kscans

Chapter 92 - The Beginning of the End, Seven

"Earth is the same as always."

"It is the only world that wasn’t tamed, after all."

"I’m envious."

The gods gathered quietly.

Many worlds had been tamed by the spirits. Time flowed peacefully and happily in those worlds, with the spirits always present.

...Forgetting the gods.

It wasn’t so bad. Humans lived in harmony with their dark neighbors. Using magic and magical power, their calm days continued.

...Eternally.

"Why did it come to this?"

"Humans are creatures that dislike change. If they can live by inertia, they will drift in that direction."

"Gods do not give trials that cannot be overcome, and yet... they won’t even try."

"...They are completely satisfied. They will not move."

The spirits did everything for them. Work, childcare, even helping them dress and eat. The humans just needed to exist. If they did what they liked and lived happily, the spirits were pleased. The gods looked down upon the lazy, apathetic humans with sorrow.

People who composed and recited poetry, danced, sang, and lived in peace day after day. They amused themselves with musical instruments, painted pictures, and immersed themselves in reading or embroidery. A life that even nobles would envy, lived by a tamed humanity.

The gods lamented and suffered, seeing the fate of the children they had nurtured for so long.

Pained by this, the Higher Beings began to move. To slay the spirits that ensnared and seduced humans in the darkness.

Amidst this, the one world that resisted being tamed by the spirits with all its might was Earth. Far from resisting, it had in turn tamed the spirits, making them truly good neighbors.

The reason was unknown. But the spirits of Earth had evolved uniquely and had, of their own accord, cut off interference from the stirring thing in the abyss. And they had truly stayed by humanity’s side.

The Higher Beings thought.

There is the rare precedent of Earth. What was different from the other worlds? What was the reason its people were able to control the spirits?

And then they arrived at an idea.

Earth has no principles of magic.

Let’s test it.

And so, the boy god and Heislepe were born.

A world with no magic whatsoever. It was given an abundance of greenery, brought forth countless living creatures, and became a world with scientific advancements that rivaled any other. Only magic was not born, but it had technology that more than compensated for it. Without magic, they wouldn’t be beguiled by the spirits. The people of Heislepe shouldn’t be able to see or hear the spirits.

So thought the Higher Beings.

However, even if the people of Heislepe couldn’t see or hear them, it wasn’t as if the spirits that dwell in all of creation were not there. The spirits of Heislepe, who were ignored and treated as non-existent no matter how much they tried to interact, quietly sickened and broke.

Too much love turns to a hundred times the hate.

If you won’t see us, we’ll make you see. The spirits, weeping profusely, reached out from the abyss and began to play tricks on Heislepe.

Persistently, viscously, until it became a fatal blow.

The loneliness and sadness of the spirits reached their limit, and accidents and malfunctions began to occur all over Heislepe. A full course of natural disasters, forest fires, tornadoes, droughts, floods, and cold snaps, one after another. It went as far as tampering with core technologies, causing meltdowns and missile misfirings, and the humans, with no time to catch their breath, became paranoid about the unnatural accidents.

They believed someone was trying to sabotage them.

It never occurred to them that it was the mischief of spirits. That was natural, as they had never seen them. They failed to notice the spirits laughing wildly, their faces contorted in mad glee, and suspecting one another, they pulled the trigger for a world war.

Get involved, and you’re spoiled and led astray. Don’t get involved, and you invite ruin and wrath.

What is to be done?

As they watched Heislepe engulfed in flames, the Higher Beings puzzled over the problem. And then, they suddenly noticed. They saw the boy god, struck down by despair.

Of course, there was that way.

The Higher Beings smiled bewitchingly.

If the celestial realm was light, then the abyss was darkness. Two sides of the same coin, both were necessary. Leaning toward the light raised consciousness under the influence of the gods. Leaning toward the darkness weakened consciousness under the influence of the spirits. Humans with weakened minds easily became dependent on the spirits and were tamed. But if their minds were too strong, they would become dependent on the gods and be stained by their magical power. A careful balance, not too close and not too far, was crucial.

Let’s create that artificially.

A soul filled with light and a soul stained with darkness. If we create these two and throw them into the abyss, the stirring thing in the darkness will awaken. The soul of light will destroy the abyss filled with the power of darkness, and if the soul of darkness thrown in at the same time newly stains the abyss, that thing will lose its place and disappear.

That thing is the Spirit King.

He is the source of the trouble, who endlessly creates spirits and has tamed numerous worlds. There are guardians at the entrance to each world, and the Spirit King cannot go to any of them. All he can do is create spirits that slip through the cracks between the guardians.

The King of Nothingness, sealed in the abyss. That is the Spirit King.

A prisoner born with the abyss, confined to eternal darkness.

His only pleasure is to feel the lives of humans through the spirits he creates.

And he was greedy.

To obtain everything, he reaches for a new world. He was terribly disappointed by Heislepe, which had no principles of magic. The indifferent humans were hateful to him, and he felt a tremendous rage, using the spirits to destroy it.

Because if it was destroyed, a new world would be born. The Spirit King knew this. Worlds he didn't like could just be destroyed and remade.

And so continued the long battle between the gods and the spirits. Around the time most worlds had been tamed by the spirits' interference, the Higher Beings repeated time over and over to create what they desired.

The soul of light was obtained relatively quickly, but the soul of darkness was the problem.

They tried to reincarnate people who had committed evil deeds in various worlds and have them accumulate new evil deeds, but this did not go well. For some reason, they only ended up accumulating virtue and were released from the yoke of their karma. So the Higher Beings set their sights on the boy god of Heislepe.

The future his world would follow was fixed. If so, let's make it even more tragic and cruel. The Higher Beings repeated the destruction of Heislepe many times, ending it in the most miserable way possible.

As a result, the boy god's heart fell into darkness.

Through repetition, the Higher Beings also got the hang of it. They realized that giving hope and then shattering it to pieces deepened the despair. A nightmare repeated like an experiment on a mouse. The Higher Beings made full and effective use of the destruction of Heislepe.

But there was a miscalculation.

The boy god’s memories, which should have been reset with each repetition, gradually accumulated, and a fragment remained in his mind.

A fragment of a nightmare remaining in a corner of his mind. Piecing them together, the boy god realized that the Higher Beings were toying with the destruction of Heislepe.

It was an unforgivable act.

The boy god, vowing revenge in his heart, sealed those memories along with his divine power into a magic crystal and had it carried to Arcadia. The same thing would surely happen in Arcadia. It was a vague premonition, but for some reason, he was certain.

"It would be good if this is just needless worry..."

And so, reincarnated in Arcadia as he had imagined, the boy god, with the cooperation of the boy he possessed, Chihaya, shared their mutual memories.

"The gods are the enemy... I can’t tell Hero this."

His sister was on good terms with the gods. She would never dream that there was a possibility of being betrayed.

‘You of all people should know that my memories are not false.’

"...Yeah."

The other worlds where spirits bewildered and controlled humanity. That too was hard to believe, but it was reality. If it weren't, the Higher Beings wouldn't be seriously trying to eliminate the Spirit King of the abyss.

Spirits...

Chihaya waved his finger in the air.

Kyau.

Hou.

Two spirits popped into existence. Chihaya’s, or rather, Cesare’s, face twisted without him realizing.

‘...These things. They destroyed Heislepe...!’

"Don’t, Cesare. These aren’t the ones from your world. You’re the one who made them this way, right?"

For a moment, rage and reason clashed in his mind.

‘That’s right. Yes, I made them this way. Didn’t I? Gnome.’

The Gnome, though frightened, prostrated itself.

To the Gnome, Cesare was an absolute being. Conversely, the salamander, Jirō-kun, snuggled up to Chihaya.

‘Hmph. It seems the salamander has escaped my control.’

The Lords of the Forest had designated a graveyard for magical beasts and nurtured magic crystals on their nutrients. The spirits that manifested using the magic of those crystals as sustenance swore absolute obedience to Cesare. The fundamental absolute being for a spirit is the Spirit King. However, nurture is stronger than nature. A spirit considers the owner of the magic that raised it to be its absolute. Cesare, having been forced through a harsh past repeatedly, noticed this mechanism. And he decided to use it in Arcadia.

‘Having his spirit pawns stolen, the Spirit King must be furious right now. Fufufu, how amusing, how amusing.’

A loud laugh echoed in his mind.

Smiling wryly at it, Chihaya stroked Jirō-kun’s chin.

"Why were you on Frontier’s side from the beginning?"

Chihaya, tilting his head in wonder, did not know. He did not know that Frontier, where magic had not been lost, had maintained the Tower of David and continued to send out magical power. It was Frontier’s magic that had created and raised the salamanders. For the salamanders, Frontier was their home, their absolute.

And so, a story unknown not only to the Higher Beings but also to the gods and the Little One was about to begin.