Chapter 492: The Supreme Divine Beings' Gift to the Witch Doctors

High Above the Heavens

The lineage of the Supreme Divine Beings watched the Star of Death drift away, that star frozen together out of water and a five-pointed star, circling the earth over and over and brushing past the moon as it went.

Nine full circuits later, it broke free of the earth's gravity at last.

Using its own power together with the sun's gravity, it raced off toward the sun in the end, to circle the sun.

Yin Shen stood upon the void, His gaze fixed on the Star of Death's shadow.

There was no blue sky here and no white cloud, because both of them lay beneath their feet.

Look out and up, and there was nothing but an endless, dark universe. Look down, and a blue, spherical world unfolded below.

Standing here, looking out at the world, at the universe itself, Hila felt as though the very word "empty" might swallow her whole.

She gazed at the distant sun. Up here it was not the golden thing it looked like from the ground, but a ring of white light.

"The sun, it really is so far away!"

Before long, she turned her gaze to the distant moon as well.

"Even the moon is the same. It looks so near, and yet in truth it is beyond all reaching."

Shelly said, "It's the stars that are really far away."

Yin Shen glanced down at Shelly.

"I told you once, long ago, that every star in the sky is a sun. Do you still remember?"

Shelly scratched at her hair and raised her eyes, thinking it over.

"God said something else too. The stars we see are stars from countless years ago, and some of them died ages back."

Shelly still could not quite make sense of it.

"But if they're all dead already, how come we can still see them?"

Yin Shen said, "Because light has a limit to its speed. What we see is only their shadow, the light they cast out countless years ago, only now arriving before our eyes."

Shelly's whole face lit up.

"No wonder the Big Meteor could gobble up the sunlight. It's because they run too slow!"

Behind them, the witch doctors murmured among themselves too.

To come this far and see a sight like this was a first even for them.

What caught their attention was that here, of all places, they had lost contact with the Dream Realm entirely.

"It seems even the power of rituals cannot be used here." The witch doctors discovered that the rituals inscribed on their own robes had actually failed.

"Many divine techniques cannot be used either. This place seems to lack the elements needed to cast them." Illusions, mental techniques, and divine techniques that summoned Seal Spirits could still be used, but those that required controlling the elements had, for the most part, stopped working.

Most Seal Spirits found their power weakened as well. A Seal Spirit that relied on earth, water, or air to work its power, for instance, could probably manage barely one or two tenths of its full strength here.

"Storage artifacts do not work either, nor do Dream Vine leaves." The witch doctors looked down at the rings on their hands and found that the rituals on them had failed. Even a Dream Vine leaf was useless, unable to reach the Lake Nymphs of the Divine Kingdom of Creation.

"Because the limit of the Dream Realm is the limit of how far life itself can reach." The witch doctors murmured among themselves about the reason.

"And this place, this is already life's forbidden domain." Having stayed at the Creator's side all this while, they understood certain secrets of the Dream Realm rather well.

And yet, without the Dream Realm's power, it was not only rituals and most divine techniques that stopped working.

It meant, too, that anyone who died here would have no boat come to carry them off, and anyone lost here would have no way at all of finding the way home.

Any spirit that died in this place might well turn into something dreadful.

The witch doctors murmured among themselves again.

"What would it take to make the Dream Realm reach out and cover this place?"

Witch Doctor Right Hand said, "Only an extraordinary species can survive here, and only then would the Dream Realm extend out to reach it. But there is nothing here at all. No extraordinary species could dwell here for long."

Witch Doctor Skull put in, "God may one day make some special star-born species. Would that not settle it?"

Witch Doctor Left Hand offered, "Or we could lift a Divine Kingdom up here. The Dream Realm would come with it."

Witch Doctor Right Foot agreed.

"That is not a bad thought. To build a Mortal Divine System at all, a Divine Kingdom must be settled somewhere, and set against the earth below, this place truly would suit it better."

Witch Doctor Left Foot said, "Are those mortal mythologies not forever fighting among themselves? Out here everything is battlefield. We could let them fight their fill."

And so the witch doctors' conversation wandered further and further afield.

Yin Shen kept His eyes on the Star of Death the whole while.

Its departure seemed to stir some memory in Him, and He lingered here a long while.

Only after it had circled the earth nine times did He finally turn around.

"Come, let us go back!"

He took only a single step, and everyone felt the world around them dissolve into a blur of afterimages.

They returned to that desolate little island.

Their Hot Air Balloon Boat was still moored on the island, and Vellen sat crouched before the cabin door, waiting for them.

The moment he saw them, the plump little Mythology Spirit sprang to his feet and waved both hands wildly, a sight that could not help but draw a smile.

Life on the little island seemed to settle back into something quiet and uneventful. Every day Shelly gathered conch shells on the beach, or propped her chin in her hands and counted grains of sand by the shore.

Once in a while she would spot a sky messenger circling at the very edge of the sky, seeming to search for the fallen starlight fragments her "Big Meteor" had left behind.

Before long, even that sky messenger vanished without a trace.

But this state of affairs did not last long.

A giant Life ability beast came from far away, bearing a gift for Shelly.

It was an enormous creature, its back studded with knob after knob of rock, as though it carried reef stones piled upon its own spine.

It came to the island's edge and lay prostrate before Shelly.

Then it spat out a neat, evenly shaped stone, and only once Shelly had taken it did the beast turn and swim unsteadily away across the sea.

It was a white stone, the very opposite of the Gravity Stone's black.

Triangular at a glance, it was really more like a small pyramid, except that its surface was smooth and even as a mirror, without the stepped sides of a real pyramid.

Shelly clutched the stone in excitement and dashed toward the center of the island.

"The Floating Stone's here!"

"Big Fireworks sent me the Floating Stone!"

"God, Hila..."

Without a second thought she activated the stone's power, and a tremendous force settled over the island.

At once, the entire island began to shake violently.

Everything around them lifted into the air. Grains of sand, pebbles, ferns, all slipped free of gravity's hold.

Even the trees tore free of the ground and floated in midair.

Then the whole island lifted free of the sea, and everything spun together in the sky.

Shelly did not resist the lifting force either, letting it carry her up into the air to spin along with everything else.

"We're floating!"

"Everything's floating!"

She even swam through the sky like a fish, paddling herself forward with practiced ease.

Gurgle gurgle~

The cabin door swung open, and Hila stared out at the world beyond in astonishment.

"Ah!"

"What is happening?"

Yet the island truly had risen just as Shelly had hoped.

But as it climbed it was steadily coming apart, and looked ready to break to pieces entirely at any moment.

The Hot Air Balloon Boat circled through the sky, and Hila spoke to her from the doorway.

"Shelly, this island is coming apart."

Shelly clutched the Floating Stone and scratched at her head, a little embarrassed.

"I just wanted to make it float. How did it go and break?"

At that moment, a beam of light appeared behind Shelly.

Yin Shen's shadow formed there, and He reached out a hand toward her.

"Give it to me."

At once Shelly handed over the stone she had been clutching so tightly, the one radiating such a powerful field of weightlessness.

Her eyes stayed on him, expectant, as though hoping for something.

She looked exactly like a child who had broken her own toy, waiting for a grown-up to fix it for her.

Slowly, out of His other hand, Yin Shen drew a black stone, another triangular pyramid of a stone.

It was the very Gravity Stone He had plucked from Ruhe Beast Island, the one that had become a shooting star.

He brought His two hands together and pressed the two stones against each other.

Snap!

The two fit together as though they had been made for each other, clinging fast the moment they touched.

Pyramid and mirrored pyramid joined into a single stone, a rhombus split cleanly between black and white.

It came to a point on either end, and had eight faces in all.

Yin Shen turned to light, standing at the center of that weightless world.

He turned the two stones, the upper and the lower, gently in His hands.

Their powers canceled each other out, even as they went on shaping one another.

At once a strange field of force spread outward, and in the end it formed something like a shielding Barrier laid over the outer layer, holding back the gravity beyond.

At the same time, a powerful gravity took shape in the very center of Yin Shen's palm, reaching out to govern everything within the barrier.

Yin Shen stretched out His hand and set the rhombus-shaped stone down.

"It is done."

Shelly threw her hands up at once, grinning as she turned toward Hila.

"Ah, it's fixed!"

What looked like some vast and miraculous power was, to Yin Shen and Shelly, really nothing more than a bit of play.

The rhombus stone sank little by little into the depths of the island, and everything that had been drifting through the sky slowly settled back into place, until the island seemed to return entirely to normal.

Though things on the island had returned to normal, the whole of it kept climbing higher.

It broke through the vault of the sky entirely, and drifted up above the highest sea of clouds.

There, at last, it came to a stop.

It did not yet have the power to fly beyond the sky itself.

Light spread for ten thousand miles across the sea of clouds and reached all the way onto the island, and in an instant this once entirely ordinary place turned sacred and dreamlike.

Shelly landed atop the Hot Air Balloon Boat's balloon and bounced about on it, shouting out toward the distance.

"It really did work!"

"I really am just too amazing!"

Hila said, "It was God who fixed it for you."

Shelly did not blush in the least.

"God sleeps all the time. Without me, God wouldn't get anything done at all."

Hila glanced toward Yin Shen too, and turned away, biting back a laugh.

Only Shelly, after all, would dare complain to the Creator's face like that.

Shelly rattled on without pause.

"My genius ideas plus an all-powerful God, add us up and we're the most amazing thing in the whole world."

---

Above the Floating Island

It looked as though simply lifting the island into the sky had already been success enough.

But it soon proved to be only the beginning of an experiment, nowhere near complete, and no end of problems still waited to be solved.

The most obvious one was that not long after the island rose into the sky, every plant growing on it had died.

In an environment like this, no ordinary species could survive at all.

The Floating Island itself was far too fragile as well, and there were other problems on top of that.

In the end, the task of greening and reinforcing the Floating Island fell once again to the witch doctors.

"Dead. Not a single one of them survived!" The witch doctors studied the withered plants and shook their heads.

"Bringing them back would do no good. No ordinary plant has any way to survive out here." Someone proposed reviving them, or replanting them fresh, but the idea was rejected at once.

"Should we lay down a Barrier, then, or simply cover the place with a mythic domain?" Someone raised the idea of setting up a Barrier, and the witch doctors fell into thought.

"This place has not slipped entirely beyond the Dream Realm's influence yet, but against a thing like this a Barrier would do little good. A mythic domain is even less called for. This is only a temporary resting place for the Supreme God and for the rest of us." In the end, the proposal was voted down all the same.

"Just so. To cover it with a mythic domain would be to refine this place into a Mortal Divine Kingdom outright." The witch doctors shook their heads, one after another.

"We could plant potions instead, or Cups of Desire and Blood Mist Cups." In the end, the witch doctors decided to grow extraordinary plants on the Floating Island.

At first they went on debating which one to plant.

"Why choose at all? Plant them all." Witch Doctor Skull slapped their own thigh, and that settled it.

In the end, the witch doctors decided to plant everything they could.

They planted Blood Mist Cups on the high ground to the west, Cups of Desire in the low ground to the east, and got hold of Potion Seeds as well, planting them in every corner of the island.

They even planted several Rainbow Trees.

A Rainbow Tree gave birth to a nymph only when planted on the Dream Continent. An ordinary one like this could serve as no more than a means of communication.

After that, they used their own mythical power to force these extraordinary plants to ripen, coaxing them into rapid growth.

Then, with their extraordinary power, they refined the island together into one piece, the way one might refine an artifact, reinforcing the Floating Island and keeping it from falling apart.

Along the way, they raised a handful of buildings too, without much effort, nothing especially grand.

After all, the island itself was not large, but what they raised was exquisite and magnificent all the same, in a style modeled on the God-Moon Era of the Henir Dynasty, copied wholesale straight out of memory.

Before long, the Floating Island had become a beautiful mansion fit for the gods.

Shelly, Hila, and Yin Shen walked past cliffs abloom with Blood Mist Cups, through a fantastical jungle glowing with faint light, and stopped at last to listen to the soft song of the Blood Mist Cups along the island's edge.

Walking last of the three, Hila took in the whole scene and stopped where she stood.

Smiling, she came before the witch doctors and regarded them with unmistakable warmth.

"You have all worked hard."

The witch doctors lined up in a row.

"This is only our duty."

Hila looked out over the island drifting through the sky, the very first Floating Island this world had ever seen.

"God told you once that someday you would go down into the mortal world, to seek out the meaning of your own existence."

"And this, this is the gift that God and we give to you."

"A day will come when you will surely want a place of your own in which to found a kingdom. This may be that place."

The witch doctors froze, staring blankly at the Dream Sovereign.

All these days they had labored on the island without ever expecting to receive anything for it, hoping only that they would make no mistake and set Lady Shelly's temper off again.

Never once had it crossed their minds that all their hard work would, in the end, come to belong to them.

"This is a gift, for us?"

"A kingdom of our own, in the time to come?"

The witch doctors could hardly contain themselves. This was no ordinary thing. This was a Floating Island.

As one, the witch doctors dropped to their knees and bowed to Hila.

"Thank you, Lady Hila."

Then they turned the other way and bowed again, to God Yinsai and Shelly there in the garden.

"And thank you as well, Great God Yinsai, and Lady Shelly."

Hila nodded and turned to make her way toward where Yinsai and Shelly stood.

Before she left, she said one thing more to the witch doctors.

"And if one day you do find your reason, you may come and tell it to God and to me."

To Hila, this was nothing especially precious. To Shelly, it was only a temporary little toy.

Naturally, neither of them meant to take it away, or carry it back to the Divine Kingdom of Creation.

But to the witch doctors, it meant something else entirely.

This was a Divine Kingdom that stood, by its own nature, high above the heavens, one destined to take its place among the stars themselves.

Push it just one step higher, and it would enter an orbit circling the earth, truly rising into the High Heavens at last.

Even while finishing the island's every last detail, the witch doctors had already been imagining how they would lay out a Divine Kingdom above the High Heavens, should it ever become one.

Watching the shadows of the Supreme Divine Beings there in the garden, the witch doctors felt some nameless feeling rise up in their hearts, all at once.

Gratitude, longing, yearning.

At the same time, could they somehow sense the warmth that passed between the Supreme Divine Beings themselves?

Perhaps only they, of all people, could ever have known that the bond among the Supreme Divine Beings ran like this.

Together, they came to the island's edge.

Looking down from high in the sky, they could make out the winged people and the sky messengers gathering fragments of Gravity Stone across the sea below.

At last, their eyes settled on that ancient puppet demon spirit, piloting his aircraft.

In that same moment, the witch doctors heard what he was saying.

Witch Doctor Left Hand said, "However high the sky may stand, it cannot hold back the heart's longing for it."

Witch Doctor Torso answered, "But it is not only the High Heavens and the realm of stars he means to fly to. He means to fly all the way to the sun."

Witch Doctor Right Foot murmured, "Perhaps he does not truly understand how far the sun stands from us."

Witch Doctor Skull was entirely unconcerned.

"And what does that matter? If you want to do a thing, then go and do it."

The witch doctors stood there above the sea of clouds, at the very edge of a divine estate no mortal could ever see, or so much as glimpse.

But at that moment, Witch Doctor Right Hand asked a question that had weighed on all of them for a long while.

"Then what is the meaning of our own existence?"

Witch Doctor Torso gave voice to the thing they had all secretly feared and worried over for so long.

"If we did not stay at the Creator's side, what else is there that we could do?"

In the silence that followed, Witch Doctor Left Hand was the first to speak.

She looked first toward the shadows of the Supreme Divine Beings.

"The Supreme Divine Beings cross the long river of time together. And we, together, search for meaning."

Then she looked to the five other witch doctors in turn.

"Whatever it turns out to be, so long as we are together and seek it side by side, that is enough."

---

Ray searched the sea again and again, circling round and round.

He never did find the shape or the shadow he had been hoping for, and in the end he returned to Matale carrying only the fragments of Gravity Stone he had gathered.

It left him a little regretful, but it steeled his resolve as well, and he put an end to his hesitating and wavering.

He had long since prepared everything he needed to become an Apostle, and the moment he returned to Matale, he set straight to work.

The ritual stone tablet Ray used had come to him through a Rainbow Tree from Elena, the God of Demon Spirits, and the ritual altar he had set up with his own hands. The materials for it he had in truth prepared before he ever left Ruhe Beast Island.

The road to becoming an Apostle was one he had been preparing for a long time now. He had simply never settled on how, exactly, he meant to become a Demon Spirit Apostle.

Inside Ray's high-altitude estate, the Barrier opened.

The ritual began.

Light spread out from the ritual altar, radiating outward along the lines and symbols carved into the stone slabs on the ground, ring after ring, until at last it connected with Number Two and Number Three, standing at their own nodes.

Beam after beam of light stretched toward the Dream Realm, the source of all power, the home to which every spirit returned, and, more than that, the kingdom where the gods themselves dwelt.

Ray stood at the very center of the ritual, taking in the crushing pressure that poured down from the Dream Realm.

An invisible force surged in from every side, like a gale blowing in from nowhere at all, until it converged, all at once, upon Ray's own body.

"Spirit!"

"Seal Imprint."

"Blood of Myth."

Following the method of the Art of God's Grace, his own Divine Blood was drawn out from within him as well.

A silver light spilled slowly out of him. That vast, boundless shadow was pressed down by the crushing weight from the Spirit Realm, compressed into a unit of Divine Blood too small for the naked eye to see, and it fused, in that same moment, with the Magic Gold Seal Imprint that Ray held.

Seal Imprint, Divine Blood, and Spirit, the three elements of Wisdom ability, fused together into one.

The God's Grace Stone appeared.

The instant it appeared, it drained away every last trace of that vast Divine Blood inside Ray, turning it into a single silver stone.

At once, the stone began to merge with Ray's own metal puppet body, mythologizing the very husk of him.

But the organ Ray's God's Grace Stone chose to mythologize was not his brain.

It was, instead, a single core component deep within him.

Ray's metal puppet form began to change, growing steadily more refined, and the mechanical gears within him turned, one after another, carrying the light along with them until it reached the core in his chest.

At last, something strange was born deep in his chest.

It was a spherical thing, intricately made, that looked for all the world like a clockwork heart of endlessly turning gears.

The moment it took shape, a powerful Mental Domain sprang into being along with it.

The great heaps of metal material all around began to change with it, turning into Magic Gold, and then into one metal monster after another, each built out of metal parts and components.

In that single instant, the whole estate became a kingdom of metal monsters.

Yet because those metal monsters all looked so much like wind-up puppets, the whole place felt more like a city of toys than anything else.

Ray looked down at his own chest, and saw his own Mythical Organ there.

"This is my Mechanical Heart."

He turned to look at Number Two and Number Three.

"And it's the road ahead of me, too."

For now, what he showed the world was still his original form.

But once he became an Apostle, he would have another form to call on as well.

Ray stepped down from the altar, down its final stair, onto a stone slab already laid out and waiting for him below.

"Ritual of God's Form!"

Light shot straight up into the sky, and the power of the ritual wrapped itself around Ray's entire body.

There on the stone slab, Ray's form began to change.

Little by little, he turned from a metal puppet into a living, breathing person.

A head of hair grew in, white shot through with a faint tinge of blue.

It looked, somehow, like the very color of lightning, and his eyes were a translucent, deep blue.

And yet even now that Ray had become a living man, the first impression he gave off still carried something of a toy doll about it, a faint unreality that clung to him.

Ray studied his own new body and face, raising a hand as if he too did not quite know what to do with himself.

"I've... taken on God's Form."

Not since the People of the Abyss had first become metal puppets had any of them felt anything like this.

He felt his own hair falling across his eyes, an odd, uncomfortable sensation.

He swept it all back with one hand, baring his forehead, and looked, somehow, all the brighter for it.

Number Two and Number Three crowded around him. Even Number Two, who was usually rather proud of herself, sounded genuinely envious and full of admiration now.

"Ray, you really did it."

Number Three practically danced with excitement, seeming happier than Ray himself.

"Apostle, Apostle, Apostle!"

"Ray, you're an Apostle now."

Meanwhile, as that fourth-rank Mental Domain spread out across the whole city of the winged people, every ability user there felt it and looked up toward the heights.

"That's...!"

"A Mental Domain?"

"Fourth-rank power!"

Several winged people and sky messengers took flight at once toward Ray's estate, and no sooner had they landed than they saw a young man bearing God's Form step out from within.

Sky Messenger Lomier, who had been just about to leave the city, stared at Ray's entirely new face and form in utter shock.

"God's Form."

"So this is your true form after all, Ray?"

Ray looked between Ose and Lomier, and did not bother explaining much.

"Lomier, I'd like to go with you to the Sacred Mountain of Light. Would that be all right?"

Lomier did not hesitate for even a moment, welcoming him at once.

"The Sacred Mountain of Light and the sky messengers welcome you."

Becoming an Apostle was only the first step. There was far more Ray meant to do yet, and no small number of unimaginable hardships waiting for him to overcome.

What he meant to do was so far from ordinary, so far beyond anything anyone could imagine.

At last, Ray turned to look at Ose, and spoke.

"Ose, I'm leaving now."

Ray broke into a smile, a metal puppet smiling in front of another person for the very first time in his life.

"I'm going to build a great aircraft. To see this whole world clearly for myself, and to see the world above the sky clearly too."

"To go where no one has ever gone before. To chase, and to seek out adventure."

Ose had already known this was coming, and yet he could not help a sigh all the same.

"That Matale should keep the mark of your footsteps is an honor to us all."

Ray looked at Ose and said, "Goodbye."

When Ray said that goodbye, he truly meant to see him again someday.

Ose the winged person said, "Goodbye."

When Ose said his own goodbye, he understood, all too well, that they might never see each other again.