, Black Dragon Anu began, unexpectedly, to laugh.

But that laughter was filled with bitterness, sorrow, helplessness, and the weight of years.

"You know something?"

"This mountain range and forest where you and I live, they call it the Devil Dragon Mountains now, the most terrible and darkest stretch of land on the whole Void Continent."

"They know nothing of any lizard person named Anu. All they know is that the most terrible black dragon on the whole continent lives here, a dragon of calamity that brings ruin and death."

Black Dragon Anu looked at the totem pillar's consciousness, head raised high, and said, "So. I have disappointed you."

"I never became any king of the lizard people. I never became their savior."

"I became the devil dragon in their eyes."

Black Dragon Anu's massive body rose just slightly, and the whole valley and forest fell into shadow.

That terrible giant dragon fixed him with a gaze dark enough to chill the blood, and in a voice that crept beneath the skin, spoke a single line. "I am Devil Dragon Anu!"

In those few words lay all the misery and bitterness of a thousand years, gathered up and pressed together.

The totem pillar's consciousness took that in. "So in the end, we became the greatest villains of all?"

Black Dragon Anu nodded. "I gave everything I had to help everyone. I wanted to save them from disaster. I wanted to bring them happiness."

"And in the end, I became the one everyone saw as the bringer of calamity."

"In their eyes I am nothing but a black dragon, nothing but the black dragon that brought them ruin."

Black Dragon Anu looked at the shadow behind the pillar. "I have turned it over and over. Where did it all go wrong?"

"Where exactly did our plan fail? Why did nothing turn out the way we expected?"

"Just now, it came to me all at once. Part of it was the appearance of the Death Demon Plague's master. Part of it was that my own inheritance was incomplete."

"I should have become a beast knight. Countless beast knights should have risen up among the lizard people. Beast knights should have changed this world, and become its true protagonists."

The totem pillar's consciousness said, "I'm sorry."

Black Dragon Anu said, "Does an apology change anything?"

Hearing him say that, the totem pillar's consciousness understood that Anu would never forgive him. Anu hated him.

The totem pillar's consciousness asked, "If you believe all of this is my fault, why not destroy the totem pillar? Why let me draw on its power and wake again instead?"

Black Dragon Anu said, "Because the years are already gone. None of it can be undone now."

"More than that..."

Black Dragon Anu paused abruptly, right in the middle of saying it.

"I have realized, all of a sudden, that there are things I simply do not care about anymore."

"Everything the young man I once was cared about, everything he chased after, none of it matters anymore."

"Even if I could go back and change everything, I no longer have that boy's innocence. I can never find that dream of becoming a savior again."

The black dragon drew a little closer to the pillar, staring hard at the shadow behind it.

"I have been waiting for you all this time, only to ask you one question."

The black dragon's voice turned sharp as a blade, driving straight into the totem pillar's consciousness.

"Where do you and I really come from?"

Anu pressed him, voicing the deepest question buried in his heart.

"I have looked into it. It is too strange, the way you and I appeared in this world. And that master of the Death Demon Plague is just the same."

"The knowledge you and I carry does not belong to this world at all."

"We really were companions once, but before we ever became companions, there must have been some other story."

"Tell me, what was that story?"

"Tell me, who is the master of the Death Demon Plague, really?"

The black dragon looked at the totem pillar. "That memory of mine, is it here with you?"

The black dragon let out a roar. "Give me back my memory."

The totem pillar's consciousness had no intention of handing that memory over now. Doing so would ruin Anu's own plan, and even sealing it away again afterward would not help, since this was still an Anu who had lived a thousand years and more.

More importantly, letting Black Dragon Anu have that memory back now would do the totem pillar's consciousness no good at all. An Anu who had lived over a thousand years was bound to see through his flaws.

As though sensing exactly what he was thinking, the black dragon struck in an instant, flame pouring from his jaws. "Give it to me!"

The totem pillar's spirit and Anu threw themselves into a full-blown fight, and at last Black Dragon Anu let the hatred in his eyes show through.

He hated the creature before him. Had nothing gone wrong on his end, nothing would have gone wrong at all, and the plan they had laid down in the first place would surely have succeeded.

Every bit of his thousand years of pain and regret traced back to this creature in front of him.

"Give it to me. Give me back what should have been mine all along."

The Ancestor Totem Pillar lifted off the ground and shot up into the sky, calling out totem spirit after totem spirit to bear down on the black dragon. But the totem pillar's consciousness showed not the slightest intention of giving anything up, and spoke to him instead.

"I told you already. Only once you become myth will you ever find your former self again."

The black dragon breathed flame, his wings whipping up storm after storm, and a ritual array surfaced across his horns and closed on the totem pillar.

The two of them fought with everything they had, and the commotion could be seen across the whole mountain range.

The totem pillar's consciousness lost ground fast. He wanted to flee, but this place had long since become the black dragon's own lair. There was no way he could escape it.

The black dragon activated the ritual array, trapping the totem pillar in place. "You cannot possibly escape."

The totem pillar's consciousness went still, as though he had already given up on escape, and looked at the black dragon. "You say you don't care anymore. That isn't true."

"You do care. Because you've never actually let it go."

"Otherwise why would you resent me? Why would you be raging at me like this?"

"You want your old memory back only because you want to know every secret, because you want even greater power, because you want to find a faster road to godhood."

"Isn't that right?"

"You say you don't care, but you still mean to defeat the master of the Death Demon Plague and have your revenge, don't you?"

By the end, the totem pillar's consciousness had turned firm and resolute, nothing like that guileless wind lizard dragon he had once been. "You... you still want to save the lizard people, don't you?"

As though those words had struck straight at his heart, the black dragon's movements stopped dead in that instant.

The light in his eyes fractured and scattered, his pupils shaking violently. The totem pillar's consciousness had just spoken aloud a secret buried deep inside him, one he himself might not have fully understood.

It was true. He had been telling himself, over and over, that he no longer cared.

But as it turned out, he had never once let it go.

But at that very moment, the totem pillar's spirit worked a divine technique Black Dragon Anu could never have expected.

"Open!"

"Gate of the Abyss."

An illusory gate opened in the sky, and the totem pillar seized its chance and slipped straight through. By way of the Gate of the Abyss, the totem pillar's spirit fled into the Dream Realm.

The black dragon lunged to stop him, but it was already too late.

He fell into a simulated Dream Realm, a dark emptiness holding nothing at all.

A single totem pillar floated within that void.

Everything here was a simulation of the real world, and nearly every divine technique that worked in the real world worked here as well. Yet a simulated Dream Realm remained a false one. There was no Abyss here, no kingdom of the gods, and certainly no Divine Kingdom of Creation.

In that fight against Black Dragon Anu just now, his opponent had held nothing back at all.

The totem pillar's consciousness had taken grievous wounds, and looked ready to scatter into nothing at any moment.

In this moment of crisis, the totem pillar's spirit kept turning the situation over in his mind, working out what his next move ought to be.

He was not afraid of death, since he knew that in this world he could not truly die.

Because he was only a sample, a test subject, within a world Void's Mold Mother had constructed to run its calculations.

"I cannot pass into the cycle of rebirth. If I do, I lose this totem pillar, and it is the very core of my simulated Path of Mythology. I cannot lose it, not under any circumstances."

"Magical beasts. Only by giving rise to more magical beasts can I hope to become myth smoothly, once the time comes for me to harvest them."

"What do I do?"

All at once, a name surfaced in his memory.

"Akmanmon."

The shadow behind the pillar began to change, turning by degrees into the shape of a charred corpse, and then into the shape of a snake person.

That's right. The totem pillar's consciousness was the King of Wrath, Dark Moon, all along.

In that moment, with his own consciousness about to scatter, he worked a divine technique borrowed and stolen from someone else entirely.

It was a divine technique once worked by the Barrow clan, servants of Xiao, and by the King of Ghouls, Akmanmon, as well. A technique gone mad beyond all reckoning.

Akmanmon had been driven to it only because he lacked the Four-Part Secret Technique of God's Grace, and had settled for an illusory immortality instead. Dark Moon already held the Four-Part Secret Technique of God's Grace. He worked the technique so that the divine artifact, the Ancestor Totem Pillar, could keep to its road toward becoming a mythical artifact, and so that the artifact itself could go on reaching into the waking world by its own power.

Breed magical beasts. Then reclaim their magic crystals.

Gather power. Ascend to myth.

In those last remaining moments, Dark Moon set the technique in motion at once.

"My Life Dream."

"Become the ritual's own altar. Scatter the Ancestor Totem Pillar's power throughout this world, and give rise to this world's magical beasts."

"Remember my obsession. Never let it be forgotten."

In that final instant, Dark Moon killed himself.

The shadow behind the pillar twisted into a knot, spiraling in on itself, annihilating itself.

One could see his consciousness scattering away, and yet a bubble of color rose into being.

Under the law of the Dream Realm, Dark Moon became a Life Dream, and fused together with the divine artifact, the Ancestor Totem Pillar.

He used his own Life Dream as an anchor point, and scattered the totem pillar's power out into the waking world.

Becoming a Life Dream to forge an artifact was the sort of mad method the King of Ghouls Akmanmon had used, and Dark Moon, clear-headed enough not to so much as flinch though he burned in eternal flame, would never have touched it.

Because a living being could die and become a Life Dream, but a Life Dream could never again become a living being. The moment Akmanmon used this method, he was already dead, and what came back to life afterward was nothing more than a ghoul carrying a copy of his memories.

But here, in this world, things were different. He, Anu, and Melde were all effectively undying, and this whole world had never been anything but an experiment from beginning to end.

He would never truly ascend to godhood here. All he was meant to do was simulate every scrap of data, every step of the process of becoming a god, and that meant any method at all was fair to use.

Dark Moon's shadow dissolved away, and his consciousness sank once more into sleep.

Hum~

But the Ancestor Totem Pillar shuddered with tremendous force, carrying the light of the Dream out with it, sending power out to the farthest corners.

The Devil Dragon Mountains

Black Dragon Anu stared up at the sky where the totem pillar had vanished, something stirring behind his eyes.

"So that is how it is!"

"There really is another world."

For all the ways Black Dragon Anu had turned it over in his mind, it had never once occurred to him that this world held a Dream Realm as well.

With the totem pillar gone, Anu had no way to use it to breed new lesser dragons, and no way to undergo mimicry himself either.

Reincarnation, at least, was untouched. Roughly once every hundred years, he could still pass through it again.

But it was not long before Black Dragon Anu noticed something strange.

The very next day, he watched a lesser dragon, a lizard magical beast, lay an egg, and somehow that egg was shimmering with an extraordinary light.

Black Dragon Anu could feel a surge of power pouring in from some unknown world, spilling out across this one, and flowing straight into that egg.

"Lesser dragons are still being born?"

Not only were they still being born, they were no longer confined to the Devil Dragon Mountains at all. It was seeping out across the whole world.

Anu looked up at the sky, as though something had just come clear to him.

"The totem pillar's power, seeping through from that other world into this one?"

Black Dragon Anu moved at once to follow this change, and set the next part of his plan into motion.

Through the power of her Abyss priests, the master of the Death Demon Plague had all but seized control of every lizard person alive. He needed to build a force that was entirely his own.

The strength of magical beasts alone was not enough. His dozen or so kinds of lesser dragon were not enough to stand against the master of the Death Demon Plague. He needed a whole host of magical beasts with wisdom of their own.

A few years later, Black Dragon Anu took on God's Form, and stood atop a magnificent altar.

Below the altar, egg after egg lay arranged in rows.

He spread his mental domain wide until it covered every egg, then cut open his palm, and drop after glowing drop of Blood of Myth flew free and fell into the eggs below.

"Lesser dragons!"

"I grant you my bloodline. I grant your descendants true wisdom."

"I grant you a measure of a divine being's own form."

"In return, you and your descendants, for all time to come, will obey my every command, and follow my will alone."

The eggs cracked open, and tiny lesser dragons crawled free, one after another.

Almost at once, within the Mimicry Domain, these lesser dragons began assimilating themselves, little by little, toward Anu's God's Form, until at last they became something half dragon, half man.

They had the look of men, but with a pair of horns atop their heads, and a tail trailing behind them.

Theirs was a race much like the Abyss race, or the ghouls.

They did not pass themselves down through bloodline, but through something else entirely.

They could not breed the next generation directly. They were a wisdom seed born out of magical beasts themselves.

They could not give birth to dragon people directly. All they could produce was another distinct lesser dragon, which would then inherit Black Dragon Anu's dragon person form within his own Mimicry Mental Domain, and become a dragon person in turn.

Their inheritance, their very wisdom, depended entirely on Black Dragon Anu.

Anu took on his black dragon shape once more, and spread his wings wide to soar across the sky.

The little dragon people, remarkably, climbed to their feet as well, chasing after Anu's shadow below. Anu called down to them, "I am Black Dragon Anu!"

"It was I who created you. I will be your god!"

The little dragon people let out roar after roar, wild beasts to look at, no different from the lizard people Anu had first laid eyes on over a thousand years ago, the moment he arrived on the Void Continent.

Black Dragon Anu soared through the sky, flying higher and higher.

He broke through the sea of clouds, and gazed down at this Void Continent, this whole world.

"I will become myth!"

"I will change everything."

The dial of time turned once more, pressing on toward the next era.