I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 477: The Demon God Who Opened the World's Lid

Once the first dragon person capable of breeding naturally through bloodline alone had appeared, the numbers of the dragon people began to swell fast, spreading into every corner of the northern plains.

The wheel of civilization, stalled for hundreds of thousands of years, began turning once more, and the dragon people started gathering together to live in large groups.

They learned to record events by carving them into stone walls, began hunting together in coordinated groups, and developed the most primitive form of language.

They walked out of their caves, and began building houses of wood.

Once the dragon people had settled in one place, they took to gathering and planting around their settlements, and in time that evolved into raising livestock. As ordinary dragon people grew more numerous, those born with extraordinary power of their own became the ones who held authority within each tribe.

Because of the wars fought between tribe and tribe, they began forging primitive weapons.

They began raising structures of stone for their own defense, and the people of any defeated tribe became slaves.

By absorbing the populations of other tribes, some dragon tribes grew steadily larger, until at last they built cities that belonged to themselves alone.

Across the Void Continent, the marks of civilization spread once more.

That day, the earth shook and the mountains swayed. In the distant peaks and jungles, every beast broke into a stampede at once, and the dragon people upon the land trembled in fear.

Once the earthquake had passed, the local dragon people discovered that it had torn open a crevice in the earth.

Someone climbed down along the crevice, and deep beneath the earth found an ancient structure, a stone tower with only its lower half still standing.

"Down here!"

"There's something down here."

The dragon person who had been first down into the crevice shouted up at once to those above.

More people came down at once, and stared up at the tower in astonishment. This was plainly nothing the dragon people of today could ever have built.

Densely woven patterns covered the stone tower, proof that a ritual array had once been set into it, one that had gone on running for a long time even after the lizard people's extinction. But across hundreds of thousands of years, the pattern of the array had gradually worn away, and it had long since ceased to function.

Yet a good deal of what had been kept inside the stone tower still remained. The books and food and other such things stored there had long since vanished, and the jars and bottles had crumbled away into piles of grit.

But certain extraordinary objects, gemstones and the like, had endured across all those years, and when someone picked one up they found it still worked.

The dragon people, of course, could not tell what the ritual array had once done, and took it for nothing more than an ordinary pattern.

But the moment they picked up those divine artifacts, the artifacts suddenly began to glow with light.

The dragon people broke into an uproar.

They had no idea how to forge artifacts themselves, but they had seen the glow of extraordinary power before.

It was not long before important figures came rushing in from far away.

A dragon person with extraordinary power of their own picked up one of the artifacts, and all at once an image released itself from the object, playing out a scene from the past. A single word, spoken in another language entirely, pressed itself directly into the dragon person's own mind.

The dragon people there watched the image play across the wall, watched city after city, watched those strange creatures walking upright on two legs, and cried out in astonishment.

"Where is this place?"

"A city this magnificent?"

"Lizard people!"

"Those things... what kind of people are they?"

The dragon people went on unearthing the remains of the lizard people's civilization from beneath the ground. Most of the traces had long since worn away, but a handful of surviving stones, fossilized bones of the lizard people themselves, all bore witness to an even older civilization that had come before the dragon people.

Beyond that, there were the artifacts and crystal stones the lizard people had left behind, objects that carried tremendous power of their own, some of them even holding information of the most staggering kind.

And it was exactly these things that brought change to the young, still-forming civilization of the dragon people.

The dragon people, only just emerged from their own wild age, took these treasures for a bestowal from some ancient divine being.

They used the power of these treasures to compete against the cities and tribes of other dragon people.

But as the age moved on, that competition only grew fiercer.

So the dragon people began studying how the lizard people had forged these artifacts and treasures, and began learning the power behind ritual arrays.

In this way, the dragon people took up cultivation in imitation of the lizard people's own civilization, learning every technique the lizard people had ever known.

They crafted divine artifacts of their own, and used ritual arrays to draw power out of the Dream Realm.

Little by little, thousands of years passed.

The dragon people's civilization did not merely recover to the height the lizard people had once reached. It surpassed the lizard people entirely.

They began hunting magical beasts, and used magic crystals to work divine techniques of every kind.

They developed standardized artifacts with magic crystals at their core, and unified ritual arrays with magic crystals at their core as well.

In the end, they gradually built a civilization powered by magic crystals.

City after prosperous city spread across every corner of the continent. Within them, buildings with magic crystals at their core could be seen everywhere, along with every manner of vehicle and vessel driven by magic crystals as well.

The dragon people dressed in simple, practical clothing, and rode these vehicles and vessels off to distant places.

Upon the sea, a fishing boat set out.

It sailed out to a stretch of deep sea water, cast its nets, and hauled up a catch of every kind.

But this time the net held more than fish and every sort of seafood. It had brought up a single black stone as well.

The stone rolled loose across the deck, and drew a crowd of sailors around it.

A dragon person wearing a cap lifted it up with great care, watching the gem catch and scatter the sunlight.

The dragon captain held it fast, unable to bear letting it go, a look of pure rapture in their eyes, as though the crystal held some boundless pull over every dragon person alive.

"Look at this!"

"It's beautiful!"

"This has to be the most beautiful gem in this whole world."

It was not long before the dragon people realized this was no ordinary black magic crystal.

The crystal gave off power beyond all imagining, power that seemed, to the dragon people, all but limitless.

This was Black Dragon Anu's own magic crystal.

Having slept beneath the sea for hundreds of thousands of years, Anu's magic crystal had surfaced once more in this world.

Through trial, the dragon people discovered that a single stone like this could power thousands upon thousands of ritual arrays at once. Most terrifying of all, it could let a dragon person unleash power on the scale of a forbidden curse.

To hold it was to hold a power that could shatter heaven and destroy the earth.

It could annihilate an entire city. It could destroy any enemy at all.

"What in the world is this thing?" Those who studied it and uncovered its secret no longer found the stone beautiful at all. It struck them instead as terrifying beyond measure, the kind of thing that raised the hair on the back of one's neck.

"Its power has no end. I can't feel any limit to it at all." But there were others who lost themselves in it all the same. No one, after all, could dislike power this immense.

"One crystal like this, and it matches countless others." A strange light flickered in the eyes of everyone who learned the secret.

Among those present, some began to guess at where the stone had come from.

"Legend says the lizard people were destroyed by divine punishment. In the age of the lizard people, gods really did exist in this world."

"Could this be a treasure a god left behind?"

"It's the Dragon God. It's got to be something the Dragon God out of the lizard people's own legends left behind."

Every dragon person there erupted with excitement. For the first time, they had proof that the divine had truly once existed in this world.

At least, they had once existed in this world.

And so the stone was given a name of its own. They called it the Dragon God Stone.

The stone's appearance stirred up a tremendous storm at once throughout the dragon people's kingdoms.

Ambitious men used the stone to destroy their enemies, and built up power bases of their own. Beneath that forbidden curse's power of destruction, they stood as high and mighty as the divine.

But it was, in the end, only the stone's own power. It was never truly theirs.

In the end, every one of these men was assassinated by someone else, or else died and left the stone to fall into another's hands.

It changed hands again and again, and the entire Void Continent went mad over this single stone, sparking war after war that swept across the whole of it.

Until one day, someone finally obtained the stone and chose not to arm himself with its mighty power, chose not to call up its world-shattering strength to cast forbidden curses at all.

Instead, he used the Dragon God Stone to build a city.

The City of the Dragon God.

This city ran entirely on the power of that single crystal. Workshop after workshop rose up across the whole of it, and what they built was a city like a divine kingdom.

Wielding the power of the Dragon God Stone, these dragon people at last unified the entire Void Continent.

More than a hundred years after the City of the Dragon God was born.

The dragon people's civilization reached its very height, but it had also run into a wall.

The Void Continent was simply too small a world to hold so many dragon people any longer. Resources dwindled steadily away, and a civilization that could not move forward could only decline. Every kind of tension began surfacing at once.

The very last magical beast had gone extinct, and beasts bred artificially could reach no higher than first rank, so the resources they could still draw upon dwindled steadily toward nothing.

War and rebellion rose up once more.

The fires of war burned everywhere, and nothing could put them out.

And in this kingdom the dragon people had brought to its very height, war itself had grown especially terrible.

With every kind of powerful extraordinary artifact, every manner of massive ritual array, even a minor skirmish could kill a hundred thousand people, even a million.

After the fighting, the population plummeted.

Everyone finally called a truce, and nursed their wounds. More than half the dragon people's population was already gone.

The tensions had, at least, eased through the very war that caused them, but the underlying problem was never solved, and no path forward could be seen.

One day, a powerful dragon person within the City of the Dragon God unlocked a portion of the secret hidden inside the Dragon God Stone.

Using that secret, they became a fourth-rank apostle.

From that day, the very first dragon person apostle was born.

In that once-prosperous city beneath the Dragon God Mountains, hundreds of thousands of dragon people gathered together in the public square.

A dragon person, finely dressed and wearing a hat, stood at the front of the platform.

"Our civilization has arrived at a turning point."

"Our energy is draining away. If we mean to take one more step forward, we must find a new road out."

The dragon people across the square murmured among themselves, heads leaning together. Someone raised a hand holding an artifact, and cast their voice out across the entire square.

"May I ask, where does our road out lie?"

The dragon apostle told them, "Beyond the world itself."

The dragon people there broke into an uproar. Some shook their heads without end, while others could hardly contain their excitement.

Within the dragon people's kingdoms, some had long suspected that beyond this world there lay another world still.

This legend had not sprung from nothing.

The records deciphered from the lizard people's own ruins, for instance, contained one such claim.

Legend held that the Dragon God, the Black-Winged Goddess, and the Totem Beast God, these three divine beings, did not belong to this world at all. They had come from beyond it.

Beyond the world lay the Homeland of the Gods, a place of boundless riches, holding extraordinary resources that could never be exhausted, a fantastical realm capable of giving rise to divine beings themselves.

The dragon people's civilization had inherited part of itself from the ancient lizard people's own civilization, and the two remained bound together in ways that could never be separated.

And this very City of the Dragon God had been forged, after all, out of the Dragon God Stone itself.

Even those present who did not believe it still carried, deep in their hearts, a boundless longing and yearning for that legendary Homeland of the Gods.

The dragon apostle stood at the center of that vast crowd, and spoke to them all.

"Remain in this world, and all that awaits us is extinction and ruin, nothing but endless infighting."

"We must go out, and seek a broader heaven and earth for ourselves."

"We cannot stand rooted in the present. We must go out and carve open the future."

In an instant, the whole crowd broke into applause.

Every one of them answered with tremendous fervor, longing plain in every eye.

"So we're going to search for the divine beings' own homeland?"

"There are so many stars above our heads. Are we going all the way out to the stars themselves?"

"Leaving this world behind, to see what lies out there in that wider place."

"The Homeland of the Gods!"

Everyone there burned with excitement, one after another, though some voiced their doubts all the same.

They doubted not only whether the legend was even true, but whether it was possible at all to leave this world and travel beyond it.

Someone asked, "We all know that out past the sea, on all four sides of the world, there's a barrier no one can see."

"If we're going out beyond the world, we've got to break through those barriers."

"Not even a forbidden curse can shake that world barrier the least bit. So how are we ever supposed to get out?"

The dragon apostle answered, "Many times before, I have led others flying up into the sky, through the sea of clouds, through the atmosphere, through the vast and boundless sky."

"In certain places high above the vault of the sky, I have seen endless storms churning."

"Ever since I came back, I have never once stopped asking myself what could cause such a thing."

"I gathered a host of scholars, to study exactly what the cause might be."

The square fell utterly silent. Everyone waited for the dragon apostle to reveal the answer.

The dragon apostle watched the crowd fall quiet, and spoke.

"And in the end, this is the conclusion we reached."

"Because that storm comes from beyond the sky itself, we can say with certainty that somewhere high above the vault of heaven, there exists a passage leading to the world outside."

"Pass through that storm, and we will surely find our way beyond this world."

"But that storm is tremendously powerful. Not even an apostle's strength can pass through it. So we have drawn up a plan, and that plan is the very reason we have gathered you all here today."

The dragon apostle, before them all, announced their plan.

"We shall use the Dragon God Stone to build a floating ship, a ship of myth."

They meant to use the Dragon God Stone to forge a divine artifact, and then use that artifact to cross the world itself, to travel beyond it and search for new hope, a new world.

There, perhaps, lay the homeland of divine beings.

The City of the Dragon God

The dragon people drew the Dragon God Stone up from the very depths of the city, and gathered every ounce of their strength under the dragon apostle's own leadership, to build what they believed would be the sturdiest ship ever made.

This great ship could hold tens of thousands of people, and its interior amounted to a small city in its own right.

The power of the Dragon God Stone could carry the ship through a voyage of tremendous length, and the supplies stored within would be enough to sustain them for a very long time.

The dragon people had prepared for every possibility.

The dragon apostle named the ship the Divine Kingdom, since, in a certain sense, it truly was a divine artifact.

The floating ship's interior was, in its own way, a divine kingdom all its own.

When the divine artifact was finally complete, the dragon apostle came in person, to awaken this great ship named the Divine Kingdom.

The dragon apostle pressed their hand against the Divine Kingdom's very core, upon the Dragon God Stone itself.

"Awaken!"

But this time, the Dragon God Stone, which had never once stirred before, seemed to meet with something unexpected.

The birth of the divine artifact was like fitting a body onto the Dragon God Stone itself, letting the consciousness trapped forever in darkness within it glimpse a single thread of light.

And since the dragon people's own power came, in truth, from the Dragon God Anu himself, the dragon apostle was, in every real sense, Anu's own apostle. In that single instant they felt Black Dragon Anu's call, and their own consciousness locked together with Black Dragon Anu's.

Endless light erupted from within the black magic crystal, and washed over the entire floating ship.

The dragon apostle's consciousness was pulled into a world of darkness. They spun around at once, staring about them in complete bewilderment.

"Why is this happening?"

The dragon apostle looked all around them, but there was nothing at all within the darkness.

Then, all at once, they sensed something.

"Up there!"

They raised their head, and there above them they saw a colossal black dragon.

The black dragon had become a statue, a mountain unto itself.

His wings and his sharp claws gripped something with all their might, holding a colossal black sphere fast in his grasp, as though he feared something inside it might break free.

"What is that!"

At first they could not make out the creature's full shape at all, but it was not long before their eyes cleared, and they understood exactly what they were looking at.

The dragon apostle's expression shifted from confusion into pure, open-mouthed shock in an instant.

They stared at that black dragon, vast as a mountain range, and the word burst from their own mouth before they could stop it.

"A god?"

A single ray of light from the outside world shone in, and a voice reached through with it.

It reached Anu too, whose consciousness, worn down through endless, unbroken struggle against Melde within that infinite darkness, had been sinking slowly into utter stillness. At last, a single thread of life stirred within it once more.

The colossal black dragon, stiff as a carved statue, began at last to move. It took him a long while before he raised his head, only slightly, and looked down at the dragon apostle below.

"Who... are... you?"

The dragon apostle did not dare speak for a long while. They had never once imagined that a divine being from some ancient age could still exist.

Hundreds of thousands of years had already passed. Two civilizations had risen and fallen across that span, and still this being lived on, undying and imperishable.

The dragon apostle could not begin to imagine what kind of power this must be.

Even they, who had already achieved a life without end, felt their own heart tremble uncontrollably before a being like this, as though it might leap straight out of their mouth.

They spoke with the greatest care they could summon. "I am the Lord of the City of the Dragon God!"

"May I ask..."

They hesitated for a long while, but asked it all the same.

"Are You the Dragon God?"

For hundreds of thousands of years, Anu had held Melde down within this stretch of darkness without end, and now he gave no answer for a long while.

Anu seemed weak beyond measure, and that weakness was not only a matter of strength. It sprang from an exhaustion that went down into his very consciousness.

Hundreds of thousands of years had passed with him locked in place, holding Melde fast, sinking together with her into this darkness.

The lizard people were already extinct. Everything had already been destroyed. Everything he had once clung to so fiercely no longer existed at all.

He no longer even knew what he was holding onto. Even the hatred that had once been carved so deep into his very bones had, across the years, been worn steadily away, forgotten little by little within this endless dark.

"Me?"

"Who am I?"

That consciousness asked itself the question for a long while, and at last seemed to remember something.

"I am the Dragon God, Anu!"

"I am Black Dragon Anu!"

"I am..."

"The lizard person, Anu!"

He remembered one identity after another. He had once been a lizard person. He had also been a giant dragon. And later, he had become the Dragon God, as mortals came to call him.

Black Dragon Anu had finally remembered who he was.

But once he had remembered all of that past, he found he had no more interest left in speaking with the dragon apostle at all.

He lowered his head.

He looked down at the black sphere still gripped fast in his own claws, the black sphere shielded beneath his own black wings.

"Why has this creature's consciousness still not dissolved away?"

"How much longer does she mean to drag this out with me?"

This same gesture had, across hundreds of thousands of years, become fixed into him completely. He no longer even knew how he might let go, if he tried.

And besides, he did not want to let go.

Because once he released his grip, he would no longer know what he was even meant to do.

The dragon apostle realized that Black Dragon Anu was paying them no attention at all, and was only straining to hold that black sphere down.

"What is inside that sphere?"

They guessed that something terrible might lie hidden inside that black sphere, but before they could even ask, they found themself pulled back into reality.

A few days later, the dragon apostle found a way to return to that place once more.

They bowed with the utmost reverence, none of the trembling fear of the last time left in them, only a courteous and measured respect.

"O Great Dragon God, I have heard it said that You made us, that every dragon person was born because of You. Is this true?"

Black Dragon Anu answered with only a single word. "Yes!"

The dragon apostle, finding that they had actually gotten a response, pressed their advantage at once.

"Ever since we learned this truth, generation after generation of our philosophers and historians have gone on wondering why You created us."

"Can You tell me, what was Your reason for making us?"

Black Dragon Anu finally raised his head, and turned his gaze upon this dragon person no larger than the very tip of his own claw.

"How long has it been, since the lizard people went extinct?"

The dragon apostle replied, "Somewhere around seven hundred thousand years."

Black Dragon Anu heard the number, and found, to his own surprise, not the faintest ripple of feeling within him. He only said, "Seven hundred thousand years!"

After a moment, Black Dragon Anu went on. "I created you only so that I might save the lizard people. In the end, sadly, I failed."

The dragon apostle froze, plainly startled by the answer. "Save the lizard people?"

Generation after generation of the dragon people's own historians, philosophers, and authors of literature had put forward every kind of theory. Some said the Dragon God had made the dragon people in his own image. Some said that making the dragon people was itself meant to replace them. Some said the Dragon God had made the dragon people in order to wipe out the lizard people.

Opinion ran every which way, but no one had ever once imagined it.

That this legendary divine being had created the dragon people for the sake of saving the lizard people, of all things.

The dragon apostle could only press on with their question. "Great Dragon God, how exactly did the lizard people come to go extinct?"

"According to the lizard people's own records, when the end came, You spread Your wings and delivered death down upon the mortal world. Is that true?"

The black dragon's shadow told them, "It was not I who destroyed the lizard people's civilization. It was this woman."

"Now she is sealed together with me, inside this very stone, sinking together with me forever into the dark."

"Never, ever open this stone. The moment you do, she will come out."

"She holds the power to destroy this whole world, the power to wipe every one of you out completely."

The dragon apostle needed no time at all to understand that the woman Black Dragon Anu spoke of could only be the Black-Winged Goddess.

The dragon apostle finally understood the whole of it, cause and effect together, and could not help but feel a swell of admiration for this legendary Dragon God before them.

"So that is how it was."

The dragon apostle knelt and bowed low to the ground, then turned and left once more.

Some time later still, the dragon apostle returned to that place once again.

Outside, at that very moment, the dragon people were preparing in a great hurry for the Divine Kingdom's departure. The voyage that would carry them beyond the world was about to begin.

The dragon apostle bowed, and spoke to Black Dragon Anu.

"Great Dragon God!"

"The ship is about to set out. It is going beyond the world itself."

"It is said that every god came from beyond this world, that on the far side of the sky lies the Homeland of the Gods."

The dragon apostle watched the black dragon's face, as though hoping to read something there, but those lifeless dragon eyes held nothing but the weight of untold years, and nothing more could be seen in them at all.

"Could You tell us, what does the world beyond truly look like?"

But Black Dragon Anu only said to the dragon apostle, "The Homeland of the Gods?"

"The place I came from?"

Black Dragon Anu, who had cared for nothing at all until now, felt a sudden light finally rise up within his own eyes.

He seemed, at last, to have found something worth caring about, something worth holding onto, an answer worth chasing after.

"That is right!"

"Where did I come from?"

"Why did I come here at all?"

"I forgot. I forgot such a long, long time ago."

"I forgot. I even forgot why I ever forgot in the first place."

Black Dragon Anu seemed to grow agitated. The claws that had gripped the black sphere so tightly loosened, ever so faintly, and the black sphere gave a sudden tremor.

And just then the dragon apostle spoke up, their voice loud and urgent.

"Great Dragon God!"

"Perhaps once we reach our destination, You will remember everything again."

The black dragon, vast as a mountain range, glanced once at the dragon apostle, said nothing more, and simply closed his eyes, sinking back into slumber.

After a long stretch of preparation, the dragon people at last set out on their voyage beyond the world.

On the day of their departure, dragon ability users boarded the Divine Kingdom in droves, and waved farewell from its deck to those left behind in the City of the Dragon God.

The Divine Kingdom rose slowly into the air, while a great crowd of dragon people below chased after it, shouting up at those aboard.

"Come back soon!"

"You have to come back!"

"You have to find the Homeland of the Gods!"

"We'll be waiting for you. We'll wait for your return."

This floating ship had been built out of the whole of the dragon people's combined strength, and it carried within it every last hope the dragon people held.

The dragon people aboard the ship looked down through the clear glass, watching the thousands upon thousands of faces turned up toward them in hope.

One by one they clenched their fists, and when they raised their eyes to the sky again, their gaze was filled with longing.

"We must find the legendary Homeland of the Gods."

"We cannot let ourselves be trapped to death in this world. The dragon people must have a future full of light."

"Go now, fly on toward the high heavens!"

"The Divine Kingdom!"

The Divine Kingdom rose slowly into the air, climbing bit by bit into the high sky.

The ship passed through the clouds, gathering speed steadily, flying higher and higher.

Little by little the clouds vanished, the air around them grew thin, the earth beneath their feet shrank smaller and smaller, and the blue of the heavens drew closer and closer still.

Once they had climbed high enough, they sailed on steadily toward the south, and after many days they finally caught sight of the storm that legend said came from beyond the sky.

A terrible storm spilled over from beyond the heavens, roaring within this very world.

"That storm!" Watching that storm blanket the whole horizon, some among them grew afraid.

"That storm is terrifying." Everyone turned to look at one another, and each could see the fear plain in the other's eyes.

"Can the Divine Kingdom really hold up against that?" someone asked.

"It's a divine artifact. Of course it can." But far more of them trusted in this artifact forged from the Dragon God Stone.

The dragon apostle, who was also the Divine Kingdom's own captain, gave the order at once.

"Set out, onward beyond the world!"

At their single command, the Divine Kingdom plunged straight into the storm without a moment's hesitation.

"It's starting. Everyone to your stations." Every soul aboard the ship gave everything they had, taking up their places.

"Rouse the Dragon God Stone's power, full strength!" The captain returned to their own station as well, taking hold of the ship's very center.

"Check the ritual arrays. Nothing can be allowed to go wrong." Every single one of them poured their own power into keeping the ship safe.

"Check the barrier!" A vast barrier spread open around the ship, its power drawn out to its very limit.

They plunged into the storm, and amid a violent stretch of pitching and rolling, somehow managed to hold their shape together.

The barrier outside had been crushed down into something like a flattened ball, but it still held, and everyone aboard the floating ship broke into cheers.

They climbed on, up through the raging chaos of the storm.

Within that dark and violent storm, the floating ship seemed on the verge of coming apart at every moment.

In a world without a single ray of light, they could tell the passage of time only by their timekeeping instruments.

They flew on through the storm for half a month straight, and the higher they climbed, the fiercer the storm grew, until the floating ship began to show signs it could not hold out much longer.

But under the dragon apostle's own guidance, they hunted out the weakest points in the storm, circling their way steadily upward.

Until, one day, the storm around them finally began to still.

High above, something like a narrow crack showed through, giving off a faint glow of light.

"Look, there's light up there." The people inside the floating ship came pouring out, gathering at the round glass windows, staring out at the world beyond.

"Beyond that light must be the Homeland of the Gods!" A single ray had broken through the darkness, and everyone believed they had reached their destination at last.

"We made it out!" Someone's eyes brimmed over with tears.

"We made it out." Someone else dropped to their knees, and pressed their forehead to the floor.

"We're flying out!" Someone else ran wildly through the ship, shouting at the top of their lungs.

In the captain's cabin and the control center, the captain stood with everyone on the upper deck, gazing at that "sacred light" beyond the high heavens.

The captain lifted their eyes and looked far off, at that single light within the dark storm, as though they were looking upon salvation itself, upon the very future and hope of civilization.

The captain, who had sailed so long through the darkness, felt their own voice turn hoarse in an instant, and they asked everyone around them.

"Do you see it?"

The dragon woman beside them nodded again and again. "It's real. It's really real."

More people gathered close around them, calling out. "That's right. We all see it."

The smile on the captain's face grew wider and wider, until it broke into a fit of wild, elated laughter.

They could not wait another moment, and shouted at everyone around them. "What are we waiting for? Full speed ahead!"

"Let us fly over there at once!"

The captain pulled off their own hat, and flung it toward the light.

"Onward... beyond the world!"

The Divine Kingdom surged forward at once, racing toward that light.

They hurtled onward, straight toward the outside, on the very verge of breaking free of this world entirely, of seeing what lay beyond it at last.

But in the very instant they broke through, just as that boundless light was about to wash over the ship's own hull.

An unseen force tore itself free of the Divine Kingdom, tore itself free of their own bodies.

In the very instant before they broke free of the world.

The ship.

It disengaged.

The dragon people had overestimated the strength of this so-called "divine artifact," and understood even less about the true nature of this world.

They did not even know, in truth, what they themselves really were.

The moment they broke free of the Void's Mold Mother's mimicked world, everything fell apart at once, and returned to its own true face.

The Divine Kingdom shattered within the void. Crack after crack spread across its hull without end, and dense white foam came pouring out from every fissure, spreading outward on every side.

"The ship, the ship is breaking apart!" Every dragon person cried out in terror. Some tried to flee, only to find cracks spreading everywhere at once, and here, high above the heavens, there was nowhere left to run.

"Look, we're coming apart too..." Right after, they discovered something even more terrible. It was not only the ship that was disengaging. It was them.

"Why on earth is this happening?" Someone found white foam welling up from within their own body, their flesh growing steadily softer.

"My hand is turning into foam. What is this?" They felt no pain at all, only a heart full of bewilderment.

On the highest deck of the Divine Kingdom, its captain stared at the Dragon God Stone, the very core of this divine artifact, the crystal that had come from the Dragon God himself.

At this very moment, even this stone, astonishingly, was disengaging.

Endless foam swelled up from within it, spreading outward on every side.

"The Dragon God Stone... is disengaging too?"

The dragon apostle was utterly lost. They could not understand how this had happened. Was the power of a god truly dissolving away, just like that?

Amid everyone's bewilderment, the Divine Kingdom broke apart completely.

Boom!

The ship split into two halves, and dragon people were flung loose in swarms, scattered out into the void.

The dragon people turned to foam high above the heavens, and even in the very moment of their deaths, their eyes remained fixed on that single ray of light above.

"Why?" The dragon people roared in despair. They could feel some force holding them back from going any further, a power like a law of nature itself, and yet they had no idea where that power came from, or why it existed at all.

"We made it all this way. Why is the ship falling apart right here?" They pressed on toward the light, refusing to accept it, even as their own bodies dissolved faster and faster.

"One step short. Just one step short!" But that one step became an impassable chasm the dragon people could never cross.

"Just a little further. We were about to fly free." One dragon person after another wept, tears streaming down their faces. They had carried the weight of civilization, the hopes of everyone left behind, and could only stop here, with likely no one left to try again after them.

"Why? Why won't you let us fly free?" Someone screamed at the top of their voice, desperate to curse something, anything, but not even knowing who it was they meant to curse.

Dragon people were annihilated in their multitudes high above the heavens, dissolving away into foam.

But in that very moment, the light above their heads grew stronger and stronger.

In that final moment, they raised their heads.

And there they saw the most terrifying sight of their entire lives, and with it, the truth of this whole world.

The dragon people watched the wall of the world above them begin to open, bit by bit.

It was a colossal hand, closing around the wall of the world itself.

Their whole world was being lifted open, like the lid off a jar.

Floating there in the void and the dark, the captain, who had fought with everything in them just to catch one glimpse of the world beyond, who had been racing with all their strength toward that light, suddenly stopped short.

The captain looked up at the heavens above, and the expression on their face now was a thousand, ten thousand times more extreme than the one they had worn upon first laying eyes on the Dragon God Anu.

Because the sight before them had gone beyond the very limits of what they could imagine. The being they now looked upon had surpassed even their own idea of what a god, of what greatness itself, could ever be.

They could not comprehend it. Nothing was left in them but a roar of madness and despair.

"What... what... what kind of joke is this?"

"What is that..."

"What is that?"

"What in the world is that?"

The captain let out a helpless wail. They had no strength left to struggle upward any longer, and simply fell away, down into the darkness below.

All that could be seen was the vault of the world's own sky, lifted open like a lid, and beyond it, a single eye of deep, inky green.

That eye spanned the entire heavens, spanned the entire world.

The spiraling pattern within it seemed as though it might swallow the entire world.

That deep green eye peered in through the opened crack, and caught sight, just then, of the disengaged Divine Kingdom, and of the dragon people dissolving away into foam.

"Huh!"

"Looks like something flew out!"

And if any dragon person had truly been able to cross beyond the world, to reach some higher place, to look upon it all from a higher vantage still.

They would have found that the world they had lived in was nothing but a glass tank, balanced on the head of a mushroom person, and that the so-called passage leading beyond the world was nothing more than a crack in the glass tank's own lid.