Believing in God Has Nothing to Do with God!

Redlichia was dead.

Yin Shen gazed past the great hall at the ocean, lost in memory.

So it was. So much had happened.

So it was.

So much time had passed.

"Yinsai... shen!"

"Yin... sai... God!"

In a daze he heard it again, that clumsy, comical accent of Redlichia's, shouting his name before the temple gates.

Outside the temple, the sinners guilty of patricide and of profaning the divine had heard Redlichia's final words as well, proclaiming to all the trilobite men that Yesael would become the second King of Wisdom of the Yinsai Kingdom.

The moment Yesael placed the Crown of Wisdom upon his head, every trilobite man knew what had happened within the temple.

The old king had passed. The new king was crowned.

The sinners outside the temple broke all at once into a chorus of weeping. They even collapsed in a limp heap before the gates, an utterly disgraceful spectacle.

They wept for the King of Wisdom's passing, but more than that they wept for the unknown fate now bearing down on them.

Yin Shen turned his gaze on them, on the trilobite men big and small crowded around the two stone coffins, and said flatly, "Too loud!"

"Silence!"

The words had scarcely been spoken when a force could be seen acting directly within the bodies of these trilobite men, working upon the bloodline passed down from the very first trilobite man.

Their weeping cut off at once. Never again could they make the faintest sound.

To their terror, they even found their own bodies changing along with it. Their vocal organs vanished entirely, their hard shells began to soften, and atop their heads sprouted two things like a pair of feelers.

Set beside a man, they looked far more like insects, or like soft-shelled shrimp.

They could do nothing but kowtow again and again toward the temple, pleading for the divine's forgiveness.

When it was over, they had become in truth a different species from the ordinary trilobite men, one better suited to the sea than to the land.

They had been struck by divine punishment, and stripped of the right to speak.

Never again could they set foot upon land. From now on they could only dwell in the deep sea.

Yin Shen looked at Redlichia, then said to the second King of Wisdom, Yesael, "Go!"

"Leave this place."

"Take all the people of the God-Given City with you, and build your kingdom on the continent."

"Do not come back again."

That voice, just like Redlichia's own royal authority of Wisdom, branded itself directly into the mind of every trilobite man.

It reached further into the minds of every trilobite man and erased all memory of where the God-Given City lay, until not one of them could so much as recall the name God-Given City. Once they left this place, they would never find their way back again.

With Redlichia dead, Yin Shen had lost all interest in this game of founding a kingdom, and no longer cared to pay it any mind.

Yesael stared up at the divine in alarm, with no idea at all what was happening.

"O Great God Yinsai?"

"Why? Have we done something wrong?"

Yin Shen stepped down from the altar and looked over everything Redlichia had made for him. His voice echoed through the hall.

It was hollow now, and cold, with none of the tolerance he had once shown in Redlichia's day.

"Yesael, everything I granted you, I granted only because you are Redlichia's descendants. Never because of anything in yourselves."

The divine paused. "He is my eldest son."

"You are not."

"This place is the God-Given Land I gave to Redlichia, the paradise that was his and mine. It is not yours."

Yesael crawled forward on his knees and prostrated himself before Yin Shen.

His voice came fast and urgent as he cried out and pleaded, hoping that God would not do this.

"God, have You no further need of us?"

"We are Your devout believers, the first life You ever created!"

Yin Shen gave a soft laugh. "Without God, you can live on all the same."

"Everything will be as it always was. Only do not come to disturb me again."

"I have no need of your offerings, and less need still of your faith."

At last the divine, exalted high above him, spoke the words Yesael would never forget as long as he lived. They rang through his mind like the tolling of a great bell.

"Your belief in me..."

"is no concern of mine."

Yesael came down from the pyramid like one who had lost his very soul, and all at once his father's words from not long before came echoing back in his ears.

"The road to becoming king is not gain alone."

"More often, it is loss."

The covenant between God and the King of Wisdom had been a covenant between God and Redlichia alone, and it had ended with Redlichia's death.

God's favor had rested on the first King of Wisdom, Redlichia, and on no one else. He alone was God's eldest son, and no other trilobite man.

Yesael gathered the people of the God-Given City together and proclaimed his decision to lead them all away.

"I am your new king."

"I, Yesael, King of Wisdom of the Yinsai Kingdom, have inherited my father's Power of the King of Wisdom and his ideals both. I am the heir of his will."

"We will go to the continent, and there we will build a new God-Given City."

"We will follow in the footsteps of the King of Wisdom and of God. On the far side of the sea lies the Origin Site, a land no less great, and there we will carve out a future of our own."

The moment Yesael finished speaking, every trilobite man below sank to his knees in despair, one after another. Thousands upon thousands of them wept together as one.

It felt to them as though the sky itself had fallen.

They had only just lost their king, and now they had been forsaken by God as well.

Yesael stepped down from the high platform and walked in among the crowd.

One after another he pulled them to their feet, and beneath the trust shining in their eyes he said, "God has not abandoned us. We still have the Origin Site, another land He promised us, and a vaster one."

"There is land without end, and broad coasts made for raising Ancestral Fish."

"The royal authority of Wisdom He granted us, the Ancestral Fish He granted us, and the script and language He granted us, all of it remains with us."

"One day we will have God's forgiveness, and we will return once more to this promised land."

"Now we go together to the far side of the sea, and there we will build an even more glorious future."

By the shore, trilobite men in their tens of thousands left their homes and pressed deep into the ocean, herding with them dense swarms of Ancestral Fish controlled through wisdom ability.

They would reach Yesael City first, and from that city beneath the sea set out anew.

Their road led onward to the legendary Origin Site, that other place God had promised them.

No one noticed that a small number of trilobite men, the descendants of Ense and Boon, had been banished into the deep sea as well.

People called them the God-Forsaken People. Never again could they speak aloud, and for all eternity they would never be permitted to use the Divine Words.

Antennae grew upon their heads, and it was by their touch that they now spoke with one another.

In the deep sea, they multiplied into a branch of their own, another line of the trilobite men.

Hymn of the King of Wisdom, the Final Chapter

The first King of Wisdom, betrayed by his own son and mourning the death of his queen, ended his glorious and radiant life before God.

He passed his throne to Yesael, the most excellent of his sons, together with the oath and the covenant he had made with God.

But the divine was enraged by Redlichia's death, and disappointed by the trilobite men's sins of patricide and fratricide.

God withdrew the land he had promised, and all trilobite men were driven from the God-Given Land.

The divine erased every memory of the God-Given Land's location from their minds, so that they could never again return to that paradise God had promised them.

Even should they reach the waters beyond the God-Given Land, they could only wander forever upon the sea, never able to set foot upon God's Island.