Rebellion and the Collapsed Divine Statue

Yesael led a company of men deep inland, and there they found a lake of salt water.

Nothing else was there at all, only that vast sheet of water rippling with white waves. Salt had drifted up along the shore in banks like white cloud, and beneath the lake a volcano must once have stood, long since gone cold.

"My King, this fits the place you have been seeking. A little further on, and we are there."

Rounding the great salt lake, he caught sight of a rugged mountain towering just beside the water.

The sky overhead was deep blue, the mountain immense, and from its foot the clouds appeared to drift in a ring about the mountain.

Below his feet the lake lay like a mirror, and the whole scene might have been some realm out of myth.

Yesael was overjoyed. "This is the very place."

He climbed the mountain, and pointing to either side of the path's entrance, said,

"Two statues shall be carved here at the entrance. One shall be my father, King Redlichia, and the other shall be myself."

"They shall kneel upon one knee, and show their devotion to God."

"As though they were welcoming the divine being down to this place, and into the temple we shall build for Him."

The temple had not yet begun to rise, and already Yesael was picturing the scene of the divine's descent.

Yesael climbed on, discussing with several ministers of the Yinsai Kingdom at his side how the place should be built. It would be the greatest miracle the kingdom had ever wrought, the most precious gift they could offer up to the divine.

"In the God-Given City there stands a statue of my father, keeping watch over the divine."

"And here, my father and I shall keep watch together over the hall of the divine."

At last, they reached the mountain's very summit, where the air ran thin and a wild wind howled.

Yet from where they stood, the whole world seemed to fall within a single glance.

The feeling carried Yesael back to the first time he had climbed the Pyramid Temple as a boy. But the view from here ran wider, and the mountain's grandeur surpassed the pyramid's.

"This is the place. Right here."

"Level this mountaintop, every last part of it. Raise a temple upon it, the most magnificent and splendid structure the world has ever seen."

"Besides the priests who serve God, several thousand more shall stand here forever, and guard the divine being."

In his excitement Yesael had already settled on a name for the temple. He looked at the clouds drifting all around him. Once it stood complete, seen from the foot of the mountain, the temple would surely look as though it were perched upon the very peak of the clouds.

"It shall be called..."

"The Sky Temple."

The Sky Temple Yesael meant to build was less a single hall than a city entire.

Yesael was thoroughly pleased with the place. Once the city rose here, he imagined, he too might win the divine's favor, as his father had before him.

"So let it be!"

"It must be built with all possible speed. Within five years. Within five years it must stand complete."

One of the ministers raised his head. "Five... five years?"

In a tone that brooked no argument, Yesael asked, "You cannot do it?"

The minister nodded hurriedly. "No trouble at all, my King!"

"Five years from now, you shall surely see this Sky Temple."

The King seemed a little impatient. Everyone knew that a project on such a scale was bound to cost enormous time and labor.

Raising a city was simple enough. But the Sky Temple was no ordinary city.

The countless exquisite statues that would need painstaking carving, the magnificent halls one after another, the God's Cup Flower Garden beyond all imagining, structures such as these demanded legions of the finest craftsmen laboring day and night.

Nor did that count Yesael's sudden whim to carve a colossal statue of the King, hundreds of meters tall, straight out of the mountain's own face. The time and strength that labor alone would cost was beyond imagining.

But no one dared say so, not now.

The King who ruled now was not the King of before. Yesael had a boldness and daring his father never had. He had dared to press deep into the sea and raise the first city ever built beneath its waves, and he had dared to strike out with only a few dozen men to chart a route in search of land.

That was precisely why he had achieved all he had today.

But Yesael also lacked his father's tolerance, and his mercy.

Any who dared offend him, or speak ill of him, he would order put to death.

To see his laws proclaimed and enforced, he had already sent no small number of trilobite men to the executioner's block, and even members of the royal family were among them.

It was also why his decrees carried through to every corner of the realm.

But Yesael was no longer young. From the height of his prime he had begun, little by little, to decline. His sister's death above all had taught him that his own death, too, could not be escaped.

And so Yesael grew ever more impatient.

So much was still left undone, he felt, while the years and death itself came chasing behind him like a dreadful shadow.

Yesael, King of the Yinsai Kingdom, had only to give the command, and the whole kingdom, high and low, swiftly stirred into motion.

Every part of it turned to carrying out his will.

Thousands upon thousands of trilobite men were marched a hundred miles to this place to raise the Sky Temple that belonged to God. With them came a fusion monster in the form of a burrowing worm, suited to moving across dry land, and a senior priest of God only just promoted.

The Sky Temple

Four years later, two lifelike statues stood hundreds of meters tall upon the sheer cliff face. A stairway of heaven's steps climbed the whole way from the mountain's foot to its very summit, and joined the temple that floated above the clouds.

A fusion monster in the form of a burrowing worm had leveled the mountaintop entire, and on that platform stood the Sky Temple, together with the city where those who served the divine being made their homes.

The temple rose dozens of meters high, and inside, extravagance knew no bounds.

The stone of the main structure was quarried on the spot. Much of the rest was rare stone and treasure found and quarried out of the sea, hauled here from a hundred miles away and beyond.

A fusion monster had even been set aside for this, kept permanently to the ferrying of these supplies.

Deep beneath the sea Yesael had found a single flawless block of pure white stone, and from it he had carved with his own hands a statue of God Yinsai. On this very day it had been hauled to the foot of the mountain.

The whole work of construction and engineering seemed nothing short of a miracle, and it could have been completed only through the might of fusion monsters and priests combined.

Hundreds of trilobite men clung to the sheer cliff face with no protection whatsoever, chiseling at the stone, and away on the far side, no few other trilobite men could be seen as well.

One trilobite man waved their arm listlessly, never noticing that the tool had already slipped from their hand.

Their head swayed, unsteady, and at last, dazed and senseless, they toppled from that great height.

Body broken, bones shattered.

"Another one's gone down."

"It's Luo!"

Not one of the trilobite craftsmen nearby showed the slightest surprise. If anything, they had grown used to the sight.

That was already the fourth today. Building this Sky Temple cost dozens of lives every month, sometimes very nearly a hundred, worked to death, fallen to their deaths, or crushed beneath falling stone.

This month had been crueler. To meet the deadline the overseers drove them to labor like men gone mad, and in a little over half a month more than a hundred had already lost their lives upon this mountain.

Another man fell, and not one face among them so much as flickered. It was someone else's turn to die now. Soon enough it would be theirs.

Perhaps tomorrow. Or it might be the day after.

High above, beneath the Sky Temple, a royal trilobite man with a pale white carapace was no less anxious, and he roared at a group of trilobite nobles charged with building the temple,

"Faster!"

"Faster, all of you!"

"There is one year left on the schedule. It must be finished within the year."

The one charged with building this place was none other than Yesael's own nephew, proof enough of how much store the King set by the temple's construction.

The King of Wisdom, Yesael, was desperate to see it finished, and those beneath him, striving to please him, threw all caution aside.

The pressure never let up. The dead mounted with every passing day, until at last the trilobite commoners and craftsmen building the Sky Temple erupted.

In the dead of night, a shadow crept into a chamber and, with a bone-handled stone hammer, crushed the royal's skull.

However great the power of wisdom ability might be, in the depths of sleep its holder was fragile all the same.

From outside, hundreds upon thousands came pouring in at once. They cut down the trilobite corpse soldiers set to watch over them, and the nobles, sparing not a single one.

Every trilobite commoner and craftsman stood upon the stairway and roared, and some of them even wept aloud.

"They're dead!"

"Every last one of them, dead!"

"We're free!"

"Hurry, let's go! We're going back to the sea!"

Only by killing that trilobite royal could they escape this place.

Otherwise, if this royal who commanded a Ruhe Beast discovered their flight, then for a hundred miles in every direction, run as fast as they might, there would be no escaping the hunt.

Roar!

Even as they celebrated and cheered, a colossal beast some twenty or thirty meters long burst out of the darkness, roaring in fury, attacking every living thing.

The powerful craftsman who had killed the trilobite royal changed color in an instant. Staring at the shadow in the darkness, a thing like some demon god, he spoke in a trembling voice,

"This is bad!"

"The Ruhe Beast has broken loose!"

The fusion monster, its colossal body now beyond all control, came writhing and grinding down from the heights.

No one could say how many it crushed or devoured along the way.

Whole sections of the structure collapsed, and huge blocks of stone came rolling down from the heights toward the foot of the mountain. One pillar, over twenty meters tall, struck square against a covered statue standing there.

BOOM!

At the foot of the mountain stood the statue of God Yinsai.

It was reduced to a heap of broken stone.

Everyone fell silent at once. Nothing could be heard but the great beast's furious roar.

Even the craftsmen's ringleaders, men who in the revolt had dared even to kill a royal, felt in that moment as though the sky itself had fallen.

They stared in despair at the white, jade-like shards, which held no trace now of what they had once been.

But they knew what those shards had once meant.

"No!"

"How could this happen?"

"We didn't do this. We didn't do this."

The ones they had fought, the ones they hated, were the nobles who had driven them past all hope of survival. It had never once occurred to them that they might commit a sacrilege against the divine being themselves.