Divine Techniques and the God's Cup

In the years since, Eli, Yesael's grandson, had grown from a boy into a man in his prime, and once again he had come with his grandfather to the Sky Temple to pay tribute to the divine.

Yesael, it was plain, was raising him to be the next king.

The sun sank westward. Bent low over his scepter, the aged Yesael walked slowly along the lake at the mountain's foot.

Then he stopped short and stood watching the setting sun.

A group of trilobite men were pouring fish fry into the water. Once grown, the fish would feed the priests and the servants of God at the Sky Temple.

Yesael recited to himself the covenant between God and King Redlichia, the divine words inscribed upon the Crown of Wisdom.

"Because of loneliness, God created Redlichia, the King of Wisdom, and because of Redlichia's loneliness, God created the trilobite men."

"Thus, the race began, and the kingdom was established from this moment on."

Eli could see his grandfather wavering, torn over whether to open all-out war against the sinful people.

The sinful people grew more numerous by the day. To wipe them out would likely take all seven fusion monsters fighting as one, and tens of thousands of men, before every last one of those creatures, which bred as fast as insects, could be driven back into the darkness of the Demon Abyss.

It would be the greatest war since the birth of intelligent life.

Even King Yesael, proud and sure of himself, could not help weighing it carefully.

He looked down at his reflection in the lake. "So I have grown old too!"

He stood there a long while, lost in thought, before he suddenly asked, "Eli, tell me. Should this war be fought or not?"

Eli was startled for a moment, then sank into thought.

In a flash the Redlichia Covenant the King had just recited came back to him, and slowly he began to speak another passage of it himself.

"God said."

"I am the God who created you!"

"And you..."

"You alone are their king."

Eli sank into the meaning of those words and pictured the scene as it must have been, God standing on the shore, watching the sun go down, watching the trilobite men come into being.

It was so like the scene unfolding now.

"Perhaps, when God spoke those words, it was to the Great King Redlichia that He spoke."

"God created him in the hope that he would become a great king, one who would tend and shepherd every living being in the divine's place. That, and that alone, was a king's duty."

Eli looked to his grandfather. "My King, perhaps the time has come to stop."

"Did you not say that God had arranged everything already?"

"Perhaps the more we do, the more we set ourselves against God's will?"

Yesael neither agreed nor disagreed. Everyone had their own reading of the Redlichia Covenant, and he had heard more than enough of them.

Schlode, for one.

These people had never so much as glimpsed God's shadow, and yet they dared to guess at God's mind.

"There may be truth in what you say. But King Redlichia said this too."

"God does not care..."

"but I do."

Rage blazed up in his eyes.

"How can I allow these sinful people to defile God's own domain? Every step they take out into the sea is a desecration of the divine."

"How can I allow them to seize the ocean? God granted it to King Redlichia."

"It was God who granted it to the people of the Yinsai Kingdom!"

The aging Yesael at last made his decision.

He would lead the campaign himself. Before God's own eyes he would root out these sinful people who had defiled the divine, and drive them back into the Demon Abyss forever.

These sinful people could never be allowed to seize the waters of the God-Given Land, nor even to draw near them.

But to do that, he needed a body strong enough.

Eli looked at his grandfather. On that aged face was an obsession that bordered on madness.

His gaze settled on the crown. Perhaps it held more than the power of the royal authority of Wisdom.

It was also a curse.

It sprang from the first King of Wisdom, sprang from the obsession of King Redlichia, the first wisdom mythical life.

Yesael summoned the High Priest of the Sky Temple and told him he meant to accept the divine technique known as the Divine Cup.

"This is a divine technique granted by God. The King ought to master it."

Schlode gazed at the King, stirred with excitement. His divine technique had won the recognition of the King of Wisdom. His place as High Priest of the Sky Temple, and his standing as one who had received God's revelation, were now beyond all doubt.

"My King, how wise you are, and how brilliant, to punish those who betrayed and defiled the divine with the mighty power God granted you."

"God's favor shall surely descend upon you, and the God-Given Land and His kingdom shall open their doors to you once more."

In the Sky Temple, before God, Yesael knelt at the feet of the divine and accepted the power of the Sun Cup.

Schlode presided over the ritual for the King together with two other priests of the Sky Temple, and they planted the Sun Cup within Yesael's body.

"O Great God!"

"I shall fill Your Divine Cup to the brim, and drink deep of the power You bestow."

"May Your divine power forge this mortal flesh of mine, and may my faith linger forever beneath Your altar."

Yesael watched the dense tangle of roots and vines stretch on and on, taking root in his own flesh and blood.

Agony spread through his mind, and with it a powerful force poured into his body. He felt as though he had been carried back to his youth.

"Ah!"

Yesael's whole body rose into the air and hung there above the temple floor.

In an instant, golden light like fireflies filled the air for a hundred meters all around, and everyone present was swept into Yesael's consciousness, into his illusion. Not even Schlode, the strongest among them, could resist it.

It was the image etched deepest in all of Yesael's memory.

Upon the altar stood a towering presence beyond time and the passing years, and he did not dare summon even the courage to look up at it.

The others who beheld the divine being fared worse. They were driven half mad, all strength leaving them as they slumped to the ground.

They fell senseless, and did not wake.

Tens of thousands of soldiers slipped one after another into the waters around Xilong City, armed with bone spears, bone tridents, hunting nets and every manner of weapon, until the sea was ringed from surface to floor without a single gap.

Priests mounted on bizarre shrimp commanded them. At the very front of the great host, all seven fusion monsters had been sent out, arrayed in a single line.

Yesael stood atop Nini, the fusion monster. Beneath the sun his body seemed to shimmer with golden light, and the golden flower cup at his shoulder blazed dazzlingly bright.

He felt wonderful, as though he had been carried back to his youth once more.

Back then he had ranged freely through the sea and the abyss both, heedless of every danger and hardship.

He raised his scepter high.

"God, look upon me!"

"Once more I shall bring divine punishment down upon these sinful people who have defiled the divine."

Yesael had laid this plan long before. He had let the monsters gnaw away at the towns of the Yinsai Kingdom unchecked, drawing those scattered across the wider seas slowly together into this one stretch of water, and only then brought his great host to encircle them completely.

"Kill!"

Above the water and below it alike, every soldier and priest of the Yinsai Kingdom surged forward at once, hurling themselves at the sinful people who had dared to seize their towns and plunder their fishing grounds.

Hunting nets closed over the monsters' powerful bodies and bound fast their weapon-armed hands and their powerful tails, and then other soldiers drove bone spears through their bodies.

The monsters swung hands like awl-sharp spikes, tearing apart and killing one soldier of the Yinsai Kingdom after another.

But once the fusion monsters and the priests entered the fray, the tide of battle turned entirely one-sided.

It became a slaughter. The power of the seven fusion monsters and the senior priests was utterly without equal.