From Lava Mountain a column of smoke gushed forth, blotting out sun and sky, joining heaven to earth.
And at the foot of Lava Mountain lay Black Rock City.
The city stood with its back to that roiling black smoke. In its overall character it differed somewhat from other Trilobite Man cities, since here metal had gone into the building of every manner of structure.
Iron signboards hung outside the shops at every turn, and metal statues of every shape and size stood in rows down both sides of the roads. Along the roadside one could even pick out a good many tricycle carts the Trilobite Man had left behind in days past, worn and battered as they looked by now.
Strange pipes ran crisscrossing through the whole city, ritual formations etched along their lengths.
These were the pipes and barrier rituals by which the Trilobite Man had once drawn on the power of the volcano. They linked laboratory to laboratory, Miracle Workshop of Trilobite ritual to Miracle Workshop, each line built to serve some purpose of its own. Even now, strange wisps of smoke still curled up from those chimneys.
Wild, rugged, untamed.
Yet the place carried within it a strange sense of civilization all the same.
Along this very road the Supreme Divine Being's pany now walked, taking in the city as they went.
A Witch Doctor named Left Hand pedaled a tricycle cart. Perched on top of it sat Shelly, hugging her glass tank and urging the witch doctor on.
"Faster!"
"Pedal faster!"
"This is too slow!"
"Great Lady Shelly, I cannot go any faster. Any faster and it will e apart," Witch Doctor Left Hand said, helpless.
"Your servant's power turned back time and froze it to keep these old relics whole, but they were worn-out castoffs to begin with."
The words were barely out when a sharp crack rang out.
Crack!
The tricycle's shaft had snapped clean in two.
Witch Doctor Left Hand flew into a fluster on the spot, and Shelly burst out shrieking.
"Ah!"
"It's broken, it's broken!"
Then, amid cries that might have been terror and might have been sheer delight, the cart went careening crookedly down the sloping street until at last it vanished from sight.
That was the scene inside the city walls. Beyond those towering ramparts, on the cliffs facing the sea, the blood mist cups bloomed in a sea of red.
That crimson sea of flowers ran all the way to the edge of the continent, until at last it merged with the ocean itself.
Out on the water rose ranks of "islands" and "reefs," every one of them radiating a powerful aura of life.
No small number of rocks, some massive, some small, drifted through midair as though gravity had no hold on them at all.
Power radiated from the Lava Monster's kin, bending and refracting the air and the very light into countless shards of color, until the sky looked pieced together entirely out of stained glass.
Below, land ran seamlessly into sea.
Above, black smoke and a curtain of color drew a boundary of their own.
Here the two were torn apart and fused together at once, and the sense of collision was powerful.
The white-robed, black-haired deity passed on through the streets, and before anyone quite marked the moment, His figure stood atop the city wall.
He looked first at the crimson sea of flowers, and at the strange ocean and sky past it. Then He braced a hand on the wall and turned back to the steel city beneath its curtain of black smoke.
"It is rather unusual."
Hila, too, could not help remarking, "It is as though this place were the border between a divine kingdom and purgatory."
Along the passage atop the city wall came the clattering, clanking racket of the tricycle cart, drawing bit by bit closer to where God Yinsai and Hila stood.
Shelly, tipped over only moments before, had e chasing after them. The witch doctor had patched the broken shaft up well enough for the time being, and the cart could just about be ridden again.
Standing atop the cart, Shelly waved to Yin Shen and shouted, "God! Am I right?"
"I told You already! This place is so much fun!"
"We can jump down into the volcano's mouth! We can play in the weightless zone up ahead! And we can make the big fireworks set off fireworks just for us!"
No one was about to jump into a volcano. No one was willing to go playing in a zone where ceaselessly shifting gravity could tear anything apart with ease. And still less did anyone want to see this "big fireworks" she kept talking about.
Yin Shen watched the tricycle cart wobble past Him. Witch Doctor Left Hand kept its head bowed nervously the whole way, not daring to look at that figure. Standing this close to a divine being left it in terror, as though soul and flesh alike might melt away together beneath the sun.
Shelly, meanwhile, held her hand up high, as though asking Yin Shen for a high five.
Yin Shen, however, stood without moving, and to the endlessly excited Shelly He said.
"The first two, you may. The last, you may not."
Shelly puckered her lips into a pout. "Fine, then."
At once she pointed out toward the sea beyond the cliffs, at the boulders great and small adrift in the air, and said to Witch Doctor Left Hand.
"Charge down! Straight for the sea over there!"
"We can fly out there!"
Straight down off the city wall the tricycle cart went, crushing a path through the sea of blood mist cups, and shot clean off the edge of the cliff.
The sky out there was a zone of weightlessness, and into it Shelly went shooting straight. The tricycle cart drifted up into the air.
Whoosh~
Shelly's feet lifted free into empty air. She stretched out her hands, savoring the delight of weightlessness.
Things did not go quite as Shelly had imagined, though. The tricycle cart drifted only a little while. Scarcely a few dozen meters on, caught between two clashing zones of shifting gravity, it came apart pletely.
Crash!
The chaotic pull of gravity slammed into that transcendent power and tore the tricycle cart outright to pieces, leaving only Shelly and the witch doctor drifting there in midair.
The two of them spun beneath that curtain of color, weaving between boulders large and small suspended in midair.
And there, caught up in that weightless spin, she pulled out a sheet of paper, and a pen.
It was the list of destinations Shelly had drawn up before this journey began.
On the sheet where she had laid out her categories before setting off, she circled "big fireworks." Above it, beside the Sky Ladder of the God-Descended City in Thunder Marsh, a checkmark already stood.
"Reached the big fireworks, but not allowed to set off any fireworks," she wrote.
That done, she put her itinerary away.
Then something occurred to her all at once.
"Huh?"
"Where's my glass tank?"
Her glass tank, and the horseshoe crab living inside it, had vanished without her noticing, though it had plainly been in her hands only moments before.
She searched a good while before she found the horseshoe crab at last, lying on the slope of Black Rock City, half dead and baking beneath the blazing sun.
Somehow it still hadn't died.
Shelly snatched it up and shoved it roughly back into the tank.
"How could you just go running off like that?"
"It's so dangerous out there! And I haven't even decided what power to give you yet!"
The horseshoe crab flopped about inside the glass tank, looking for all the world as though it were down to its very last breath.
Could it have spoken, it might have said that the most dangerous place of all was right there at Shelly's side.
And so the Supreme Divine Being's pany settled in at Black Rock City, meaning to stay for what would surely be a "brief" while.
But on this particular day, an unexpected visitor arrived at Black Rock City.
Starlight fell from the sky, turning into a ribbon of light that settled over the crimson sea of flowers and passed in through the half-open city gate.
She sought Hila out first, and Hila in turn led her before Yin Shen.
It was the Great Spirit Simila.
The temple was a colossal thing, built entirely of metal and glass. Light gathered and refracted within it, and fell at last behind a massive divine statue.
At a glance, nothing of the statue's form could be made out at all. There was only endless light.
In its way, the scene recreated to perfection the image of the Creator, Yinsai, as set down in the writings left behind by the second King of Wisdom, Yesael.
Yesael, as a son of the Divine King, had likewise been able to make out nothing more than a silhouette beneath that endless light.
It seemed the shape of a man, yet also like an Eternal Star.
Simila knelt before God. On the pack across her back, the knitted doll still swung to and fro.
Yin Shen knew her. Simila was one of the very first spirits ever born from the Sun Cup Flower Sea, and among them, one of the more gifted.
A single glance at Simila was enough for Him to understand why she had e.
"You want the final volume of the Yinsai Epic. The volume that sets down Polo's story."
God's voice echoed all around, and yet nothing else stirred that Simila could hear. She did not dare lift her head to look upon the god.
Even so, Simila was not quite like the others who came before a divine being. Deep reverence she held, but nothing that could be called dread.
"O God," she said, "it is the final volume of the Yinsai Epic, or else the stone carving Lord Polo made with his own hands."
"I only need to collect one of those two."
"Why do you wish to collect them?" the Creator asked.
"I want them placed in the great Spirit Library," Simila told the Creator, "so that everyone remembers Lord Polo."
"The stone carving Lord Polo made with his own hands is down in the mortal world. On my travels there I came by the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline, so I offered it to them in trade. To this day, though, no one has taken me up on it."
"As for the Yinsai Epic, its first half is enshrined at the Sky Temple. But the Bone Book of the final volume, search as I might, I cannot find it anywhere."
From beyond the statue, endless light drew near, closing on Simila little by little.
To Simila, still bowed low, it seemed as though the whole world had drained of color and turned to white.
The Creator extended a hand, His white sleeve flowing like liquid light, and what He held in it came into view.
He brought out a Bone Book, the very final volume of the Yinsai Epic.
This was the first epic the Great Poet Tito ever wrote, the epic of the Trilobite Man, and it spanned every chapter from the age when the Trilobite Man departed the God-Given Land, down through the reign of every King of Yinsai, all the way to Queen Star's time.
Of all its chapters, the final volume was dictated by Queen Star herself and pleted under the witness of the Divine Messenger Polo, and it recorded their story as well.
Yet after Tito died, he had taken that final volume away with him, carrying it back to his own homeland.
So that final volume came to rest in Stan City, deep within the Star Night Mountain Range, buried in the tomb of Tito, once a saint of that land. There it stayed until God Yinsai retrieved it from the Star Night Mountain Range.
"You still remember Polo. That is truly a good thing."
"Of course. We have never stopped remembering him," Simila said.
Confirmation in hand, Simila was overjoyed as well.
"God, so it was with You all along!"
"No wonder I could not find it anywhere! Even the Magic Mirror had no idea where it was."
"It was as though it had vanished somewhere in the great river of time."
That figure wrapped in endless light drew nearer still and held the Bone Book out to her, the final volume of the Yinsai Epic.
Simila broke into a smile and took it with the greatest care.
"God, are You truly giving this to me?"
"It is not mine alone. It belongs to all of you as well," the white-robed, black-haired deity said.
"Let it stay within the Divine Kingdom of Creation. Place it in your library!"
So Yin Shen gave the final volume of the Yinsai Epic to the spirit. Perhaps this was a far better place for it to rest than to be carried on His person forever.
Simila could hardly contain her excitement. Then something occurred to her all at once, and she drew a stone tablet from her pack.
The Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline.
The stone depicted a scene within the Wisdom Palace, where the ancient Divine King stood wearing the Crown of Supreme Divine Authority, a scepter in hand.
He was the king of every Wisdom Seed, and all Wisdom Seeds bowed down before him.
Before the Divine King, his sons lifted their eyes in reverence.
Endless silver light coiled about the scepter and swirled through the palace, and to gaze upon this carving was almost to hear again the very first sound of the Divine King's Bestowing of Power.
On the back of the stone tablet stood the words the Divine King of Wisdom had bestowed upon his sons.
"I bestow my power upon you, and lay the Wisdom Ability upon your bloodline."
"The ocean and the abyss can no longer hinder your steps. The mountains and land are no longer the end of your path."
Simila, holding the Stone Carving of the Royal Bloodline, asked, "God, does my exchange with the Trilobite Man still stand?"
Yin Shen's reply sounded like an answer and yet somehow was not quite one. "You remember Polo. They too remember Redlichia."
Simila understood Yin Shen's meaning well enough all the same, and put the stone tablet away. "God, I understand."
The Divine Kingdom of Creation
Before the gate of the Creator's Domain many spirits and nymphs had gathered, gazing down into the Reflection Realm below.
It was the reflection of the gate, and the reflection of the world besides.
Around Wood Nymph Rosa's neck hung a peculiar key, long, its handle cut in openwork.
"Rosa!" Those walking ahead of her came to a stop.
"You're too slow!" Everyone was waiting on her, and everyone was watching her too.
"Hurry up and get over here! You're standing right in the middle today!" Borne along by the crowd around her, Rosa was ushered up to the very front. She was today's guest of honor, and every spirit and nymph greeted her warmly.
"Rosa, you're finally going to build your spirit realm!" Someone had called out the very reason they had all gathered here today.
In her arms Rosa held a book, its cover showing the gate of the Divine Kingdom of Creation with the Reflection Realm below it.
The book was titled Labyrinth, Door, and the Reflection Realm.
Wielding the Miracle Tool, the Star Key, Rosa had entered the Reflection Realm many times already. Even now, though, she had not fully unraveled the Reflection Realm's secrets, nor even those of the Star Key itself.
After so many trips, all the same, she had at last grown gradually familiar with how the Reflection Realm behaved.
What the book set down was her own understanding of the Reflection Realm.
Overhead, spirits flew circling around Rosa.
"Rosa, Rosa, lend us the key! We'll give you all sorts of things for it!"
"Rosa, what's the Reflection Realm actually like?"
"Is it fun in there?"
The little spirits were practically drooling over it. Beautiful that key was, and marvelous, and it held mastery over the wondrous Reflection Realm besides.
More than that, it was something Lady Hila herself had given.
Rosa clutched the key tight to her chest at once with her other hand and looked at the little spirits in earnest.
"The key is not something to be used carelessly."
"And the Reflection Realm is a dangerous place. You cannot simply wander into it."
Rosa launched straight into the contents of her own book, and once she started there was no stopping her.
"If the Dream Realm is a city with no up or down, no left or right, no normal space, not even any ordinary boundary at all,"
"then the Reflection Realm is the network of pipes hidden beneath that city of the Dream Realm. The shadow of the gate of the Divine Kingdom of Creation is the center of that underground network, and its core besides. Without the Star Key, it is also the only entrance and the only exit."
"No one knows where any one pipe leads. It may open onto reality. It may open into someone's dream. Or it may open somewhere else altogether, somewhere unknown."
None of this frightened those few spirits in the least. Rosa knew just how mischievous the little spirits could be, and so she told them at once.
"If you are careless and fall into one of those knotted little corners, a hundred thousand years could pass, a million years, and no one would ever find you in there."
That was enough. Every spirit dropped any thought of charging inside on the spot.
Still, Rosa added at last, "If the Door Spirit Realm is built successfully, I will let everyone use it as well."
With a round of preparations behind her, Rosa was ready at last to begin building her own spirit realm.
First, though, she needed to seek the spirits' help.
A handful of spirits, arranged for in advance, puffed themselves up like balloons and paraded out of the crowd in a deliberate line, making everyone clear a path for them.
"Make way, make way!"
"The most spectacular, most magnificent performance is about to begin!"
"Cheer for the greatest performers in all of history!"
On the little spirits came in their line, cheering for themselves, moved by their own performance, until they reached the center.
Then up into the sky they flew together, their golden robes puffing out into little points at the edges, all of them linked as though holding hands.
They spun rapidly in a circle, then poured their power down below, and colorful light went rushing outward.
"Change... change... change!"
Within that dazzling, kaleidoscopic light, something was being born.
Bricks rained down from the sky in a great mass, piling together, hardening into wall after wall.
Then wooden doors squeezed wobbling out of those walls one by one and spread endlessly along them.
Before long a labyrinth studded with countless doors had risen out of the ground.
The spirits let go of one another's hands at last, then knocked their heads together in midair and high-fived.
"A total success!"
"We're incredible!"
"We're simply the strongest there is!"
The other spirits and nymphs looking on crowded in at once, staring at the newly born labyrinth in great curiosity.
"It looks so interesting!"
"Is this the Door Spirit Realm?"
"The Door Spirit Realm needs a demigod before it can fully take shape. This must only be its rudimentary form!"
"Lady Hila gave the Star Key to Rosa, so Rosa can borrow the power of the Reflection Realm."
Rosa stepped forward and thanked the spirits who had helped her, her courtesy perfectly proper.
"Thank you all. When my Labyrinth, Door, and the Reflection Realm is finished, I will be certain to give each of you a copy."
Ever since Hila, spirits and nymphs alike had gradually taken to writing books, posing poems, painting pictures, and creating songs of their own.
True creators stayed rare, though, so whenever one appeared, everyone would crowd round to celebrate them, and they were treated as something like a celebrity of the Divine Kingdom of Creation.
And whatever creative work they gave away meant far more to the beings of the Divine Kingdom of Creation than any other gift could.
Here, after all, such things were the truly rare treasures.
"It's a promise, then!" The little spirits were overjoyed, and more than a little eager already.
"You have to give us one, for certain!" She had not even started writing, and already they were pressing her anxiously.
"Give us the very first one!" The little spirits were dead serious about it.
"And don't turn out like Lady Hila!" One little spirit let that slip without meaning to, giving away a certain Sovereign's chronic procrastination.
Rosa nodded to the little spirits, then went back to the crowd where the nymphs stood gathered.
Florrie, eldest of the Wood Nymphs, had e, and so had Saint Raphael, most famous of the Storage Nymphs. Florrie stepped forward and said to Rosa, "Rosa! We can begin!"
Rosa nodded. "We are ready."
Then the whole pany of nymphs ringed the great labyrinth and set about some manner of prayer ritual together.
Slowly, something came descending out of the sky.
It was a tall flowering tree in brilliant color.
Rosa's Rainbow Tree settled down into the very center of the labyrinth and took root there. Its colorful blossoms opened wide, and the petals drifted loose to spread into every corner of the labyrinth.
A ring of light rippled outward, enveloping the entire labyrinth.
A domain unfurled, and Rosa's power fused into one with the whole of the labyrinth.
This was only the beginning, though.
With the Rainbow Tree rooted inside the labyrinth, Rosa herself stepped little by little into that maze of a spirit realm.
Down the winding paths she walked, tangled so badly that a mere look at them was enough to make the head swim, and made her way toward the center.
And as she walked, the whole spirit realm was sinking bit by bit into the shadow of the Divine Kingdom of Creation's gate.
That black shadow crept up like rising water, gradually swallowing labyrinth and spirit realm whole.
The Miracle Tool, the Star Key, held fast in her hand, Rosa passed into the Reflection Realm.
The instant spirit realm and labyrinth passed wholly into the Reflection Realm, both were pressed to the very extreme, crushed down as if into a single point.
Then, like a strand of noodle dough, they stretched out to the furthest extreme, drawn out into countless jagged points.
Immediately after, they twisted together like a braided fried dough stick, passage overlapping passage, door crossing over door.
If the space of the Dream Realm could be described as space, or perhaps as a plane, then the space here was more like lines, and points.
At that moment, through all that warping distortion, Wood Nymph Rosa, the Star Key held fast in her hand, found the right path, and came to stand beneath her own Rainbow Tree.
She invoked the tool's power and authority, and in an instant stood connected to the whole of the Reflection Realm.
"In the name of the Dream Sovereign, Lady Hila, and by the power of the Star Key, I mand you."
"O Reflection Realm!"
"Lend your power to me. Be joined with my spirit realm. Be joined with my Teleportation Gate."
Countless beams of light shone in from deep within the Reflection Realm, light that seemed to e from reality itself.
Bit by bit the entire labyrinth linked itself to the Reflection Realm, and every path within the labyrinth seemed to e "undone," unraveling into overlapping lines, one atop another.
Look up, and the labyrinth's passages ran both above and below.
Some straight, some curved.
Seemingly disconnected from one another, and yet they could still be walked through just as before.
It was as if those unraveled passages remained, all the same, a plete labyrinth, a single whole.
And every door joined to some single point, countless doors twisting together and fusing with those passages turned to lines, scattered like stars across the chaos of space.
Still, labyrinth and spirit realm together no longer risked spinning out of control amid the warping of space and time. Here, at last, it had truly taken root.
What was more, this spirit realm could now draw upon the power of the Reflection Realm and grow gradually stronger. The price of that was that this spirit realm could never leave this place again.
Rosa held the book in one hand and the key in the other.
She stood there amid that warped world.
She stood beneath her own Rainbow Tree.
Rosa gazed out over the whole labyrinth spirit realm, light flickering in her eyes, and she could not help crying out in excitement.
"It worked. I really did it!"
So long a wait, so long a preparation, and she had taken her first step at last.
The rudimentary form of the Door Spirit Realm had been born.
This place was so unbreakable that not even a god could force their way through. It held a power that could ignore space entirely and connect directly to anywhere at all, and behind every single door there seemed to lie some unknown world.
For now, though, Rosa still could not push open so much as one of those doors. Not a single Teleportation Gate here yet carried any real power of its own, let alone the spirit realm as a whole.
But Rosa knew well enough what she needed to do next, the Star Key held fast in her grasp.
"Now I must go and collect Dreams."
Nymph Rosa looked upon the doors stretching endlessly onward along the labyrinth's passages, and it seemed to her she was gazing at countless doors, each one, if only pushed open, capable of leading to some distant place, some land of dreams.
"I will seek out the Dream that longs most of all to reach some distant place."
"I will seek out the person who yearns for that distant place."
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