The Way Back to the Divine Realm

The Sky Temple

Beneath the idol, a trilobite woman knelt before the throne of the god Yinsai with her hands clasped, praying, her eyes shut tight and her expression full of devotion.

But just then, a priest of the Sky Temple came bursting into the hall in a panic, startling her and breaking off her prayer.

"Your Majesty!"

She was the tenth generation to serve as high priest of the Sky Temple, queen of the Xilong family of the Royal Bloodline.

Through generation after generation of inheritance, the strength of the Star Luo Kingdom had grown steadily greater, until the people under its rule alone numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

The queen looked more than a little angry that anyone would dare disturb her while she was at prayer before the divine.

"This is a temple. Who gave you leave to raise your voice here?"

"Do you not know that this is an act of disturbance, a blasphemy against the divine?"

The one who had come in was seized with terror, and dropped to their knees on the ground.

They did not dare say another word.

But the queen knew as well that unless something of the utmost importance had happened, they would never have dared burst into the hall of the divine uninvited.

The queen stepped out of the temple, and came to stand before the pillars of the corridor.

"What has happened?"

A junior priest of the Xilong family produced a bone tablet. "A message, sent from the God-Descended City."

The queen rose to her feet. She read it through once, and in an instant, the look in her eyes changed.

Star Luo Queen, who was thought of as composed and even-tempered, lost her calm entirely, and cried out a single word.

"What?"

The tablet read that a caravan, claiming to hail from the Samo Kingdom, had slipped into Tito Town, and slaughtered Saint Tito's family down to the last soul. At that very same moment, a door had opened in the sky above the God-Descended City.

But that was not even the most important part. What the lord of the God-Descended City reported next was what truly made the queen's face change color.

After the slaughter of the Tito family, the lord of the God-Descended City had found, beneath Tito Town, the very place where Saint Tito's bones lay buried. With it lay the ruins the Divine Messenger Polo and Queen Star had left behind long ago, their final place of seclusion.

Even more shocking, the very moment Saint Tito's burial place had been robbed was the very moment the gate of the Kingdom of God had opened.

The lord was certain beyond all doubt. Someone had taken Saint Tito's relic and used it to open the gate to the Kingdom of God.

The tablet's own words ran as follows.

【A gate leading to the Kingdom of God opened above the God-Descended City. Beyond it lay the land God had promised, and the God-Given City. An eternal pyramid and temple appeared amid the starlight. God has opened the road home to us once again.】

【Your Majesty, all of this stems from the secret Saint Tito left behind. This is a supreme glory belonging to the Star Luo Kingdom, a grace God has granted to us and us alone.】

【And that grace, someone has stolen from us.】

The queen was first overcome with excitement, and then fury welled up in her eyes.

The excitement was because Saint Tito had, of all things, left behind a means of opening the gate to the domain of the divine, and more than that, because someone had actually opened it.

What did that mean?

It meant God had given tacit permission. The supreme god had allowed the trilobite men, fallen into dust and mortal earth, to open his kingdom, had allowed them to return once more to the land God had promised.

Just what form that permission took, no one could say. It might be that it allowed some one person to set foot in his kingdom, and wash away the trilobite men's original sin.

Or it might be that it allowed the will of a trilobite man, after death, to return to his hall, never again to wander the barren earth.

And the fury was because this thing, which belonged to the Star Luo Kingdom, had been stolen away.

The queen lowered her hand, and set the tablet down.

She gazed off into the distance, murmuring softly to herself, "The secret Saint Tito left behind."

"And... the road home."

"Home?"

The instant she spoke the word home, even Star Luo Queen herself felt a shiver race from her heels up to the back of her skull.

All at once she felt as though voice after different voice were roaring and calling to her from inside her own blood. They were the voices of her ancestors, generation upon generation of trilobite men, the wishes and hopes buried deep in their blood and their will.

Afterward, she reached out her hand toward the Sacred Lake, and without the slightest hesitation, unleashed the most powerful divine technique and power she possessed.

"A divine technique."

"Consciousness Projection!"

Within the Sacred Lake, a monstrous, colossal beast broke the surface of the water.

The Sky Temple Queen's consciousness descended into the Ruhe Beast, and through its eyes she looked out at everything around her. Then, little by little, it rose from the depths of the water.

"Go!"

"Sky Beast."

"Go to the God-Descended City, and bring back what belongs to the Star Luo Kingdom, and to the Xilong family."

The Consciousness Projection technique that Queen Star had pioneered, all those years ago, had by now developed into the mainstream path for priests.

It lacked the versatility of the illusion techniques mastered by fusing with the Sun Cup Flower, but in practical use it was every bit as powerful.

Senior priests gained the power to command and control beasts from a thousand miles away, and through this means could gather intelligence, or carry out assassinations.

More than that, they had once relied on wisdom ability to commune with their beasts, and though their minds were joined, there had always been some clumsiness to it. Consciousness Projection was something else entirely. A priest's own consciousness merged almost completely with whatever they controlled, moving it as freely and naturally as their own body.

Especially so for the Royal Bloodline families.

With their consciousness projected into a Ruhe Beast, they could sit at the seat of power in their own capital and still, in a moment, strike at any city in their kingdom or seize control of it.

Whoosh~

A vast, hollow sound rolled out over the Sacred Lake, and it was not the Ruhe Beast's roar.

It was the sound of air being drawn away, of wind surging and beating.

This, of all things, was a Ruhe Beast with the power of flight. A great canopy, like a jellyfish's bell, spread wide open, and it drifted up into the sky and soared away into the distance.

The canopy it opened reached more than a hundred meters across, its thin, translucent membrane letting the clouds and sun shine right through.

Of the seven Ruhe Beasts the Yinsai people now commanded, most had passed through their cycle of rebirth twice, or even three times over.

The strength of a Ruhe Beast never changed in kind. But as the concentration of mythical blood within it thickened over the years, its size and the range over which its power could be controlled grew steadily more terrifying.

In the several cities at the foot of the Sacred Mountain, in town upon town built around the Sacred Lake, the people of the Star Luo Kingdom lifted their heads and watched that colossal beast drift across the sea of clouds.

One after another, they bowed low in reverence, crying out as they did.

"Ruhe!"

"Ruhe!"

They knew that the appearance of a Ruhe Beast meant the queen herself, and with her, the will of the kingdom.

With this done, the queen made her way swiftly down from the Sky Temple, toward the God-Servant City.

In the royal palace of the God-Servant City, the queen took her seat upon a magnificent high-backed stone throne, carved through with open latticework.

Sunlight from either side fell crisscrossing through the windows into the hall, and the ministers of the Star Luo Kingdom stood in humble rows to either side of the throne.

What had happened in the God-Descended City had shaken the nobles of the God-Servant City and the priests of the Sky Temple in equal measure. In the Star Luo Kingdom faith counted for more than the crown itself, and every soul thought of itself first as a servant of God and a priest. An event as momentous as this descent of a miracle mattered more than almost anything else could.

"Your Majesty, the Tito family has been slaughtered. We must trace this to its root."

"It must be the Samo Kingdom's doing. They betrayed the Xilong family and Queen Star once before, and now they come to steal the grace that belongs to us."

"The vile Samo family. All these years, and still they cannot change their wicked ways."

One after another, men stood forward, most of them from the Xilong family.

Even after hundreds of years, the people of the Xilong family had never once forgotten that old hatred.

In those days, after all, they had been the kings of Yinsai.

The queen was clearly far more level-headed than the rest. "A caravan of the Samo Kingdom?"

"I do not think it is as simple as that."

The queen gave an order at once. "Muster the army. Move them immediately to the God-Descended City, to Stone Forest City, and to Sun City."

"Watch the Samo Kingdom, the Sele Kingdom, and the Volcano Kingdom closely. After all these years, the gate to the Kingdom of God has opened once more, and Saint Tito's family has been slaughtered."

"I have a feeling that some far greater upheaval is certain to follow."