Divine Power and New Mythical Life

Yin Shen walked across the sea of Sun Cup Flowers, and thousands upon thousands of golden flower cups bloomed at once, loosing golden pollen into the air.

Whoosh!

The wind swept across the island, which lay gilded all over in gold, and the pollen gathered itself into a swirling vortex.

It should have been a scene straight out of some dreamlike fairy tale, sweetened besides with a flower scent heady enough to intoxicate.

But Yin Shen could not smell that fragrance at all, and could not even feel the wind brushing past him.

The gene fragments within the Sun Cup had been devoured by the Blood of Myth inside the Crown of Wisdom. The Crown of Wisdom itself, and Redlichia's own Blood of Myth with it, had begun to change as well, rising from that early, imperfect blood of myth into something more complete, and the power of wisdom ability was transformed along with it.

This was unlike the early form of wisdom ability, which had acted only upon consciousness and thought.

Now wisdom ability had been made wholly manifest, becoming a divine power capable of intervening directly in the outside world.

With a single thought from Yin Shen, the God-Given City beneath his feet, buried under the sea of flowers, shifted in response.

RUMBLE!

Yin Shen raised the hand that wore the ring, and could feel with perfect clarity that the entire God-Given City now rested within his own palm.

As though, with the slightest effort, he could lift the whole of the God-Given City clean off the ground.

A smile spread across his face. "It's this powerful?"

His delight was not merely at the strength of this power, but at the fact that through it he could now connect directly with reality itself.

He still had no body of his own, but with this power in hand he could at last intervene in reality directly.

Yin Shen walked through the ruined city, wandered across the sea of flowers, and stood upon the very peak of the valley.

He no longer needed to borrow another's strength in order to lay hold of things in this world.

But even as Yin Shen grew practiced with this power, he sensed that it remained far from perfect.

Not that it lacked strength, but that it lacked any sense of true refinement, of a qualitative leap.

Like comparing a waterwheel driven by flowing water to a steam engine, or an internal combustion engine.

Let alone something on the order of electric power, or nuclear power.

"It should be able to grow far stronger than this. Far more wondrous."

At night, Yin Shen gazed upon the mythical conch shell set into the temple wall. Through the day he had taken in all the power and gains that wisdom ability's Blood of Myth had won by transforming over this stretch of time, and it had given rise in him to a new idea.

An idea he had once had before, but had never found a way to carry out.

"To make an entirely new mythical life."

At first he had wanted a single life to hold both life ability and wisdom ability together, and so bring into being an utterly different kind of mythical life. But between two such starkly different abilities, and the Blood of Myth behind them, a violent conflict had always arisen.

One single life could never hold two abilities at once.

But this new discovery had opened a new path before him, a way to make an entirely new kind of blood of myth.

Since blood of myth itself was capable of perfecting and completing itself, why not draw out a handful of gene fragments from the Blood of Myth of both life ability and wisdom ability, let them combine at random within the mythical conch shell, and see whether some new kind of blood of myth might emerge from it?

A bloodline and a power unlike either Redlichia's or Shelly's, the forebear of an entirely different mythical life, might well be born from this.

Yin Shen was curious. "Life ability and wisdom ability, joined together. What kind of being would come out of that?"

But before any of that, he would need some vessel capable of holding blood of myth.

Yin Shen looked behind him.

In the corner, the Sun Cup had been secretly watching Yin Shen all along. The moment it realized this terrifying god had turned his gaze upon it, it spun its flower cup away in another direction.

Trembling all over.

Weak.

And helpless.

Seized by Yin Shen, the Sun Cup let out a hissing shriek, thrashing and struggling with all its might, like some unruly child.

Hisss hisss hisss!

Even earlier, when Yin Shen had gone off for a while during the day, the Sun Cup had not dared to flee. Or it simply could not.

It might have been able to escape the palm of Shelly's hand, but there was no escaping the grasp of God.

It could feel that this being was the very source of all mythical power, and the origin of its own existence.

He was its supreme sovereign, its lord of creation.

Yin Shen placed the Sun Cup into the mythical conch shell. It could not speak, nor could it express its own consciousness in any way.

But its desire to get back out was plain to see.

It pressed itself tight against the thin wall of the mythical conch shell, twisting and writhing toward the outside.

Through the transparent wall, Yin Shen gave the Sun Cup a small wave of his hand.

"Sleep now!"

"When you wake, it will all be different."

The Sun Cup's bud slowly closed, its consciousness sinking into sleep, and its whole body drifted gently down to the bottom of the great shell's interior, its roots taking hold there.

The experiment began.

Attempt after attempt, and failure after failure.

The work was tedious, and coming away disappointed was the ordinary shape of every single day, yet within that ordinary routine there still waited that one singular surprise.

Day after day, year after year.

At last, the surprise arrived, right on time.

A new mythical life...

was born.

Yin Shen stood within the temple, still as stone, watching the scene inside the wall of light.

The Sun Cup within the shell had become something utterly different from before. Though it remained golden, within the flower cup itself had somehow grown a human head.

Its sex could not be told, but it was plainly a skull that closely resembled a human's.

A child's head, at that, its eyes closed in sleep.

Fwoo~

Listening closely, one could make out a soft snore drifting from the flower cup, but that snoring carried within it some heavy, mysterious tint of power, and merely listening to it for a moment was enough to lull a person to sleep.

Yin Shen listened closely, feeling out that power.

And then, all at once, the entire world changed.

He vanished from the Pyramid Temple of the God-Given Land.

Yin Shen took in everything around him. This too was a temple, a temple magnificent and towering.

Here too stood a statue of himself, but this was plainly not the God-Given Land.

He walked out of the temple, and looked out at what lay beyond.

This hall stood upon the very peak of a high mountain, and beyond it a whole city had been built to guard and encircle it, while at the mountain's foot spread a lake so vast its far end could not be seen.

He heard the snoring sound once more, and walked on toward it.

There he found the core consciousness of the Sun Cup, sleeping within an indoor flower garden.

This was the very place where the Sun Cup had been born, God's Cup Flower Garden of the Sky Temple.

"The King is here!"

"Quick, go and pay your respects to the King of Wisdom!"

"High Priest Schlode has already gone on ahead!"

Trilobite men ran past, one after another, passing straight through Yin Shen's shadow, before vanishing into the light behind him.

"This is... a dream?"

A flicker of interest rose upon Yin Shen's face.

It was a dream, and yet it was something far beyond a dream too.

More like a Dream Realm born out of some mythical cell, an illusory Spirit Realm that could nonetheless exist eternally.

Even now that the life and master it had depended upon were gone, so long as that mythical bloodline still endured, and the blood of myth itself had not been worn away...

this Spirit Realm, born out of and bound to that bloodline, would go on existing forever.