What Belongs to God Returns to God

Polo grinned at Star, cheeky as anything, and saw that her mouth hung open without a single word coming out of it.

Doubt rose in his mind. "Has this one been scared stupid? Why won't she say anything?"

Star's mouth was hanging wide open, her astonishment beyond words.

"Why isn't the Sun Cup biting him?"

Polo pressed on. "Hey, how did you do that?"

"To be able to project your mind that far, and control a fish down in the lake!"

Polo was, after all, a mythical life, sovereign over dream ability.

A single glance had been enough to see through Star's divine technique, and he could even wander between consciousness and the dreaming illusion, and find the very fish Star had taken hold of.

What Polo said frightened her a step further, and her heart filled with dread beyond measure.

"How could he possibly know about my divine technique?"

She backed away several steps, eyeing him warily. "Just who are you?"

Polo spread both arms wide. Without the slightest effort his body rose into the air, then drifted slowly back down to the ground like a falling petal.

Her wariness did not trouble him in the least. He walked toward her as though the two of them had been friends for years.

"My name's Polo."

"What's yours?"

"You're really something, you know that! Can this projection power of yours put anyone's mind into this world?"

"And once you're projected, what then?"

"Can you feel the wind? Can you taste food? Can you smell flowers, or the scent of the sea breeze?"

Polo's questions came one after another like firecrackers, and got no answer at all. Star could tell by now, though, that he meant her no harm.

"That's my own divine technique. It isn't finished yet, though."

She studied Polo, a strange look in her eyes. He was nothing but a young boy, and yet she had never in her life seen a living being that looked like this.

"My name is Star. And you... what exactly are you?"

"You look so strange! Nothing at all like the rest of us!"

"And you can talk as well! A living being that isn't a trilobite man, and yet it speaks. That's the strangest thing of all."

Polo looked at Star with scorn, with the very look one gives a country bumpkin who has never seen the wider world.

"Have you ever seen God? Have you ever been to the hall of the gods?"

Star drew herself up. "This place right here is the hall of the gods!"

Polo wore a haughty look. "I mean the God-Given Land. The Yinsai Temple that the first King of Wisdom, Redlichia, built."

"If you'd ever seen the mural Redlichia carved of God, you would know."

"This is what the divine race looks like!"

Star had taken more shocks in these few short moments than in all her life since birth. It was hardly surprising. Noble as her birth was, she had never once set foot beyond this Sacred Mountain.

"You've been to the God-Given Land?"

"That's not right!"

"How dare you speak of the Great King of Wisdom that way."

Polo lifted his skull proudly. "I'm God's messenger."

"I come from the God-Given Land, and I carry the mission God gave me."

Star wanted to press him further, but Polo had no intention of saying anything more.

"Star, if you ever make up your mind, come find me, and be my companion!"

"You only have to call my name, and I'll come and find you."

"We'll go and do something together, something great beyond compare!"

Polo's robe billowed outward, gathering layer upon layer of dreaming starlight, and a surge of overwhelming, transcendent power rippled out through the God's Cup Flower Garden.

Under Star's astonished gaze, Polo slipped away into another world entirely.

The Spirit Realm that belonged to him alone.

Star chased after the dreaming light, watching the hem of his robe sweep past her, his lithe, dancing figure vanishing into the heights above.

For a long while she stood rooted to the spot, with no idea how to describe the dreamlike meeting that had just happened.

She was a senior priest, heir to the Xilong family.

And yet she had never once sensed his presence, had not seen how he came, nor how he left.

Whatever power he held, it far surpassed her own.

"Was that truly a messenger of God?"

At once she broke into a run, racing the whole way, through the colonnade and up the steep stairs.

She ran on into the temple, and dropped to her knees on the floor.

"Oh God, have You truly been watching over us all this time?"

She lifted her face to the statue of God Yinsai, and began to recite the Redlichia Covenant.

"God spoke."

"..."

Every other time she had recited these words of the covenant, her heart had felt only blankness, an echo of what others said before her.

Now that blankness melted away, piece by piece, and in its place came a fullness and a safety beyond words. This was a world with a god in it, and they were a people that God watched over and protected.

Polo's invitation stirred something in her, and yet she was afraid too. She had never once left the Sky Temple and the Sacred Mountain. This was her home, her entire world.

She was curious about the world beyond. She was just as afraid to leave the world she knew.

The God-Descended City

Everyone in the royal palace knelt on the ground in obeisance, and a pall of grief hung over the halls within and without.

"The King is dead!"

Eli was, beyond any doubt, the new king. He stood in the palace and watched the departed king laid into a stone coffin, then carried that coffin with his own hands and buried his father in the royal burial ground.

Eli felt little grief over his father's passing, nothing next to the blow his grandfather Yesael's death had once dealt him.

He had grown up from childhood at King Yesael's side, hearing and seeing the old king's great deeds and legends as he grew. It had left him looking down on his rather weak father, and longing to accomplish deeds like Yesael's own.

But the power of the King of Yinsai was fading, little by little.

The King of Yinsai had lost the supreme power of the Royal Authority of Wisdom, and with it the Crown of Wisdom. No longer could he command all the royal houses as easily as before, and the city-states of the Yinsai Kingdom no longer submitted to him with the same complete obedience they once had.

Wearing a new crown, Eli summoned the ministers of the Yinsai Kingdom to his own chambers.

"How do things stand at the Sky Temple?"

"Is the Xilong family willing to hand over the Ruhe Beast?"

Eli meant to reclaim all seven fusion monsters. It would shore up the power of the King of Yinsai, and hold down the four other branches of the royal line, who held fusion monsters of their own and grew stronger by the day.

The Sky Temple was where he chose to strike first.

The fusion monster in Xilong hands had to be taken, and all the more so because the Sky Temple still held priests of God in no small number, a formidable power in its own right.

A minister was aghast. "But that is God's hall."

Eli nodded, but gave no clear answer either way.

"God does indeed exist."

"But what of it?"

"God is like a star hanging high above, one for whom a single glance down at the mortal world would be a glance wasted."

"Do you imagine He cares what we do? That He cares whether we are devout or false in our faith?"

Eli turned his head, and bent to look down at the minister kneeling and trembling before him.

"Who do you take us for? King Redlichia, God's own firstborn son?"

"No!"

"He thinks us nothing but a swarm of ugly, base insects, and finds even a single glance at us disgusting."

"Would He step forward to punish me? Would He come to hate me for it?"

"No!"

"God would do no such thing."

"We are not even fit to be hated by Him, or to be punished by Him."

"How could a god so far above us ever bring Himself to cast that precious gaze of His down on us? God favors only His firstborn son, and even the Great King Yesael never won a flicker of His regard."

Eli spoke lightly, as though it were nothing at all, and yet his chest heaved and his breath came ragged.

With his own eyes he had watched how devoutly King Yesael believed in God, how he gave everything of himself to God, and how in the end he lost everything all the same.

He too had once believed in God without reservation, and even now he did not deny God's greatness.

But.

He would never again give everything of himself to God, the way King Redlichia and his grandfather Yesael once had.

He said it plainly, without feeling.

"What belongs to God returns to God, and what belongs to the King returns to the King."