The Lost Crown of Wisdom

The slaughter raged from day into night, until the warm sea turned cold, until the clear blue water ran the color of blood, until corpses drifted thick above the surface and below it alike.

Of nearly twenty thousand monsters, only a few thousand remained alive.

The monsters grew afraid.

Gathering what strength remained to them, they found the weak point in the encirclement and broke through it.

By instinct they fled toward the place they had come from, that dark, cold trench in the sea.

Yesael gave chase on the strength of his great victory, laughing as he called out to the warriors and followers below him, just as he had once called out to the champions of the God-Given City when they set out for the Origin Site.

"After them!"

"Drive them back into the Demon Abyss. The sinful people belong in the realm of eternal darkness, where the light of day never comes."

At the very height of their power, other senior priests could move no more than a stone the size of a head. Yesael could do far more than lift his own body into the air. He could command the wind itself, and fly.

Yesael held himself aloft, flying high above, racing at the very head of his great host.

Below him the seven fusion monsters tore through the waves, driving onward into the distance, and thousands upon thousands of Yinsai soldiers followed in his wake.

He felt exhilarated beyond measure, chasing the sinful people until they had nowhere left to run, no path to heaven and no door into the earth.

Heedless of all else, he wrung every last drop of power from his own bloodline and from the Sun Cup, driving on until he hung directly above that bottomless trench.

Yet he never noticed that the Sun Cup bound to him in symbiosis had begun to change.

The battlefield had spread all the way to the Deep Sea Abyss, and the battle line was stretched to its very limit. To stop the great mass of sinful people from escaping down into it, Yesael had charged out ahead of everyone else.

Little by little he pulled away from the main force, until only a handful of royal court guards and a single starfish-shaped fusion monster remained at his side.

But the power within him was mighty and unrivaled, and he feared nothing.

Not far below lay the bottomless trench itself. Yesael strode upon empty air above the waves, charging alone into the swarm of monsters, letting a dozen or more surround and attack him at once.

A sweep of his hand raised a towering wave, and seven or eight monsters were flung away by it.

In midair, those monsters were smashed into ragged lumps of flesh.

A towering sinful person, more than two meters tall, charged straight at Yesael, leaping up out of the water and thrusting its arm at him like a spear.

The monster opened its terrible mouthparts, yet could not make even the faintest sound.

And yet its fury was plain to feel. Having watched so many of its own kind die before its eyes, even a creature as dim-witted and foolish as this one felt a grief beyond measure.

But however furious it grew, nothing could close the gap between their strength, a gap as wide as heaven from earth.

Yesael reached out a hand, and seized the creature through the empty air.

As though he had pinched up nothing more than an insect.

The crowned King of Yinsai studied the creature closely. For a body to have grown to such a size, it had to carry the direct bloodline.

It turned Yesael's stomach to think that a monster like this had once had the same blood flowing through it as his own.

"How utterly hideous."

"A descendant of the sons who murdered their father."

His fingers closed.

The monster burst apart in midair, its innards raining down into the sea in a wet clatter.

Thousands upon thousands of Yinsai soldiers, rushing in from afar, watched it happen with their own eyes. In that moment, he was the very incarnation of the divine.

"The King! The King of Wisdom!"

"Nothing can stand against the power God has granted! Kill every last one of these sinful people!"

Nearby royal court guards surfaced from the water and cheered.

This did not feel like a war. It felt more like a feast.

In truth, a performance offered up to the divine.

And the Sun Cup at Yesael's shoulder blazed brighter and brighter, golden light pouring from it, truly like the sun itself.

He drove the Sun Cup at his shoulder, and from above the water's surface unleashed the divine technique, the Realm of Illusion.

One monster after another lost all sense of direction and rose up out of the depths onto the surface, only to be struck down by Yesael on the spot, some even turning on their own kind.

Yesael walked leisurely across the water, cutting down these sinful people without the slightest effort, his steps smooth and light, as though he were dancing.

He felt as though he were the star of it all, offering up to the divine the most beautiful music ever played.

Using the very power God had granted him, to punish God's own sinful people.

"Ense, Boon, you two sinners who defiled the divine, you sons who murdered their father!"

"Do you see now? This is the power of God."

"This is the chastisement God lays upon you. This is the divine retribution for your crime of patricide."

The more he called upon his power, the stronger the Sun Cup's own power grew.

This strange flower known as a Divine Cup had never before encountered anyone bearing such a powerful mythical bloodline, someone who unleashed his power upon it so completely, holding nothing back.

Without his even noticing, the Sun Cup at his shoulder grew larger and larger.

At last it suddenly began to move on its own, and let out an ugly, hissing shriek.

Hiss!

Yesael, who had been pouring out his power without restraint, stopped dead in his tracks, the expression on his face frozen in an instant.

He suddenly lost control of his power, and of his own body, stumbling and pitching from the water's surface down into the sea.

"What is happening!"

Yesael, seized with terror, cut his eyes sideways toward his own shoulder.

The Sun Cup, once so beautiful, had split open all at once, transformed into a horrific, fang-lined maw that lunged down at Yesael's own skull.

Yesael watched it happen before his own eyes, and could do nothing at all.

Its aim was not to kill him. It meant to swallow the Crown of Wisdom upon his head, that supreme divine artifact holding within it the vast power of myth and the power of the King of Wisdom.

Yesael panicked.

He raged inside his own mind, but could not make a single sound.

He wanted to call out to the fusion monster on the distant water's surface, but he could not even summon his wisdom ability anymore.

"No!"

Suddenly, a tremendous force struck him from behind.

Crack.

It was the sound of a sharp blade piercing through carapace.

A monster wild with fury had shot up from beneath the water, and struck Yesael at that exact moment.

A sharp spike tore straight through Yesael's neck, and his skull parted from his body, flying off into the distance like a thrown ball.

A descendant of the sons who murdered their father had struck Yesael the killing blow, as though the hatred and resentment of Ense, the forebear of its bloodline, still lived on in the bones and blood of its kind, and had erupted in full at last.

The whole world spun around him. "How can this be?"

Never in his life had Yesael imagined that this, of all things, would be his end.

He suddenly remembered Ense's words, that even if he were banished into the Abyss, he would return one day to kill Yesael, and seize the throne that belonged to him.

"Could even this have been fated?"

With a splash, his sight was swallowed by the sea, and his consciousness slowly sank into darkness.

He could no longer hear even a single sound. The whole world had fallen silent.

In his hazy half-consciousness, he suddenly saw a tall, warm figure appear before him.

The figure stood where the temple's light fell behind it, its long shadow trailing across the stone floor.

"Yesael!"

"Only the divine being is eternal."

"However much we gain, in the end we will still... decay, and lose it all."

Joy welled up wildly in Yesael's heart, and in that instant his spirit brightened, like the last gleam of a setting sun.

"Father!"

"Have you come for me? Have you come to bring me home to God's kingdom?"

Yesael let out a long breath, as though a stone that had weighed on his heart his whole life had finally been set down.

"Ah!"

"I knew it. I knew God would surely forgive us."

He wanted to reach out and take hold of his father's hand, to follow him home to the hall of the divine, but in that very instant he woke with a jolt, and found himself nothing but a single skull.

Everything scattered like a dream, like foam upon the water, and with it went his consciousness.

The second King of Wisdom, Yesael, was dead.

In the seawater, bubbling with a soft gurgle, the crown atop his head slipped free of its own accord, and fell away into the cold, ever-dark, bottomless trench.

One thousand meters.

Five thousand meters.

Ten thousand meters.

Down to depths where even a fusion monster could scarcely reach, into the bottomless abyss.

The royal authority of Wisdom that had once belonged to the trilobite men...

was lost.