I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 441: The Creator Is Right There

The two apostles and a lone Lizard Person rode the flying magic carpet through the sky and its seas of cloud. How long they flew, none could say. They only watched as blue sky and white cloud slowly gave way to a deep curtain of night, dense with stars.

At last, they came to a port city by the sea.

This place had once belonged to the Char Territory. Now it was called the Char Province, and its port bore the name Blue River Port. The name alone told the story. This was an outlet to the sea, home to a river called the Blue River.

It was said that when the moon rose, the river would turn blue, the whole of it transformed by the moonlight into a single ribbon of blue.

In the still of the night, the flying magic carpet descended into the city and came to rest before a strange-looking house of many colors that stood beside the river. ”We have arrived. This is the place.”

Oran and Sukob stepped down together and came to stand before the house.

Oran climbed the few steps, straightened his clothes, and knocked upon the door, his face grave and solemn.

Knock, knock, knock!

Only once the flying magic carpet had settled before the house, and Oran himself had stepped up to strike the door, did Anu finally focus his gaze and take in what was so strange about the place.

The Lizard Person stood below the doorway, at the foot of the steps, staring up at it. ”This house...”
”How can it be like this?” The colorful house did not look large. It sat at the very center of a sea of red flowers.

There was no telling what the whole of it had been built from. Its colors were so vivid, so saturated, that the house seemed to belong to no mortal world at all, and behind it an enormous wheel turned round and round, like the winding key of some giant clockwork.

This was the Miracle Tool of the Scarlet Goddess Vivien. The Magic Wheel House.

And yet, with this extraordinary house and its uncanny sea of flowers laid out before him, Anuʼs gaze and his instincts alike kept slipping past them, as though it were just an ordinary house, as though the flower sea had never existed at all.

It was a profoundly strange sensation. Here was a thing that did not belong to the mortal world, a thing whose mere appearance should have seized the attention of everyone alive. Yet some feeling kept whispering that it belonged to the mortal world, that it was ordinary, that it was unremarkable, that there was no need to pay it any mind. To notice that jarring wrongness at all demanded power of at least the apostle rank. Anu looked around again. ”Blood Mist Cups.”

The Blood Mist Cups, at least, he recognized. Everything here proved that this was where the Scarlet Goddess dwelled. Sukob knew exactly what Anu was feeling, and he told him the reason for it.

He pointed to the pale, bewildering mist drifting up around the sea of flowers. ”The scent and the fog the Blood Mist Cups give off can lead a mind astray, and the Wisdom Ability commands powers that do the same. In the very beginning, the power of illusion itself was born of the Sun Cup.”

The Blood Mist Cup and the Cup of Desire were Divine Blood variants of the Sun Cup, and every illusion the Wisdom Seeds had ever commanded was, in the beginning, cast by borrowing the Sun Cupʼs power.

Then he went on. ”When apostles and Divine Beings walk the mortal world, they use their power to sever the ties between themselves and it, so that no mortal can hold them in his gaze. The power of an apostle, of a Mythical being, has long passed beyond the mortal domain. At times a line must be drawn between us and mortals, and not only to spare ourselves trouble. It is to protect the mortals as well.”

Anu understood that among the mortals to be protected and kept at a distance, he was one.

After a short wait, the door of the Magic Wheel House finally opened.

Sukob and the others walked in at once, and the moment they stepped inside, darkness swallowed them whole. In an instant, heaven and earth were spinning.

A tremendous force dragged them into a passage, and the three of them were swept up and up as though caught inside a tornado, until at last they arrived in an unknown realm. Sukob and Oran seemed simply to ignore both gravity and the spinning. The instant the pull ceased, they came to rest standing perfectly upright. Anu was another matter. He came down flat against the ground.

He hauled himself up with some effort and staggered in a few dizzy circles, his head still swimming. ”This... This is the inside of the house?”

”How is the inside of this house... so... so big...” Thud!

The words came out of him like a stutter, and then all at once he was flat on the ground again, unable to rise for a long while. Yet even through the dizziness, Anu managed a rough look at his surroundings.

They were inside a vast crystal formed of countless diamond facets. Within every facet a figure could be seen, and seeds of Divine Technique of every kind darted through the mirrored surfaces like spirits, leaping like sparks of firelight.

This was most certainly not the inside of any room or house.

The moment the darkness had drawn him in, Sukob had known what was happening. ”Was that a passage of the Dream Realm we just crossed?”

Oran was studying their surroundings. ”It was. Yet this place does not look like the Blood Kingdom, and it is plainly not the Scarlet Goddessʼs divine kingdom either. It belongs to another Mythical being.”

The two of them could roughly guess who that was. This was the Mythical being that the God of Desire and Alchemy, Iva, had once spoken of, the one who had lately ascended to the divine throne.

This was the Dream Realm, the Divine Technique Kingdom of the Mythical Artifact, the Eye of True Knowledge. At the far end of the kingdom, a tall, slender figure raised a hand and beckoned to the three of them.

In an instant the world around the three began to stretch longer and longer, while the tiny point in the distance swelled larger and larger, until they found themselves in the innermost depths of the divine kingdom. The shadows of two Mythical beings, one real and one illusory, stood on high and looked down upon them. Behind the two figures bloomed a single giant Blood Mist Cup. The Blood Mist Cup was wrapped around something, and from within it came a sound like the beating of a heart.

Anu lifted his head to look, and saw two Divine Beings standing side by side.

One had red hair, the other blue. One looked mature and composed, while the other seemed far younger. The red-haired goddess stood with her feet firmly upon the ground, her gaze bright and full of majesty.

The blue-haired Divine Being floated in the air with her eyes closed, ringed all about by what looked like ice crystals or snow.

Sukob stepped forward and bowed. ”Sukob greets the two Divine Beings. On behalf of the God of Knowledge and Truth, I bring You my greetings.”

Oran stayed where he stood and inclined his head. ”Oran greets the goddesses. God Iva bade me convey His respects to You both.”

Both Sukob and Oran had seen the Scarlet Goddess before. Sukob had watched with his own eyes, during the divine war at Maya City long ago, as the Scarlet Goddess struck Xiao down into the Abyss. Oran had met the goddess while accompanying the Storage Nymph, Saint Raphael.

Anu followed their lead as best he could, copying Oran from behind, though his movements came out somewhat stiff. ”Anu greets the two goddesses.”

As for passing along a greeting, he had no idea whether Lord Kurmis had charged him with one at all.

Still less did he know whether he ought to offer some empty courtesy anyway, or honestly leave things as they were. The upshot of all his hesitation was that the last half of his sentence never left his mouth at all.

Having drawn the three of them before her, the Scarlet Goddess turned away once more. ”What matter brings you here to see me?”

The Scarlet Goddess moved close to the giant Blood Mist Cup. Wave upon wave of potent life force circled around it, urging the living thing within toward its final shape. Light eddied across the flower, and a dim silhouette showed faintly through.

Thump! Thump!

The sound rolled over itself layer upon layer like ocean waves, echoing through the divine kingdom, and with it came a pressure that surged in like mountains and seas. It was the music of life being nurtured, and it was the will of a Wisdom Reincarnator. None of them knew what it was, and none of them dared to ask.

It was Sukob who spoke up first, giving the reason they had come and laying out the terms of the Contract of the Gods. They hoped the Scarlet Goddess might join it as well, he said, and open Suinhorʼs borders to the world beyond.

”Not Suinhor alone. The Royal Court of Ten Thousand Serpents, the White Tower Alliance, and every nation of the Snake People shall throw open their borders as one, to welcome the coming of a new age.”

The Scarlet Goddess, whose attention until now had rested wholly upon the Blood Mist Cup, at last grew serious, and lowered her gaze upon the three of them. ”Signing a Contract of the Gods.”

Sukob and Oran felt the pressure crash down upon them like a mountain, with no way to guess how this Divine Being would answer. The Scarlet Goddess said neither yes nor no. ”And how is this contract to be signed?” she asked instead.

”Sukob, you are the future God of Contracts and the Legal Code. Do you believe your contracts and your legal code can bind the gods?”

Sukob began to hem and haw at once. Setting the present aside, even if he one day ascended as a Mythical being, he could likely never truly bind a Divine Being. Ordinary oaths and ordinary contracts held no meaning for the gods.

The Scarlet Goddess raised another kind of oath. ”With the Crown of Wisdom Covenant, then?” That covenant was mighty beyond compare. Mighty, in truth, to a somewhat excessive degree.

”Surely you do not imagine that if a Divine Being swore an oath to the supreme Crown of Wisdom, the Crown of Wisdom would answer it?”

”That is the covenant between the Divine King of Wisdom and the Eternal Creator, a power that shelters and guides all the races of Wisdom. Before him, every Wisdom Seed is only a Wisdom Seed, whether you stand as a Divine Being or as a mortal.”

Oran stepped forward and spoke with the utmost reverence. ”It would be no more than an agreement, an agreement spoken aloud between the gods.”

The Scarlet Goddess smiled. ”Then suppose such a contract were signed. What power would you hold to bind the gods to it? What do you possess that could make the gods of the mortal world feel awe? And on what grounds should the other gods trust that this agreement will be kept as promised?”

And then she added one thing more. ”Besides. If there truly existed a binding so strong that it could be laid upon a Divine Being and never defied, would the gods be willing to sign it at all? Would they willingly lock such a shackle upon their own bodies, knowing that one day it might become a weakness for others to seize?”

At that, Sukob and Oran both fell silent. Their intentions were good, and they had won the godsʼ consent.

But the gods had all seen the flaws as well. They simply had not spoken of them to their faces. Perhaps they had known the problems all along, and had left them unspoken as a trial for the two of them to solve. And now, the Scarlet Goddess had laid it all bare.

Seeing the two of them somewhat dejected, the Scarlet Goddess pressed them no further. Instead she pointed them toward a path. ”There is one way. If you can accomplish it, the Contract of the Gods can indeed be sealed.”

The two could not help but ask at once. ”Goddess, please, tell us. What is this way?”

A trace of a smile, hard to read, rose in the Scarlet Goddessʼs eyes as she looked at the two divine candidates. ”Go and find the Stone Carving of The Royal Bloodline.”

”Use it as the witness to the Contract of the Gods, and swear your oath upon it.”

”The moment you truly hold the Stone Carving of The Royal Bloodline in your hands will be the moment the Contract of the Gods is sealed.”

The two of them froze for a moment.

They had indeed received the Dream Vine leaves of the Barter Emissary, the Lake Nymph, but their level of access granted them no right to see anything concerning the Stone Carving of The Royal Bloodline.

So the two knew neither what the royal authority was, nor what the bloodline was.

But the words ”stone carving,” at least, they understood. It was presumably something carved into a piece of stone.

They had never once heard of the Stone Carving of The Royal Bloodline. The picture famed among the Snake People was The Lost Kingdom, and that one had been left behind by a Trilobite Symbiote.

Sukob burst out. ”Goddess! What is the Stone Carving of The Royal Bloodline? Some tool of tremendous power? A Divine Artifact?”

”Will that truly be enough?” Oran asked instead.

The Scarlet Goddess glanced at the two of them, and knew that neither had learned anything of the Stone Carving of The Royal Bloodline from his own god. ”It is only a stone tablet.”

”Upon it is graven the most ancient of all myths, the first myth of the Wisdom Seeds.”

”It depicts every beginning and every origin. Upon that tablet is carved the first secret of the Wisdom Seeds. The royal authority of Wisdom, the beginning of myth, our origin and our birth, the beginning and the end of Ability. All of it flows from that stone.”

”What flows in the veins of the mortal worldʼs gods is a bloodline granted by the royal authority. What they possess is power bestowed by the Divine King. Swear your oath before the ancient Divine King and the divine children of the Divine King, with the stone as your witness, and none will dare defy it.”

The Scarlet Goddess put it more plainly still. ”Whoever can take hold of that tablet will know the secret of Wisdomʼs origin, and the secret of the Ruhe Great God. But if you do obtain it, do not look upon it. Above all, do not dream of prying into the secrets it holds.”

Sukob and Oran exchanged a glance. ”Why not?”

”Because you will die,” the Scarlet Goddess said. ”Until you become Divine Beings yourselves, at the very least, it is not to be looked upon.”

Sukob and Oran grew all the more certain that the tablet was a Divine Artifact. What they did not know was that the power lay not in the tablet, but in the images recorded upon it. The Scarlet Goddess said this much, and no more.

The Scarlet Goddess turned a solemn look upon Sukob. ”Ask your god, Asai. He may have a way to obtain that tablet.”

The Stone Carving of The Royal Bloodline lay in the hands of the spirits. Obtaining it, however, would cost another stone tablet in exchange.

But for all her long searching, the Scarlet Goddess still had no trace of that other tablet. Yet the spirits had said it still existed, and so exist it must. And through all her seeking and remembering, the Scarlet Goddess had formed a rough guess of her own. Either that tablet was in Asaiʼs hands.

Or else it was in the hands of the other one who had broken away from the Temple of Truth.

Sukob nodded. He had far too many questions in need of answers. Asai might have fallen into slumber, but the Door of Truth still stood, and Polik remained. All that God Asai knew, Polik knew as well.

At the very least, the journey had not been made in vain. The Scarlet Goddess had all but agreed. She had set a condition that looked dauntingly hard to fulfill, yet she clearly held a genuine intent to see the contract sealed.

”Scarlet Goddess, we thank You for Your guidance, and we shall come to call upon You again.”

From beginning to end, Anu had stood at the back like a shadow no one saw, without managing a single word. In truth, that was the whole meaning of his coming: to be here, to hear the words that passed between Sukob, Oran, and the Scarlet Goddess, and to carry them back to Kurmis afterward.

Yet just as Anu made ready to leave with Sukob and Oran, the Scarlet Goddess spoke suddenly from the heights of the divine kingdom. ”Servant of Kurmis, Lizard Person Anu. Stay a moment. There are some questions I wish to ask you.”

Sukob and Oran exchanged a glance, then nodded to Anu. ”We will take our leave first, then.”

The two of them understood that if the Divine Being had kept Anu back until the very end, there must be questions meant for him alone, questions she did not wish them to hear.

Within the Divine Technique Kingdom, Sukob and Oran were gone. Just like that, they had left him behind.

Anu looked up at the Divine Being on high, visibly strained. Earlier, with the two apostles ahead of him to hide behind, it had not been so bad. Now, facing a Divine Beingʼs gaze head-on, the pressure was more than words could tell.

Kurmis might be called an aspiring divine being, but between him and a true Divine Being there still lay a gap. Well... a gap of somewhere between hundreds of thousands and a million reincarnations, and the distance of an entire era besides.

Anuʼs mind turned through a thousand loops. Why would this goddess go out of her way to keep a Lizard Person like him behind? ”Did I give some offense just now?” he wondered.

”No, that canʼt be it. A Divine Being would never care what I did. It must be something about Lord Kurmis.”

”The Scarlet Goddess must have something she wants me to carry back to Lord Kurmis. That must be it.”

Anu settled on that, then raised his head, ready to speak. He had his words and his honorifics all prepared, and at that very moment a single sentence from the Scarlet Goddess threw his whole plan into disarray. ”I am told you have come by a Miracle Tool.”

This was the true reason the Scarlet Goddess had kept him behind.

Miracle Tools were not so easily come by. Every one of them had a master, and none of them fell lightly into the hands of anyone belonging to this era. Elenaʼs compass, Rayʼs Aircraft, Vivienʼs Magic Wheel House. Every one of them was a symbol of what its master had once been.

The Scarlet Goddess truly could not fathom where Anu might have gotten a Miracle Tool.

”A Miracle Tool?” Anu echoed.

After a momentʼs thought, Anu understood that the Scarlet Goddess must mean the Pouch of Woven Hope. He did not dare conceal it. ”There is, indeed. A spirit out of legend gave it to me.”

”A spirit?” the Scarlet Goddess asked. ”Will you tell me how it happened?”

Anu thought back carefully, then recounted the whole of it. ”The King of Ghouls, Akmanmon, fell upon our village. He wanted the power and the secrets that Lord Kurmis holds.”

”Lord Kurmis sent me then to the cabin at the edge of the Moonlight Jungle, to destroy every record of the old experiments on the Eye of Mutation and the Brown Ball Vine.”

”That day, once I had finished setting the cabin in order, I was weary, and before I knew it I had drifted off to sleep.”

As he spoke, Anuʼs eyes sank wholly into memory, back into that dream whose splendor no words could describe. ”In the dream, I saw a dreamlike river flowing above my head, and farther off, the sacred sun stretching out its sharp rays.”

”I had never seen a sun like that. It was so warm it felt like soaking in spring water. For a moment it even carried me back to the finest days of my childhood. And I saw a dreamlike river of stars, steeped in a weight and an age beyond any words. That place was truly...”

The Scarlet Goddess stared at Anu, frozen where she stood.

She was weighing whether the Lizard Person before her spoke truth or falsehood. Whether he had truly seen it, or was inventing it out of thin air. But in the next breath she was certain he spoke the truth, because he did not even have the standing to know such records existed. If Anu could know of it, then he had surely seen it.

Even if he had not seen it in waking truth, but only in a dream.

The Scarlet Goddess suddenly cut Anu off, a complicated look in her eyes. ”That was no river of stars.”

She paused a moment before going on. ”That was the Dream Starry Sea. And that sun was no sun, but the supreme Divine Artifact of Dreams, the highest Authority of all. That was the Divine Cup.”

”The Divine Cup?” Anu repeated.

”A Divine Artifact equal to the Mother Conch of All Things,” the Scarlet Goddess told him, ”the source of every law and every Seal Imprint.”

She lowered her gaze, and spoke as one who had lived through it all. ”In a certain sense, without the Divine Cup, without Seal Imprints and laws, civilization would sink into eternal darkness.”

Anu seemed to understand. In truth, he understood almost nothing at all.

It was like a man crouched in the grass, explaining to a night frog that every star in the sky was a burning sun, and that the distance between them was measured in light-years. The frog might know that a light-year was far, but never how far. It might know the stars were something wholly other, but never that a star was itself a sun.

Inside, Anuʼs heart was all but shouting. ”What? That sun was a Divine Artifact?” ”A Divine Artifact on par with the Mother Conch of All Things? Then it can be no ordinary artifact, surely!”

Looking at the stunned expression on his face, the Scarlet Goddess let out a sigh. ”Go on, then! What else did you see?”

Anu could only continue. ”A shadow came walking out of the sun. The light she gave off melted into the sun itself, until they seemed as one.”

Anu strained to recall her appearance, and could not. In truth, he had never seen her face at all.

”So I asked her who she was. I think she said that, long ago, people called her the Divine Messenger of the Creator. And that she still is, even now. She is also the guardian of the Dream Realm and the Divine Kingdom of Creation, and the keeper of the Divine Cup.”

Lost in the effort of remembering, Anu never noticed that above him, the Scarlet Goddess had swept several steps forward, emotion breaking across her face. Still deep in the images of that dream, he was struck all at once by a realization. ”Thatʼs right! She spoke of the Divine Cup too. I think... a messenger of the Creatorʼs Domain... then she must surely have been a spirit!”

He was about to say something more to the Scarlet Goddess when he found that she had already come down from on high, and was standing right in front of him.

The Scarlet Goddess studied Anu closely, this rather ugly Lizard Person, and watched him lower his head, at an utter loss. ”Did... did I say something wrong?”

Perhaps he would never understand what it was he had seen, or how great a being he had stood before. The Scarlet Goddess looked him over carefully. ”A spirit?”

The Scarlet Goddess wanted to laugh, but all she could do was shake her head, again and again. The laugh that escaped her was bitter, caught somewhere between laughing and crying. ”That was no Dream Spirit, Lizard Person Anu.”

”That was one of the most ancient of gods, one of the first deities who brought hope and light to the mortal world. The Supreme Divine Being, the Dream Sovereign.”

Vivien saw that the Lizard Person before her knew nothing at all, and yet he had lived through what all others could only yearn for from afar.

”The Dream Sovereign?” Anu said blankly. ”The main deity of the Miracle Temple?” At long last he had understood something. But to Vivien, his understanding amounted to much the same as no understanding at all. She had learned what she wished to learn, though the answer had gone far beyond anything she had foreseen.

She had thought the Lizard Person had come upon some bequest left over from the last era. Never had she imagined that what Anu received was a gift bestowed by the Supreme Divine Being. ”Near the Moonlight Jungle,” she murmured.

But she did not linger on the subject with Anu any further. She turned away and walked back beneath the giant Blood Mist Cup. At first a trace of dejection hung about her, but little by little, a smile broke across her face.

”To think that God has been in Suinhor all along.”

The Scarlet Goddess stepped away, murmuring something under her breath. Anu did not know who this God she spoke of might be. Such existences were far too distant from him. All he could truly know was his own world.

He had worries of his own, and his head was full of nothing but himself, the Lizard People, and the days to come.

And so, after hesitating a long, long while, he finally seized this hardest-won of chances to stand before a Divine Being, and asked the question that had weighed on him most of late. ”Great goddess! There is a question I wish to ask You.”

”You may ask,” Vivien told him.

Anu gathered his words, and then he spoke.

”You are enlightened. You are willing to seal a contract with the gods, willing to yield ground for the future of Suinhor and of every mortal. Then why is it that Your believers, Your own servants, have not inherited Your will?”

”Take Your Chief Shepherd in the mortal world, Menro. Why does he not follow Your will in full?”

”Everything he is doing may well stand in the way of this very cause.”

The Scarlet Goddess did not seem ignorant of any of this. In truth, she seemed to know it all already.

”Each person sits in a different seat,” the Divine Being told Anu, her voice calm and level. ”Each person stands at a different height. Each person is driven by different desires and different interests. Whether Wisdom Seed or wild beast, whether mortal or Divine Being, it is so for all.”

”I cannot demand that every soul of Suinhor be perfect, and I never would. I cannot require every believer to be flawless, free of every desire. I myself have never been perfect, and everything I have ever done has carried a purpose of its own.”

”Menro has united all the temples and consolidated the divine authority. He is fulfilling the mission that his age, and I, have laid upon him.”

Anuʼs mouth fell open. ”But... but... do You not think he is wrong? Everything he is doing now runs counter to the very future You hope for!”

The Scarlet Goddess turned her head and looked at Anu, who still seemed so terribly young. ”Standing where he stands, he has done nothing wrong. Standing at this point in time, he has done nothing wrong either.”

”As King of Suinhor, what matters above all for Morabi is that he can unite the whole kingdom and govern this nation well.”

”As a Divine Servant of the temple, Menro has done his duty, and he is devout enough, even if it is only a devotion as he himself understands it. That is already enough. At the very least, he has played the role his own age asked him to play.”

”As for the Contract of the Gods, that is the mission and the story of the next age. What has it to do with him?”

Anu raised his head, and all at once he understood the distance between himself and the Divine Beings. It was not only the gulf in power. It was the distance laid down by time itself.

The Scarlet Goddess went on. ”Morabi and Menro alike. Each carries out a justice that belongs to him, and cries out for an ideal of his own. They are believers, they are kings, but above all they are men driven by desire.”

”It is not they themselves who divide right from wrong. It is the seats they occupy, one as the voice of divine authority, the other as the voice of royal power. And the one you follow is King Morabi, who speaks for the royal power.”

”As for me, right and wrong lie in what they mean to their age, in the duties they carry within it. Their responsibility before history.”

At the last, the Scarlet Goddess looked at Anu and asked a question that struck straight into his heart. ”Anu! If you were a Divine Servant of the Temple of Fire Protection, would you still believe Morabi is wrong?”

”And if, for the Snake People, killing every last Lizard Person would save Snake People in their tens of thousands, if it would bring gain to every Snake Person alive, then would killing you not be justice?”

”That cannot be!” Anu cried out at once. ”How could that possibly be justice?”

But the more he thought on it, the deeper his dread grew.

Anu even found himself remembering the ghouls, remembering the words the King of Ghouls, Akmanmon the Second, had spoken before he was sealed away. ”You are next.”

The turmoil in his heart surged higher still, and he could not help shaking his head. ”How could ghouls count as people? How could ghouls ever be compared with us? We were Snake People from the very start. We were Snake People once.”

”The right and wrong you long for,” the Scarlet Goddess said, ”is not the right and wrong of others at all.”

A nameless shock ran through Anu. Something seemed to be crumbling before his eyes, and at the same time, it was as though a whole new world were opening in its place.

”Are even Divine Beings driven by desire? Do even Divine Beings have a right and wrong of their own? Do the gods, too, have their own ground on which they stand?”

”Of course,” the Scarlet Goddess said.

”The God of Demon Spirits speaks for the Demon Spirit race. The God of Desire speaks for the Alchemists. The God of Knowledge and Truth speaks for the Witch Spirits.”

And the Scarlet Goddess herself spoke for the Temple of Truth, for the Trilobite people. The seat she occupied was that of the Sage of Truth.

What she represented was only the justice of the Trilobite people, the legacy of Yinsai.

The Scarlet Goddess made no effort to hide any of it, still less would she deceive a Lizard Person with lies. But for Anu, these words were far too heavy to carry. He stood at the foot of the Divine Technique Kingdom, gazing up at the deity on high.

The boundary between justice and evil, the back and forth of right and wrong, everything he had believed to be true. In a single instant, it all seemed to come crashing down.

A question rose suddenly within him. ”Then who can speak for the Lizard People? And who would ever be willing to walk at their side?”

In the end, Anu left the Divine Technique Kingdom carrying shock, bewilderment, and doubt.

Blue River Port

On the Blue River, where the waters flowed in stillness, Vivien returned from the Dream Realm into the Magic Wheel House. She pushed open the window and gazed into the distance.

She had walked out of the Blood Kingdom of the Deep Sea not long ago, and now, it seemed, she knew where her next destination lay. ”So it is over there. The Moonlight Jungle.”

Vivien had long known that the Creator, God Yinsai, had already entered the mortal world. Godʼs Moon, hanging beyond the veil of the sky and hidden behind the curtain of the world, was proof of it all.

She had known God Yinsai was in this world, yet she had never known where to look for Him. And now, from Anu, she had the answer.

The necklace in her hand, the Mythical Artifact known as the Eye of True Knowledge, suddenly gave off a glow, and a figure appeared at Vivienʼs back. The Ghost Race spirit glanced at her, as though asking where Vivien meant to go.

Vivien spoke to the ghost of her memories. ”Do you remember when we were small?”

The ghost did not answer, yet Vivien murmured on, as though to herself. ”You were hurt so badly. You bled so much. Lester said you were going to die, and I was frightened out of my mind. I was truly so afraid back then. I pushed you along, chasing the legendary ship that passed across the sky, searching for the Witch Doctors of legend. We searched for so long. We truly searched for so long, and we never found them.”

”I thought there was truly nothing more to be done, nothing left but to pray to the gods.”

Vivien strained to remember it all. ”The things that happened next, I can no longer quite recall. I only remember that you were well again.”

The Scarlet Goddess looked back over her shoulder and smiled at the ghost. ”Perhaps, once, we truly did meet the Supreme Divine Being.”

Again the ghost gave no answer, and again Vivien was left speaking to herself.

The ghost said nothing. She simply hung in the air as she always had, snowflakes drifting and dancing about her wherever she went.

And at that moment, the Magic Wheel House stirred to life and set off toward the north. The Scarlet Goddess drew the ghost to her side, and together the two of them looked out through the window.

”Let us set out! Let us set out together.”

”To chase once more the legendary vessel of God that crossed the sea of clouds. To seek the Supreme Divine Being of the myths.”