I am God LSLCCF

Inside the Radiant Temple

Even as he spoke, Ray was studying the three tall, eight-winged sky messengers before him. He marked the differences between them, as though hoping to learn from what he saw some deeper secret of this mysterious technique.

The one on the left wore armor beneath her cloak. Her eyes were empty and cold, like some machine made only to command a battle, and they stayed on Ray every moment, as though she were keeping constant guard.

The one on the right was splendidly dressed. Her robe was the same white as the others', but it bore patterns of great intricacy, and she wore ornaments as well.

She sat sideways upon the Altar, one foot planted on the ground, the other drawn up beneath her on the Altar's surface. A strange feather quill moved in her hand, writing without pause across a scroll of cloth that looked worn and frayed. Not once did she show the least intention of looking at Ray.

The same face, three times over, and yet each of them carried herself in an entirely different way.

Duma's Personality heard Ray out, then spoke.

"I hear from Lomier that you believe this world is a ball. That truly is an interesting notion."

Ray asked, "You're interested in it too, then?"

Duma answered, "Somewhat. But I have neither the energy nor the strength to go chasing after such things the way you do."

Ray sounded a little regretful.

"It's a bit of a shame."

He raised his head and went on.

"But if I do come back here one day, perhaps I can tell you a little of what I've seen."

Little by little, the conversation drew at last toward its close.

This journey had left Ray one more memory worth keeping. He had reached the Sacred Mountain of Light, and he had met the sky messengers, and their King as well.

Ray took his leave of her, and turned to go.

Just then, Duma spoke up abruptly.

"What manner of person was he, truly?"

Until now Duma had been unwilling to so much as mention her father Xiao in words, but in the end there was still something she wanted to know.

Ray turned back.

"You've met him before, haven't you?"

All three Dumas lifted their heads together, and as one they looked at Ray.

After a moment, Duma's Personality spoke.

"I asked my mother once who my father was. Until then, it had never once occurred to me to wonder."

"My father... is a god."

Something seemed to surface out of her memory. Duma's Personality drew her long, slender brows down a fraction, and her gaze went unfocused, resting on the floor.

Then, just as quickly, she raised her head to Ray again. Her lips pressed together of their own accord, the corners curling faintly upward.

Some instinct seemed to tell her that her face had betrayed what she felt inside, and she hurried to cover it over with a smile.

Ray could see plainly enough that this was someone who disliked showing what she felt. Whether sorrow or joy, she never cared to let it show before others.

But no flatness of expression, no practiced coldness, could quite hide it. She was someone who truly felt things.

"But..." Duma said.

"He was nothing like what I had imagined. He was nothing like the god I had imagined."

"Or perhaps that is precisely what a true god is, and I am no more than a fragile mortal."

Ray replied, "Honestly, I don't really understand Xiao either."

"Most of what I do know came from my teacher, Lady Elena."

"You could ask Lomier about that. I've talked it over with him before."

The sorrow Duma had let slip now and then was gathered up at once, and she gave a small shake of her head.

"Never mind."

"Some things are better left unknown, perhaps. Better forgotten."

Ray said nothing more. He turned and left the Radiant Temple.

Outside, Lomier had been waiting the whole while. The moment Ray emerged, he hurried after him and led the way to where Ray was staying.

The Sacred Mountain of Light had arranged lodgings for Ray, and the view from them was strikingly beautiful, with a character all its own.

But Ray, glancing over his temporary quarters, found he had little enough to unpack.

Lomier, after all, knew perfectly well how much Ray's storage tool actually held.

Seeing this, he seemed to catch on to something.

"Ray, do you mean to leave within the next few days?"

Ray nodded.

"Well, I'm in the middle of a journey, aren't I?"

"I used to think this place was the destination I had been searching for. Now it looks as though I'm still a long way off from the one I want."

In truth, Lomier found it a little hard to understand why this ancient member of the divine race before him clung so stubbornly to a goal that seemed to hold nothing but empty air, with no real meaning behind it at all.

"Why must it be flying to the sun? This world is so wonderful as it is. Why go searching after things so far beyond reach?"

"This place and the Land of Light are both so beautiful. You could stay on a while longer and see them for yourself."

Ray went to rap his knuckles against his own iron skull, only to find that his head had long since turned into a lump of flesh.

So all he could do was pull over the Big-Head Demon Spirit beside him, rap a knuckle against their head, and sling an arm around their shoulder to stand there together.

"Look at us. Our shape, our form, how perfectly suited we are to exploring the world."

"Don't you think we're just born adventurers?"

Lomier said, "Simply because of that?"

Just because a body was sturdy, because it could survive almost anything, did that really mean it had to go looking for adventure?

It seemed a bit of a stretch.

Ray fell silent a moment.

"Anything born into this world has to find a reason for its own existence sooner or later."

"I'm not just traveling. I'm searching out the future of our own race, and the meaning of our existence."

It was only then that Lomier began, however dimly, to understand what truly lay behind Ray's travels.

It was not some aimless or empty pursuit. For Ray, and for his whole race of demon spirits, the search carried a meaning nothing else could replace, just as the building of a kingdom that belonged to the sky messengers mattered to Lomier himself.

All at once Lomier's expression turned serious.

"Ray, I heard your conversation with Lady Duma just now."

He hesitated a moment, then at last asked what was on his mind.

"I want to know this. What is the difference between a demigod and a mythical artifact?"

Ray studied him a moment. Duma knew the answer to that question perfectly well, so this was certainly not something she had sent Lomier to ask on her behalf.

"You want to become a god too?"

"Does your King of the Sky Messengers know?"

Lomier shook his head.

"This is something I wished to ask of my own accord. Lady Duma does not know of it yet, but I shall tell her."

Ray looked at him with some curiosity.

"You're not trying to contest her claim to the title of King of the Sky Messengers?"

Ray knew any number of stories about those who would stop at nothing to become a god, who would scheme and betray one another for power.

But Lomier said, "Lady Duma is the one and only King of the Sky Messengers. She may not yet be a god, but in our hearts she is already the only god we have."

"You said just now that on Ruhe Beast Island there is one who walks the road to true godhood by way of a mythical artifact."

"Can we not help Lady Duma walk that same road?"

Ray studied Lomier for a long moment, his translucent blue eyes seeming to weigh the sky messenger standing before him.

He was trying to tell whether the words were true, or nothing more than an empty lie.

At last, Ray spoke.

"A demigod becomes a Mythology by way of the reincarnation method. It's the hardest road of all, but once they've become a Mythology they hold their Authority in their own hands, and turn into an undying divine being. Even should their Divine Kingdom be destroyed, even should they themselves fall, so long as a single one of their servants still lives in this world, they still have the chance to climb back onto the throne of godhood."

"A mythical artifact needs no reincarnation method at all. Given Divine Blood enough and the particular method for it, it can become a Mythology. Set against the first path, this one is far simpler. But their Authority is attached to the artifact itself. It's the artifact that holds the Authority, and the Mythology Spirit merely dwells upon it, which leaves it with many limitations of its own."

It was much like the old story of the Little Person in the Bottle. The spirit of a mythical artifact cannot exist apart from the artifact itself, and should the bottle ever shatter, the spirit vanishes into thin air along with it.

That was all Ray said. He offered nothing more.

"As for the specifics and the methods, go and ask Duma yourself."

"She knows all of it."

"All I can tell you is something of the difference between the two."

Lomier nodded.

"I understand."

The clouds drifted farther away, and the sky turned from deep blue to a hushed and heavy darkness.

Stars that the daylight had hidden came out slowly with the night, glimmering above the clouds.

At the cliff's edge rose a spire shaped like a candlestick, joined to a distant side hall by a long stone bridge pierced with more than a dozen arched openings. The vast structure gave off a feeling of hollowness, and of weight pressing down.

Beneath the night sky, a single sky messenger in a plain, unadorned robe walked slowly and alone across the long bridge. She rounded the railed passage at the base of the spire and came out on the far side of the tower.

Wooo~

A cold wind cut through the archways beneath the bridge, letting out a low, keening moan.

From here, one's eyes could pierce the clouds and make out the faint lamp fires of the winged people's city far below.

Duma stood beneath the spire, looking down.

The night wind was bitterly cold, but for a being such as herself, ordinary cold or heat had long since ceased to mean anything at all.

Today's conversation with Ray had given Duma a great deal to think about.

She had learned not only how the reincarnation method now stood, but had come to see something of her own flaws as well, and yet nothing weighed on Duma so heavily as the matter of her father, Xiao.

She suddenly found herself remembering the very last time she had seen her father.

Beneath that endless black rain, an evil god in a tattered, rotting robe had stood alone in the darkness. He had watched her with eyes that held not the faintest trace of warmth, and he had spoken.

"Duma, you are free."

It was the first time he had ever spoken her name aloud, and yet it sounded as though he were releasing a prisoner, casting off some servant who had outlived her use.

She had stared back at him, her face full of disbelief.

He was the Lord of Radiance. He was a god.

And yet there was nothing radiant about him, and not a trace of mercy to speak of.

The evil god standing there in the darkness seemed to see through her thoughts at a single glance.

"You think me nothing like the god you imagined?"

"You think a god ought to be merciful? That a god ought to be radiant? That a god ought to shelter mortals?"

"A pity."

"The divine is not defined by mortals. Nor is it changed by the fantasies of a weakling such as you."

Duma could not understand what manner of being this was, that he could be so utterly cold.

Whether toward the winged people, toward the snake people.

Or...

To his own daughter.

Most of the time, Duma dared not let herself think of that shadow at all.

He had once been the god she looked up to, the god she believed in. He was her father too, but the instant he appeared before her, he had torn to shreds every hope and every longing she had ever held for what a god should be, and left nothing behind.

Beneath the quiet tower, another figure suddenly appeared, making no effort at all to conceal themselves.

Duma turned her head to look, and saw a six-winged sky messenger.

It was Lomier.

Lomier came before Duma and bowed to her.

"Lady Duma."

He had returned earlier that day and presented the Gravity Stone to her at once.

But since he had needed to stay close by Ray's side, he had not had the chance to give Duma a fuller report.

Duma looked at the six-winged sky messenger before her, and his figure called another to mind, from decades before.

"Lomier, look how you have grown."

Most of the time, Duma's Personality lay dormant, taking turns on watch with the other two.

The primary Personality woke only now and then, and when it did, it was to bestow her power upon some newly born sky messenger.

So the last time she had seen Lomier had been many years before.

Lomier raised his head, excitement plain on his face, and looked to Duma.

"Lady Duma, you still remember me?"

Duma replied, "I remember still how you first came to the Sacred Mountain of Light as a small child, forever hiding beneath this very bridge to cry. You told me you had climbed the mountain to look for your family, who had died. But there was no family of yours to be found upon the mountain."

Her voice sounded, if anything, a little cool.

But Lomier knew there was a warm heart hidden beneath that voice.

Lomier broke into a smile.

"It was you who told me that the Sacred Mountain of Light was my home. That you and all the sky messengers were my family."

Something else seemed to come back to Duma.

"As a child you also said that everyone had told you the Sacred Mountain of Light stood up in the sky, and that when you arrived you found it still on the ground. You wept bitterly over it."

Lomier looked embarrassed at once.

"Before ever I came to the mountain, that was what everyone told me."

He could not help laughing as he said it.

"And you told me then that if I liked the idea of living in the sky so much, I ought to make the mountain fly myself!"

Duma seemed to have half-forgotten it.

"Did I say such a thing?"

Lomier said, quite seriously, "You did."

Lomier looked at the King of the Sky Messengers before him, bathed in the holy radiance her wings gave off, and it was as though he had been carried straight back to his childhood, running once more beneath those wings.

In those days, none of the children had stood even as high as Duma's thigh.

Every one of those young winged people and sky-messengers-to-be had gained the power they now carried only after receiving Duma's blessing.

The young Lomier had come to the Sacred Mountain carrying hope and longing. So much of what he found there was nothing like what he had once imagined, and yet Lady Duma alone had stood taller and more radiant than anything he could have pictured. To Lomier, she was the eternal god of his heart.

"But no matter whether it stands in the sky or upon the ground."

"No matter what the Sacred Mountain may be, Lady Duma, you are the only god we want."

Lomier lifted his head and knelt before the eight-winged sky messenger.

"You are our only King."

"Wherever you stand, there is the Divine Kingdom."

Duma seemed not quite at ease with the sight before her. She fell silent a moment, then abruptly changed the subject and spoke to him.

"I have looked at the Gravity Stone you brought back. It is indeed a marvel."

"But its power does indeed go beyond anything we imagined, and it is not something we can master easily."

But Lomier said, "It is still missing something. Yet in time we shall surely find the right way to use it."

He went on to give a full account of how he had found the Gravity Stone, along with what he knew of the Floating Stone, and a few ideas of his own.

He held nothing back, and laid it all out before the King of the Sky Messengers.

Duma made no move to stop Lomier from pressing ahead. She only nodded at his burning enthusiasm.

She looked at him. There were questions she had never meant to ask, but now that he stood before her, they came out all the same.

"Lomier, it seems Ray has told you something of God Xia."

Lomier nodded.

"He did say some of it."

He thought back for a moment, then repeated to Duma everything Ray had told him.

How Ray had said God Xia killed his own teacher, and offered up countless numbers of his own kind as sacrifice.

How Xia had abandoned every last principle, sparing no cost, until at last, forsaken by all, he had cast his body into the sea and crossed the ages alone.

Last of all, he told Duma what Elena, the God of Demon Spirits, thought of Xiao.

What Ray had said was vague at best, whole matters folded into a single line. Lomier had understood little of it, and had to guess at much of the rest.

But Duma knew far more of it than Lomier did.

Piecing it all together, she suddenly understood a great deal.

Beneath the towering building the King of the Sky Messengers stood straight and still before the railing, gazing down at the city beneath the clouds, and she repeated the words Lomier had just spoken.

"He gave up everything, long ago."

That single line, it seemed, was enough to say it all.

It was at this point that Lomier finally gave voice to the one important request that had brought him before Duma.

"Lady Duma, I wish to become an eight-winged sky messenger."

Duma slowly turned her head to look at Lomier, a trace of surprise crossing her face.

That Lomier had managed to become a third-rank, six-winged sky messenger spoke well enough of his gift, but the gap between third rank and fourth rank was nothing short of a chasm between heaven and earth.

Given his own aptitude, the odds of his breaking through to the fourth rank were, in truth, very low.

More than that, a God's Grace Stone could not simply be formed by wanting it. It meant drawing out every last drop of one's Divine Blood, drawing out one's Seal Imprint and spirit completely, and should the attempt fail, there was no easy way to recover.

More likely than not, it would end in death.

That was why most third-rank ability users dared not attempt the breakthrough while they were young, and by the time old age had drained their mental power dry, next to no chance of success remained. For every ability user, this one step could rightly be called an impassable chasm.

"You mean to break through to Apostle?"

"Are you prepared for it?"

"Should the breakthrough fail, you may die."

Duma did not much like his odds, but she gave Lomier the warning all the same.

Lomier answered in all seriousness, "I have already made up my mind."

Duma said, "Very well. Only see that you are properly prepared."

With Duma's permission granted, Lomier was overjoyed. He bowed and turned away, disappearing down the long bridge.

Once again, Duma was left there alone.

She leaned upon the railing, her holy wings stirring faintly at her back, and turned over and over in her mind the words Lomier had passed on to her.

"To become a god, he killed his own teacher."

"To become a god, he sacrificed countless numbers of his own kind."

"To chase after his own goal, he stopped at almost nothing, and abandoned every principle he had."

"He... gave up everything, long ago."

Little by little, the scene she had never quite finished recalling rose up before her eyes once more.

It carried her back to the very end of the War of the Divine Beings.

In the dark and filthy Abyss, beneath that endless black rain.

The evil god of original sin had turned away, and with a wave of his hand cast her down into the mortal world. Through the roaring black downpour, his cold voice had echoed.

"We are born in sin. Weak, ignorant, greedy."

"All of it is sin."

"Because we are born weak, we crave strength."

"Because we are not born knowing, we covet truth."

"Because our lives are brief, we chase after eternity."

"We are sinners."

"Because we were not born gods."

The shape of the evil god of original sin had sunk slowly into the darkness, his words cold and full of shadow.

"Duma, become a god!"

"Become an eternal god!"

"Then you may command all things. Command yourself, and command everything."

"Since you cannot find the god you want, then become the god you want."

After all this time, Duma finally understood what he had meant by those words.

Why a being so powerful, so undying, would speak of being born weak, of not knowing from birth, of a life so brief.

She had, at last, come to understand something of her father, Xiao. Something of the story behind the man he had been.

"To become a god. For eternity. For power."

"You lost your teacher. You lost your own people too."

"But it is all in the past. Hundreds of millions of years in the past."

"At least in this era, you could have had the winged people. You could have had my mother. You could have had me."

"You could have chosen differently."

Duma's hand gripped the railing as she gazed out into the distance through the night wind.

Somewhere within that endless black night, she seemed to see him again, that cold and merciless god.

"But..."

"You still wanted none of it."

Duma's voice drifted away into the night wind, heard by no one but herself.

"You wanted only to become the god in your own eyes. Nothing else mattered to you at all."

"In your eyes, were we truly nothing at all?"

She understood now what those words of his had meant, and she thought she could feel, too, some trace of the bitterness he must once have carried.

But she never wanted, not for anything, to become a person like him.

Ten Thousand Meters Above, the Floating Island

The island hung in the sky, drifting slowly through the highest layer of clouds. Layer upon layer of flowing cloud swept over it, over the cliffs of piled stone, until at last they swallowed whole the sea of red flowers along the cliff's edge, and the glass structures standing among them.

On the far side of the island, a colorful hot air balloon boat was docked in a garden of silver.

The pudgy Mythology Spirit Vellen crouched by the cabin door, seemingly in conversation with the Cups of Desire around him.

The whole island, and the balloon boat resting upon it, lay perfectly still and silent.

At the edge of the floating island, six mythology witch doctors stood together, discussing their plan to remake the island into a Divine Kingdom.

One of the witch doctors said, "Lady Hila, the Dream Sovereign, has gone to see the Door Nymph. Lady Shelly, the Life Sovereign, is speaking with the Lava God through the glass tank. This is exactly the moment for us to set about remaking the floating island."

"That way, They will be just in time to see the Divine Kingdom we have remade."

Hila had lately been using the Teleportation Gate on the hot air balloon boat to check in on the Door Nymph, Rosa.

Shelly, meanwhile, was speaking with her "Big Fireworks" about something. No one knew quite what she was up to this time.

God Yinsai went unmentioned for a simple reason. The Creator was prone to disappearing without a trace, and his frequent absences were nothing out of the ordinary.

"How should we remake it?" The witch doctors exchanged a glance, and one after another they voiced their agreement.

"Since this is to be our own Divine Kingdom from now on, we will certainly need a Divine Kingdom's main city, will we not?" One of a Divine Kingdom's most important functions was to shelter the spirits of one's servants, so it was nothing unusual to build a city within a Divine Kingdom.

"And since it has become a Divine Kingdom, we could build a fully sealed glass-domed botanical garden. Then we could keep all manner of plants, could we not?" Witch Doctor Left Hand said.

"Then we could build a zoo as well, and keep every kind of animal, even extraordinary beasts," Witch Doctor Right Hand said.

"In that case we would need a great deal of water as well. Should we draw a small river up here?" Witch Doctor Torso said, sounding unusually sensible this time.

"To lock the water in, we will need to lay down a Barrier as well, one that seals off the inside from the outside," Witch Doctor Skull said.

No sooner said than done. When Mythologies set their hands to work, the speed and power they commanded went far beyond anything a mortal could imagine.

In little more than ten days, they raised up a sprawling city, and drew a small river up from the earth into the sky.

They transplanted every manner of plant from the land below, caught every manner of creature, and raised a vast Barrier around it all.

"The main city of the Divine Kingdom is built and finished. I went to the trouble of summoning a hundred Stone Demons to help with the work." Witch Doctor Right Leg was the first to speak.

"The artificial lake, the fountains, the whole water cycling system, all of it complete." Witch Doctor Torso snapped their fingers, and at once fountains burst up from the stone-paved plaza beneath the cliff face. Higher up, waterfalls poured down along channels cut through the Divine Kingdom's city, gathering below into an artificial pool and lake.

Down in the lake and its channels the water ran deep, and shoals of fish could be seen drifting through it.

"The task of building the botanical garden, I have completed." Witch Doctor Left Hand pointed toward the glass-domed structure atop the cliff, standing at the center of a field of Blood Mist Cups. The structure rose over a hundred meters high, vast beyond measure, and inside it grew dense stands of great trees and every kind of plant, lush and green.

"I was in charge of the zoo, and it is finished as well. Left Hand and I made it together," Witch Doctor Right Hand said. The botanical garden and the zoo had, in the end, merged into one. Inside the glass dome's jungle there were not only jungle plants, but every kind of animal could be seen making its home among them.

"The divine domain's Barrier, that too is complete." Witch Doctor Skull stood beneath a massive stone monument, the very cornerstone of the Barrier.

"Next, we merge the mythic domain into it." They looked to the others, and everyone made ready.

Witch Doctor Skull struck the stone monument once, and a sheet of light spread out from beneath their feet, sweeping across the whole of the island.

All six witch doctors called on their power together, and a towering silhouette of God's Form could be seen rising up, standing tall over the floating island.

Within that silhouette of God's Form, six great vortices fell, sinking into the island's six stone monuments.

An invisible sphere of light spread outward, settling over the whole of the floating island.

In an instant, the floating island began to turn hazy, as though it were no longer wholly real.

Little by little, the island was assimilated by the power of wisdom and spirit, until it felt caught somewhere between the real and the unreal.

It still hung there in the sky, exactly as before, but to anyone else's eyes, the island had simply vanished.

Only once they had fully forged the floating island into their own Kingdom did the witch doctors truly begin to feel the power the island held.

They sensed the subtle connection between the island, the world beyond it, and the earth far below.

"It was never that it cut off the power of the earth. It canceled out the power of the earth instead." The witch doctors had always assumed that the Floating Stone's power severed the pull of the world below, but in truth that was not how it worked at all.

"No. It cancels out only a portion of the earth's binding force, weakening it until the island looks for all the world as though it had lost its weight. But in truth the earth still holds it fast. That is why the floating island stays anchored to this world even while it moves through the sky." At last the witch doctors understood the true nature of the floating island's power, and why it moved as it did.

"I can see the power of that stone spreading outward unseen, tangling itself together with the power of the earth, and even with the power beyond the sky." Their eyes stayed fixed on the eight-sided rhomboid stone at the island's core.

"When this island passes through the sky, it works some faint influence on the world below as well." They came to the island's edge and looked down, and there they could see a portion of the stone's power breaking free of its bonds, touching the mortal world beneath with the barest influence.

But before they had even grown fully familiar with their new Divine Kingdom, the God's Mount at the center of the valley abloom with Cups of Desire suddenly began to blaze with dazzling light, layer upon layer.

The witch doctors turned to look at once.

"It is Lady Hila, come back."