I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 508: The First Divine Technique Born in the Primordial Age

Amid the sea of clouds, a book flew as though it had grown wings.

Its two halves opened and closed as it soared beneath the blue sky, wonderfully free and every bit as graceful as a bird on the wing.

From the moment it was born, the book imp possessed power beyond that of an ordinary imp. Its maker had been a mighty ability user at the peak of second rank, so the power scattered at his death was naturally greater than an ordinary person's.

Newborn, it knew only the confusion tangled through its mind.

Images surfaced endlessly from its memory. An elder held it, turning its pages again and again as he read. At other times, the same elder stood motionless for ages with a letter in hand, his face full of longing and sorrow.

The elder's memories were perfectly clear to it, as were his sorrow and every last one of his emotions.

It had been born inside those very emotions and memories.

Once it had climbed high enough, it began reciting the name of a divine being, though no one had ever taught it the words. It had never laid eyes on that being, yet the name had been branded into its mind from birth.

"The Lord of the Divine Form above the Star Realm, the God of Creation of the Spirits of Old Things, the Primordial Mythical Witch Doctors born of the power of creation."

It repeated the words several times, sending the power of that divine name far into the distance.

Within the sea of clouds, an unseen door swung slowly open.

Beyond lay a passage to the Witch Doctor Kingdom, the floating island high in the heavens.

The Dream Realm entrance to the witch doctors' kingdom sprang to life, and its power summoned the book imp inside.

This was nothing like traveling through a teleportation gate. Only a divine being summoning its own servant could use this method. The one summoned had to be an ability user or an extraordinary species, and they could bring nothing of the mortal world with them.

One example was a divine being summoning its dependents. Another was the gathering of a dead servant's spirit back into the Divine Kingdom.

It all worked this way.

The mythical witch doctor kingdom towered in the Star Realm. Beneath its glass dome, an enormous tree rose through the jungle world, reaching toward the heavens. Now it began to glow.

Creak!

The great door set into the hollow swung open, and the book imp flew through.

Unlike the other imps, it did not tumble from the heights in a graceless heap. It descended with remarkable elegance, then circled above the miniature city.

By the standards of this city, the book imp was one of the larger residents.

All across the imp city, residents poked their heads from their houses and looked up.

"Whoa, something really strong just showed up!" The imps watched the newcomer flying overhead with curiosity.

"What is that thing? It's square, flat, and stacked in all these layers!" Many of the imps were seeing a kinsman in the shape of a book for the first time.

"It's a book!" A few imps searched the images in their memories and found a record of what a book was.

"Why hasn't it grown anything?" Imps almost always grew an organ of their own. Some grew a single eye, some a mouth and tongue, some a pair of feet, and others ears or a pair of hands.

By and large, though, every one of them grew some special organ.

The words had scarcely died away when light burst from both covers and a pair of small white wings unfurled.

The book imp's arrival changed the mythical altar and the imp city as well.

A new house took shape by itself within the city, plainly prepared for the newcomer. It resembled a bookshelf.

At once, the book imp dropped inside and settled quietly into a corner.

Most days, it slept quietly in the bookshelf house. Sometimes it rose into the air and flew above the city, saying things to itself.

Its mind held nothing but Ose's memories of the Round Earth Theory. Day after day, it had watched the elder turn its pages and make notes while a Globe stood beside him.

As it flew, it imitated the elder and declaimed in a mighty voice.

Weathered though the voice was, it rang with enormous force, like an old general who still had plenty of fight left.

"We may fail, but we must never be cowards."

"We may be weak, but we must still be brave."

"Be steadfast and stubborn, like thunder tearing across the sky on a stormy night."

The imps pointed at the odd creature in the sky and talked it over among themselves.

After it had lived in the imp city for a while, its disordered memories and emotions finally settled into place. It also began learning to talk with the other imps.

"Where am I?"

"This is the imp city."

"How did we end up here?"

"The god called us here."

Then it asked again, "Then why did the god call us here?"

The cup imp turned the question over.

"Why would the god call us here?"

The perfume bottle imp said, "Dunno."

A face stretched long and wide was reflected in the gleaming hollow of the spoon imp.

"Because the god wanted to."

Of course the god had been willing. The book imp wanted to know why.

The other imps had never thought that far. They discussed the question for ages but reached no answer.

The book imp seemed a little cleverer than the rest, though it still came across as slow and stubborn.

"But I want to go back to the mortal world."

The other imps answered at once, "No one's ever gone back."

An idea came to the book imp, and it acted at once.

Remembering the door in the towering tree through which it had arrived, it flew toward the sky.

Its wings beating furiously, it shot upward and slammed straight into the tightly shut door.

Thwack!

Then it slid back down.

The City of the Divine Kingdom

The six mythical witch doctors walked along together, discussing something as they went.

The imps had been born. Building a profession of their own upon this newborn extraordinary race, however, presented the witch doctors with a new difficulty.

Turning the discussion to the imps as a people, Witch Doctor Right Hand declared the race they had made a success.

"The imps are witch doctors by birth. They inherited our power. As artificial life, they are born knowing some of life's secrets."

"At first rank, they need only study to wield the power Left Hand and I bestowed upon them. They can make medicines based on the secrets of life they understand, treating diseases of the eyes, ears, hands, feet, and even the internal organs."

"At second rank, they should be able to draw upon the gifts Left Leg and Right Leg bestowed upon them."

"Through study and inheritance, they will uncover more of life's mysteries and grow more organs. At the same time, they will extend the limits of their witch doctor divine techniques."

With that, Witch Doctor Right Hand summed up all the observations and information the witch doctors had gathered about the imps during this time.

No second-rank imp had yet appeared, but the witch doctors had already formed a rough idea of the abilities one would possess.

Witch Doctor Left Hand, however, had concerns. She raised the question that had occupied her thoughts of late.

"Yet because they are artificial life, though born extraordinary, in some respects they are not nearly as perfect as life created by a supreme divine being."

"They may walk a path of continual self-perfection, but from the outset their wisdom is flawed."

"Seen in that light, are they truly fit to become witch doctors?"

At that, Witch Doctor Skull stepped forward, looked at the others, and spoke.

"I say each imp should find a partner, just as the six of us have one another."

"Together, an imp and its partner would form a new witch doctor."

The other witch doctors nodded their agreement with Witch Doctor Skull's judgment.

Witch Doctor Left Hand frowned.

"Then by what measure are we to choose those who can form a contract with an imp?"

Witch Doctor Right Leg had a view of their own.

"Only those who have suffered illness can know its pain. Only they can understand how precious life is and grasp the true path of the witch doctor."

"Only when the gravely ill, those who yearn for salvation, are themselves saved will they truly wield our power and become true witch doctors."

Witch Doctor Left Leg agreed wholeheartedly. They too believed the new witch doctors should be chosen from among those who had suffered the pain of disease.

"Conveniently, when an imp forms a contract with such a person, it can become part of their body, an organ that sustains their life."

"The imp saves their life. They, in turn, carry it with them and become a new witch doctor."

The idea was sound, but it left them facing another problem.

A simple contract would have been easy enough. Binding an imp's power to its partner's as a single whole, with both rising in rank together, was another matter entirely.

Harder was the thought of turning an ordinary person into an ability user.

That was no simple matter.

The witch doctors' idea resembled the extraordinary profession of beast knight. A beast knight, however, chose ordinary wild beasts, formed a contract with them, and shared divine blood to make them partners. This was something else altogether.

An ordinary beast carried no Divine Blood of Wisdom, so nothing between the two could clash.

The imps, by contrast, were meant to contract with Wisdom Seeds, each and every one.

Even an ordinary person without talent still carried divine blood. It simply expressed no power of ability.

The witch doctors fell silent. The problem was enormous.

One day, Witch Doctor Left Hand sat in the library leafing through book after book. She searched the records of both the last era and this one, hoping that somewhere in that boundless ocean of divine technique knowledge lay the answer they needed.

The newest knowledge and canonical texts of divine techniques yielded nothing.

She turned instead to the ancient records, working backward page by page until, to her surprise, she reached the very beginning of the primordial age.

In the library, Witch Doctor Left Hand suddenly cried out.

"I have found it!"

She hurried from the library and made for the botanical garden in search of the others.

The other witch doctors received word and gathered together.

"You found it, Left Hand?"

"What method did you find?"

"How did you uncover it?"

Rather than answer directly, Witch Doctor Left Hand put a question to the others.

"Do you remember the oldest divine technique in existence?"

"The very first divine technique born in the primordial age."

"The divine technique the Creator bestowed upon the King of Wisdom!"

The grand titles rolled from Witch Doctor Left Hand one after another, their weight leaving the others momentarily stunned.

Witch Doctor Skull suddenly remembered something and asked quietly.

"You mean the Bestowing of Power?"

Witch Doctor Left Hand nodded firmly and spoke to them all.

"Precisely. The Bestowing of Power."

The Bestowing of Power dated back to the King of Wisdom in the Primordial Era. Wishing to divide his power among his sons, Redlichia had begged the Creator for a way to do so.

God Yinsai gave the divine technique of the Bestowing of Power to the King of Wisdom Redlichia. In turn, he passed that power and the Ruhe Imprint God had granted him on to his sons.

The Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline that the gods had fought over carried the image of that very scene.

As a rule, each person could use the Bestowing of Power only once. By handing one's talent to another, the divine technique could awaken the power of ability in someone born without talent.

In this era, though, ordinary people no longer used it.

Its shadow could still be seen within almost every extraordinary profession.

Whenever a new servant of God was born, part of the Bestowing of Power was at work within it. Through that power, a divine being handed one of its own power seeds to a mortal.

As Witch Doctor Left Hand laid out her idea, her eyes seemed to shine.

"If we alter the Bestowing of Power slightly, use our mythical altar as the contract's hub, and have an imp share a bloodline with a Wisdom Seed as a beast knight does, it should work."

"Unless some lunatic tries to contract with several imps at once and share all their power, there should be no difficulty."

The witch doctors exchanged looks and considered the idea for a long while.

One after another, they nodded. The method would serve.

Flap, flap, flap!

At that moment, a white-winged book flew from the miniature imp city off to one side and headed for the treetop far above.

Its pages turned over and over with a ceaseless rustle.

It flew back and forth around the tree's crown, peering this way and that at the double doors as though trying to work out how to open them.

The other witch doctors seemed to have noticed the odd imp some time ago. They pointed it out to Witch Doctor Left Hand, who had spent all these days in the library poring over books of divine technique.

"A highly promising imp arrived not long ago."

"It was once a book."

"It seems to want to fly out of here and return to the mortal world."

Witch Doctor Left Hand extended a hand, and the book drifted over to hover before her.

The words Round Earth Theory stood in large printed characters across the cover, and the ink gave off a clean fragrance. Both that ink and the wholly new printing technique had only begun spreading through the Land of Light in recent years.

The book opened. With a single sweep of her gaze, Witch Doctor Left Hand read through enough to grasp the gist of the whole thing.

"This is remarkably well written!" Witch Doctor Left Hand was greatly surprised.

"Someone has already discovered that the world is a sphere, and even knows of the earth's pull." The witch doctors had the term for the earth's pull from the Creator, Yinsai. Until then they had preferred to call it gravity.

"The mortal world still has no shortage of wise minds." The other witch doctors had already read it, and they agreed.

Curious to see who had written the book, Witch Doctor Left Hand turned back to the front and found a strangely familiar name.

Plainly written by hand, the name was a single word.

"Ray?"

Witch Doctor Left Hand remembered him at once, the fellow who owed them a debt.

During their travels through the mortal world, the witch doctors had been occupied with business of their own and had never crossed paths with him.

They were in no hurry. That fellow would fly into the Star Realm one day regardless, and they could collect from him then.

Witch Doctor Left Hand asked the book imp, "Why do you wish to return to the mortal world?"

The book imp's pages stirred.

"It feels like I've left so much undone, so much to regret. I can't stay here, wasting my life when I have so little time left."

Witch Doctor Left Hand said, "Those regrets are not yours. They belong to the person whose memories you carry."

The book imp thought of the elder, then drew on its mental power and spoke in the elder's own voice.

"Even if those regrets are his, I still wish to finish what he left undone and make up for it in his place."

The witch doctors exchanged a glance. Then Witch Doctor Skull, their leader, spoke.

"Then why not begin with this one?"

They would begin with the book imp and use it to choose the first person ever to enter the witch doctor profession.

The witch doctors nodded.

"Let us see whom it chooses as its partner!"

Witch Doctor Right Leg spoke up, "Anyone who would become a witch doctor and form a contract with an imp must first pass a trial!"

Witch Doctor Torso thought that a fine idea.

"What sort of trial should we devise? Perhaps one modeled on the saints?"

In Witch Doctor Torso's eyes, the trials endured by both generations of saints had been equally good.

First came an imitation of the first-generation saint.

"Fate lies in our own hands."

Without pause, they followed with the words spoken by the second-generation saint in his final moment.

"This moment is eternity in my life."

Witch Doctor Torso drew their tall body upright. In that instant, they seemed to have become a saint themselves.

The other witch doctors looked at one another.

The proposal was far too demanding. Choosing witch doctors by the measure of a saint was pure daydreaming.

The other five voted as one and threw out Witch Doctor Torso's proposal.

Witch Doctor Left Hand spoke then, "Leave the choice to the imps themselves. Let each imp devise a trial for its own partner."

Witch Doctor Left Hand looked toward the imps of the miniature city.

"After all, it is they, not we, who will share a lifetime with their partners."

The mechanical fish airship crossed the sky, flying over the Matale Principality, flying over the Good News Kingdom and several smaller nations.

At last it reached the Oracle Kingdom.

For the girl aboard, the first few hours of novelty slowly gave way to weariness. Throughout the journey, she kept hoping the mechanical fish airship would land so she could get off and stretch her legs.

Later still, that hope turned into a wish to be home sooner.

The airship finally settled at a station in one of the Oracle Kingdom's cities. Built on a square halfway up a mountainside, the station bustled with people coming and going.

The family of three disembarked and flew toward their home on the level below.

Unable to fly yet, little Matafus rode through the sky in her father's arms.

Her mother asked her, "What was it like, riding the airship?"

Little Matafus answered in a small voice, "It made me really tired."

Her father told her, "I hear Magic Tool City has a teleportation gate. Once it opens, it'll take you anywhere you want to go."

"Your great-grandfather's friend built Magic Tool City, teleportation gate and all."

Little Matafus's head came up at once.

"I know! The demon spirit called Ray."

Little Matafus thought of her great-grandfather. Ose was gone, yet the legend of his life had been carved into her mind a thousand times over.

She grieved a little for her great-grandfather's passing, and at the same time the story of his life filled her with longing.

"Great-grandfather really was amazing!"

"I want to go to the Sacred Mountain of Light one day, just like he did."

"And I want to pass the selection and become a beautiful, holy sky messenger!"

Her parents laughed and spoke to Matafus.

"Of course you will. Our Matafus is every bit as adorable as a sky messenger."

Neither parent told her just how much talent it took to become a sky messenger.

Even someone like her great-grandfather had failed. That alone showed how difficult it was.

Something came back to little Matafus, and she said in a small, unhappy voice, "It's too bad. I lost Great-grandfather's book."

Her father held her tighter and comforted her.

"It went away to find your great-grandfather."

Another two months passed after they returned home.

Matafus's parents took her to a renowned Medical Fortress and consulted its physicians.

Little Matafus did not know what was happening, but fear had already taken hold. Only sick people came to this place, and that made it terrifying.

Up ahead, Matafus's father spoke quietly with the winged physician.

"She's four already, but her wings are still so small she can't even start learning to fly."

The physician looked the little girl over.

"At her age, yes, her wings are much too small."

After examining Matafus's wings, the physician asked her mother to carry the child outside, then spoke to her father.

"I am afraid she was born with a deformity."

"I have examined her bones. A congenital deformity of this kind cannot be cured."

The look on her father's face said he could not accept it. Being unable to fly was the same as being unable to walk for the winged people.

He said quickly, "Then the sky messengers' Radiant Divine Technique, could it..."

The price of a sky messenger's divine technique was enormous, yet Matafus's father was willing to pay it. No winged parent could bear to see their child born unable to fly.

The physician shook their head and told Matafus's father.

"The sky messengers' Radiant Divine Technique excels at treating grave injuries."

"But even a sky messenger would find this sort of condition difficult to cure."

Healing wounds was what sky messengers did best.

A sky messenger could even bring someone on the point of death back from the grave.

Their healing, however, could only restore an injury to its previous state.

The sky messengers' Radiant Divine Technique had no effect on a condition present from birth or a disease beyond curing.

Her father emerged with his spirit crushed. The moment he stepped before little Matafus, however, he became a man to whom nothing at all had happened.

As he straightened his daughter's clothes, he seemed to sense her fear.

Her father asked, "Are you scared?"

Little Matafus was plainly very frightened, yet she said, "I'm not scared! Great-grandfather said I have to be brave."

Her father laughed. He rose and took little Matafus by the hand.

"All right, off we go."

Little Matafus asked in surprise, "That's it?"

Her father nodded.

"All done. We're going home."

Little Matafus could not have been happier. The atmosphere here was simply too frightening.

"We're going home!"

After leading little Matafus a few steps, her father swept her into his arms and spoke as though tremendously happy.

"Come on, let's go home. We're having roast meat tonight."

Little Matafus made a delighted sound.

"Wow!"

Behind her, unseen, her mother wept without end. No matter how she tried, she could not wipe the tears away.