The Island of Sun Cup Flowers

Yin Shen stood on high ground and watched the crowds stream out of the God-Given City, fusion monster after fusion monster clearing a path ahead of them.

The trilobite men returned once more to the sea. A handful of holders of wisdom ability controlled the fusion monsters and drove the dense swarms of fish onward, departing with the setting sun. Behind them they left this paradise, which had once belonged to no one but him, Redlichia, and Shelly.

The whole world fell silent. The city that had once bustled with life now stood utterly empty.

Yin Shen turned back and looked at Redlichia, who knelt before the statue of the divine.

"Redlichia, it's just as well they've gone. We don't need this many people keeping us company."

"The sea and the land are where civilization belongs. This place is only an island."

As he once had, he wanted to reach out and pat Redlichia's shoulder. To his shock, his hand passed straight through Redlichia's body.

Yin Shen stood stunned. A moment of confusion passed before he understood why.

Redlichia's Blood of Myth had passed entirely to his descendants and into the Crown of Wisdom. The body left behind was nothing but an ordinary shell now. It no longer held the power he had once granted Redlichia, and it had lost with that its ability to serve as an anchor point.

Yin Shen looked at his own hand, glowing with light. All at once a fierce, nameless anger surged up within him.

"Just what am I? Dead, or alive?"

Yin Shen wanted badly to smash everything before him to pieces. He raised his hand, and let it fall again. Anger and impatience would accomplish nothing.

All he could rely on was that endless span of time and life.

He could change everything. He could accomplish everything. All that was needed was to wait.

He had gone from fearing loneliness to loathing it.

And now he had begun to grow used to it.

God.

No companion at all.

He sat before the temple steps, silent and still, looking out over the God-Given Land.

He watched light and shadow creep bit by bit from the shoreline across the buildings of the God-Given City, and watched the moon drift from one side of the night sea to the other.

The sun rose and set several times over before at last he stood up.

"Shelly!"

The girl turned her head, her big eyes fixed on him.

In a few quick trotting steps she scampered over to Yin Shen, stretching out her head, and made a sound.

Gurgle gurgle~

Yin Shen started down the steps. "Let's go down for a walk."

The two of them came down from the temple together, Shelly cradling a flowerpot in her arms.

Yin Shen stood a while before the statue Yesael had built for Redlichia, then wandered once through the dead-silent God-Given City, and on to the marsh where Ancestral Fish had once been raised.

At last, he came to a stop upon the shoreline.

The tide wore away at the beach, scattering loose stones and grit everywhere. Not far from the water's edge, Shelly planted her beloved Sun Cup Flower.

Roots like tentacles spread endlessly down into the earth. Freed from the stone pot that had confined it, this strange, half-plant, half-animal life began to release its formidable vitality.

In just a few days, it had already grown taller than a meter.

Soon after, several young shoots sprang up around it.

It multiplied. It spread.

Across the God-Given Land, Sun Cup Flower after Sun Cup Flower burst into bloom, blanketing the ground, covering the beach and the shore, climbing over hills and valleys.

At last they crept bit by bit into the dead-silent God-Given City, bringing the color of life back once more to that empty town.

The whole of the God-Given Land turned into a sea of golden blossoms.

And the tall Pyramid Temple stood at the very heart of that sea of flowers.

In that age, this was heaven itself made real, a wonderland out of a dream.

He looked out over that sea of flowers glowing gold, swaying as the wind passed over it, dazzling to the eye and almost dizzying to behold.

Yin Shen felt his spirits lighten considerably.

"So beautiful."

Whether Shelly liked it or not, no one could say, but she was forever creeping quietly down into that sea of golden blossoms.

There she breathed in the fragrance of the flowers and lay back in comfort to bask in the sun.

Then one day, at last, Yin Shen called Shelly back from where she lay hidden among the flowers.

He meant to slow his own perception of time for a while, and let himself fall into a deep sleep.

For him, this too was a way of crossing through time.

To wake from a single sleep and find that a hundred years had passed, or thousands upon thousands of years, was its own way of traveling upon the long river of time.

"Shelly, I'm going to sleep for a while."

"Stay here and watch over the temple. Don't wander off, and don't leave the God-Given Land."

"Wait for me to wake."

Yin Shen stepped into the statue. Its light gathered inward bit by bit and sank away inside, until nothing about it seemed out of the ordinary any longer.

He would wait for the power of his Blood of Myth to undergo some fundamental change, or for his extraordinary power and Authority to shift in some way. Perhaps at some point he would be able to alter this state of affairs.

In the dim temple, Shelly curled up close beside the statue, her little legs swinging.

Her gaze was empty, fixed on some distant point, and she made her own particular sound.

Gurgle gurgle~

The Continent

With the first successful crossing behind them, the trilobite men skirted every danger on their second attempt and reached the Origin Site safely. The route came to be called the Yesael Route, in honor of the great feat by which Yesael and his companions had found that land.

The second King of Wisdom, Yesael, led thousands upon thousands of his people onto the land. Every one of them was struck with awe at the sheer, unimaginable vastness of this earth.

"The Origin Site."

"So this is... the place where God descended?"

"All of this is ours?"

They knelt upon the shore, kissing the earth, crying out the names of God and the first King of Wisdom, Redlichia.

They still believed in God, and more devoutly now than ever before.

They had been driven from the God-Given Land, but only because the trilobite men had committed a sin beyond forgiveness.

It was they who had done wrong, not the divine.

They had seen with their own eyes the divine's boundless might, and what terrible judgment had come upon the sinners who profaned the divine.

And now, with this boundless land before them, they suddenly felt they had not been exiled by God at all. The divine had bestowed upon them an even vaster God-Given Land instead.

This was a place vast enough to hold them and all their descendants, to shelter and sustain them forever.

The broad coastal waters enjoyed a warm climate, rich with plant life and with creatures beneath the surface, perfectly suited for raising the Ancestral Fish the divine had granted them.

Just as Yesael had said, this was the place best suited to their survival.

Here there was hope in abundance, and a future.

Yesael stood atop the cliffs above the shore, and reaching out his hand toward all the trilobite men who had set foot upon the Origin Site below, he said, "I told you. God has not abandoned us."

The crowd cheered and rejoiced. Some, moved to tears, wept openly. Others buried their faces deep in the sand, as though trying to feel the very breath God had left lingering there.

It was as though in doing so they too might receive God's protection, just as the God-Given City once had.

Three enormous fusion monsters quarried great stones to raise the framework of the new city, and the other trilobite men worked alongside them. Together they cleared fishing grounds of their own along the coast.

With Ense and Boon dead, their fusion monsters had passed into the hands of the new King, Yesael.

Yesael watched the fervent, bustling activity across the Origin Site, and the city taking shape more with each passing day, and joy shone in his eyes.

One of Yesael's followers asked him, "My King, what should we call this city?"

Yesael, the Crown of Wisdom upon his head, fell into deep thought.

"This is where the divine descended. It is the birthplace of the great first King of Wisdom, and the Origin Site of us trilobite men."

"But it was the descent of the divine that made everything after it possible."

"Then let it be called the God-Descended City."

It differed from the God-Given City by only a single word.

That way, it seemed as though nothing at all had changed.