I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 490: Saint Raphael, ʼAmbushedʼ

The Land of Light

Lomier set out on the difficult journey home with the Gravity Stone, but he could not fly at all. The whole way he could only stagger and wobble along, low above the ground.

Several days of that carried him only a few dozen miles, and at such a rate there was no telling how long it would take him to fly all the way back.

Just carrying that tiny thing, no bigger than a grain of rice, made Lomier feel as though he had a small mountain on his back. He even had to summon his Seal Spirit to help share the burden.

”This will not do. I must think of some other way.”

At first he tried every method he could think of to seal the Gravity Stoneʼs force field away. Nothing worked at all.

Before long, though, Lomier discovered something about the nature of the Gravity Stone.

It made everything feel impossibly heavy, and yet the weight did not come from the stone itself.

It came from the force field the stone gave off, a field pressing down on whatever lay around it, pressing down on Lomier himself.

”So it is not that the stone itself is heavy. It makes me feel heavy, and it makes everything around it grow heavy.”
Understanding broke over Lomier, and a wholly new method came to him at once.

He spun a thread out of spiritual power and kept himself well clear of the Gravity Stoneʼs range, hauling the stone up into the sky like that. Its force field could never reach his own body, and he flew on toward the distance.

In this way, Lomier finally managed to fly home with the Gravity Stone in tow.

He crossed the whole western Land of Light along the way, and winged people and the traces of civilization began to appear around him once more.

Lomier had returned to the Matale Principality of the winged people.

He made straight for the principalityʼs capital. He had a few doubts and questions, and that peculiar demon spirit might have the answers.

The winged people of this city, perched high atop its mountain peak, had been unusually busy and lively of late. Craftsmen and ability users had gathered here in crowds from cities all across the land, and even winged ability users from the Good News Kingdom had come, drawn by its reputation.

They had all come to witness the metal angel from foreign lands forging an artifact.

To the winged people, a divine beingʼs blessed one was simply an angel.

After all, they had no other name for such a being.

Word that he meant to forge a third-rank artifact in public had sent many of them rushing here.

An artifact of that rank would stand as a nation-guarding treasure for any of the winged nations, on par with the Matale Principalityʼs own third-rank stone demon.

Set beside a third-rank stone demon, a third-rank artifact was plainly rarer and more precious.

”Is the magic gold done smelting yet? The Grand Duke said itʼs got to be finished this month, didnʼt he?” someone shouted. Inside the cityʼs towering extraordinary furnace, spirit flames roiled upward, while the winged people below worked the wind and drove it into the fire.

”Is the extraordinary material sorted and processed? Has all the spiritual activity been cleaned out of it? Master Rayʼs already given us the method himself. This is a real secret technique, so every one of you had better throw everything youʼve got at it, and pay the master back.” Elsewhere, in a workshop, crowds of ability users were hard at work on extraordinary materials, stripping the spiritual-power activity out of substances that had once carried all manner of tangled powers.

”Word is Master Ray means to use these extraordinary materials to inscribe a Seal Imprint?” At the mention of a Seal Imprintʼs power, a murmur ran at once through everyone present.

”That metal angel from some foreign land, they say he knows all sorts of Seal Imprints.” Talk like that was as good as saying he commanded many Laws, and every ability user who had come here wanted to see the power of these other Seal Imprints for themselves.

The moment Sky Messenger Lomier arrived, the bells high above the city rang out once more.

Both Mataleʼs current Grand Duke and the former Grand Duke, Ose, came out to receive him in person.

”Lord Lomier.”

Flying down, Lomier took in the stir running through the city, then asked Ose at once how Ray had been getting on of late.

At the estate the preparations were all but complete, yet the nearer the moment of forging came, the more hollow Ray felt inside.

Some nagging unease sat in his chest, and it left a faint trouble on his face.

Whole days he spent bent over books in his room, running through his preparations again and again, or turning one particular problem over and over.

The problem was his Round Earth Theory. One crucial piece of it had still never been proven beyond doubt.

If the world was a sphere, was there truly some force that could hold everything, even the earth itself, together?

Sometimes, in the privacy of his own mind, he even asked himself, ”Is it possible Iʼve gotten this wrong?”

Round and round the thought went, without end, and it left him anxious.

A map could be imprecise. It could leave whole stretches blank. Failings like those could always be corrected later, the blanks filled in.

But if the model of the world itself was wrong, then the very starting point of the whole journey was wrong, and nothing that came after could ever set it right.

It was just then that Lomier arrived at the estate. Seated beneath the huge papier-mache globe of a map, Ray turned his head toward the sky messenger, whose bearing was as sacred and beautiful as ever.

He got to his feet and asked, a note of hope in his voice.

”Sky Messenger, youʼre back?”

At once he realized he had just said something pointless, and went straight to the question that mattered most to him.

”Did you find it?”

What he meant, of course, was whether Lomier had found the meteor.

Lomier nodded, but told Ray, ”I have found something. Only it is not fitting to show it here.”

Lomier was worried that bringing the Gravity Stone out here might damage something in the room.

Only once they had reached open ground did Lomier finally summon the Gravity Stone down from high above.

Ray studied the rice-sized stone that had dropped out of the sky, curious.

”This is the meteor from before? And itʼs only this small?”

No sooner had the words left his mouth than a powerful force fell over everyone there.

Ose dropped straight toward the ground in an instant, their wings unable even to beat, until Lomier shoved the stone back up high and its gravity field no longer weighed down on the three of them.

Ray was astonished.

”Something that small, and thereʼs this much power in it.”

Sky Messenger Lomier told Ray and Ose, ”Its name is the Gravity Stone!”

Ray turned the name over on his tongue, and the more he repeated it, the more interesting those two words became.

”Gravity!”

”Gravity!”

Insight sparked across Rayʼs gem-set eyes, and the metal puppet grew so excited that he could not stop waving his arms about.

”Thatʼs right. Thatʼs the name, exactly.”

”Gravity, laid upon everything there is. The Great Law that holds this world together.”

”Itʼs a force no one can see, and yet thereʼs nowhere it isnʼt.”

”Itʼs not that we never noticed it. Itʼs that it had become part of our very existence, a law of the world so ordinary we never gave it a thought.”

”Thatʼs why we overlooked it. But thereʼs no doubt about it. Itʼs one of the most important Laws this world has.”

With Lomierʼs arrival, the Gravity Stone had confirmed Rayʼs own theory beyond any doubt.

Ray rushed forward, and as he studied that rice-sized stone up close, the greatest doubt and worry weighing on his heart finally came undone.

”Its power is exactly what I imagined.”

Ray looked at Lomier and spoke with the utmost seriousness.

”This is a Law of the world.”

”A stone born beneath a Law of the world.”

”Without it, we might have spent a very long time getting here, and we might never have sensed this secret at all.”

”Thank you, Lomier. Youʼve unraveled a mystery and a doubt I was carrying in my heart.”

Dimly, Lomier could understand the feeling in Rayʼs heart. It was much like what he himself had felt watching that great star rise beyond the vault of the heavens.

Lomier had no way to put the Gravity Stone away, and seeing it, Ray gave him something.

It was a peculiar box. It opened only a narrow crack, and even that crack was part of the ritual sequence needed to activate it.

Lomier took the box in his hands.

”What is this?”

”Itʼs an ordinary storage artifact,” Ray told him, ”but it can put the Gravity Stone away for you. At least then you wonʼt have to haul it about like that.”

Storage artifacts had come into being only after the Storage Nymph, Saint Raphael, walked among mortals, and this was the first the sky messenger had ever heard that such a marvelous thing existed in the world.

Lomier activated the ritual inscribed on it. The box cracked open a narrow gap, a beam of light shot out, and the Gravity Stone was drawn inside.

When he opened it again, the Gravity Stone reappeared inside, whole as before.

Shock filled Lomierʼs face. He looked at Ray.

”A thing as precious as this, and you would truly give it to me?”

”A plain box like this hardly counts as precious,” Ray told Lomier.

”On Ruhe Beast Island itʼs a fairly common storage artifact. Take this one. Itʼs got no more than ten years of use left in it, and once those ten years are up, the dimensional space itʼs anchored to will shatter and itʼll stop working altogether.”

”A step up from that is a storage pouch. The materials that go into a pouch are far more precious, and itʼs easier to carry as well.”

”Past that youʼve got storage scrolls, and storage rings and bracelets too.”

”And of course the permanent storage artifacts are the most precious of the lot.”

”Only most artifact makers canʼt bear to make one of those permanent storage artifacts, and most of them wouldnʼt have the first idea how.”

”And apart from certain inherited relics, or something meant to hold an item of the utmost importance, nobody can bear to use one anyway. It costs far too much to make.”

That an ancient puppet demon spirit would use the word ”expensive” at all told everyone present roughly what kind of price they were talking about.

From this one storage artifact alone, Lomier could see how far extraordinary power had come to flourish on Ruhe Beast Island.

He genuinely did need something like this, so he stopped refusing.

”Then you have my deepest thanks.”

In the time that followed, Ray was no longer hesitant, no longer lost.

The next day, he announced that he would forge the artifact.

Nearly every winged person in Mataleʼs capital had gathered before Ray so much as appeared, and no small number of winged ability users could be seen among them.

For the moment they stood among the crowd like every other winged person there, with nothing to mark them apart.

Some stood in the square, others stood on the rooftops or hovered low in the air, and every gaze was fixed on the center of the square.

The moment Ray arrived he wasted no more words and went straight into forging the artifact.

He worked mainly with magic gold as the skeleton and with Abyssal Bone Demon bone powder as the main body, forging out the primary structure.

Then, handling his materials the way an alchemist would, he fused more than a hundred kinds of extraordinary material together to forge the Seal Core.

Last of all, with a Witch Spiritʼs methods, he traced the map lines and the formation lines across its surface.

In a sense, Rayʼs whole way of forging an artifact gathered up the very best of the old ways and the new.

It also stood at the very highest level an ordinary artifact maker could ever hope to reach.

Watching Rayʼs practiced hands at work, the winged people who had traveled so far to be here stood stunned.

It was not only that the techniques and methods Ray used ran so far beyond them that they could make no sense of what they were even seeing. What shocked them still more was that Ray was actually willing to lay skill this masterful out in the open for them to watch.

Some of the core secret techniques lay beyond their ability to learn. Even so, Ray had shown the winged ability users and artifact makers a correct path forward, and to them that was worth even more than a few core techniques, since it meant the whole history of winged artifact-forging was about to leap a generation ahead.

None of them could have imagined this happening. Whatever house possessed a technique like this would surely have guarded it jealously and let no one so much as glimpse it, since it was the kind of secret that could spark a war on its own.

But then they remembered that the man before them was a divine beingʼs blessed one, and all at once it made perfect sense.

”Heʼs actually forging it right out in front of everyone.”

”A Seal Core. The very technique for forging a Seal Core, and heʼs just letting us watch it?”

”What Seal Imprint even is that?”

”No idea. But a forging method like that has to work on a Wind Seal Imprint as well.”

Before long, Ray had finished forging the artifactʼs main body and smelting its Seal Core.

The moment the two were joined into one, the Seal Imprintʼs power could at once be seen radiating out from within the artifact, gathering into a crushing pressure.

It was then that Ray brought out a bolt of cloth.

A map had been drawn across it, along with mysterious lines and patterns.

Ray wrapped the cloth around the sphere, and it caught fire on its own, crackling as it burned.

But alongside the flames, warped currents of extraordinary spirit-light surged and churned.

A powerful sealing force appeared, and the ritual formation, laid out in two overlapping layers across the square, pressed down from above.

Sizzle sizzle!

The cloth spun by the Silk-Weaving Spirit Insect burned steadily away to nothing, but the extraordinary power within it, and the pattern drawn across it, printed themselves onto the sphere beneath, vivid with bright color.

At last, with this final step, the artifact was finished.

It was a spherical divine artifact set on a base, the sphere itself free to turn in any direction.

A roar of cheering broke from the crowd at once. Everyone applauded Ray, and the sound of it thundered like a storm.

No small number of them even bowed where they stood, to thank Ray for his generosity.

Mataleʼs former Grand Duke, Ose, came walking over as well.

”This is astonishing beyond words. We never once imagined that the forging of an artifact held so many techniques.”

Even Ray felt a little awkward with a crowd this size watching.

”This is the ancient method of artifact-making. Alchemy is whatʼs mainstream nowadays.”

”Is that because their method is the better one? The more powerful one?” Ose asked.

”Not necessarily,” Ray said.

”But their threshold is a good deal lower.”

”An alchemist can pick up any first-rank servant at random, an apprentice even, and with the power of the Lamp of Covenant and the Fire of Desire, they can start forging an artifact.”

”And if a first-rank alchemist is skilled enough, they even stand a chance of breaking past their own limits and forging a second-rank artifact.”

”But the old method of artifact-making can hardly manage anything of the sort.”

”So the old arts of artifact-making probably wonʼt be driven out altogether. But nothing is going to stop alchemists and alchemy from becoming the mainstream of this world.”

Ose more or less understood. It called to mind the very things they had watched happen while ruling this nation.

One thing replaces another not necessarily because itʼs better, but because itʼs cheaper.

Ose looked toward the artifact that had just come into being.

”Does it have a name?”

”The Globe,” Ray told Ose.

”Thatʼs the name I gave it.”

”It was born out of my Round Earth Theory, so the name suits it exactly.”

The Divine Artifact Globe had come into being.

On the Divine Cup within the Divine Kingdom of Creation, one more entry appeared.

【Divine Artifact: Globe】

【Sequence Number 485】

【Ability 1 Map Record: It senses all terrain information in its surroundings and records it, and can also be amended by others through a Brand. It is a map that continually perfects itself.】

【Ability 2 Unerring Navigation: It holds the power to calculate its own position from the angle of the sun, the angle of the stars, and other surrounding factors. It can dispel most common forms of confusion that lead one astray, and whoever holds it will never lose their way.】

【Ability 3 Sun-Chasing Spirit: Sealed within the Globe is a Seal Spirit. Even without a master, it will still press onward, following the sunʼs path, exploring this world.】

Ray walked over to the artifact he had just made and reached out to touch it.

The instant his hand met the Globe, the sphere dissolved into a beam of light and enveloped Rayʼs whole body.

For some reason it suddenly darted up onto Rayʼs head, settling there like a hood pulled snugly over his skull.

His face happened to sit right at its surface, and the change left him standing there utterly bewildered.

”...?”

”What just happened?”

Ray found himself remembering the last artifact he had forged, that special aircraft he had built.

Unfortunately, the aircraft had gone down into the Black Storm the moment it was finished.

Still, once that artifact had been completed, he, Number One Ray, along with Number Two and Number Three, had been mounted together inside it and made into a single whole.

Now this newly forged artifact of his had actually leapt onto him of its own accord. All at once, Ray understood something.

”Demon Spirits and artifacts share a natural affinity. Could that be pointing to the road of power the whole demon spirit race will walk in time to come?”

The Sky-High Estate

Rayʼs Globe sat off to one side. Behind him, Number Three, the Big-Head Demon Spirit, appeared to be sleeping, while over at the window Number Two, the Kite Demon Spirit tethered on its string, drifted back and forth on the wind.

As an ancient puppet Demon Spirit, Ray possessed something like an eternal form, but what carried from life to life was only his shell, still the very one forged more than two hundred million years ago, and the single consciousness shared by every version of him. Everything else about him had to be built up fresh again in every lifetime.

But that had never really been a problem for Ray. This lifetime too, he had cultivated his way swiftly back to the very peak of the third rank, and from here breaking through to Apostle seemed only natural.

And yet, having come this far, he found himself stuck all the same.

Demon Spirits had long since stopped taking the form of the People of the Abyss. They had transformed into an entirely new form altogether, one bound to the Demon Spirit Pyramid.

The old Art of Godʼs Grace no longer suited their power completely, and finding an entirely new Art of Godʼs Grace had become inevitable.

Sitting at his table, Ray spoke up all at once to his two companions.

”Number Two, Number Three, I think Iʼve found the steps for a demon spirit to become Divine Grace.”

First-Era Apostles were also known as Godʼs Grace Priests, and Ray still slipped into calling them that out of habit sometimes.

Number Three finally lifted their head, voice a droning hum.

”Oh, Ray, are you finally going to be an Apostle?”

The tethered kite flew back and settled at the window.

Their voice was light and airy.

”Ray, what kind of Apostle do you want to be?”

”The way I see it, the new Art of Godʼs Grace should draw a demon spiritʼs potential out to its very limit,” Ray told Number Two and Number Three, excitement running through his voice.

”And where weʼre strongest is our affinity with artifacts. Itʼs how unlike anything else our bodies are.”

”We can even plug an artifact straight into our own bodies and use it as an extension of our power.”

”So if we want to become Godʼs Grace Priests, the first thing to do is design a large composite artifact, one we actually want to build.”

”Then, much the way weʼd make any artifact, we take ourselves for the material and forge ourselves into that large composite artifactʼs foundational core. That would be our Mythical Organ.”

”Then we take other artifacts as plug-ins, extensions of our own mental domain, and mount them onto that core, until at the end of it weʼve built an artifact on an enormous scale.”

Ray went on laying his idea out, unable to stop.

”And it doesnʼt stop there. The whole demon spirit race could even invite other demon spirits in to build a large composite artifact together.”

”The moment our powers join, every companionʼs strength gets driven to its very strongest.”

”And so long as we all pull together with one heart, there is nowhere in this world that could halt our steps.”

At last, Ray looked toward the Kite Demon Spirit.

”Number Two, Number Three, Iʼm setting aside a place for the two of you, in both my mental domain and my large composite artifact.”

”From here on weʼre tied together for good, and weʼll never come apart.”

”Are the two of you willing?”

The Kite Demon Spirit told Ray, ”Ray, werenʼt you going to go to the sun? I want to go too.”

”Until the day we reach the sun, Iʼll be right there at your side.”

Ray flopped down against the window.

”Oh, so once we fly all the way to the sun, youʼll leave?”

The Kite Demon Spirit spun in a lazy circle.

”Thatʼll depend on whether youʼve turned up some even greater dream by then.”

Ray thought it over for a moment. Honestly, he could not imagine any dream greater than this one.

Number Three, the Big-Head Demon Spirit, scratched at their own big head.

”Whatever you say goes, Ray.”

They could not be bothered to think it through. Whatever came, they would follow Ray.

His companionsʼ support secured, Ray threw himself at once into a feverish design of his future great composite artifact.

”I have to design and build a large composite artifact, and this time I have to make it big enough. Even if it isnʼt big enough now, one day it will be.”

”It has to fly, and fly far, far away, and fly high, high up into the sky.”

Ray lifted his Globe and gave it a shake above his head.

”The Globe comes along too, mounted right on top.”

Then he pointed at the Kite Demon Spirit.

”Number Two, youʼll always be my helmsman, my lookout.”

Then he pointed to the Big-Head Demon Spirit.

”Number Three, youʼll always be the gunner of Rayʼs adventure team.”

Finally Ray tilted his head back and rapped his knuckles against his own iron skull, and it gave off a hollow clanging sound.

”Thereʼs still no end of hardship and danger between us and our goal. But that doesnʼt matter.”

”Our adventure team will never disband.”

The Divine Kingdom of Creation, Storage Spirit Realm

Saint Raphael was no longer the only storage nymph in this spirit realm standing by the sea. One after another over time, a handful of other wood nymphs had chosen the path of storage as well, and had moved their rainbow trees in to join her here.

The new storage nymphs had joined their own spirit realms to Saint Raphaelʼs, and the whole realm now looked especially vast, holding several towering rainbow trees at once.

Still, among mortals the best known storage nymph remained Saint Raphael, and most storage-artifact makers went on chanting her name and praying to her before setting to work.

It was easy to see, then, that Saint Raphaelʼs rainbow tree here was the largest of them all, and that the flowers on it bloomed the most abundantly.

Every flower on a storage nymphʼs rainbow tree represented one small dimensional space.

Every one of them meant that, somewhere among mortals, a storage artifact had just come into being.

Every day, Saint Raphael came to stand beneath her flowering tree, looking up over the abundant blossoms of her rainbow tree, counting them one by one.

It felt, for all the world, like a miser counting every last gold coin in his own vault.

But this was the happiest part of Saint Raphaelʼs every day, and she never once tired of it.

”One!”

”Two...”

Today, though, Saint Raphael had barely begun counting when she noticed something was wrong.

A whole stretch of her rainbow treeʼs crown of blossoms had somehow been crushed flat.

”Hm?”

Saint Raphael craned her neck back, tilting her head as far up as it would go, eyes fixed on the branches above.

She puffed out her cheeks and blew a few times with her mouth wide open, as though she meant to blow the crown of blossoms back into shape.

In truth, what she was really doing was straining to lift the rainbow treeʼs crown back up with her own will.

Whoosh!

But no sooner had it lifted than it sank right back down again.

Whoosh!

So Saint Raphael tried again at once.

But it still did no good at all.

Saint Raphael had no choice but to back off a little and take a proper look at the crown of blossoms above.

”Hm?”

She studied it from side to side, growing more baffled the longer she looked.

A whole section of her rainbow flowering tree really had been crushed down, its very branches bent out of shape, and from somewhere up above she could even hear a creaking, groaning sound.

Yet look as she might, she could not see a single thing sitting on top of the blossoms.

”What in the world is going on here?”

Saint Raphael floated upward, drifting through branches and clusters of flowers, meaning to see for herself exactly what was going on.

But the moment she rose up, a powerful gravity bore down on her.

”Ah!”

The power of the Ruhe Great God, Star of Death, yanked Saint Raphael straight down to the ground before she had the slightest chance to brace herself.

The storage nymph landed with a solid, jarring thud, so hard her backside very nearly split in two.

”My poor backside.”

”Who?”

”Who ambushed me?”

”The Hammer of Justice?”

”Was it you?”

”Thatʼs bullying, that is. I didnʼt do anything at all.”

Saint Raphael searched all around for her ʼcriminal,ʼ suspecting some wicked little spirit had come to torment poor Saint Raphael.

Afterward she even suspected the Hammer of Justice of slipping out of the Storage White Tower, but there was not a soul to be found anywhere. The Hammer of Justice sat inside the White Tower still, had not paid her the slightest attention, and had never once come out at all.

Saint Raphael rubbed at her own backside, thoroughly wronged.

She had not done a single bad thing. All she had done was count the blossoms on her own rainbow tree, in her own home, and somehow she had still taken a terrible blow and been ambushed.

”No, this wonʼt do. Iʼm going to hunt that villain down.”

At last Saint Raphael found the true culprit behind it all, tucked inside a single blossom of her rainbow tree.

”The power of the Life Myth?”

”Thereʼs something of a Ruhe Great God here?”

Saint Raphael puffed out her cheeks.

These mortals down below were simply too wicked, dreaming up a scheme like this just to ambush the great storage nymph.

”Just who was it?”

”The nerve, leaving a mythical item lying about like this!”

Saint Raphael made up her mind on the spot. From now on, there would have to be a rule.

”From now on, nothing that holds the power of myth goes into an ordinary storage artifact. Not ever again.”

”It can only go into a permanent storage artifact, and it stays in the Storage White Tower.”

”If anyone dares put a mythical item in one, the storage artifact and its dimensional space will break apart on the spot. And donʼt any of you think you can use my rainbow tree to carry the strain for you.”