Memory Stars Returning to God's Realm

"God, is this... punishment because I was not devout enough?"

Despairing, the Star Luo Queen closed her eyes.

The moment her consciousness sank into darkness, a light kindled before her.

A shaft of light shone from an immeasurable height and fell directly upon the Star Luo Queen.

At its source stood the Divine Messenger, clad in her golden robe.

"O descendant of Redlichia!"

"The divine has punished no one. All of this came from your own choices."

The dream spirit had opened the gates of the domain of the divine and created a ferryman to travel among the dreams in search of a trilobite man worthy of receiving the power of dreams.

All her efforts served to strengthen the Spirit Realm's power.

At that very moment, the Star Luo Queen was about to become the first memory star to enter the Dream Starry Sea.

She would be the dream spirit's first gift to the divine.

Step by step, the Divine Messenger descended from above and came to stand before the Star Luo Queen.

"You chose destruction. You abandoned the future."

"God has punished no one, and God does not care how devout you are."

The dream spirit Hila regarded the Star Luo Queen. "Because you surrendered the future, you did not live to enter the glory of the domain of the divine."

"But even after death, one chance remains for you to enter the domain of the divine."

The Star Luo Queen stared at the dream spirit. "Can even someone like me enter the domain of the divine?"

"Of course you can," the dream spirit said.

"From the moment God reclaimed the great beasts' power of destruction, the gates of the Kingdom of God have stood open to the trilobite men once more."

"After death, every one of you may become a memory star set among the Dream Starry Sea, circling the Kingdom of God forever in the company of the eternal divine being."

"You need no longer fear eternal darkness or dread wandering an endless savage desert. God has allowed you to return home."

The spirit paused, her tone growing serious.

"Of course."

"You must first pass a test."

The spirit fixed the Star Luo Queen with an unwavering gaze, as though peering through the windows of her soul and into her heart.

"The dream realm ferryman who steers the Divine Boat shall kindle your dream of memory."

"If your dream of memory is a beautiful dream..."

The Star Luo Queen hurriedly asked the Divine Messenger, "What makes a dream beautiful?"

The dream spirit told her, "When the good in your heart overcomes the evil, and the beauty within it overcomes every wicked thought."

"Then the dream of the life you lived is a beautiful dream."

Reaching out, the spirit drew forth the memory of the Star Luo Queen's entire life.

Freed from its shell of flesh, her memory swelled without end until it enveloped her completely.

At last, it became a dreamlike bubble enclosing her on every side.

Through the bubble's wall, the Star Luo Queen gazed upon her own life.

Scene after scene unfolded across the bubble's surface, revealing the images carved deepest into memory and moments long since forgotten.

Now every one of those memories rose within the bubble.

She saw herself in early childhood.

There she stood, lifting an Ancestral Fish from the Sacred Lake with both hands and smiling delightedly at her father.

She saw herself babble her first words in the divine words. She watched herself learn the first written character of all, the sun, said to have been drawn by the divine.

She saw herself awaken the wisdom ability for the first time. She saw herself receive the Ruhe brand.

Most of her life had been filled with goodness. Yet neither that goodness nor that happiness had come from the trilobite men themselves.

Food, the divine words, power, everything had come from God.

From birth until death, no trilobite man could live without the grace of the divine.

Boundless shame swept over the Star Luo Queen. With her own petty heart, she had presumed to measure the great and merciful divine.

"All this time, we were using up the grace the divine gave us, and we never even knew it."

"Without God, we could never have survived in such a world."

"Weak and fragile as we are, in our arrogance we still called ourselves strong."

The Star Luo Queen lifted her head as a vast gate slowly opened before her.

Beyond the gate swayed a boundless sea of golden flowers.

That was the God-Given Land, the homeland of every trilobite man.

Overhead hung the sun transformed from the Divine Cup and the Dream Moon transformed from the Crown of Wisdom.

"Thank you, Messenger of God Yinsai!"

She did not know why the divine had opened the gates of the domain of the divine to the trilobite men. Still, she believed the dream spirit's efforts had given distant wanderers a chance to return home one day.

They would finally wander this endless waste no more.

She walked toward the gates of the Kingdom of God. Her form slowly dissolved in the light and melted into her dream of memory.

The dreamlike memory star rose slowly into the Spirit Realm, leaving behind the body she had worn in the living world.

The Dream Realm

Beneath the Dream Moon's radiance, a ship approached from far across the Dream Starry Sea.

The Divine Boat reached the gate opened by the Spirit Realm and received the Star Luo Queen's dream of memory.

Before the Divine Boat's lantern, the ferryman who had become a shadow lifted the Star Luo Queen's entire life in both hands and placed it beneath the lantern.

The lantern's light flickered like flame and kindled the Star Luo Queen's Dream.

In an instant, the plain, unremarkable dream erupted in every color, illuminating the entire Divine Boat like a dazzling, many-hued lamp.

Brilliant colors filled the dream alongside gray and darkness.

Little by little, however, the colors overtook the gray and black. In the end, they drove out the darkness entirely.

This was a beautiful dream, and it could be kindled.

The dream realm ferryman carried the dream of memory down along the Dream Starry Sea until it came above the God-Given Land.

It hung the dream of memory in the open air, where it became a star.

The star's light cast itself downward and fell as radiance upon the gardens of the God-Given Land, lighting the city where the ancestors of the trilobite men once dwelt, and the paradise God had promised them.

Within the star, the Star Luo Queen relived the beautiful dream of her life again and again.

Until... forever.

The Halls of the Divine

Yin Shen stood at the temple window, gazing at the new stars beyond it.

The Dream Starry Sea was now divided into several layers.

Dreamlike starlight drifted through the topmost layer, carrying all the strange and shifting things born in the trilobite men's sleep and later forgotten. In the layer below, their dreams of memory shone as brilliant stars.

The purer the beautiful dream, the closer it lay to the God-Given Land.

It would record the life of one trilobite man after another, the beginning and end of one age after another, even the birth and destruction of one civilization after another.

Even if one day every trace of their civilization were worn away entirely, their cities crumbled to ash with the passing years, and their writing and language were buried beneath time itself...

The Dream Starry Sea would preserve every trace of their existence.

Starlight rippled behind Yin Shen. The dream spirit Hila appeared at his back and bowed reverently.

"O great divine being!"

"No one is willing to relinquish the power of destruction."

"They see only the fleeting present. The bright future lies beyond their sight."

God seemed to have foreseen everything. In truth, he had never cared.

"Oh."

Yin Shen did not even turn his head. He offered only a single reply.

"If that is how it is, perhaps they should never possess the power of dreams."

The spirit lowered her head and bowed before the divine.

"God, the trilobite men are not perfect."

"But I have seen that even in the darkest of dreams, they still reach for something beautiful."

"I shall find someone worthy of receiving the power of dreams."