Mythical Blood

A voice came from within the temple, empty and desolate, drained of all feeling, as though time itself were speaking.

"Come in!"

Fearful and uneasy, Yesael stepped into the great hall, his whole body trembling. He feared this overwhelming, myth-like life, and he felt the pressure of standing before the very source of his own power.

He stared in terror at the girl with brown hair and green eyes, and found that she paid him no attention at all. Her gaze stayed fixed on the sky beyond the temple, the way some mighty bizarre shrimp of the deep sea would never spare a glance for the trilobites beneath its feet.

In awe he looked up at the divine upon the altar, and after a single glance he lowered his head.

That radiance was too dazzling to look upon directly.

"Redlichia, is this one your son as well?"

Redlichia knelt below the altar, and the pride and joy coming off him were plain even to Yin Shen.

"Yes, God."

"He has inherited my bloodline and my myth-like power. He holds the honor of being able to see God and to receive divine oracles."

"O Great God Yinsai, Redlichia has finally found my heir!"

"He will surely inherit my power, and he will lead the God-Given City toward a farther future, a greater future."

"He will inherit my will as well, and he will worship and stand guard over the divine being."

Yesael had seen his father, the King of Wisdom, standing high above all others. He had seen every trilobite man crowd around his father in a fervor of reverence, each one proclaiming the King of Wisdom's greatness.

Now he had also seen the King of Wisdom's humility, there at the feet of God.

Yin Shen looked at Yesael. He could sense it as well, that this young trilobite man was different from the rest.

He was different from Redlichia and Shelly. He was no myth born directly of Yin Shen, but a life that had come by myth-like power only through nurture and growth.

"What is your name?"

God asked him.

For a long moment Yesael said nothing. Then he realized God was speaking to him.

He answered in a fluster, mind gone blank, barely aware of what he was saying.

"Yesael!"

"Great God, Great God Yinsai."

"My name is Yesael, son of the King of Wisdom, Redlichia."

Yin Shen bade him step closer, and touched a finger to his forehead.

The very fact that Yin Shen could touch him meant his anchor points in this world had grown by one more.

"How interesting. So myth-like power can be passed down after all."

"But... why should that be?"

At the instant of contact, every image of Yesael's life poured into Yin Shen's mind, from birth through growth to the moment he took human shape. In a heartbeat he knew everything there was to know about him.

At the very start of his life, he had been nothing more than an egg.

But this egg was plainly unlike the eggs of other trilobite men. Inside it lay an inherited power, some measure of that mighty force in Redlichia which transcended the mortal world and went by the name of myth.

Yin Shen watched it lie in the warm seawater, gradually waiting for life to take shape inside it, until at last it broke from its shell in the undersea city.

From that moment on he possessed a power wholly unlike that of any ordinary life. Yin Shen watched Yesael grow, little by little, until at last he climbed the great well out of the undersea city, stepped out beneath the sun, and received the outpouring of wisdom and knowledge.

Yesael had none of the power Redlichia held as the Progenitor King, the power to command every trilobite man, and he could not pass his own knowledge down as an inheritance. But Redlichia's mind-reading power he did have. He could see what other trilobite men were thinking.

He had inherited only the weakest fragment of Redlichia's power.

But even so, it was still power that belonged to myth.

In Yesael's very origin Yin Shen had found something out of the ordinary, and it confirmed a suspicion he had held for a long time without ever being able to prove it.

Myth-like power sprang from him, and yet it was not entirely like him. He was an intangible form existing beyond the universe and beyond matter, lodged in the crevices between time and space, while the power itself was an actual, observable substance.

"Mythical Matter?"

"So this is where the secret of the anchor points lies. It is held right inside the body."

"This is also the origin of myth-like power. It can be copied, and it can be inherited."

A smile broke across Yin Shen's face, a rare thing since he had come to this primordial age hundreds of millions of years in the past.

At last he understood what set Redlichia and Shelly apart as myth-born lives, why the two of them could see him, when no other trilobite man ever could.

It was those cells, steeped and mutated by his own radiation, that were the true source of their power, and the reason the anchor points had come to exist at all.

A trace of Mythical Matter so scarce, dissolved through an entire body, was small enough to be overlooked altogether. That was why Yin Shen had found it so hard, until now, to trace the source of myth-like power in Redlichia and Shelly.

Searching without a target was like fishing a needle from the sea.

But now that he had seen the key to it in Yesael, everything was different.

Now that he knew how myth-like power was born, now that he knew it lay hidden within the bloodline itself, he would naturally find a way to extract it, and to make more.

Yin Shen drew back his finger, and fell into deep thought.

Yesael, too, stirred back to awareness out of that blankness.

Huff, huff~

He could not stop gasping for breath. In the instant the divine's finger touched his forehead, he had seemed for one heartbeat to look directly upon the very concept of time itself.

He had seen stars exploding into ruin over and over. He had seen the years spinning backward against their flow. He had seen the horror of being imprisoned within time and the passing years.

It was a silence and despair beyond words, a terror sunk so deep into his bones that he did not dare call it to mind again.

Yin Shen glanced at Yesael. "His power is far too weak. He cannot remain inside the temple for long."

Now that Yesael had looked upon the divine once, Redlichia sent him outside the temple to stand and wait for him.

Yesael, for his part, felt a great weight lift from him.

His myth-like power was nothing like his father's. Even the fusion monster beside him, a creature of myth in its own right, had already pressed the breath out of him.

Within the temple, only Yin Shen and Redlichia remained.

Yin Shen looked at Redlichia and asked, "Why are you in such a hurry to find yourself an heir?"

Redlichia raised a hand. The carapace that had once gleamed bright had begun to turn rough and coarse, like stone.

For a trilobite man, this was the mark of growing old.

He was still strong, but he was not truly immortal, and he could feel himself slipping down from the peak of his life, little by little, toward some turning point.

"God, I will grow old, and in the end I will fade away!"

"Some things I can still do. Others I can no longer do at all, and those I can only leave to the next generation."

All at once, Yin Shen understood. What had felt to him like no more than the snap of a finger had carried the trilobite men through several generations. Life was so very fragile before the passage of time.

"In time I mean for Yesael to inherit the position of King of Wisdom, and to do in my place what I cannot."

Yin Shen looked at Redlichia, and said nothing for a long while.

At last, he spoke.

"Do as you see fit!"