The Saint's Memory and the Forbidden Technique

The sea stretched endlessly in the distance. No sound of waves reached Stan Tito, yet at the sight of it, the music of the tides echoed in his ears.

Ah!

"God-Descended City!"

The familiar city and the familiar scent of the sea breeze stirred a deep longing within him.

He had not been away long, yet it felt like years.

As he walked on, he saw crowds gathered outside the city before a field of stone mounds large and small. They were the graves of trilobite men.

Stones of every size had been piled into mound after mound, forming a single cemetery.

Sorrow marked every face. Each mourner passed a grave and laid another stone upon the mound, the trilobite custom for grieving the dead.

The returning Child of Fortune asked, "What happened here?"

Someone answered, "They lost family in the great beast calamity. They're mourning them. All those poor souls, gone in the one disaster."

To ordinary people, a great beast was a calamity from heaven. It was divine punishment.

Stan Tito looked across the cemetery. "All of these graves?"

The man nodded. "Every one of them."

Stan Tito stared at the mound graves crowded together. There were at least hundreds at a glance, perhaps a thousand or more.

In an instant, all the joy and excitement of coming home drained away. "The disaster was only the beginning. The suffering hasn't ended."

He had witnessed the ruin and calamity wrought by a great beast. Now he saw the pain and torment left in its wake.

He no longer had the heart to enter God-Descended City. Instead, he went straight to Tito Town.

He wanted to see the people of his home town again, though few in Tito Town had ever known him. Back then, he had been only an unremarkable craftsman's son.

He returned to find the once-bustling town reduced to an empty shell.

Its people were gone. Its houses stood hollow.

Not a trace of a living soul remained.

At a loss, he wandered through the deserted town.

Outside the town, he came upon an old man who had once lived there.

"Where did everyone go?"

The old man answered, "They took most of the craftsmen off to rebuild the royal residence, the one that came down. The rest just scattered. Some went to beg help off the other branches of the family."

"Nobody wants our wares now, and we've no fishing grounds of our own. There's no living in that. We had to find some other way."

The old man sighed, "Tito Town..."

"It's gone."

Tito Town's prosperity had scattered, and everything else had drifted away with it like smoke.

The absurdity of it struck Stan Tito. "Her Majesty is gone. Why rebuild a royal residence now?"

The old man replied, "Her Majesty may be gone, but didn't a new king come along recently?"

"The lord of God-Descended City wants to curry favor with him, so he's rebuilding the royal residence to welcome the new king."

"They say it's the only way to preserve God-Descended City's glory and dignity!"

Stan Tito frowned. "Henir?"

The old man nodded. "Yes, yes. That's the name."

Stan Tito could make no sense of it. "Henir's only just taken the throne. Where would he find the time for God-Descended City? He isn't sparing them a thought."

The old man spread his hands. "How would ordinary folk like us understand the affairs of great men?"

Stan Tito gave an ugly laugh.

"Did the great beasts truly bring this ruin, or did the greed and desire in men's hearts summon the disaster?"

Deft hands worked chisel and hammer against a stone tablet as tall as a man. Little by little, an exquisite carving emerged.

The craftsman poured every last measure of his strength into carving the scene upon the tablet.

The carving showed people weeping for lost family in the cemetery beneath the city wall.

Inside the city, devastation lay everywhere. A great beast had destroyed nearly half of it, and the repairs remained unfinished.

Yet no one spared a thought for the shattered streets or the homes of commoners. All their effort went into raising the palace at the city's heart.

Slaves hauled stone up flights of steps. Craftsmen hung in midair as they labored over the towering, majestic Yesael Palace. Below them, nobles stood with overseers and guards, passing judgment on every detail.

A single picture laid bare the full span of life.

The commoners' grief, the slaves' lowliness, the craftsmen's bitter toil, and the nobles' arrogance were all laid bare.

Until now, he had only reproduced the famous works of the ancients. At last he had made something of his own, a work that truly carried his soul and will.

Stan Tito carried the first creation of his life into the empty ruins of the town.

At the town's center lay the site of the Tito family's old castle.

Openings riddled the vast sunken pit, each leading into caverns deep underground.

The priests of God-Descended City had ransacked the place. Almost everything they could carry had been taken back to the city and enshrined in the Yesael Palace and the Yinsai Temple.

They had taken every brick, every stone, and every flower.

Only the deep pit remained.

To Stan Tito, however, the place remained sacred.

Here lay the great poet's bones. Here the Divine Messenger Polo and Queen Star had breathed their last. The relics and stones had never made this place noble or holy. Their will had.

He wanted to leave his work here as an offering to the great poet of old, the ancestor he revered above all others.

He followed one of the caverns deep into the earth.

Darkness deepened with every step. At last he entered a vast underground chamber completely flooded with seawater.

He knelt and bowed toward the depths.

"An offering to the great poet!"

Without hesitation, he lowered the carving into the seawater.

The stone tablet sank to the bottom, sending ripples across the water.

Splash!

A clear note rang from the water. Ripples traveled into the distance as though brushing against something.

Suddenly, a golden radiance flickered beneath the water.

A moment later, a Sun Cup bloomed within the radiance, illuminating the water's surface and the entire cavern.

The world spun around Stan Tito. In the next instant, he was no longer standing in the cavern, but upon a seashore.

A sea of flowers spread before him, surrounding a small, elegant house and courtyard.

"The ruins left by the Divine Messenger Polo and Queen Star."

"An illusion?"

He had encountered illusion techniques cast through a Sun Cup before, and recognized this one immediately.

The thickets once filled with blooming Sun Cups had long since vanished. What he saw could only be an illusion technique.

Stan Tito crossed the illusory sea of flowers, entered the courtyard, and stepped inside the house.

Inside, the house was far larger than it had appeared. Bone tablets rose in mountainous heaps upon the shelves, while stone paintings covered every wall, recording ancient epics and scenes from myth.

Turning to the shelves, he opened one of the bone books bound together there.

"The Bestowing of Power."

Stan Tito froze. This divine technique had been mastered by only a handful of people within the royal house.

He opened the next book. "A forbidden technique?"

At first he did not understand. The moment the book opened, he felt as though he had touched the most terrible thing in the world and hurriedly shut it again.

The forbidden technique had been left by Schlode Xilong, the Sky Temple's first high priest and most ancient senior priest.

That very technique had ultimately killed him alongside King Yesael, and even caused the loss of the Crown of Wisdom.

Without warning, a figure appeared behind him, seated by the window and watching Stan Tito in silence.

"Has someone finally come?"

Startled by the voice, Stan Tito spun around.

Backlit by the window, the figure's face lay hidden.

The figure's outline felt strangely familiar. "I am Stan Tito."

"Who are you?"

The figure answered, "I am Tito."

"This is the memory illusion I left behind. It holds the memories and power I placed within it."

"Only one with a pure heart can awaken it."

Stan Tito stood motionless. Then he stepped closer and finally saw the figure clearly.

The ruined eyes and the scars across that face left no doubt about who stood before him.

"The great poet."

"Saint... Saint Tito?"

He cried out in shock. Emotion carried him several quick steps forward before awe stopped him short.

He looked upon his ancestor and asked.

"Why did you leave all of this behind? Was there some mission you meant to pass on?"

The great poet sat quietly by the window, gazing into the garden. "Every person's mission is born from within, not bestowed by another."

"This is a library. It contains all that I left behind in my lifetime."

"I merely wished to keep certain things from being forgotten. Nothing more."

As the words fell, everything around him shattered in an instant.

Only then did Stan Tito realize he still stood in the dark cavern.

But when he lowered his head, he found a Sun Cup in his hand.

The flower cup opened wide. A golden apparition spun forth and touched one finger to Stan Tito's forehead.

"The Bestowing of Power."

Stan Tito had inherited the memory and power left behind by Saint Tito.