I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 454: They Are the Children of the Divine King

Snow fell heavy over the Ice-Sealed Plateau, and the rolling mountain ridges lay pale and white beneath it.

A knife-edged wind came with the snow, blinding the way ahead until the very air seemed frozen into a hazy mist.

Yet into this desolate, deadly place, figures came one after another.

From the foot of the mountain the first Divine Blessed King, Alpens, climbed step by step, leaving a neat trail of footprints behind him.

At last, he reached the summit of the snow mountain.

Before him spread a vast frozen lake, stretching beyond the reach of sight.

The peaks rose beyond the sky itself. The whole world seemed to lie beneath his feet, and this strange frozen lake looked like a mirror set adrift in the heavens.

The Forbidden Zone of Death, Heavenʼs Mirror.

A mirage shimmered into being in the sky, and from within it a shaft of phantom light came slanting down. Out of that illusion stepped a figure, who came likewise to stand at the edge of Heavenʼs Mirror. It was Sukob, apostle of the God of Knowledge and Truth.

Almost at the same moment another apostle came drifting through the air on a magic carpet, unhurried, and settled into a steady hover a little over a meter above the ice and snow.
”King Alpens!”

”King Alpens!”

The two of them greeted Alpens first, then nodded to each other in acknowledgment.

Whoosh!

Flames swept across the sky and roared upward.

A richly dressed puppet stepped out of the flames, a long sword slung at her side, and only then did the fire begin to die down.

Sukob and Oran turned to look together. ”The Demon Spirit Queen!”

The queen of the demon spirit race nodded, though naturally no expression could be read on a puppetʼs face. King Alpens, for his part, had already fixed his gaze on the sword at her waist, and he could not hide the look of shock and envy that came over him.

”The Ruhe Sword.”

The People of the Abyss still had real depth of legacy. Even in their decline, something like this had survived to be handed down.

At the foot of the mountain, a great mass of vines came surging together all at once and took at last the shape of a woman in dark robes. The Earth Witch had arrived as well.

Last of all came a beast knight astride a wind lizard dragon, drifting through the wind and snow, swaying unhurriedly across the sky.

Anu felt as though the cold of the Ice-Sealed Plateau had all but frozen him solid. He landed atop the snow mountain, brushed the snow from his body, and only then climbed down, pulling his coat tighter around himself.

One after another the divine chosen, or those who stood in for them, arrived at the edge of the Forbidden Zone of Death, Heavenʼs Mirror. They looked one another over. Nearly everyone here already knew everyone else.

Only the Lizard Man Anu studied King Alpens and the demon spirit puppet with open curiosity. He had never before laid eyes on Alpens, that ancient Divine Blessed King, nor ever seen a being like the demon spirit puppet at all.

He even wanted to ask after King Osis, to hear how he had been of late, but no one else was speaking, and so the Lizard Man Anu did not dare open his mouth either.

Everyone was waiting for something.

Anu looked toward the frozen lake and understood. They must be waiting for the moment Heavenʼs Mirror opened.

It was said that whenever the moon stood at its zenith at midnight, Heavenʼs Mirror would open a gateway to another world.

That world below was the true Forbidden Zone of Death, a domain no mortal was permitted to glimpse. As for this seemingly terrible Ice-Sealed Plateau, it did not even deserve the name.

Anu gazed at the frozen lake and tried to picture what kind of world might lie beneath it.

”I have heard that what lies below is the sacred ground of the Most Ancient Race. The sacred ground of the gods.”

”There is a temple inside it?”

”It is called the Sky Temple.”

Oran and Sukob had told him as much before he came. The ritual to seal the Contract of the Gods would take place at the Forbidden Zone of Death, Heavenʼs Mirror, and the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline would in the end be enshrined within the Sky Temple in that forbidden ground.

Still, Anu found it hard to understand. If the gods themselves held this temple to be sacred ground, then who was it that the gods enshrined and worshipped there?

”A temple that the gods themselves worship at. Then which Supreme Divine Being is enshrined inside it?”

Anu guessed, dimly.

In all likelihood, it was none other than the true Creator.

He had once heard Lord Kurmis speak of strange encounters, of how the Feathered Serpent Kurmis had come by certain secrets inside the Demon Spirit Kingdom, secrets of the previous era, secrets of the ancient Creator.

The Life Sovereign was not the true Creator. She was merely the maker of the snake people.

The knowledge had shaken Anu to the core, and at first he could hardly believe it. But he grew, little by little, and came to know more secrets, until he began to believe that it truly was so.

Most of those gathered here likewise knew some fragment or another of the First Eraʼs secrets. Those born into this present era, though, did not know the Creatorʼs name, and what they did know of it remained slight.

Gazing down at the frozen lake that was Heavenʼs Mirror, most of them, like Anu, could do no more than guess at what scene lay beneath it.

But among them were two who had truly come from the First Era.

Alpens stood at the edge of Heavenʼs Mirror for a long while, gazing deeply down into it.

”The Sky Temple.”

He seemed to long, desperately, for a single chance to enter it, and yet there was no way for him to do so. Alpens knew exactly what the Sky Temple looked like inside. He had once even stood guard within its walls.

Instead it was the Demon Spirit Queen who spoke first. She used the Wisdom Language, and her question was aimed squarely at Alpens.

”Spoel Henir.”

”I have heard the Sage of Truth once entered the Sky Temple, and brought the Yinsai Scepter back out of it.”

King Alpens replied, ”Yes. Only after the Life Sovereign had granted permission, and the Supreme Divine Being had given approval.”

The Demon Spirit Queen gave Alpens a long, deep look, but in the end could not bring herself to say more.

The Yinsai Scepter was no scepter at all, but the walking cane the King of Wisdom, Redlichia, had leaned on in his later years. At first it carried no special meaning of its own, and in the hand of the second King of Wisdom, Yesael, it stood for little more than a remembrance of his father.

Then the Crown of Wisdom was lost, and everything changed. The cane began to carry a meaning far beyond the ordinary.

Yet King Redlichia had passed the Yinsai Scepter down together with the Crown of Wisdom, to the second King of Wisdom, Yesael. However one looked at it, the thing had little to do with the People of the Abyss, and it was not theirs to inherit.

So the Scarlet Goddess, Vivien, had reclaimed the scepter, and there was little more they could say about it now.

The others watched the exchange between the two of them, brief and over almost as soon as it had begun, and were left utterly lost.

None of them had understood a single word the two had spoken.

Anu, curious, asked, ”What were they saying?”

A faint smile touched Sukobʼs lips. ”It is a language of a certain kind.”

Oran kept his eyes on the frozen lake. ”Is it about the temple down below?”

The Earth Witchʼs gaze kept drifting, again and again, toward King Alpens and the Demon Spirit Queen. ”The Most Ancient Race. The ancient puppet demon spirits. I have heard they are a divine race out of the previous era.”

As they waited, the moon slowly rose.

The moment it hung directly overhead, the wind stopped short, and even the snow that had been hissing down all around vanished entirely.

It was as though the whole world had been washed clean. With nothing left to obstruct it, the moonlight poured through the clear air onto the frozen lake and the white snow.

For a moment, the entire world seemed to brighten all at once.

It felt almost no different from broad daylight.

Then something stranger still followed close on its heels. The instant that cold, clear moonlight touched the surface of the ice, the whole frozen sheet began to melt, as though spring itself had arrived in a single breath.

Slow at first, the melting soon accelerated, faster and faster, to the very limit of speed.

Not a single ripple crossed the lakeʼs surface. It lay so still that some hand of boundless power might have smoothed it flat, sealing the place off from any outside force that could interfere.

Yet the water did not reflect the sky above. Instead, it revealed an entirely different scene.

Anu saw, within the water, an ancient mountain.

A mountain that soared straight into the clouds.

Two steps forward, and he could dimly make out a city built upon that mountain, with a temple standing at its peak.

This was a mountain that carried the weight of ages and secrets within it, a Sacred Mountain where a Supreme Divine Being was enshrined.

The sheer weight of those years, the traces left by the faith of countless people, struck whoever looked upon it, in that very instant, with a force that left the mind entirely blank.

”The Sky Temple!”

Anu knew at once what it was.

The instant the ancient Sacred Mountain and the Sky Temple came into view, passage after passage opened in the sky above, connecting to the kingdoms of the gods.

The Blood Kingdom of the Deep Sea, the Sky Miracle Garden, the City of Knowledge, the demon spiritsʼ mythic domain, all appeared at once.

God after god appeared, each standing within their own kingdom.

Even the City of Knowledge appeared, though it had always kept its distance from Ruhe Beast Island. Polik had reasoned that at a time like this, at least, the Ruhe Great God would surely not cast him out.

It had not been long since their last meeting out on the open sea, and now the gods gathered together once more.

A slender ray of starlight descended between the sea of clouds and Heavenʼs Mirror, and the Messenger of the Divine Kingdom of Creation appeared as well.

Spirit Simila, a pack slung over her shoulders, looked out over the assembled gods, then down at the apostles, the trilobite symbiotes, the demon spirit puppets and the lizard people below, and broke into a smile.

”It looks like youʼre all ready.”

One after another, the gods bowed to Simila. Even the longest-lived among them could not match the one standing before them now.

She had met not only their teachers, but their ancestors before them as well.

”O Messenger of the Divine Kingdom of Creation!”

”We are ready.”

The spirit reached into her pack again and drew out that stone carving. It gave off a light so bright that no one could make out what was carved upon it.

She opened her hand, and the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline simply hung there, floating in the air.

Higher and higher the carving rose, up through the clouds above, until the gods ringed it round and held it there at the very center.

The great spirit spun once around and vanished into thin air.

She left behind only a single line. ”The barter is complete.”

Iva stepped forward then, holding his lamp aloft, its light spilling down from above the sea of clouds, and turned to face the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline.

”I, the God of Desire and Alchemy, swear this oath as Master of the Desire Divine System, witnessed by the supreme Royal Bloodline itself, and attested by wisdom without equal.”

”The age in which the gods divided their kingdoms according to faith shall become a thing of the past.”

”From this day forward, every person in the Land of Sunrise, every person in this world, shall have the right to choose their own faith.”

”So long as that faith does not violate the pacts and bounds agreed upon among the true gods.”

The Scarlet Goddess came walking slowly out of the Divine Technique Kingdom, a small child visible there in her arms.

There was no telling what race the child belonged to. She had been born already in a Godʼs Form.

”I, Vivien, and Anli, swear our oath before the Royal Bloodline. Every person of Suinhor, every person in this world...”

The God of Demon Spirits, Elena, followed close behind her. ”I, the God of Monsters and Demon Spirits, swear this oath here, witnessed by the Royal Bloodline...”

The Door of Truth shook violently, and the Ghost Polikʼs voice seemed to overlap with some other presence entirely. ”The lineage of the God of Knowledge and Truth swears this oath, as Master of the Knowledge Divine System...”

The four mythical beings had sworn their oaths, and now the turn passed to the divine chosen gathered there.

Sukob declared, ”I, Sukob, Divine Chosen of the God of Contracts and the Legal Code, swear this oath, that I shall abide by the pacts among the true gods, and never violate the Contract of the Gods...”

Oran spoke next. ”I, Oran, Divine Chosen of the God of Happiness and Wishes...”

Anu, too, reached out and joined with Kurmisʼs power and will, his body transforming on the spot into the shape of a feathered serpent.

A colossal feathered serpent coiled above the snow mountain, beneath the clouds, and its voice rang out. ”I, Kurmis the Feathered Serpent, Divine Chosen, swear this oath. I shall abide by it forever...”

So the Contract of the Gods was sealed, and the old division of holy ground by faith became, once and for all, a thing of the past.

Missionary work could proceed freely among the Divine Systems that had signed the contract, though for the time being it remained confined within the territory of the snake people.

The instant the contract was successfully sealed, the light upon the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline blazed up with a brilliance beyond compare, and a vast and mighty voice rose to encircle it.

It was speaking the very oaths just sworn, the very contract just signed by everyone present.

But in the space of an instant, it was drowned out by other voices altogether.

It was a cadence no snake personʼs throat could ever produce, chanting in the oldest form of the Wisdom Language.

”God said, I am alone and so are you.”

”Because of loneliness, God created Redlichia, the King of Wisdom, and because of Redlichiaʼs loneliness, God created the trilobite men.”

”Thus, the race began, and the Yinsai Kingdom was established from this moment on.”

”God said, I am the God who created you, and you alone are their king.”

They were the voices of yet more trilobite men besides, trilobite men long dead and long vanished, calling out.

The oaths just spoken were meant only to serve as witness. To the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline, the pacts and oaths these gods swore among themselves were nothing more than a fragment out of hundreds of millions of years, one more among the countless Wisdom Seeds that had wound their obsessions around it.

Beyond those oaths and hymns, other voices still lingered upon the carving.

”O Royal Bloodline, our eternal ancestor and bloodline.”

”The royal power of Sele shall never fade.”

”Starlight Xilong dwells forever within the Sky Temple.”

”O sons of the royal power...”

Countless voices gathered into one, and Heavenʼs Mirror became a sacred hall.

The gods themselves were dazzled by it. Some among them even found tears welling in their eyes.

In that moment it felt to them as though Yinsai still stood, as though those long-departed trilobite men were living yet.

Even the Second Era beings present sank to their knees against their own will, as though their bodies no longer answered to them, though not one of them understood a single word of what that voice was saying.

Amid that voice, vast enough to leave the mind reeling and the senses spinning, the stone tablet drifted down out of the sky, little by little.

At that moment, the Earth Witch, Metel, stepped slowly forward.

She knelt at the edge of Heavenʼs Mirror, pressing her joined hands to her forehead.

”O Ruhe Great God who guards the Life Sovereignʼs garden!”

”Your servant beseeches You!”

”Please, return the ancient sacred relic to the temple of days gone by. Let the godsʼ covenant be kept forever within that holy place of old.”

And the instant the stone tablet drew close to the waterʼs surface, light blazed to life in the Earth Witch Metelʼs eyes.

By their agreement, it fell to her to commune with the Ruhe Great God and guide the carving into the Sky Temple.

And in return, she would be allowed a single glimpse of the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline, the portion of it bearing the Ruhe Imprint.

In the midst of her prayer, the Earth Witch Metelʼs strange magic eyes pierced through the light upon the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline, and she saw what lay within it.

The image on the carving grew larger and larger, and within the witchʼs eyes it began slowly to twist and writhe, turning little by little into something real.

In an instant, her consciousness seemed dragged back into the primordial ages, back two hundred and fifty million years.

She stood within an ancient, weathered palace.

It was a palace built entirely from great stones of the Deep Sea, heavy, solid, and finely wrought.

It carried all the weathered vastness of the primordial wilds, and it spoke, too, of its builderʼs tremendous power.

She could not make out her surroundings clearly, but she could sense what stood all around her, a host of pale, half-formed outlines and shadows, shadows so ancient they seemed born at the very dawn of the world. Every one of them faced the same high place, kneeling in worship before some presence there.

She knew she had no time to spare, and did not dare study those shadows closely. She raised her head at once, wanting to see the high place within the palace, sensing that everything she sought must lie there.

But the instant she lifted her head, everything before her eyes turned pitch black.

The whole world began to warp and twist. Those shadows around her, ancient beyond all description, writhed and convulsed as though turning into black malevolent spirits, and the curse they loosed blanketed everything, coiling around the witch and dragging her down into a bottomless, dark ocean trench.

Rumble!

A curse from atop the Dream Starry Sea came rushing after her, swallowing her sight entirely.

”You must not look!”

”Die, die, die, die...”

”Die, die, die, die, die...”

She had not even seen anything yet. She had only raised her head, meaning to look, and already it felt as though she were about to die.

It was the ancient trilobite menʼs dream, there upon the Dream Starry Sea, that would not let her look. It was the shared will of the trilobite men that would not let her look.

In that same instant her body began to rot away, and even the divine tree planted at the foot of the Mountain of Lifeʼs Origin withered along with it, drawing the eyes of every snake person throughout the whole of Pence City, every one of them staring in open terror.

Within that illusory world, deep inside the primordial memory, Metel let out a terrified wail. Never before had she felt anything like this.

”I did not look!”

”I only wanted to see the imprints.”

Her mind could not withstand it. Her eyes, even so, had pierced through layer after layer of darkness and obscuring mist, and recorded some part of it.

Her eyes were no ordinary eyes. They were the magic eyes the Ruhe Great Gods had granted to the witches, the Ruhe Great Godsʼ own eyes upon the mortal world.

She felt the curse dragging at her, pulling her down, ever downward, into the darkness below.

As she fell, she caught a dim glimpse of the palaceʼs highest point.

A towering, majestic shadow sat upon an ancient stone throne, raising high the scepter in its hand.

It scattered supreme authority down upon the mortal world, and Ruhe Imprint after Ruhe Imprint fell with it.

Those Ruhe Imprints fell upon the other figures kneeling below, and the instant each brand burned into a body, phantom shapes representing the Ruhe Great Gods rose up one after another to stand guard at their sides.

Metel recognized what it was, and yet somehow it felt not quite the same.

”The Ruhe Imprint.”

”No. This is not the Ruhe Imprint.”

”This is... the Ruhe Great Godʼs Source Imprint...”

The Earth Witch Metel finally understood. That was the authority to command a Ruhe Great God itself.

Oran had told the Earth Witch Metel that the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline bore the Ruhe Imprint upon it, but he had never explained why those imprints were there at all.

And only now, at last, did she understand why a Ruhe Great Godʼs imprint would be carved into a sacred relic the gods themselves spoke of with such reverence.

In that primordial, savage age, a group of people had inherited these Ruhe Source Imprints, one after another, from some being beyond all imagining, and through them gained the power to command the Ruhe Great Gods.

Through those imprints they commanded the Ruhe Great Gods, and so wielded power beyond imagining, power that might be called the mightiest force beneath the Supreme Divine Beings themselves.

”Is this real?”

”How could anyone possibly gain power like this?”

”The Most Ancient Race?”

”Those divine races?”

The Earth Witchʼs mind reeled with terror. She could hardly bring herself to accept it.

But another name rose up in her mind, the name of this very stone tablet.

”The Royal Bloodline!”

”No. They are no ordinary divine race.”

Something became utterly clear to the Earth Witch, and all at once her terror and unease found their answer.

All of this had happened within a single instant.

By the time the Earth Witch pulled free of that ancient scene, the carving had not yet fallen into Heavenʼs Mirror.

Everything before her eyes finally returned to normal, yet the seven Ruhe brands upon the carving seemed to drift free of the stone and burn themselves into the very depths of her heart.

When the King of Wisdom, Redlichia, performed the Bestowing of Power for his sons and granted them their strength, he had done it one at a time, and not within any single continuous stretch of time.

But the first-generation trilobite man who created the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline recorded the scene of each of the King of Wisdomʼs descendants, arranging them all neatly together, as though every one had happened in the very same moment.

Even the likeness of the second King of Wisdom, Yesael, had been carved there alongside them, standing right at the Divine Kingʼs side.

Sustained by the Ruhe Great Godʼs tremendous life force, the Earth Witch quickly pulled through, and the half of her body that had rotted away slowly began to mend.

Then, at once, she took up her chant again.

”O Ruhe Great God who guards the Life Sovereignʼs garden!”

”Your servant beseeches You!”

”Please, return the ancient sacred relic to the temple of days gone by. Let the godsʼ covenant be kept forever within that holy place of old.”

She prayed to the Ruhe Great God, repeating the words again and again.

At last, little by little, she guided the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline down into Heavenʼs Mirror.

Everyone watched as the carving drifted slowly down toward the bottom of the water, floating away into another realm, another kingdom entirely.

It sank into that mysterious hall no eye could clearly see, and even the vast voice that had filled the whole world faded away, little by little, into silence.

The Sacred Mountain

A surge of power carried it onward, over the skies above the God-Servant City, through the gates of the Sky Temple, until at last it took its place among the other sacred relics enshrined within.

Within the temple echoed the prayers of the trilobite men, though now and again another voice could be heard resounding there as well.

It was the very sound of the gods sealing their contract.

And so, for the gods and their divine chosen alike, the ritual and the contract had come to an end. A new age had begun.

The Scarlet Goddess gazed at the Sky Temple, and a complicated tangle of feeling came into her voice. ”The carving that records the Divine King and the Divine Children has returned to the Sky Temple in the end.”

The God of Desire and Alchemy, Iva, answered, ”All things in this world decay in the end. Yet beneath the power of the Supreme Divine Beings, they shall be eternal.”

The gateway within Heavenʼs Mirror closed once more, little by little, freezing solid again.

One by one, the passages in the sky leading to the kingdoms of the gods slowly closed as well, and the gods withdrew from the scene.

Everyone else who remained gathered in close around the Earth Witch Metel.

Some looked at the still-shaken witch with open curiosity. Others found nothing strange at all in her having just suffered a backlash.

Oran stepped forward and asked, ”Lady Witch, are you all right?”

The Earth Witch remained kneeling just as she was, and turned her head to look at Oran.

”You know, do you not?”

”You know the truth of it?”

”Everything the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline records. Is all of it real?”

King Alpens looked at the Earth Witch Metel. ”You saw it?”

The Earth Witch Metel answered, ”I could not see it. I did not dare to look. But I saw the truth of the Ruhe Imprint.”

”The very first Ruhe Imprint, the Ruhe Source Imprint itself. So this is what it was.”

”How could this be?”

”How could anyone possibly gain power like this?”

”Who is the Royal Bloodline?”

”And who is the being that gave them those imprints?”

Alpens only said to Metel, ”Some things are not for you to know. Not yet.”

The Demon Spirit Queen spoke. ”There are beings in this world whose greatness lies far, far beyond anything you could imagine.”

The Earth Witch looked at the Demon Spirit Queen, her lips trembling for a long moment before she spoke.

”They are the children of some Divine King.”

”Children of the Divine King.”

”Is that it?”

”You call yourselves a divine race. Does your blood, too, trace back to that same Divine King?”

”That Divine King is the very one you all speak of, one of the Supreme Divine Beings. Is that not so?”

”Who is He, really?”

The Earth Witch seemed to yearn desperately for an answer, longing to know the truth of that primordial age, and the secrets of those great and mighty beings.

But King Alpens gave no answer. He only shook his head, then turned and walked away.

The Demon Spirit Queen looked at the dazed and forlorn witch. ”Some secrets are kept from you. That is how you are protected.”

Then the queen, too, dissolved into a ball of flame, and vanished from atop the snow mountain.