I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 487: Miracle Technique and the Descendants of the Sovereign Deities

Beneath the Rainbow Tree

By prayer, and by chanting the name of the wood nymphs, Ray drew what he wanted out of the hollow of the tree.

Most of it was what he badly needed and the Land of Light did not have, things he could not make for himself either, and on top of that a few extraordinary materials, along with the replies others had written back to him.

The moment the letters were in his hands Ray tore them open and read them where he stood. Ose, beside him, could see them too, but hardly any winged person had ever truly mastered the snake people's script, and not a word of it meant anything to Ose.

The instant he finished reading, Ray cried out in excitement.

"These are the replies from my friends. About that idea I put to them, that the world isn't heaven round and earth square after all."

Ose had gone back and forth with Ray on this very question more than once of late, a debate that had even drawn in plenty of craftsmen and Matale nobles, and somewhere along the way Ose had come to accept a part of Ray's theory.

Plenty of questions really could be explained by Ray's way of looking at it, questions that had never had any explanation at all before.

Even so, there were points Ose still found hard to accept.

Ray held the letter up, all excitement.

"Look. Apostle Oran writes that as far back as two hundred years ago, a school of alchemy in the Land of Sunrise had already put forward an idea much like mine."

"And what's more, they didn't just hold that the world was something other than heaven round and earth square. They held it was a sphere."

Ray was overjoyed. To think there were others, and not a few of them, who held views close to his own.

These people had never once traveled far from home, and still they had worked out the secret behind the world. There was no shortage of wise minds in this world.

But they had never held any great power, and in its day their theory had won no one over. It had been taken for a joke instead, and for an act of heresy.

"A circle... a sphere..."

The new idea the letter put forward sank Ray at once into deep thought.

Then excitement set him trembling, stiff as some kind of machine, jerking and stumbling about with a clatter of metal.

"A sphere!"

"That's it. A circle, a sphere, this shape is far more perfect than that loop-of-ribbon idea I put forward before."

Some questions, if no one ever dared to raise them, dared to imagine boldly beyond them, could never be proven, never be broken through.

Some people had noticed, for instance, that the land and the surface of the sea were not flat. A few thought it strange. Others held that ground which rolled and water which flowed were uneven by their very nature. The world, the earth itself, had never been some perfectly flat thing to begin with.

But there were those willing to fly out and prove, once and for all, that the world was round.

Ray stepped through the lush, flower-strewn barrier around the Rainbow Tree and came out into the open.

He caught sight of the moon, and turned to speak to Ose beside him.

"I think this idea is right. The world is a sphere, just like the moon, just like the sun."

"Look at the moon."

"Look at that shape. How perfect it is."

"If the world has some other shape, it can only be this one."

Ose looked at the several letters in Ray's hand, and asked again, "What do the others say?"

Ray picked up another letter.

"Apostle Sukob writes that he thinks I'm right too, and that he's very much looking forward to the day I make it home, this whole journey around the world finished."

Ray went on, "Of course, there are some who don't believe what I'm saying, who think I must simply have gotten lost, and that's how I ended up flying to the Land of Light."

Ray said to Ose, earnestly, "But I know for myself. This is the truth, the truth of the world."

Ose looked up at the moon in the sky and found themself thinking, all at once, that perhaps these wild ideas of Ray's were the truly correct ones.

"But if your theory is to be right, there is one thing you must prove first."

"Is there really a force that could hold fast every single thing in this world, absolutely everything there is?"

Ray let out a burst of laughter.

"It looks like Master Ose is starting to believe my theory too."

Ose said nothing, only laughed along with him.

Just then Ray turned suddenly to look west, out over the Land of Light, toward the direction the meteor had streaked across, the same direction the sky messenger Lomier had gone chasing after it.

"Maybe that sky messenger will see something, will prove something."

Ray had no idea how that meteor had come to be, but he had a vague sense that a power like that might have something to do with a Supreme Divine Being.

The moment they were back, Ray and Ose set to revising the original map along the lines of this newest theory.

Working from the map already joined into a loop, they reckoned from its size and length, and step by step worked out how big the world-sphere must be.

Then Ray set to work with his own hands, pasting the world map together bit by bit into a sphere.

Beyond the loop of the already-known map, the rest of it was left blank white.

Ray held the sphere aloft with his spirit power, and spoke to Ose.

"Look!"

"Our world might look just like this."

"The place we live in, the world we already know, ought to take up just about this much space."

Ose looked at the sphere, circling round and round it, and at last let out a sigh.

"I feel that the world is so very large, and all at once I feel that it is so very small."

Ray said to Ose, "The world really is vast. Most people spend their whole lives and never manage to walk their way off a single small island, or across a single plain."

"So in our hearts, the world feels boundless, as if it goes on forever."

"Now that we've made this world-sphere, the whole world is suddenly right there in front of us. Set against the boundlessness we always imagined, it feels small."

"Still, looked at a certain way, the world really is boundless."

"Look at this sphere. No matter which direction we walk, we'd never once reach an end."

"Because in the end we'd always come back to where we started. That really does count as a boundlessness all its own."

Ray looked at the world-sphere he had made, running his fingers over the blank spaces on it.

"There's still so much, so much blank space left, places no Wisdom Seed has ever set foot on, places never yet discovered."

"But at least, now we know what shape the world takes."

Ray rose to his feet, looked at Ose, and brought up another matter.

"Master Ose, that thing you mentioned to me before."

"Crafting the map into an artifact. It really does look like it's necessary after all."

"Except now the world might not be a sheet of paper rolled up together anymore. It's a sphere."

Eager anticipation showed in Ose's eyes.

"Master Ray, if you have need of my help in anything at all, you have only to ask."

Ray told Ose, "I could genuinely use a few more hands."

In the capital of the Matale Principality, Ose gathered a great host of winged ability users, and collected besides every manner of extraordinary material Ray might need, all of it delivered to Ray's temporary residence.

But Ray took one look at the materials and shook his head.

"If it's for crafting an artifact, this won't do. At the very least, it doesn't reach the strength I'm after."

"Even used as a supplementary material, worked through divine blood corrosion, it still wouldn't be enough."

Ray had stone tablet after stone tablet carried over, carved mysterious lines into them one by one, and at last wrote out in Wisdom Script a mysterious name, the name of a spirit of the Divine Kingdom of Creation.

Then out of his storage ring he flung onto the ground scraps of waste earth and ordinary materials, a whole heap of things that looked for all the world like garbage.

Ose watched Ray with utter incomprehension, no idea at all what he meant to do.

"Master Ray, what is it you are doing?"

Ray looked at Ose, and spoke with an air of deep mystery.

"Would you like to see the power of a miracle?"

Ose, utterly at sea, could only stare blankly at this metal puppet, one who was forever a little unpredictable, forever saying strange things and doing stranger deeds.

Ray offered no explanation. The moment he finished speaking, he pressed his hand down onto the stone tablet.

In an instant, colored light came surging upward, gathering high above into the shadow-shape of a Dream Egg, and it was from within that Dream Egg that the power of the miracle came pouring out.

A realm of dream spread outward, settling over Ray, settling over everything around him.

At once, nugget after nugget of magic gold came leaping out of the dream, piling up in front of Ray, gleaming with the colors of the Abyss.

Ray looked it over and said, "That's enough magic gold. Let's make a few other things while we're at it."

He pressed his hand down onto another stone tablet.

"Oh, right, let's make some ink and Divine Weave too."

The colored inks Ray needed appeared bottled inside one delicate little flask after another, and bolt after bolt of snow-white Divine Weave came rolling into being, born out of the colored light.

The spirit Ray had made his pact with was well versed in many different miracle techniques, and so the range of miraculous things he could turn out through the miracle ritual tablet was rich and varied.

But the miracle technique Ray displayed left the winged people in the mansion utterly thunderstruck.

Ose most of all, standing right beside him.

Ose could not make sense of what they were seeing. To their eyes, Ray might have been a god stepped straight out of legend.

All they saw was this. Ray would say a single line, naming whatever he wanted.

Then the thing he had named would simply come leaping into being.

They could say for certain, beyond any doubt, that these things were being conjured into existence just like that, and not drawn out of some storage artifact.

But this scene that left Ose and the winged people so thunderstruck was, to Ray, nothing more than an ordinary day.

Out on his travels, he made things this way all the time. Otherwise, the many supplies he carried would have run dry long ago.

Ose stepped forward and laid a hand on the Divine Weave, gingerly, as though testing whether what they felt were some kind of illusion.

They had never once seen cloth like this in their life. Even the sky messengers who lived on the Sacred Mountain of Light had no garments like it.

They turned their head to look at Ray, and asked him, hardly able to believe it.

"This, this, this..."

"Is this a divine miracle?"

"Do the snake people of Ruhe Beast Island truly make whatever they want, just like this, exactly as they please?"

"What power is this, exactly?"

The power Ray had displayed shattered Ose's composure in an instant.

More than that, in that one instant the winged people seemed to them nothing more than spiders in some dark corner, or lizards hiding away in a cave, creatures who had always believed themselves tremendously powerful beings, a species able to soar through the very sky.

Now, all at once, they realized that the world held beings who commanded a power like this too, beings just like the divine race.

Beings who, whatever they wanted, needed only set a stone tablet before themselves and press both hands down upon it to have it.

Watching this, they could no longer bring themself to say the words they had once said so readily.

"We may lag behind you, but we are both a Wisdom Seed all the same, and I do not believe our potential falls short of theirs."

"One day, we shall catch up to them."

If every last one of the snake people was like this, then what hope had the winged people of ever chasing after beings such as these?

Everything a mortal owned, they had to make with their own two hands. Ray, standing right there before them, simply conjured it up.

Ray shook his head.

"The snake people can't use a power like this."

Ose's lips moved faintly, as though they wanted to ask something.

Ray saw straight through to what was on their mind, of course, and shook his head at them.

"And you couldn't ever gain this power either."

Ose assumed Ray simply meant to guard this secret art jealously.

"Why not?"

Ray told Ose, "Because it isn't this stone tablet that does the work, and it isn't me who holds this power. It's the spirits of the Divine Kingdom of Creation, that eternal race of dream, the great spirits."

"We only hold this power because of the pact we've made with the spirits, the pact made with those Messengers of Creation."

"After us, maybe no one will ever gain this power again. As the years wear on, those who hold this power may only keep growing fewer."

Seeing that Ose did not believe him, Ray handed the stone tablet over to them.

"Go on, try it yourself."

Ose copied what Ray had done, and carried out the ritual.

But the tablet gave no response at all. It might as well have been just an ordinary stone with lines carved into it.

Ose knew something of ritual power themself, and in the end they gave up on it, feeling, if anything, a measure of relief. So this power really was not something to be used lightly, after all.

But the doubt in their heart only grew deeper, over just who Ray was, and where he had come from.

"How is it that you are able to make a pact with the Creator's messengers, able to call upon so great a power?"

"And besides, just now, you said 'we.'"

"Are there still many others who can use this power?"

Ray told Ose, "Not many anymore. Only a small handful are left."

"Among all the ancient demon spirits, the Spirit Realm priests may still have a few who can use it, and so may that old batch of the Most Ancient Race."

"As for why we're able to use this power at all, it's a grace passed down from our ancestors, a gift that traces back to the Creator."

Ray turned his metal head, and answered with a smile.

"Because we..."

"...are descendants of the Sovereign Deities!"

Ose was struck half-witless, and repeated the words back to Ray as though to check he had not misspoken.

"Descendants of the Sovereign Deities?"

Ray nodded.

"It's not really any secret, actually. The gods among mortals know it, the divine chosen know it. Plenty of people know it."

"We're just a bunch of has-beens, though, basking in our ancestors' glory, long since fallen from grace."

Ray looked at the stone tablet, and his voice, always so sunny, suddenly turned gentle, carrying a calm settled deep by the passing years, and a sorrow with no shape to it at all.

"We're a line of descendants who never amounted to much, a line that keeps on making mistakes, a line that never knew how high the sky was or how deep the earth ran."

"But the blood of the Sovereign Deities really does run in our veins. Our ancestors were the Divine King's own children."

"We really did once have so much, things beyond anything you could imagine."

"There was a time when countless numbers among us could use this power."

"We needed nothing at all. Just a stone tablet, a fragment of incantation, and we could conjure up food, wealth, minerals, more than we could ever spend."

"And our whole civilization was built on miracles."

Having said this much, Ray slowly picked the stone tablet up off the ground.

Then, with the utmost care, he wiped clean the lines carved into it, and at last put it away inside his storage artifact.

"But power too great, too dreamlike, can make a person lose themselves in it, until at last they lose the courage to chase after the unknown at all."

But just then, in Ose's eyes, Ray seemed to be shining with a light of his own.

Ose was so filled with envy they could not find words for a long moment. Not even in a dream, not even in a fairy tale.

No winged person had ever dared to fantasize about such a thing, let alone imagine that someone had truly once held power like this.

But if it was really as Ray had said, that they were the offspring of the Sovereign Deities, then perhaps it was not so strange after all.

They had not understood, not in the least, what Ray's very last words had meant.

Ose asked Ray, "Why would a being as great as you come down to the mortal world, come to a backwater place like this?"

Ray asked Ose, "Then where do you think I should be?"

Ose said, "You ought to be dwelling in a kingdom of the divine, receiving the worship of mortals."

Ray asked Ose, "How long do you think I've been alive?"

Ose thought it over and answered, "A few hundred years?"

Ose guessed again.

"A thousand years?"

Ose froze, and named a number they barely dared even to think.

"It could not be ten thousand years, surely?"

Ray laughed out loud, unable to help himself, like a man who had just landed a joke on a friend.

"Hundreds of millions of years."

"Tens of thousands of ten-thousand-year spans ago, a being named Ray already existed in this world."

Ray looked at the way Ose was staring at him, their eyes gone utterly blank.

"Don't look at me like that."

"Truth be told, I've forgotten near enough everything about the past."

"But there are some things I could never forget, no matter what."

"Like how, a very, very long time ago, I once said I wanted to go and see the place where the sun rises."

"However much time has passed, however much the world has changed, I still remember it."

"As long as I still exist, as long as I'm still alive, I'll never stop."

Ray told Ose, "However great a being may be, without a meaning to its own existence, without an anchor to hold it fast through the years, it will end up utterly lost in the passage of time."

"A god's greatness isn't only in their power. It's in the eternal devotion, the eternal pursuit, that drives them."

"A god's greatness isn't only in sitting high above some divine kingdom either. It's in walking ahead of civilization itself."

Among the winged people Ose counted as no small age, and had always thought themself well traveled and worldly.

But all at once they felt as though they had never truly seen how vast this world was, never seen how wide the sky could be.

Ray looked at Ose and said, "Ose, you're a very interesting person, someone willing to chase after knowledge, after the unknown."

"You shouldn't let yourself be bound by whatever's narrow and close at hand. You should see things higher, farther away."

"I hope that someday you'll find the thing you want to pursue too, that you'll come to understand what life means."

"And even more than that, I hope that years and years from now, I'll get to meet you again, and talk just like this about the mysteries of the world."

Ose looked at Ray, and suddenly understood something.

Once this artifact was finished, Ray would likely be leaving Matale.

That, perhaps, was the very reason he had shown Ose the miracle technique, and his true identity.

Star Night Mountain Range

This place lay forever in the dark of night. The sun at the world's edge seemed as though it would never rise here.

At the very heart of the star-bright mountains, in the city atop the highest peak, all manner of strange new things had lately appeared. In truth, they were a strange kind of living creature.

Creatures the size of a fist, like flames of starlight, darted and played across the Star Night Mountain Range.

Now and then they would hang themselves up in the sky, disguising themselves as true stars.

Now and then they would drop out of the sky, and as they darted about they burst into colors like showers of sparks, extraordinarily brilliant.

Hila stepped down from the hot air balloon boat on the little island, crossed the sea, climbed up the Star Night Mountain Range, and arrived at the Pottery Temple.

"Tee-hee-hee!"

The moment she arrived, she found Shelly playing with those strange little creatures.

Shelly reached out a finger, meaning to poke one of the little starlight-flame spirits darting everywhere, but before she could touch it, the strange creatures scattered in fright.

Yet they dared not run too far either, and still circled close around Shelly.

Hila watched these strange creatures with some curiosity.

"What are these? I do not think I saw them the last time I came."

Shelly told Hila, "These are the Big Meteor's children!"

Hila understood at once. These were dependents of the Star of Death.

Or they could be called Children of the Star of Death, too.

Shelly teased at the strange little creatures.

"They're not grown up yet! They were only just born, not long ago at all."

Hila watched the little things flitting about.

"And what do they look like once they are grown? Do they simply get bigger?"

Shelly answered brightly.

"Once they're grown they can't fly anymore. Flying is only for now."

Shelly finished speaking, and took out a Gravity Stone.

A young Child of the Star of Death dropped down out of the sky, circling close around the Gravity Stone, drinking in its power.

"Once it has power it grows, and it turns into something like this!"

The Child of the Star of Death fed on the Gravity Stone, and before long its shape began to change.

From its infant form, it slowly turned into a great starfish, glowing with rainbow light.

What is more, squirming mouthparts and long, stretching tentacles grew out of it, giving it a look of especial ferocity.

Hila had been standing quite close to the Child of the Star of Death at first, but now, at a second glance, she had already opened a good two meters between herself and it.

The Child of the Star of Death's once-light form grew heavier, more massive, and as it kept on growing, the gravity around it slowly built up too.

In the end, it lost the power to hover entirely, and fell to the ground.

With one quick fwoosh, it burrowed straight into the earth, and vanished without a trace.

A moment later, a small hillock rose up in the distance.

Only once it had gone did Hila come walking over.

"It was so pretty a moment ago, but once it grew up it turned into something a little frightening!"

But Shelly saw it differently.

"That's just growing up! The bigger they get, the stronger they get."

Hila asked Shelly, "Shelly, are you planning to use them to reclaim the Star of Death's power on Ruhe Beast Island?"

Shelly nodded.

"I'll set them loose on Ruhe Beast Island. They'll turn every bit of the Star of Death's power there into Gravity Stones, and store it all up inside themselves."

Shelly waved a hand, and turned to face the sky.

"Every time the Big Meteor comes near the earth, passing by Ruhe Beast Island, it'll pull at them and they'll pull back."

"In the end they'll be pulled right up out of the ground, and fly back to the Big Meteor."

"That way, my garden won't come crashing down."

Hila asked, "If the Star of Death takes all its power back, will they be of no more use after that?"

Shelly shook her head.

"They can still play at being a meteor shower!"

"Flying down, and flying back up again."

"Every time round is a whole cycle, and it makes the Big Meteor stronger too."

The ordinary way a Life demigod grew in power was through their dependents. Every so often those dependents would enter a cycle of rebirth, and with every cycle they completed, a portion of divine blood and power grew along with them.

Growing power through the Eye of Mutation instead, that was the unusual path.

It was not only the Star of Death that worked this way. The Lava Mountain, for one, would sometimes erupt and hurl its own offspring out over the sea.

The swarms of worms active near the Mountain of Life's Origin, the sky dependents in the cloud sea of the Thunder Marsh, it was all the same.

Hila watched Shelly finish her preparations, and nodded.

"So you are ready to send it up into the sky now. Do you need my help?"

Shelly was bursting with excitement.

"First I'll send the Big Meteor up into the sky, and then I'll scatter the Big Meteor's children down after it!"

Shelly looked at Hila and let out a cheer.

"There'll be a great meteor shower then! All you have to do is watch, Hila."

Seeing Shelly so excited, Hila felt a flicker of worry.

"Will there be any danger?"

Shelly looked at the Child of the Star of Death, unable to see where any danger lay.

"They're so weak, and so small! Where's the danger in that?"

Poor little things. When Shelly reached out and poked at them, she was almost afraid of poking them to death by accident.

Hila noticed Shelly's little dress had gone all rumpled, her bow tie crooked too.

So she crouched down and helped straighten her up a little.

At the same time, she asked, "I mean, will it be dangerous for the ordinary people on Ruhe Beast Island?"

Shelly said, "They'll all come down in places with no people. They can run about on their own, you know!"

Hila finished straightening Shelly's dress and bow tie, and said with a smile.

"Then let us get ready to begin. God will be coming by in a little while too."