Chapter 491: The God of Demon Spirits Elena's Verdict on Xiao

Ray's Temporary Estate, High in the Sky

Now, this estate was more of a mess than ever.

Books, odds and ends, extraordinary materials, and all manner of strange components lay scattered everywhere inside, and sheet after sheet of drafting paper hung across the walls.

In the one patch of floor that had been cleared with some effort, a Magic Crystal hung suspended in midair. A special ritual was driving it just then, and out of it projected the shape of a wind lizard dragon.

It was the Magic Crystal of a wild wind lizard dragon.

Ray had gotten it from someone else in a lake nymph's dream, traded for a Dream Vine leaf.

A wild magical beast was nothing like a beast knight's companion. This breed was savage and bloodthirsty, raised deep in the Volcano Forest.

Most of the time they were kept as sacrifices for the Feathered Serpent God, though materials taken from these wild beasts did now and then slip out into the world to be sold.

Of late in particular it had grown more and more common, as the beasts of the Volcano Forest multiplied.

Even the Harvest Temple's repeated bans and crackdowns had done nothing to stop it.

In the main hall, Ray circled the projected shape of the wind lizard dragon, shouting and exclaiming like some mad scientist.

One moment the metal puppet cupped his own chin in thought, the next he threw both hands high into the air.

"Look at it. Just look how perfect this wind lizard dragon's form is."

"You see that streamlined skull? That's what lets them fly so much more easily."

"You see those beautiful wings? Look how nimble they are, how alive."

"You see that long, slender tail? That design isn't there for nothing either. It balances the body, and it steers in flight."

"There isn't one wasted part anywhere in its build. Life really is the most exquisite instrument this world has ever made."

Perhaps it was because Ray's voice had grown so overblown, his praise of the wind lizard dragon so extravagant, that the Kite Demon Spirit at the window spoke up, which she rarely did.

"The wing demon race goes back a hundred million years. The Sage of Truth, Lan, made us with his own hands, and the wing demons of old were the true masters of the sky."

Ray himself had once been an apprentice at the Temple of Truth, so naturally he could not speak a disrespectful word against one of its sages.

"Of course. As the oldest flying species this world has ever known, the wing demons are beyond any doubt the forerunners of everything that flies."

"Without the wing demons, there would be no one who came after."

"My thanks to the great sage. My thanks to the Great Lan."

"He was the first of all to give chase to the sky."

Ray meant to design his future great composite artifact after the forms of the wind lizard dragon and the wing demons, and the walls already bore sketch after sketch to show for it.

One moment the metal puppet studied the wind lizard dragon's build, lost in thought. The next he was peppering the Kite Demon Spirit with questions about the wing demons. The next he had a book flipped open, or the design drafts of his old aircraft pulled out, or some strange component held up against the paper to compare.

Then, with practiced hands, he took up a quill and drew lines across the long sheet of drafting paper on the wall, working out the numbers.

Scritch scritch scritch!

Ray, who a moment ago had been carrying on so noisily, fell utterly silent now, wholly absorbed.

Ray could not have said how many sheets like this he had drawn, how many times he had designed and redesigned the shape of his aircraft.

But of this design he was certain. It was the most complicated of them all, and the highest in rank as well.

It would need an Apostle demon spirit's Mythical Organ as its core, and the Seal Imprints of two demon spirits, one of Wind and one of Fire.

A Flame Demon Spirit's Seal Imprint would supply the power and the force behind its cannons, while a Kite Demon Spirit would control the wings and command the airflow. Beyond that, no end of supporting artifacts and components would still have to be forged.

The resources and material wealth its forging would demand were immense beyond imagining, and this was only the beginning.

Ray might have to spend his whole life, every moment of it, endlessly perfecting this entirely new flying craft.

Day after day passed, and the intricate figure on the drafting paper gradually took shape, ringed about by a great scatter of drawings of the parts that made it up, broken down into the head, the belly, the tail wings, the wings, and more.

Its main body looked like some great mechanical bird soaring through the sky, though anyone living in this era would have said it looked more like a wind lizard dragon.

Built of metal, though, it lacked the fluid grace of a true living creature, and its posture read a touch stiff.

But that metal frame, that dense mass of mechanical components, gave it a beauty all its own, one belonging to alchemy, to extraordinary civilization, to magic itself.

Its head was nearly identical to a wind lizard dragon's, long and narrow, with a sharp, beaklike point.

On the drafting paper it was clearly a hollow design. Look closely and it even had seating drawn in, a lookout post, and a control console.

The whole head was designed to be this great artifact's control room, and the Globe had already been placed inside it, meant for navigation and record-keeping.

The long neck joining the head was itself a passage and a stairway, leading straight down to the belly.

The belly of this great mechanical bird was divided into several chambers, each serving its own purpose. There was a rest room for the three of them, a main hall, a power furnace chamber, a storeroom, and more.

That also made its belly far larger than an ordinary wind lizard dragon's, swollen and rather bulky to look at.

Its wings combined traits of both the wind lizard dragon and the wing demons, better suited to gliding, and able to fold away easily.

But look closely, and they carried something like the wing demons' own jet vents as well.

Its claws served as metal landing gear, able to extend outward or retract completely.

On this day, Ray finally set down his pen.

This artifact's design looked all but finished, and Ray wrote its name across the top.

"The Sun's Wing."

On paper it looked nearly finished, but in truth the only part where the work was genuinely complete was the core, the Mechanical Heart.

This was the first piece Ray needed to forge, and it would also be his own future Mythical Organ, the one that would carry him onto the path of an Apostle.

Ray took up the drawings and invited his adventure team's companions to look them over with him.

"You see it?"

"I'm the Mechanical Heart, and the whole main body as well, controlling every extension of the magic gold and every change the artifact makes."

Ray had already designed positions for his two little companions as well.

"Number Three, you're the Flame Core, the power furnace."

"Number Two, you're lookout and navigator, and you have charge of the control room up in the head."

This was no longer the kind of aircraft Ray had built before, one that could only seat two. This was a fortress that could fly through the sky.

Number Two, the Kite Demon Spirit, drifted her thin, papery body through the air, fluttering like a scrap of cloth caught in flight, and studied her own place on the drawings, the mechanical bird's head.

"This angle's a good one. It's the highest point, so I'll be able to see a long, long way."

Number Three, meanwhile, offered their own understanding of what the three roles meant.

"So, I'm the one who stokes the boiler."

"She's the one who flies the thing."

"And you're the one who sits there and gives the orders."

Ray scratched at his own iron skull, worried Number Three might be unhappy with the arrangement.

"You're not stoking a boiler. You're the Head of the Power Furnace Chamber."

Number Three thought it over for a long moment, then let out a good-natured chuckle.

"Heh heh, isn't that the same thing as before?"

---

Sky Messenger Lomier had no sooner reached Matale than he wrote out a rainbow tree letter and sent it to the Sacred Mountain of Light, setting down everything he had seen and heard over the past stretch of time.

Part of it concerned the Gravity Stone, and part of it the moment he had watched that star rise into the sky.

Again and again Lomier stressed that the Gravity Stone's power lay far beyond anything they could have imagined. It was a crucial, central piece for building a true Divine Kingdom of the Sky Messengers.

"I flew west without turning, out past the borders of the Land of Light, and then all at once I had blundered into a domain shrouded in starlit night."

"Only afterward did I understand. I had most likely flown into the realm of a being called a Great God."

"..." After that, Lomier set down the peril he had found himself in.

"In the moment of greatest danger, it was six deities in god-robes who saved me. Their names I do not know. All I remember is the pattern of God's Form upon their robes."

"And those deities told me that what we had seen was no meteor at all. It was a stone that some being of greatness beyond imagining had reached out and taken up from Ruhe Beast Island with its own hand. They called it the Gravity Stone."

"After that I saw for myself what a Gravity Stone is, and I saw the true form this power takes."

"I saw the sea turn to waterfalls and whirlwinds and go up into the sky. I saw a boundless stretch of ocean run dry in a single instant."

"I saw the seabed shatter and collapse, and boulders without number went falling upward into the sky before my very eyes, until they congealed there in the heavens into one towering star."

"Beneath that starlit night, a mountain range of wonders broke past the limit of the firmament and became a Star Divine Kingdom that shall never fall."

"And in the instant I looked upon its true form, far off as I was, my mind and spirit were driven to the very brink of collapse."

"After that, I could see nothing at all."

Lomier had to stop when he reached this point in the letter.

His body had begun to shake with ragged breath, quite beyond his control, and his mind and spirit churned so violently he could not settle them. His hand trembled so hard he could not even hold his quill.

It was a long while before he could bring himself to write on.

"Forgive me my blasphemy."

"That sight brought suddenly to mind the scene the King of the Sky Messengers once described to me, of a Gate of Mythology falling out of the heavens, and of how every soul who looked directly upon a deity's true form and drew too near to the divine was turned, to the last of them, into a monster."

"..."

The scene he spoke of was, in fact, the very one Duma herself had witnessed, the War of the Divine Beings, the same battle in which Xiao had fallen into the Abyss.

At the time, a group of snake people led by Kurmis had looked directly upon Xiao's true form, and having drawn too close, they were corroded by Xiao's mythical power, every one of them, into great winged serpents.

These were things Lomier should never have spoken of, and yet he had spoken them anyway.

It was meant to prove that he really had seen a deity, to prove just how significant this whole matter truly was.

Then Lomier went to stand beneath a rainbow tree and solemnly sent the letter on its way.

And so, for some time now, he had been waiting here for a reply.

On this day, the reply finally came.

A heated discussion seemed to have taken place on the Sacred Mountain of Light as well, which was why the reply had been so long in coming.

They too found what Lomier had seen and heard almost impossible to believe, but in the end they chose to trust everything he had told them.

The letter read, "Wait in Matale. Other sky messengers will arrive at once at the head of a squad, to assist you in your mission."

Lomier had the reply in hand and had only just gotten back to where he was staying when he saw his own storage box shaking violently.

Before long, the box actually split apart, ruined completely.

Crack!

Fortunately Lomier noticed in time, and pulled the Gravity Stone out of the storage box before it was too late.

He examined the box and found that it truly could not be used anymore.

"What has happened here? Has it broken?"

"Was it not said to have ten more years of use left in it?"

Still, Lomier could more or less guess the reason. The Gravity Stone's power was probably simply too great for an ordinary storage artifact like this one to bear.

Until now Lomier had had no good reason to go looking for Ray, so he seized the chance and made his way to Ray's estate.

Lomier came to Ray's residence, and Ray let him straight in.

Of course he saw the sketch Ray had hung right in the center of the room.

Lomier could not really make sense of the drawings, and he did not recognize the writing or the figures on them.

He could guess even so that this had to be an artifact of tremendous power, since the Globe, that third-rank artifact, was apparently only one component of it.

Lomier could not help but ask, "Could this possibly be a fourth-rank artifact?"

Ray said nothing about his plan to break through to Apostle, but he made not the slightest effort to hide that he meant to build the airship, the Sun's Wing.

"Its name is the Sun's Wing," Ray told him.

Lomier said, "The Sun's Wing. There would seem to be some meaning hidden in that name."

"You could think of it as a wing in pursuit of the sun," Ray said.

Lomier said, "This seems to be more than a wing. Is it not something colossal?"

"That's because I'm the one who wants to fly to the sun," Ray said.

"It's only my wing."

Lomier studied Ray for a long moment. He had already heard from Ose why Ray had come to the Land of Light in the first place, that this metal puppet actually meant to fly all the way to the sun and find out exactly where it was.

"You mean to use it to fly beyond this world?"

"To break past the very limit of the sky?"

Ray said, "That's right. I've tried before, flying as high as I could."

"But no matter how high I flew, I always reached a limit in the end."

"It's as if there's something tugging at us, blocking us from ever leaving this world."

Lomier was one of the winged people, a flying race, and a sky messenger at that, so of course he understood exactly what Ray meant.

They too had challenged the limits of the sky more times than anyone could count.

Lomier recalled an old saying passed down among the winged people since ancient times.

"The sky has its limit. Even we who were born with wings cannot pierce the curtain of the heavens."

Ray nodded.

"I once believed the same, that there was a curtain hanging over the sky, a barrier that could never be crossed."

"But now, at last, I understand."

"The force holding us back doesn't come from the sky at all. It comes from beneath our feet, from this world itself."

Ray ran a hand across his drawings, as though touching some treasured thing.

"The Sun's Wing. That's the artifact I mean to break past that limit with one day."

Lomier had found the Gravity Stone with his own hands, and had watched with his own eyes as the ocean and great boulders went flying backward into the sky. He had some understanding, then, of what Ray was talking about.

"It is just as you said before. Gravity is a Law of this world."

"The earth beneath our feet gives off gravity without end, and it holds the whole world, and us along with it, fast against the ground, so that we cannot break free."

"And the Gravity Stone is nothing more than this Law made manifest."

Ray said, "It protects us. But it also holds back our steps from ever exploring beyond this world."

Lomier looked at the Sun's Wing on the drawings, that mechanical creation so full of extraordinary civilization's fantastical color. Even so, he shook his head.

"But even if you truly do build an artifact like this, I do not think it could break the earth's hold on us."

"To explore the limits of the world, and the space that lies outside it."

"This is not enough. It is nowhere near enough."

Ray understood as much himself. An ordinary fourth-rank artifact could hardly break the Law of the Earth. He sighed.

"Yes. That is the basic Law that holds this world together, after all. It's the Law of Creation."

"But there is one thing that will surely help you break past a Law as powerful as that," Lomier told Ray.

Ray's interest was piqued.

"What is it?"

Lomier stepped up in front of the metal puppet and finally put the question he had been carrying all along.

"Ray, do you know of the Floating Stone?"

Ray thought it over for a moment and was sure he had genuinely never heard the term before.

"What's a Floating Stone?"

Lomier looked a little disappointed.

"You do not know either?"

Ray shook his head.

"If you mean the word itself, 'Floating Stone,' then no, I really have never heard it before."

Lomier still could not quite let it go. If any one person could know of the Floating Stone's existence, after all, the only one he could think of was standing right in front of him.

Ray was not only from Ruhe Beast Island, but a divine being's blessed one as well.

So Lomier told the whole story of how he had come by the Gravity Stone, hoping to learn more from Ray.

Ray had never guessed that Lomier's journey had brought him an adventure like this.

It also reminded him all at once of that moment when the sky itself had turned to darkness, when both Number Two and Number Three had trembled with fright.

"So that darkness that day, that was a Great God's power."

"It was a Great God's power."

Ray spoke up, naming one by one the seven Great Gods who bore up Ruhe Beast Island.

"Sky Beast God, Moon God, Sele Great God, Desert Giant God, God of Earth, the Great God Star of Death, and Lava God."

"And of them all, the only one who could turn into a boundless starlit night has to be the Great God Star of Death!"

Lomier said, "The Great God Star of Death?"

"Is that the divine name of that star deity?"

Ray nodded.

"That's what everyone on Ruhe Beast Island calls them."

Ray felt certain now that what Lomier had seen had to have been the Star of Death.

But far more interesting to Ray, far more curious, were the six mythic shadows who had saved Lomier.

"Are you certain? You saw six deities?"

Lomier nodded.

"Yes. Six mythic shadows stood there before me. Never before had I seen so many deities at once."

Lomier looked toward Ray.

"Surely you too have heard of them. Would you tell me their names?"

Ray shook his head again.

"No, I can't say for certain either."

"But that image of six united as one, and the pattern you described, they put me in mind of a certain being Lady Elena once spoke of."

"Even to her, that was a figure who existed only in legend."

Ray lifted his head and spoke with great solemnity.

"Not only are they themselves shrouded in mystery beyond all telling, they also once had a student, one named the God-Created Man, Stuen."

"He is the oldest mortal mythology of them all. Legend says the Creator shaped Stuen as a mythical life in his own form, and that he walked upon the earth to carry out some mission."

"And it was precisely because he came into being that the mythologies and Apostles who came after gained the power to take on God's Form at all. It's an imitation of him, a power borrowed from him."

Lomier said, "The God-Created Man?"

"Then why would the Creator be the one to make him?"

Lomier had been willing to share a secret like this with him, so Ray did not mind giving up a few of his own in return.

"In the most ancient of days, 'god' meant the Creator and nothing else."

"The gods of today, put more precisely, are beings who've stepped onto the rank of Mythology."

"But little by little, people just started calling them gods anyway."

"To be exact, they've only walked half the Path of Mythology. They're only demigods."

"The reason so many mythologies are flooding down into the mortal world now, each building its own Mortal Divine System, is that they're all fighting over the fruit of true godhood."

"That's no secret at all. Your own King of the Sky Messengers knows it too. She's surely seen with her own eyes what it looks like when the Source of Wisdom bears fruit."

Lomier had never once heard of such a thing. His mouth fell open.

Then Ray picked the earlier topic back up, the one about the witch doctors.

"But if you really did see them, Lomier, then you may not have simply seen a few mortal-world gods."

"Legend says they walk in the company of the Supreme Divine Beings."

Lomier said, "The Creator, is that the Life Sovereign?"

Ray looked at Lomier and said, "For your people, you could say so."

Lomier could not quite work out what that answer was supposed to mean.

"From what you've just told me, you'll all be going back to that stretch of ocean, won't you?" Ray said at last.

Lomier's head was still ringing with everything he had just heard, and he answered almost mechanically.

"Mm. Yes."

Ray turned to look at Lomier.

"I'd like to come along with you all too."

Ray wanted to go see that stretch of ocean for himself as well.

Lomier nodded.

"You may. But there is a favor I have been meaning to ask of you as well."

Lomier brought out the broken storage artifact box, and Ray scratched at his own skull.

"I really do have a permanent storage artifact, but I only have the one, and it's already in use."

"But I've still got Dream Vine leaves here. If you're all willing to pay a good enough price, I can trade you a new one with those."

---

Some time later, a party from the Sacred Mountain of Light reached the Matale Principality, an entire squad of sky messengers.

Going back to the coastline to search that stretch of ocean again was an entirely different matter this time.

There was Lomier and his squad of sky messengers, and no small number of winged exploration parties along with them.

They led countless hands over that stretch of ocean, combing through it as though plowing a field.

Most of the Gravity Stones that could be found, the pieces that had fallen here, were all gathered up.

Even Ray found two small fragments of Gravity Stone, though they were so tiny they did not even reach the size of a grain of rice. Still, he tucked them away with great care, meaning to study the secrets held inside them.

However small it was, it was still a mythical item.

Ray piloted his aircraft, circling endlessly through the sky.

Ray's aircraft truly was a powerful thing, and yet it did not belong to reality at all. It belonged to the Dream Realm.

It was a vessel built for roaming the Dream Realm.

Flying it through the waking world was, in truth, something of a waste of its power and its nature.

Lomier had returned to the sky as well, and he noticed how lost Ray seemed.

He soared alongside Ray's aircraft through the sea of clouds.

"You did not find what you were hoping to see?"

There was a note of loss in Ray's voice.

"Maybe it left along with that star."

But Ray shook off the mood quickly enough.

"Then again, thinking it over, I really don't have the standing to lay eyes on a Supreme Divine Being."

"No, more precisely, I don't have a reason to."

"Even if I did see them in all their greatness, I wouldn't know what to say. I came all this way for no other reason than to see them, and that's all."

"How could a reason as thin as mine ever earn an audience with the Supreme?"

In a sense, there was simply no karmic thread connecting him to a Supreme Divine Being.

And yet Ray went on staring off into the distance. Whatever his mouth said, his heart longed for it fiercely all the same.

"But still, I'd love to catch just one glimpse of those great and eternal shadows."

"Even from far, far away, even just one look would be enough!"

Lomier could not help but ask, "Ray, how do you know so much about all this?"

"Have you really... lived for a hundred million years?"

Ray turned to look at Lomier.

"I once cultivated at a sacred place. The very seat I once sat in, your own former Lord of Radiance once sat there too."

"If you really count it out, your God Xia and I are of the same generation, though I came along many years after him. By the time I did, the legends of his era were long since over!"

Lomier found himself unable to say a single word. It struck him all at once that he probably should not have asked a question like that at all. Ray's own origins and standing were enough to silence him completely, enough to shatter his whole worldview and his faith along with it.

But the subject had been opened now, and Ray went on.

"Of course, my own gifts can't compare to your former Lord of Radiance."

"And my methods, my will, they're nowhere near as ruthless as your Lord of Radiance, Xia, once was."

Xiao's own ability talent had, in truth, ranked among the very best the Temple of Truth had ever produced. He had once been a teacher within the temple himself, and had personally taught Anli what she knew.

But being among the best was nowhere near enough. To break through to Apostle before his lifespan reached its limit, he had to be one of a kind, unmatched by anyone.

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

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

"To chase after his own goal, he stopped at almost nothing, and gave up every last line a person should never cross."

Lomier said, "Do you think it truly wise to say such a thing to the face of a sky messenger?"

Ray explained why he had said it at all. A few days back he had overheard some sky messengers talking, and among them and among the winged people, some still, astonishingly, clung to a fantasy about the Lord of Radiance, Xia, and wanted him brought back.

"I only wanted to tell you the truth. To tell you what kind of being your god really is."

"I hear your current King of Angels is doing quite well. But I've also heard some among you still want to bring your God Xia back."

Ray shook his head at Lomier and told him.

"Give up on that idea!"

"Every god has an obsession of their own, something they can't bear to let go of. But your god let go of everything, long ago."

"Just to chase after some hazy, insubstantial view from beyond eternity, he traded away everything he had."

Ray suddenly found himself remembering his own teacher, and her judgment of Xiao.

"He believed he was the one true seeker of truth. But he isn't even himself anymore. He's lost everything he ever treasured, everyone who ever walked beside him."

"He gave up everything, and now chases some hazy, insubstantial thing all alone."

"What could any of it possibly mean now?"

"He's nothing more than a wandering ghost adrift outside the world, a lone beast roaming the earth, gazing up at a moon in the sky forever out of reach."

"He thinks he looks down on the whole world from some great height. In truth he's nothing but another little person in the bottle, peering out at the world through the mouth of a jar."

"Even other people's hatred is a kind of reward to him, because it means there's still someone in this world who remembers this pitiable, lonely ghost, someone who'll still play out this endless game of chess with him."

Ray's own words seemed to fall into step with those of that distant God of Demon Spirits.

"Just forget him completely. Let him wander forever across an earth as empty and alone as he is."

Though Lomier already had some vague sense of these rumors, hearing Ray say it outright still stirred something in him.

"But are you not chasing the sun yourself? Chasing after something just as far out of reach."

Ray said, "I'm not the same."

Lomier looked at him, puzzled, as if asking why not.

Ray looked toward Number Three in the back seat of his aircraft, then toward the kite trailing on its string, and spoke with a pride he made no effort to hide.

"I have companions."

"I have my own people."

"I have a teacher."

"Even when I dream, I dream it together with all of them."

"And he, he'll always be a solitary man with nobody at all."

In that moment, Ray seemed to have won, and won completely.

From Ray's words, Lomier seemed to catch a glimpse of the relationships tangled up among these mortal-world gods, some knot of history running between one deity and another, entirely unlike anything he had ever imagined.

What neither of them knew was that, at this very moment, higher up, a few pairs of eyes were watching them closely.