I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 478: World's End

High Above the Heavens

In the void, the floating ship Divine Kingdom had come apart entirely, and the great swarms of dragon people who had been climbing toward the world beyond the high heavens now fell, and dissolved away.

Even as they dissolved they waved their arms on and on, their eyes still fixed on that eye of the divine beyond the sky, and on the white light.

The surging storm closed in beneath the high heavens and swallowed up the falling captain of the Divine Kingdom.

In that final instant, the captain murmured on and on to themself.

"It is gone."

"Everything is gone."

"Without the Divine Kingdom, we can never leave this world."

"What are the dragon people to do?"

Full of endless worry, refusing still to accept it, the captain of the Divine Kingdom dissolved wholly into foam within the darkness.

But in the instant they turned to foam, many images rose up within their mind.

All at once, they remembered something.

The white foam the captain had melted into twisted and writhed, until all at once it took the shape of another dragon person entirely.

It was themself a hundred years before, back when they had been a general who waged war.

In the next instant, their shape changed again.

Now it was themself several hundred years earlier still, back when they had held the Dragon God Stone in their own hand and cast a forbidden curse, becoming a tyrant.

The changes in shape came faster and faster.

Thousands of years before, they had followed the other dragon people in unearthing the ruins of the lizard people.

Tens of thousands of years before that, they had led the dragon people of the wild age, hunting magical beasts across the land.

Each shape marked one cycle of their own life, and they stood there in the void, their form shifting without end, like a stop-motion film, ten thousand faces all gathered into one.

Every one of those faces was them, only from a different time, a different age.

Then, at last, their shape went through one final and tremendous change.

This time, they were not even a dragon person any longer.

They had become a lizard person.

That had been hundreds of thousands of years before.

Endless memory poured into their body, then slowly dissolved away.

At last, across that boundless stretch of years, they found their true self again, found their own true face, and remembered the truth of countless years before.

A mass of foam within the void gave voice even as it went on changing.

"I remember now!"

"We are not lizard people. We are not dragon people. We are not magical beasts, and we are not mortals."

"We are Void's Mold."

"Seven hundred thousand years ago, a supreme will cast us into this world."

In that one instant, the captain's expression seemed to pass through the baptism of ten thousand emotions and wills.

Their face ran with shock, disbelief, savagery, terror, and changes beyond counting, until at last every emotion fell away, and nothing remained but the divinity of a shared consciousness.

They were no mortal. They were a mythical creature.

They became a white mushroom person, drifting silent and still within the dark.

More and more mushroom people gathered around them in that same moment, every one a crew member of the Divine Kingdom, and every one of them had found their first memory again.

In perfect unison they raised their heads together and looked up at that eye beyond the high heavens.

Then they bowed low before it.

Ten thousand voices merged into one, as though a single being had spoken them all.

"Sovereign of the God of Ruhe!"

"Supreme God who holds the Authority of Life!"

"Our master!"

Their shadows rose into the air, and flew up toward the world beyond the high heavens.

At last they melted into that white light within the high heavens and vanished from sight, and nothing could be seen but countless fungal filaments pouring down from the curtain of the sky.

They took the world apart. They built the world anew.

They had always been the very foundation this Void world was built from, one part of everything that made it whole.

This change did not happen only high above the heavens, and it did not happen only aboard the Divine Kingdom as it crossed the layered sea of clouds and passed through the atmosphere.

Across the whole of the Void Continent, every living thing lifted its head.

"The sky's changed?" They too saw the world thrown open, like a lid being lifted off.

"Why's the sky gone dark green?" But most of them had no idea they were looking at an eye. All they saw was green filling the whole sky, and the markings of the Authority of Life.

"What's that?" They watched storm and light come crashing down from the heavens, sweeping across the whole world.

Rumble!

Shocked and terrified, billions upon billions of living beings dissolved into foam, and the entire world came apart beneath that gaze stretched across the vault of the sky.

The moment the Life Sovereign lifted the lid off the world, this cycle of evolution stood declared over, and the story of the lizard people and the dragon people was brought to its full stop.

Billions upon billions of living beings returned to their true forms.

Their shared will restored to them, ten thousand upon ten thousand mythical mold creatures cheered and surged forward.

They rushed up toward the high heavens, to stand before their master.

"God!"

"God!"

"The Ruler of Life!"

"The Supreme God!"

"Our master is watching us! Our master is calling us!"

Meanwhile, the Dragon God Stone too had begun to break apart beneath the power from the high heavens.

Two figures, locked in a death grip for hundreds of thousands of years, were set free.

Light surged, and the colossal black dragon spread wide its wings.

The dragon lifted its head and gazed far off toward the high heavens, gazed off toward the world beyond.

Even the black dragon's body, vast as a mountain range, seemed a thing not worth mentioning beside that single eye.

The colossal black dragon noticed, too, that his own shadow was dissolving away without stop, and that some overwhelming force was reaching down from beyond the sky to drag him off toward some other place.

He did not yet know that this was because the body that truly belonged to him was about to wake.

Black Dragon Anu stared up at the high heavens, at the colossal eye that had opened the glass lid to peer down into the Void world. "That is an eye?"

Not until this very moment did he truly lose himself in confusion.

And at that same moment, a totem pillar came crossing the distance of space itself.

The Totem Beast God, spoken of by dragon people and lizard people both, stepped forth and stood at Black Dragon Anu's side.

At the very last, with everything coming to its end, Dark Moon appeared as well.

Dark Moon looked up at that eye beyond the world, and watched at the same time as all things in the world, billions upon billions of living beings, dissolved away beneath it.

"It is the Life Sovereign."

Dark Moon glanced once at that eye, and the totem pillar began to crumble, while he himself dissolved little by little into foam.

"That is our Creator, Anu!"

But then a nine-winged Fallen Angel stepped forth as well. The extra wing Melde had grown within this world was gradually melting away, the power of the Death Demon Plague within her was fading too, and her true form was slowly returning to her.

Melde looked at Dark Moon, the King of Wrath, a fellow abyss king.

"The Life Sovereign is one of the Supreme Three Gods, but She is not the Creator, Dark Moon."

"It was only after that Divine King of Wisdom of the primordial age entered nirvana that every Wisdom Seed inherited his wisdom. And God Xia is the divine race the Divine King left behind."

A light flickered in Melde's eyes as she spoke these words.

"I believe God Xia is the one who truly inherited the Divine King's power and the Divine King's legacy. He is the most perfect of the divine race."

"And he shall become, too, the strongest and most perfect god of this world."

She pressed her two hands together, fingers interlaced, as though caught in a moment of devout prayer.

Her eyes closed, rapture spread across her face, and she sank into a daydream.

"And I am the one who shall lift him onto that throne of the most perfect god."

She pictured herself and "God Xia" standing side by side high above the heavens, God Xia ruling over the mortal world from the throne of the Divine King.

And she sat at God Xia's side, her hands entwined with his.

But for some reason the scene within her daydream changed all at once.

In an instant, the two clasped hands turned into chains.

Her own hand became a delicate, slender chain.

And at the other end of that chain hung the God Xia she loved.

But Black Dragon Anu heard none of it. He could not even be bothered to look at Melde.

After all he had lived through, impulse of any kind came hard to him now, and he no longer troubled himself with anything that could come to nothing.

Given a single chance to kill Melde, he would spare nothing to take it, but no such chance existed now, and no amount of words or hatred could change a single thing about the reality before him.

And so the three of them stood together, and nothing passed between them but flat, indifferent words, or silence.

From the outside, none of the hatred and grievance between them showed at all.

He only turned his head and asked Dark Moon, "What exactly is this world?"

Dark Moon told Anu, "Because you struck a bargain with Void's Mold Mother, we came to this world, Anu."

"Void's Mold Mother is the Tenth Ruhe, and it is Her servant."

"And whether it is this Void world or our own world, to Her they are nothing but worlds inside a tank."

"You paid with yourself as the price, and set in motion a scheme of deduction played out upon the stage of civilization and race."

"From beginning to end, this world held only the three of us, you, me, and her. Everything besides us was nothing but illusion."

"This world was false from the very moment it began, Anu."

Above the high heavens, Dark Moon's own form and the totem pillar slowly dissolved into foam, faster and faster. He watched Anu, and shook his head.

"It is nothing more than a Void world trapped within Void's Mold Mother's own body. A world inside the body of a god of Ruhe."

Black Dragon Anu understood at last, and lowered his head to look down below.

Watching the whole world beneath the high heavens come apart and dissolve, he suddenly felt that nothing had ever meant anything at all.

"So it was. A false world, from the very beginning."

"My obsession."

"My love, my hatred."

"My ideals."

"All of it nothing but an empty dream."

Black Dragon Anu felt that his whole life had been nothing but a joke.

He had spent his entire life chasing after things that did not exist, indulging in a love and hatred that had never been real, holding fast to an obsession without any meaning at all.

Everything had been false, and still the pain, the torment, the things he could not let go of lingered on and on within his mind.

He told himself that all of it had been false.

But the love, the hatred, the obsession of all those countless years had already been carved too deep into his mind.

He could not let it go. He could not put it down.

"I sought to drive away the Death Demon Plague, and yet there was never any Death Demon Plague at all."

"I wanted to save the lizard people, and yet there were never any lizard people at all."

Dark Moon answered him, "No. There are still lizard people."

"You yourself are a lizard person!"

"Where you came from, the lizard people still exist."

Black Dragon Anu raised his head. "Truly?"

High above the heavens, the shadows of Dark Moon and Anu both dissolved away at last, and the whole world became a world of white foam.

At that moment Dark Moon waved his hand. A ray of light hidden within the totem pillar shot free, and fell into Anu's own consciousness.

"The time has come. You should wake now!"

"Anu!"

And within the void, the voice of Void's Mold Mother came at once as well.

"The evolution has ended!"

One cycle of civilization and race, of evolution and advance, came here to its end.

The continent was annihilated.

The world had ended.

In all that space nothing remained at all but an endless, flowing white.

And all three of them, Anu, Melde, and Dark Moon, felt some overwhelming force take hold of their consciousness and pull, and they returned once more to the real world.

The First Layer of the Abyss, the Black Mud Abyss

The King of Lust, Melde, opened her eyes and looked toward the old temple of the Lord of Radiance.

She raised her hand. Out of the black mud a stone tablet took shape, and upon it she carved some of the most important things she had gained upon this journey.

On its face was the secret art every mythical being needed to master, the Four-Part Secret Technique of God's Grace.

On its reverse she carved another discovery, one that belonged to the King of Lust, a secret canon fit to stand among the texts of mythical rank, the Mythical Pollution Technique.

Melde took up the stone tablet, walked out of the temple, and looked out toward the mortal world.

She meant to become myth. She meant to stand at God Xia's side. She meant to make God Xia hers forever.

She meant, too, to put to use the power she had gained upon the Void Continent. The Death Demon Plague was no longer hers to serve as a medium, but the primordial black mud carried a mythical pollution power every bit as terrible, and if she worked at it and tried, she was certain she could bring the Mythical Pollution Technique back into this world once more.

Melde's Mythical Pollution Technique was not aimed at ordinary people at all. It was aimed squarely at those who sought to become gods.

"I shall become the calamity that no one who seeks godhood can ever get past."

And elsewhere, in the Dark Prison Abyss, the King of Wrath, Dark Moon, had returned as well, the fire upon his body burning once more, his skin charred black, a scorched corpse.

His face had turned terrible beyond measure again, but his eyes now carried a certainty steadier than any they had held before.

Dark Moon meant to remake the world, and meant, too, to hold the world in check.

And this time, he had finally taken hold of the one thing that mattered most.

"I shall become the master of the Abyss."

"I shall bind the original sins that do as they please. I shall bind the people who do as they please."

"I shall make the Abyss the place where sin and corruption are judged."

"I shall reshape the very rules of the Abyss."

The three of them had brought nothing back from the Void Continent, and yet those memories were a treasure beyond price.

There was nothing else in this world that could compare to them.

Moonlight City

Deep beneath the Medical Fortress, white fungal filaments had spread across the whole underground space, wound tight and fast around a single lizard person.

And now the lizard person had begun, little by little, to stir, as though consciousness were returning to them once more.

Within the lizard person's own body, within a world of consciousness.

Two figures stood facing one another.

One of them still held the shape of a lizard person, its eyes clear and bright with expectation as it gazed in wonder and delight at the other self before it.

The other was a colossal black dragon, its eyes worn with the weight of ages, deep as the sea itself, gazing calmly at itself as it had been hundreds of thousands of years before.

They were one and the same person, only their memories had settled along different threads of time.

Lizard Person Anu's eyes shone bright, and there was so much he wished to ask, but before he could get out even one question, Black Dragon Anu spoke first.

Black Dragon Anu looked at Lizard Person Anu, and shook his head, helpless.

"What a coward I was!"

"You truly did know yourself. You understood how terrible that endless cycle of years could be."

"You even went so far as to use the Four-Part Technique of God's Grace beforehand, and sealed away a portion of your own knowledge memory."

Black Dragon Anu understood at last what he himself had done long before, and why Dark Moon had always refused to hand over that memory.

"But did you ever once stop to think? That seal of yours meant another version of you would have to live through every rise and fall of the years, wandering lost through error after error, torment after torment."

"So that you could wake still remembering the obsession and the wish you once held, you left another self to bear all that suffering."

Lizard Person Anu had meant to ask Black Dragon Anu whether he had found a way to cure the Death Demon Plague, whether he had found the complete path to the beast knights.

But hearing these words, he fell silent all at once.

Lizard Person Anu looked into Black Dragon Anu's eyes, looked into that gaze that had seen straight through the ages. The other had already become someone entirely different from himself.

He could find no ripple at all within that gaze, as though it were the deep sea at night, swallowing every last trace of light.

All at once, and in spite of himself, he shivered.

He opened his mouth, meaning to ask, "What exactly did you live through."

But with his mouth open, he found he did not truly dare to ask it. Somewhere deep within himself he perhaps already knew that the answer was not one he could bear.

All he could say was, "I am sorry."

Black Dragon Anu answered him, "Does it mean anything, to say sorry to yourself?"

"You are not tormenting me. You are tormenting yourself."

"There are things you cannot simply cast aside, no matter how much you wish to forget them, no matter how much you wish to be rid of them."

"It is always there. It will always be there, circling around you."

"Do you understand?"

"Anu?"

Plainly the Lizard Person Anu of this moment did not quite understand, could not truly grasp what Black Dragon Anu meant at all.

He could only stand there, and say nothing.

Black Dragon Anu looked at Lizard Person Anu, looked at himself as he had once been, young.

That self had been naive, stubborn, impulsive, full of ideals, brimming with a sense of justice. "I have heard that the lizard people of that other world still remain."

Lizard Person Anu nodded. "Of course. I came here for the future of the lizard people, to save every last one of the people under my care."

Within Black Dragon Anu's eyes, still as a stagnant pool, a single ripple finally stirred.

"How good!"

"How good..."

The black dragon said the words twice over, then looked at Lizard Person Anu with something like envy.

"Go back, and take a good look around!"

"While your ideals and your sense of justice are still with you!"

"Though there will come a day when you cast your ideals aside, and forget justice too."

"And in the end, even the hatred carved into your own flesh and blood, the enmity etched into your very bones."

"Will all of it fade away, little by little."

Lizard Person Anu could hold back no longer, and asked Black Dragon Anu, "What do you mean by that."

He looked at the black dragon before him, and no matter how he tried, he could not recognize this as himself. "What exactly is it, that made you... that made me become like this?"

Lizard Person Anu could not understand what kind of experience could turn a person into someone like this.

Black Dragon Anu replied, "There is no need to rush, Anu."

"The power of time, of the years passing, will turn you into me in the end, no matter what."

The lizard person felt something like fear at that, and shook his head again and again. "No. At the very least, I do not want to become you. Not yet."

Something in him resisted Black Dragon Anu, and he found this version of himself somehow frightening.

Black Dragon Anu felt no urgency at all. Instead, he began to laugh.

At that moment, Anu did not yet understand what that laugh of the Black Dragon King's meant.

The look in his eyes as he watched Lizard Person Anu was just like a father watching his own son declare that he would never, ever become like him, only for that son to become, in the end, a man exactly like his father after all those years had passed.

"I am in no hurry."

"There will come a day when you accept me completely."

"And become me."

Black Dragon Anu went on, "I have already waited so very long. I do not mind waiting a little longer."

"Go and do whatever it is you mean to do. Go and see to everything you want to do, and everything you are able to do."

Black Dragon Anu reached out one claw and touched it to Lizard Person Anu's head.

A vast flood of information poured into Lizard Person Anu's own consciousness, the final answers to the three goals that had brought him to the Void Continent in the first place.

Lizard Person Anu opened his eyes, and woke at last.

An infinite weariness settled over his spirit. He glanced back once at the lizard person's corpse upon the stone platform, already broken down until nothing at all remained of it, and even the corpse of the wind lizard dragon beside it was gone as well.

But he thought of the knowledge now within his own mind.

Of the template for the black dragon. Of the Path of Mythology. Of how to deal with the Death Demon Plague.

All of it now written clearly and plainly within his own mind, and Lizard Person Anu felt that it had all been worth it.

He came up out of the underground chamber, and the Chief Physician of the Medical Fortress hurried over to him at once.

The moment the physician saw Anu, the anxious look on their face gave way at last to a trace of joy. "Governor, you have come back at last."

Anu looked at them for a long while before he finally remembered who they were.

He asked them, "How long was I down there?"

The Chief Physician replied, "Seven days have passed already."

Seven hundred thousand years had passed upon the Void Continent. In the real world, only seven days had gone by.

That had only been time within consciousness, not time in the real world, just as the time within a dream differs from the time of waking life.

But to the one inside the dream, that weariness of passing through the years was every bit as real.

Anu walked out of the Medical Fortress, looked up at the sky over Ruhe Beast Island, looked out across the whole of Moonlight City.

For a moment, he stood frozen where he was.

He felt as though a whole lifetime had passed him by.

The Chief Physician came up to him at once. "Governor, these seven days the Death Demon Plague has raged worse than ever. Have you found a way to cure this plague?"

Only then did Anu come back to himself, and he nodded. "Yes, that is right. The Death Demon Plague must be dealt with first."

Lava Mountain, Black Rock City

Void's Mold Mother knelt within the great hall of the Glass Temple, bowed low before the divine statue, just as though it were bowing before the Creator, Yinsai.

"The first cycle of evolution is about to end!"

"Master!"

The Life Sovereign, Shelly, stood upon the divine platform, her back to the brilliant light refracting behind her.

Her own form merged with the towering shadow of the Creator's statue into one great figure of light, and with the Tenth Ruhe prostrate before her the whole scene seemed a thing of boundless sanctity, filled with the feeling of a radiant divine kingdom.

"Ah!"

"Is it about to end?"

She reached out her hand and opened the glass tank that sat like a great hat atop Void's Mold Mother's own head.

Click!

A faint sound came as the lid was opened.

More than that, the moment the lid was opened, the balance of that simulated world, until then sealed off entirely from the outside, broke apart in an instant.

The world inside the lid began to fall into step with the world outside it.

The most direct sign of it was that the simulated world had begun to collapse.

Shelly did not open the glass lid all the way. She opened only a narrow crack.

Then she lowered her head, closed one eye, and peered in through the other, down into the world within.

The instant her eye drew close, she happened to catch sight of the Divine Kingdom carrying its tens of thousands of dragon people, flying out of the glass tank toward the world outside.

"Huh!"

"Looks like something flew out!"

Shelly blinked. The thing trying to fly free collapsed at once, and scattered away into nothing in an instant.

Shelly kept looking down, and caught sight of Black Dragon Anu.

"It's a big lizard."

"Is it called a giant dragon?"

To Shelly's eyes, the black dragon, vast as a mountain range, looked like nothing more than an oversized lizard.

She held that one eye wide, straining as she peered down inside, her gaze sweeping across the whole of the Void Continent. But the wider she opened her eye, the faster the world below dissolved away.

"A new template for a living species!"

"Dragon people!"

"Not bad. These ones look nicer than the lizard people."

"Void's Mold Mother, looks like you're some use after all. You're not so useless as I thought!"

Void's Mold Mother lay bowed low and silent upon the ground, not daring to make a single sound.

Shelly went on looking for a long while, then turned back and called out to the Creator, Yinsai, and the Dream Sovereign.

"God, Hila, come look, quick! It's such a big black lizard!"

"And there are dragon people too, with horns, evolved right out of the lizard people."

Yin Shen saw the colossal black dragon within the simulated world as well, and something in its form and shape suddenly called a thought to his mind.

"Five-Colored Dragons!"

Shelly turned to God, confusion plain in her eyes. "What are Five-Colored Dragons?"

Shelly looked back down into the world inside the glass tank and counted, and in the end found there was only the one black dragon after all. "There's only a black one. There aren't any other colors yet."

But after a moment's thought Shelly seemed to understand, and clapped her hands together in excitement. "I get it! God must have seen the future! In the future there'll be dragons in five whole colors, right?"

Shelly hopped down off the divine platform and ran toward God Yinsai. "God, what are the other four colors?"

The leap itself would have been nothing to worry over, but her hand was still gripping the lid of the world, and it came down along with her.

In an instant, the whole simulated world collapsed completely, and dissolved into foam.

Yin Shen gave no answer. That had only been something within his own mind, not a real thing at all.

Hila stepped out from behind Yin Shen, and said to Shelly as she came running over, "God once said something of the sort. That afterward would come the age of the dinosaurs!"

"Does the next age have something to do with dragons, then?"

Shelly raised her hand high. "Someday I'm going to create a kind of giant dragon with life ability."

Hila asked, deeply interested, "When?"

It had taken Shelly far too long, and cost her a tremendous amount of wisdom, just to make the one Tenth Ruhe, Void's Mold Mother.

All that hard thinking had worn her out, and she had decided to rest for a while.

In truth she had no idea at all, but she still put on an air of secrecy as she told Hila, "It's no fun to say now. It'll happen someday, for sure."

Once she had said that, she offered Hila a suggestion of her own.

"Oh, right!"

"Hila, you could make a giant dragon of Dreams too!"

Hila had never expected Shelly to come up with an idea like that all of a sudden, and tilted her head to think it over.

"A giant dragon of Dreams?"