The Moonlight Jungle
Within the spirit realm, the Wood Nymphs, the Lake Nymphs, and the spirits had all gathered. The witch doctors, Mythical beings though they were, packed things away like servants, filing into a long line to carry them aboard the airship.
The Mythology Spirit Vellen stood beside the door like a mascot, waving down at the crowd below.
"Is God setting out already?" the spirits called up to Vellen in greeting. He said nothing, only nodded.
"And where's the next stop?" they pressed, but Vellen only shook his head.
"The Teleportation Gate aboard the Divine Being's vessel is random. No one can say where it will open next." It was the Wood Nymphs who answered, the ones with mand over space. They seemed to know a thing or two about that door.
Then a discussion broke out among them, on the power of the Teleportation Gate, and on Rosa's wish to build the Door Spirit Realm.
Anho City, Ice Temple
Hila was holding a painting. Upon it were a Lake Nymph and the Dream Vine.
Hila quietly admired her own work for a moment, marveling at how her skill with the brush had improved yet again. With the utmost care, she blew away dust that was not there, looking for all the world like the Mythology Spirit Vellen cherishing his own husk.
She conjured an exquisite frame and set the painting into it.
Next she opened a door of light. Beyond it lay the Divine Treasury of the God-Given Land.
Hila placed her painting inside, setting it in line beside another. That one depicted the Wood Nymphs and the Rainbow Tree.
The painting was finished, and with its pletion the Lake Nymphs were fully and perfectly born as a race.
But once she turned around, she frowned.
"Hmm... If they only stay shut away in the Divine Treasury, then no one will ever get to admire my work, will they?"
That would never do. It would be far too great a pity for such perfect works to lie shut away in the Divine Treasury.
She had, after all, spent several hundred years painting these two pieces, on and off.
Hila thought for a moment, then took both paintings back out of the Divine Treasury.
She opened another door. This one led to the Spirit Library.
She placed her paintings in the great Spirit Library, hanging them in the most eye-catching spot just inside the entrance, where everyone would be able to see them.
Now the great Spirit Library held not only Hila's writings, but her paintings as well.
Only then did Hila nod in satisfaction.
Hila rose and went out to the square before the temple hall. Under the fluorescent glow of the moonlight plants, the whole square was bathed in light.
The ancient fountain had run dry long ago. Only recently had its spring begun to flow again.
A figure stood beside the fountain pool, gazing at a plant growing within it. It was a Brown Ball Vine that Hila had planted on a whim, the specimen she had kept for parison before the Dream Vine was ever created.
Hila stepped up behind the figure. "God, it is time to set out."
Yin Shen had stayed here a while as well. In that time, the Lake Nymphs had at last been brought fully and perfectly into being, and the new Barter Emissaries had been born and set about their work.
Yin Shen nodded, but did not move.
There was still some time yet before the door would open.
Hila knew as well that the hour of the Teleportation Gate's opening had not yet e, so she took out her Magic Mirror and began to watch.
Scenes swept past upon it, most of them events unfolding in the mortal world, worth some attention.
Hila sat on the rim of the fountain pool, facing outward, recounting to God Yinsai as she watched.
"God, the gods of the mortal world are preparing to seal a contract. No longer will they divide faith by territory."
"Magical beasts? Potions?"
"God, a new extraordinary profession has appeared, one they call the Beast Knight. Its practitioners can bind themselves to a wild beast that carries extraordinary power within it."
At the last, as she watched on, Hila saw Vivien, and Anli, whose reincarnation had already begun.
"The Trilobite people are as devout as they ever were. They wish to raise the Temple of Truth again, and to restore their faith in You."
Yin Shen only said, "All believers are devout."
"What they are devout toward is only the god within their hearts, the god perfect and without flaw, the god they wish existed."
"I would sooner they remember their own ancestors than remember me."
Hila said, "They are, after all, the last descendants of Redlichia."
And just then, dark shadows surged across the sky, blotting out the glow the moonlight plants cast.
The shadows crossed the heights like so many winding pipes, and then a girl in red leather boots came tumbling down out of them, landing with a smack upon the rim of the fountain pool.
Shelly could hardly contain herself. She thrust both hands out toward Yin Shen and cried, "We're setting out! We're setting out!"
"The big fireworks!"
"The big fireworks!"
Yin Shen told her, "You may go wherever you wish. But you must abide by the rules."
The rules in question were simple. Wherever the door opened, that was where they went.
Or, if the door became a vehicle upon opening, then wherever its destination was set, that was where they were bound.
Shelly stuck out her tongue at Yin Shen. She no longer believed a word of it.
"Bleh! What rules? It's obviously just You going wherever You please, God!"
Shelly had recently discovered an interesting phenomenon.
Whatever God Yinsai thought of in His heart, whatever He hoped for, would quietly, invisibly shape this world that He had created.
His will was enough to overturn all things, including what mortals called fate, and even things that lived at the level of pure probability.
Perhaps none of it was deliberate. But even the stirrings of His subconscious were secretly urging the world on, in whatever direction lay within His mind.
And it reached down into the finer details too. Take, for example, the supposedly random Teleportation Gate.
It had e to mean that wherever God Yinsai, deep in His heart, wished to go, there the next stop would most likely open. What should have been a matter of pure random chance had bee, through His subconscious leanings, something very close to a certainty.
So now Yin Shen told Shelly, "You must follow the rules. The door opens at random, and once it has opened, there is no taking it back."
It felt rather like a grown-up who had already bought the food telling a child not to be a picky eater.
The food a grown-up bought was, after all, always the food the grown-up liked. And the places where the Teleportation Gate opened were, in all likelihood, exactly the places God Yinsai wished to go.
Once, Shelly had believed every word of it, and had been strung along for a very long time.
But Shelly was clever. It had not taken her long to see through the secret.
Shelly pouted. "We always go exactly where You want to go. I don't believe for one second it's really random!"
"God's will is fate itself! It's the law that can never be changed!"
Yin Shen did not answer. Much of this world truly was touched, somewhere in the unseen, by His consciousness. On that point there was no arguing.
Even if He had genuinely set the door to random, that randomness would still sway, now and then, beneath a passing thought or a flicker of His subconscious.
Yin Shen raised His head. "It is time."
Hila waved a hand, and a bubble lifted the remains of King Redlichia, carrying them adrift through the air.
Shelly, for her part, hugged the bottle that held the dream Polo had sent to Yin Shen, muttering on and on at His side without pause.
The pany left Anho City and the Ice Temple, making for the outside.
"Big fireworks... big fireworks..." Shelly marched along on her stubby little legs, throwing all her strength into every step, each stride stretched to its utmost limit.
"Let's go and see the big fireworks, O Creator God!" She wagged her head this way and that, all but glued to Yin Shen's side.
"Ah! Shelly wants to see the big fireworks!"
"O great God Yinsai, the next stop simply has to be the big fireworks!"
Hila walked along behind them, watching Shelly's muttering little display, and could not keep from laughing behind her hand.
They left the underground cavern and came out into the Moonlight Jungle, where one more surprise was waiting for Yin Shen.
Several little spirits sat planted in neat rows of flowerpots. There was no telling how long they had been waiting there.
The moment Yin Shen and the others appeared, the potted little spirits began bouncing along in perfect unison, hopping eagerly out in front to lead the way, shouting at the top of their voices, "Lava Mountain has the ancient Black Rock City! It has the Glass Temple of the Nine Great Ritual Temples! It has the most beautiful colored glass garden! It has..."
What Shelly was doing was not pleading. In truth, it was nothing so simple as pleading.
She was changing fate. She was rewriting the variables and the probabilities.
The way Shelly saw it, so long as she kept bringing up the big fireworks in front of Yin Shen, the next stop was bound to be Lava Mountain. So long as she kept reminding God Yinsai how wonderful Lava Mountain was before the door opened, God Yinsai was certain to take an interest.
And so long as God Yinsai wished to go, the door would open there.
Who said fate could not be controlled?
Look. Shelly had found the way to change fate.
Take the uncontrollable odds and variables of the Teleportation Gate's opening, and bend them, endlessly, toward Lava Mountain.
Shrink the chance that the next destination might appear anywhere else at all, and magnify, without limit, the chance that the next destination would be Lava Mountain.
Yin Shen and His pany came to the front of the spirit realm.
Among the dense moonlight plants the airship rested, already prepared, and before the spirit realm stood the spirits and nymphs gathered to see the Supreme Divine Being off.
The moment the Supreme Divine Being appeared, the spirits spiraled up into the sky with cries of joy, and the nymphs stood before the spirit realm, bowing with reverence.
Yin Shen boarded the airship. Everyone else stood behind Him, waiting for Him to open the door.
Yin Shen looked down at Shelly, who was staring up at Him with those big, rolling eyes, her small hands pressed together before her chest as though she were praying to a god.
Though in truth, it was less a prayer than a wish.
Then Yin Shen turned His head and glanced at Hila.
"Lava Mountain. It seems this era's magical beasts and potions were born there."
The word magical beast held a certain interest for Yin Shen. Perhaps it would be worth a look, to see how these magical beasts differed from the magical beasts of His own imagining.
The Dream Sovereign Hila broke into a smile. For Yin Shen to ask such a thing now was interesting indeed. It seemed the thought of going to Lava Mountain had already stirred in Him.
"So You have agreed after all, God."
On the surface, Hila's words seemed to mean that God had finally granted Shelly's plea.
But there was a second meaning folded inside them.
Lava Mountain lay right beside the Blood Kingdom. In the end, Yin Shen had agreed to see Vivien once before leaving for good.
As Hila saw it, deep in His heart Yin Shen did not wish for these last descendants of Redlichia to fade away entirely in this era either.
Lava Mountain, then, would likely be their last stop upon Ruhe Beast Island. Yin Shen had decided to see Vivien before He departed.
Yin Shen only glanced at Hila, and gave an answer that seemed to say one thing while meaning another. "Before that, I would sooner they remember their own ancestors. Their king."
His gaze calm and far away, Yin Shen gave the faintest shake of His head. "And not me."
Hila's head tilted a little, puzzlement showing in her eyes.
She could always read God's heart. This time, she had not entirely guessed what Yin Shen meant.
Yin Shen reached out and grasped the handle of the Teleportation Gate.
Click!
The instant the door opened, a power beyond all pare poured out along the handle. Dreamlike power in every color became a storm, a spinning vortex that swept over the whole ground where the airship stood.
A many-colored bubble closed over the airship, then drew inward and inward upon itself, carrying the airship away in the space of a blink.
The spirits came diving down out of the sky, circling round and round the place where it had vanished.
And the nymphs of the spirit realm, one after another, bowed themselves to the ground in prayer.
Far away in the east, a great vortex opened in the sea of clouds, and out of the many-colored light a dreamlike iron bird with vast wings condensed into being.
This time, the Spirit's Hot Air Balloon had taken the form of a great flying craft.
Inside the cabin, the Mythology Spirit Vellen, looking for all the world like an astronaut, made the announcement. "Next stop... Lava Mountain."
The moment Shelly heard it, she flung both hands high into the air.
"Ah~ It worked!"
"I knew it would work! I knew it!"
Shelly was certain her strategy had succeeded. Sure enough, all you had to do was pray to God, and fate itself could be overturned.
God was, in all this world, the mightiest wishing machine there was.
Shelly was overjoyed, spinning circle after circle around Yin Shen.
She even had her next prayer ready. A brand-new wish.
Something like, "Ah! Almighty God Yinsai, let the big fireworks erupt with everything they have!"
Eh. On second thought, that one did not seem to need God Yinsai at all. That one, she could do herself.
Yin Shen seemed to see straight through Shelly's thoughts. He lowered His head and told her, "My will may be able to change some things. But it is not the whole of fate."
"The will of a person, the freedom a person longs for, their dreams and their desires, the choices they make... such things do not bend wholly to my influence."
"I may be able to change the laws and bend the rules. But the true fate of this world is built out of the choices people make for themselves."
Yin Shen rested a hand on Shelly's head. "Just as your own will belongs pletely to you."
Shelly's little mouth fell open, her eyes shining, as if to say she understood.
"I get it! So now I can do whatever I want, because nothing can hold me back?"
Yin Shen wrapped an arm around her shoulders and stood there with her. "I cannot bind your thoughts. Your actions, however, I can."
A colorful, cartoonish house rolled on its wheels across the land, the great wind-up wheel at its back creaking as it turned.
All along its way stretched a road paved by a sea of red flowers, drawing a smooth red path between jungle and river.
Inside the Magic Wheel House, Vivien stood before the window. Behind her, an entrance opened into the Dream Realm.
Through it she could watch, clearly and at every moment, the life being nurtured within that giant Blood Mist Cup, alert to its every change.
Vivien turned her head toward the Dream Realm entrance, toward the interior of the Divine Technique Kingdom. "It still needs some time."
"But this way, Anli will hold that much greater potential once she is reborn."
"This life is of great importance. It will decide all that es after."
Even as she hurried toward the Moonlight Jungle, the Scarlet Goddess Vivien was quietly waiting for Anli's Reincarnator to e into the world.
Anli's reincarnation relied upon an egg of the Snake People. But this egg was one Vivien had made herself with her Life Ability, infused with Anli's damaged God's Grace Stone.
And at the same time, Vivien had set the power of the Eye of True Knowledge within it as its anchor, as the core of its Authority, the vessel of the Second Era's new way of reincarnation and of the Path of Wisdom.
From the moment of its birth, the child would be a born God's Form and a Reincarnator. The seedling of an entirely new extraordinary profession, its source and its origin.
Something akin to the Sky Messengers, the Witch Spirits, or the Alchemists.
Though in truth, the closest likeness of all was Duma.
Vivien had thought it through long ago. She herself had bee a Life Demigod, and could never again bee a Wisdom Seed. Everything, then, could rest only upon Anli.
In her design, Anli would be the new fourth-generation Sage of Truth. Which was to say, the first Sage of Truth of the Second Era.
In this era Anli would raise the Temple of Truth anew, and the new Temple of Truth, along with all who returned to it, would believe in God Yinsai just as they had of old.
It would be as though the Yinsai of old had e again.
Yinsai. The nation that held faith in God Yinsai.
Vivien had planned it all out so well. That was exactly why she longed so deeply to see God Yinsai.
She hoped to receive Yinsai's guidance, to stand in audience before their supreme God, to be granted the Divine Being's recognition.
Vivien gazed out through the window, expectation glowing in her eyes.
"God Yinsai! Creator, who brought all things into this world. You created life. Because of You, life came to hold Wisdom. Because of You, the world came to hold Dreams."
"Nothing of You will ever be forgotten, because we will remember always. The Trilobite people will remember forever."
The Magic Wheel House raced onward. Then all at once, Vivien sensed something at the window, and lifted her head.
The Magic Wheel House screeched to a sudden stop. Vivien stared wide-eyed at the sky.
"What is that? It feels almost like... the power of a miracle?"
Before Vivien's eyes, many-colored streams of light unfurled at the heart of the sea of clouds.
A colossal white iron bird broke through the cloud sea, revealing itself before her in a form that shook her to the soul.
Mythical power surged through the sky. The ripples of space flowed across the world.
The Scarlet Goddess froze for a heartbeat. Then, in an instant, she understood. "God's vessel... That is God Yinsai's vessel!"
She had never imagined that before she even reached her destination, she would lay eyes upon the vessel of God.
No words could hold Vivien's excitement. In a single instant she burst out through the window, being a streak of blood-light in pursuit of that vast white iron bird.
"God! God Yinsai!"
On and on the Scarlet Goddess cried the name of her God, like one gone mad, chasing the vessel of God just as she had chased it once, long ago.
The Scarlet Goddess was fast. But however fast she flew, speed had its limit.
And the divine vessel ahead of her seemed to be threading through space itself.
You might chase Him, and never know where it truly was at all.
You might race off in one direction, never certain that it was truly the way the divine vessel had gone.
There was only one way to catch Him, and that was for the Supreme Divine Being to stop and wait for you.
This time, sadly, the vessel of God did not stay for her.
She could only watch it go, watch the white iron bird drift on at its own unhurried pace and yet stride across space, until it vanished at the far end of the sky.
Everything she had so bitterly yearned for, everything she believed in, the ancient, everlasting Eternal Star she had chased for so long. All of it slipped away before her eyes, until it could be seen no more.
The Scarlet Goddess chased it all the way to the end of the sky, until at the last there was nothing left to see.
She knelt, dazed, upon the sea of clouds, staring blankly into the far distance.
She was in anguish, adrift, at an utter loss, just as she had been long ago.
"Why? Am I unworthy to look upon You? Or is there something I have failed to do?"
And on the other side, aboard the Spirit's Hot Air Balloon, Hila at last understood what Yin Shen had meant by "before that." At this very moment, Vivien had still not found her way back to what they once had been. She had not yet fully remembered the past of the Trilobite people.
Their Divine King, the sons of the Divine King, their ancestors.
They had not yet truly recovered the source of their Wisdom, or their own beginning.
They knew themselves only as believers of God Yinsai, as heirs of Yinsai, as the legacy of the saints.
But the Supreme Divine Being cared nothing for any of that.
In God Yinsai's eyes, they bore only one identity. The descendants of Redlichia.
At the other end of the world, Sukob arrived at a small prayer hall inside a Contract Guild, and prayed before the statue of the God of Knowledge and Truth.
High above, the painted divine kingdom upon the dome turned real, and its figures and rosy clouds began to flow.
The light of an illusory sea poured in through the stained glass windows, drawing Sukob little by little away from the guild hall.
In the instant his eyes opened, Sukob was already standing in the City of Knowledge.
In the distance towered the Door of Truth, vast and mighty.
It still looked scarred and battered, but it was in far better state than before.
One ghost after another appeared, each with a Book of the Witch Spirit in hand. They looked toward Sukob and nodded to him in greeting.
Sukob crossed the Cross Avenue of the City of Knowledge and came to the steps beneath the greatest of the libraries, where he found Ghost Polik. "Lord Polik."
Polik seemed to know already what had brought Sukob here. The moment he saw him, he spoke. "The Stone Carving of The Royal Bloodline is in the hands of the spirit race. The spirits have already placed it within the Barter Dream of the Lake Nymphs."
"But to trade for it, you must offer something else in return. The Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo."
"It is a stone carving, and at the same time a Miracle Tool, made by the hand of the Divine Messenger Polo."
Polik seemed to know this stone tablet, and to know it very well.
Polik held the Door of Truth, and preserved within it was the image of this very carving, the one named Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo.
Long ago, Anhofus had beheld the carving with his own eyes, in the days when he governed the Sky Temple.
Sukob asked again, "Then where is the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo now?"
Polik said, "In the First Era it was enshrined within the Sky Temple. Later, it was lost."
"And in all that stretch of time, only two ever governed the Sky Temple. One was Anhofus. The other was Xiao."
Sukob dimly knew the name Anhofus, knew it was bound to God Asai by a thousand tangled threads.
And Xiao, Sukob knew as well. Xiao was the Evil God of Original Sin.
He asked, "So this thing..."
What Sukob meant was to ask whether it now lay with God Asai.
Polik told Sukob, "It is not in God Asai's hands."
The answer surfaced in Sukob's eyes. "Then it is in the hands of the Evil God of Original Sin?"
Polik was all but certain it rested with Xiao. "Xiao carried off no small number of things," he said. "The Saint's Chapter of The Island of Mist. Part of the hidden treasures of the Sky Temple. The ancient inheritances of each of the Ritual Temples."
"But after Xiao chose to cross the eras, none of those things were ever found."
"Ruhe Beast Island is where the last era stood, and everything that once was lies buried here. In the last era he must surely have hidden them away by some means, leaving every one of those tools upon this continent."
"And by now, having woken in this era, he should have recovered a good number of them."
Just as Vivien, after her own awakening, had found her Magic Wheel House again.
In the age when the evil god ran rampant, that god had held the greater half of the world in its grasp. Which was to say, Xiao had held the greater half of the world.
His wealth passed all imagining. Beneath him followed countless cultists mad with devotion. And it was by means of those hidden treasures that he crafted the Divine Artifact that revived him in this era, The Destined Marionette.
Having said this much, Polik looked at Sukob and suddenly added one thing more. "Those are things left behind by descendants of the Divine King, and some even by the saints. They are beyond imagining."
"Among them lie objects enough to drive the very gods mad."
Sukob stood dumbstruck. All at once the task felt truly hard, and the meaning behind it ran far past anything he had imagined.
And the Scarlet Goddess's desire for the tablet of The Royal Bloodline was, perhaps, not so simple a matter as they had once believed either.
Sukob frowned. "This is being troublesome."
More important still, the Evil God of Original Sin had already sunk into slumber. Where would that evil god have left such things?
Behind the Door of Original Sin? In some place that no one alive even knew?
And had he, in this era, ever recovered the Stone Carving of Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo at all?
But Ghost Polik had one more thing to tell Sukob, and it was a clue of the greatest importance.
"Before Xiao went into slumber, he cast his servant, the ceramic figurine, down into the mortal world. If you can find it, you may find a trail that leads to Xiao's treasury."
Sukob pondered a moment. "The ceramic figurine... That creature is in the mortal world?"
It puzzled him deeply. How could a creature like that be down in the mortal world without stirring the slightest ripple?
By the look of it, some grand scheme was brewing.
The ceramic figurine was not strong. But its name loomed large, and in the mortal world its infamy was fearsome.
Among the Abyss Kings, there was not one it had not toyed with to within an inch of their sanity.
Then again, the ceramic figurine might be the plaything of the Evil God of Original Sin, but it was also the only existence in all the world permitted anywhere near him.
If anyone knew where the Evil God of Original Sin had put Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo, it was that creature, and that creature alone.
Before the great library, Polik turned and took his leave. "That is all I know. The rest is up to you."
The connection with the Door of Truth came to an end, and Sukob returned once more to the prayer hall in the mortal world.
Sukob rose to his feet with only one thought in his mind. "Now, how am I supposed to find this ceramic figurine?"
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