God Awakened

Shelly cradled a flowerpot in one hand, and in the other she gripped the Sun Cup, which had given up any struggle.

This Sun Cup she had just caught was plainly far more beautiful than the one already in the flowerpot.

Glug glug~

Shelly plucked the flower already in the pot and tossed it aside, planting the one she had just caught in its place.

Her small, delicate form pushed on through the sea of flowers, squeezing out from beneath the dense press of Sun Cup Flowers.

Under the sunlight, the flower cups swayed and rippled all along her path, rising and falling like waves upon the sea.

Tap!

Tap!

She climbed the pyramid's steps.

In her human form Shelly was not very tall, which made the climb feel especially amusing.

Each step meant hoisting her leg absurdly high, as though she were straining with all her might, all but ready to grunt with the effort, her whole body swaying left and right along with it.

She came to stand beneath the statue of the divine, and, just as she did every day, set the flowerpot down upon the altar.

As though she were offering it up to God.

For all these many years, day after day, year after year.

She had done this every single day.

Just as she was about to climb onto the altar herself and sit down beside God, starlight burst into bloom high above her, and a soft voice drifted down.

"What a beautiful flower."

Shelly looked up.

Light poured from the statue of the divine in ribbons like flowing silk, and a shadow draped in radiance slowly worked itself free from within.

God...

had finally awoken.

Shelly gave up the climb, let go, and stood still where she was.

She stared with wide eyes, leaning forward at the waist, her hands clasped behind her back.

Gurgle gurgle~

Truly, she looked just like a fish blowing bubbles.

Even the figure of light stepping down from the altar could not help laughing. He came to stand beside her and rested a hand on her shoulder, and then his gaze fell upon the Sun Cup.

The newly born, wisdom-touched consciousness within the Sun Cup understood nothing of this warmth. It was already frightened half out of its senses.

It had only just escaped the palm of a demon god, and now found itself before another presence so terrible its very mind could not comprehend it.

It had never encountered anything so terrifying. It could not even begin to imagine such a thing.

What its mind sensed was some towering star, standing at the very end of time, beyond the bounds of the universe. That shadow, radiant past all description, seemed to cross the distance from some existence unimaginably far beyond the Earth, his unimaginable power tearing through the boundary of time and space, to step into the very world where it now stood.

Hiss!

It was not a sound it had meant to make.

In truth, it had been so terrified it dared not make a single sound at all, but its fear had now surged past whatever limit it could bear, and beyond its own control it let out a cry, its whole body trembling along with it.

The Sun Cup unfurled, and the extraordinary power that belonged to it tore through the air, rippling outward in every direction.

But before God, that power might as well not have existed at all. He stood exactly where he was, utterly unaffected by any of it.

Still, Yin Shen noticed this extraordinary power at once, a power able to interfere directly with reality itself.

In fact, this was precisely what had drawn him, and roused him from his sleep.

"That was lucky."

For Blood of Myth to have undergone such a transformation in so short a span of time had already exceeded even Yin Shen's expectations.

While the consciousness within the Sun Cup trembled in terror, shaking the flower cup again and again, Yin Shen laid a finger upon it.

That Yin Shen could touch it at all meant that it was, just as he had expected, one of his own anchor points, a being that had inherited his Blood of Myth.

But what exactly had happened to it, Yin Shen would know only after he had seen it all for himself.

The Sun Cup, which had been trembling without pause, went utterly still in an instant.

Its consciousness sank completely into blankness, and it could feel nothing at all anymore.

But before Yin Shen's eyes, it was as though time itself flowed backward, scene after scene rising up and turning past.

The Sky Temple. God's Cup Flower Garden. The second King of Wisdom, Yesael.

The fated war between Yesael's Yinsai Kingdom and the descendants of Ense and Boon. His hunger for eternal life, and the Sun Cup's revenge upon him for it.

Down to the very end, when the royal authority of Wisdom was lost within the bottomless trench, and a new wisdom was born within the strange flower, out of Yesael's own death.

He saw it all.

Only now did Yin Shen come to know what had happened during the whole span of his slumber. Unlike the peace and stillness of the God-Given Land, out beyond it storms had risen, and everything had been turned upside down.

"So even Yesael is dead?"

Yin Shen drew back his hand, his face showing no expression at all.

Only his voice carried a faint note of sorrow and sighing regret.

Shelly trotted on ahead of Yin Shen, dashing all the way to the shore, while his figure followed after her through the flowers at an unhurried pace.

Shelly stood at the water's edge, turning back to look at Yin Shen with her large green eyes, waiting for him to catch up.

Only once Yin Shen had come to stand before her did she turn, become a streak of light, and dive into the sea.

BOOM!

A great wave rose up.

Shelly, who only a moment before had been an adorable little girl, revealed her true form in the blink of an eye.

It was a monstrous creature seventy or eighty meters across, countless terrible green eyes of every size rolling and turning, and innumerable tentacles rising from the sea to sweep across the sky.

The creature carried Yin Shen away from the God-Given Land, just as it had once carried him here in days long past.

"Over to the trench."

Above the vast, hazy expanse of the sea, Yin Shen's gaze pierced straight through the trench, down to the Crown of Wisdom lying beneath the abyss.

With a single thought, the crown, resting at the dark, frigid bottom of the deep sea, began to rise, little by little.

At last it broke the surface of the water, and floated there before Yin Shen.

The Crown of Wisdom gave off a faint radiance, and with it came a soft, low hum.

As though Redlichia, long dead, were speaking with Yin Shen through this very sound.

Yin Shen shook his head helplessly. "Redlichia."

"We agreed you would let go. Then let go of it completely!"

"There is no need to bind your descendants any longer. Let it all end here."

"Let it end!"

The Crown of Wisdom, glowing with its faint light, drifted little by little toward Yin Shen, as though it longed to settle itself upon his head, but in the end its courage failed, and it dared not draw any closer.

As though it felt itself unworthy to rest upon the head of God.

In the end it shrank, ring by ring, smaller and smaller, and settled instead upon the middle finger of Yin Shen's right hand.

Like nothing more than a plain black ring.

Yin Shen raised his hand, and standing there at the center of the sea, sent out a call to the entire world with the power of the royal authority of Wisdom.

Ribbons of glowing light came crossing through space from the very edge of the sky, gathering above that stretch of ocean, like a river of stars encircling the divine.

All those wisdom ability mythical factors scattered across heaven and earth, all that power lost with the deaths of the royal bloodline and the trilobite men, came flooding back at the Crown of Wisdom's call.

In the end, every last bit of it fell into the Crown of Wisdom.

The Crown of Wisdom, once entirely black, took on a thread of dark gold, carrying with it a breath of something undying.

Yin Shen drew back his upraised hand, and amid the spreading light, the black ring too was swallowed from sight, vanishing without a trace.

As though, drawn back along with the power of the divine, it too had been pulled away into the crack between time and space.