Species and King

In the warm nest of seawater, the eggs of the trilobite men began to hatch.

At first, they had no human shape at all. They were less men than insects.

But as they grew slowly in the ocean, color seeped into their once-transparent, beetle-like shells, which turned opaque and hardened.

They preyed on the insects and ancient creatures of the coastal waters to survive, and they had no natural enemies.

Years later, they began to take on human form.

And it was then that a voice began to sound deep within their minds. A single voice, the one from which their wisdom and consciousness had first arisen, the forebear to whom their bloodline traced back.

"Come!"

"Come to me."

"Come back!"

Drawn by that overwhelming call, the trilobite men came climbing up out of the sea one by one and onto the shore.

They gathered at the base of the pyramid, that towering pile of stone, curious eyes roaming over everything around them, lifting to the temple of God.

On the pyramid's steps stood a figure who looked exactly like them, facing out toward the sea.

Redlichia waited to receive them at the foot of the steps. The call that had summoned these lives ashore was his. He reached out his hand and smiled, and the joy in him was real.

Among the crowd stood one particular trilobite woman, her armor white, unlike anyone else's.

That alone set her apart from all the rest, and Redlichia noticed her.

He froze for a moment, and something stirred inside him. He did not understand what it was, and did not yet know that there was an emotion called affection.

Before the grand and towering temple, Yin Shen was watching too as this first generation of trilobite men came ashore.

"Trilobite men?"

"Trilobites!"

"Men in name. And in the end they still can't shake the habits of a bug."

"They've taken human form. They can live on land and in the sea both. And still the ocean won't let them go."

"They have to breed in the sea. Still laying eggs, still bound to the shallows near the shore."

He glanced back at the barren ground behind him, as desolate as the surface of Mars.

It was the same across the whole island, and even more so on the mainland.

In an age this ancient, only the ocean could sustain life at all.

Life could hardly reshape nature. It could only adapt to it.

Fusion Monster Shelly stood beside a pillar of the temple, looking down at those feeble little newborn bugs. Her gaze held no malice at all, and still it filled every trilobite man with a terror that ran in their very blood, a chill that sank into their bones, worse than the icy deep-sea trenches where no sunlight ever reached.

The trilobite men could not see Yin Shen. All they could do was stare in fear at the mythical creature, the fusion monster.

She still held her human shape, small and delicate as it was, and yet they could sense just what a terrible monster lay hidden beneath that skin.

Under Shelly's gaze they trembled from head to foot, and knelt without ever meaning to.

In the end they collapsed limp at the foot of the pyramid, whimpers and wordless murmurs spilling from their mouths.

Uhh...!

Uhh, uhh...!

Eeyah...!

Redlichia stood at the foot of the pyramid, and like the countless trilobite men around him, lifted his eyes to the heights above.

"That is the temple."

"And that is Shelly, God's messenger."

These newborn lives understood almost nothing, and had no idea what a messenger of God even was.

But this much they could still understand. What dwelled up there was a being beyond all others, supreme above them all.

Redlichia turned back and raised a hand toward the gathered trilobite men.

The tide surged in and gnawed at the shore. An irresistible force rose above their own will, lifted them bodily from the ground, and set them upright again.

"Rise!"

"There is nothing to fear."

"Because you are God's children, you are God's faithful, you are the chosen firstborn of God."

"In this world there is nothing worthy of your fear or your worship, save God alone."

In truth, Redlichia looked down on Fusion Monster Shelly. He had never thought much of the fusion monster at all, and it had shown from the very start, in how carelessly he had left the building of the pyramid to her.

He believed himself to be God's firstborn son.

The fusion monster, to him, was nothing more than a servant of God, while he alone was God's true representative.

Redlichia's exchanges with the trilobite men were less a matter of speech than of will. He could brand the words he wished to say directly into their minds.

Yin Shen took note of this.

Just as he had expected, Redlichia's power was not wisdom alone. Only now that his own race had come into being did the full strength of it truly show itself.

He could summon every trilobite man, control every trilobite man, and drive his own thoughts straight into the body and mind of every one of them.

No one could defy his will.

In truth, he could control every intelligent being that existed in the world at that time.

This was Redlichia's own power, the power of wisdom and of consciousness.

Rooted deep in their bloodline, that power of the forebear turned the gaze of the trilobite men on Redlichia into worship, their eyes brimming with boundless fervor.

It was the very same look Redlichia himself wore whenever he gazed upon Yin Shen.

Redlichia raised his hand and cried out, "From this day on, we shall be the masters of land and sea, the Divine Chosen race that rules this world in God's stead!"

"And I am your king, Redlichia."

All the trilobite men roared back in a frenzy, bellowing raw, hoarse, hollow syllables wildly off-key.

"King!"

"King!"

Yin Shen was Redlichia's creator, the God who had granted him wisdom.

And Redlichia, in turn, was their creator, the supreme king who had granted them life.

Redlichia led them into the valley behind the pyramid, where they carved cave after cave into the cliff walls, and with the stone they quarried, raised up a city.

Just as Yin Shen had told him to, he built up his own city-state and nation out of the wilderness.

The caves ran all the way down to the sea floor, so that beyond the city rising in the valley there lay a second city through those caves, deep beneath the water.

They lived upon the island, and made their offerings to God.

They hunted in the sea, and bred their young in the sea.

This place seemed to have stepped straight out of myth and legend, an origin site much like where Nüwa shaped mankind from clay, God's own Garden of Eden.

This tiny island, insignificant against the whole of the Earth, had become the beginning of intelligent life, a paradise cut off from the world, and one that belonged to no human being.

At last, Redlichia had a family of his own.

He made the trilobite woman with the white bone helmet and white shell his queen, and together they brought their first child naturally into the world.

Now a father, Redlichia had no sooner climbed up out of the sea onto dry land than he swept his child's hand into his own, wild with joy, and could not wait to climb the pyramid.

The two of them, one large and one small, climbed step by step toward the heights, until at last they knelt before the temple.

He whispered to his child, "Look!"

"God is right there, watching you!"

But his child only stared into the temple in blank confusion. Aside from the great stone statue and the stone altar, there was nothing there at all.

"But there's nothing there? It's just rocks."

Redlichia felt a chill run through his whole body. As he looked at his child, disbelief showed in his eyes, and an endless, aching disappointment.

Sorrow lived in those eyes, and loss, and a helpless bewilderment.

He understood, then, that his child could not see God.

Unlike him, his child had neither the sight to behold God's glory nor the gift God had granted him.