The Final Chapter

Star Luo Kingdom, Tito Town

It was a small seaside town outside God-Descended City. The great poet Tito had already been dead for close to two hundred years. His children, entangled in some dark and treacherous power struggle, had left God-Servant City in disgrace, and built a family of their own here.

This was the very place where Divine Messenger Polo and Queen Star had once withdrawn from the world in their final years. Tito's descendants had found it by following the records and memories Tito himself had left behind.

They built a village here, and named it after Tito.

More than a hundred years passed. The village became a town, drawing no small number of Yinsai settlers from elsewhere, and it grew more prosperous by the year.

But this coastal town was unlike the ordinary fishing villages and fishing towns along the sea. It did not live by fishing.

Its fame rested instead on carved bone books and carved stone.

The town was home to a host of craftsmen, all of them servants and subjects bound to the Tito family's domain.

They carved bone books and stone tablets of the Yinsai Epic, the Hymn of the King of Wisdom, and the Redlichia Covenant, and shipped them out across every corner of the Star Luo Kingdom.

In God-Descended City, and in the homes of nobles, merchants, and officials across every town of the Star Luo Kingdom, displaying a bone book or stone tablet made in Tito Town had become a point of pride, a way of showing one's own devotion to God.

The great poet Tito of old could scarcely have imagined that his descendants would one day let go of the mapmaking skills their ancestors had handed down, and never learn to be poets as he had been.

Instead, they leaned on the epics and myths their ancestors had left behind to sustain both the glory of their noble house and a life of extravagance.

These noble descendants lived off what the great poet Tito had left them, coasting on it for more than a hundred years.

By the look of things, barring some disaster, this family could go on coasting for at least a few hundred years more, on nothing but poet Tito's fame and the great glory of their ancestors.

On this day, a merchant caravan arrived in Tito Town.

The whole town was not only built up with tall, castle-like buildings, but ringed as well by a stone wall two meters high, with a thin stone gate set into its entrance.

Call it a town, but it looked more like a small city.

Someone poked their head out through a small window to look the caravan over.

"What's your business here?"

The caravan's leader was a trilobite man clad in white carapace, plainly of no ordinary birth. "We are a merchant caravan out of the Samo Kingdom," he said. "We have traveled this whole long road for Tito Town's epic bone books, and hope to carry some of them home to our own nobles."

The gatekeeper looked them over, and a glint of greed crept into their eyes.

"Every caravan pays the toll. Only then does it get into town."

The caravan leader had clearly come prepared. He passed a handful of bone coins and a few stone coins through the window.

The gatekeeper waved at once for the gate to be opened, and let the whole caravan inside.

The caravan took rooms at an inn in town, seemingly travel-worn and weary from the long road, and settled in to rest before nightfall even came.

But once deep night had fallen, the caravan's people slipped out from the courtyard one by one, murmuring to each other under their breath as they drew their weapons.

Their shapes moved through the streets, bone spears, stone hammers, and hunting nets in hand, making straight for the Tito family's castle.

This was no merchant caravan at all. It was plainly a company of well-trained soldiers.

And more unexpected, the caravan's leader turned out to be a high priest, a being who commanded the power of divine technique.

With one wave of his hand, from the far side of the gate and without ever touching them, he snapped the necks of several castle guards clean through.

Then he shoved the castle gate open with a single hand, and led the soldiers surging inside.

A massacre descended upon the Tito family.

In the great hall, where corpses lay strewn across the floor, the sacred scenes and generations of kings carved into the walls looked on at this brutal slaughter, at the crime and greed behind it.

Before an exquisite long table, the caravan leader had pinned down a trilobite man so fat that one might have doubted they could walk unaided, a Ruhe Sword pressed to them, one foot planted on their hand.

"Talk!"

"Where is it, exactly?"

The head of the Tito family was at a total loss. "What thing?"

"I really don't know!"

The caravan leader reminded them again. "The Final Chapter the great poet left behind, the book that records the secret legends of the kingdom of God."

The whole caravan had clearly come with a plan, premeditated down to the last detail, aimed squarely at the Final Chapter the great poet had left behind.

With their hand still pinned beneath the man's foot, the head of the Tito family let out an agonized howl.

"I really don't know!"

"The Tito family has never had any such thing. I've never so much as heard of any such thing."

The caravan leader had even tried reading their mind, only to find that the head of the Tito family truly knew nothing at all.

Seeing there was nothing more to be dug out of them, he looked at the head of the Tito family with utter disappointment.

"Two hundred years have passed. You have not merely forgotten your ancestors' glory. You have let the old inheritance and its secrets die out almost to the last."

"A pack of fat, degenerate worms, nothing more. You do nothing but defile the great poet's sacred name."

The head of the Tito family watched the man raise the Ruhe Sword high, and a shrill cry tore out of them.

"You would kill the descendant of the great poet himself! The head of the glorious and honored Tito family!"

"This will surely bring retribution down on you!"

"The Star Luo Kingdom will never let this go. Her Majesty the Queen will never let this go."

The man sneered. "The great poet Tito is untouchable and beyond blasphemy, of course. But his glory belongs to him, and to him alone."

"You shameless vermin, leeching off the great poet's glory and calling yourselves the descendants of a saint. You dare to claim glory and splendor for yourselves?"

"And what are you?"

"You carry royal blood in your veins. You call yourselves the descendants of a saint. And in a hundred years you have not produced so much as a single priest."

"Rotted and fallen this low, and you are still fit to bear the name of the great poet Tito?"

With that, he drove his blade straight through the gap in their carapace.

The fat worm twitched a few times, and then went still.

From the very start, the caravan leader had never intended to leave anyone alive.

He despised these bloated worms who disgraced the great poet's sacred name, but he knew exactly how far the Tito family's name and influence still reached.

Generation after generation, the Sky Temple and the Royal Bloodline families of Star Luo had shut them out and ground them down, and the Tito family had long since fallen into decline, but one had only to hear their title of saint's descendants to know how much trouble they could be.

If he left this to fester into future trouble, it would mean certain death for him.

Even the one standing behind him would never dare protect him then.

"Search!"

"It is set down in the notes of the great poet Tito's three sons. Before the great poet returned to the domain of the divine, he sent his eldest son here, to seek out the place where Queen Star and Divine Messenger Polo had withdrawn from the world, and to hide every one of his secrets within it."

"That place. It must be here."

The caravan leader led his men in a search of every corner, and at last, before a wall in the castle's underground storeroom, they found something out of the ordinary.

"Found it."

Carved into the wall was a pattern of stars, neither ornate nor especially remarkable.

The others with him ran their hands over the wall, knocking and tapping at it.

"There's nothing here?"

The caravan leader knew better. "This is an illusion, cast with the power of a Sun Cup!"

He reached out a hand, and closed it loosely in the air before the wall.

The once-tall wall began to warp and twist, spinning open into a passage.

Rumble!

Dust rose into the air, and the stone slabs of the floor collapsed and fell away, one after another.

The passage ran straight down into the depths of the earth, and the group followed it down.

Little by little, a faint golden glow began to kindle in the darkness ahead.

"What is this?"

Only when they drew closer did they realize that this whole underground space was in full bloom with Sun Cups.

The Sun Cups' blossoms had opened wide, dreamlike flowers swaying one after another, their pollen drifting through the whole space and glowing with a soft phosphorescence.

At a glance, it was like falling straight into a beautiful, dreamlike vision.

"Sun Cups!"

"So many Sun Cups, all in bloom!"

"There's a whole sea of Sun Cups hiding right under the Tito family's feet!"

Excited as they were, every one of them held it in check.

To an ordinary trilobite man, even to a noble, any single one of these Sun Cups would be a treasure beyond price.

But these men, with their purpose set clear before them, knew that next to what they had actually come here to find, even a treasure beyond price was not worth mentioning at all.

What lay hidden deep within that sea of flowers was the great poet Tito's own treasure.

It was the very thing that even the Royal Bloodline families themselves longed for with envious eyes, and craved with watering mouths.

It was a treasure beyond all others, one bound up with God himself.

An epic chapter that hid within it the secrets of the domain of the divine.