Chapter 495: Ray Who Saw the Floating Island

Hila, the Dream Sovereign, pushed the door open, and behind her lay the Door Spirit Realm of the Reflection Realm.

Through this one door, a labyrinth could be seen, spiraling and twisting on toward some unseen end, its walls lined with countless illusory doors.

Some of those doors had already taken physical form, summoned through into the mortal world.

She stood before the open Teleportation Gate, looking at the Door Nymph Rosa, who seemed a little ill at ease.

"Just as I thought. So long as Rosa sets about a thing in earnest, she is certain to see it done!"

"From the topmost layer of the Dream Starry Sea, I heard countless people calling out your name."

She leaned down slightly, golden light spilling over Rosa, and spoke slowly.

"The nymph who can open the door to distant places."

Hila turned away, smiling.

With a single step she crossed through, and behind her the gate of light closed little by little.

The Door Nymph Rosa bent low in a bow, and the key hanging from her neck swung down with her.

The moment Hila returned, she found the floating island utterly transformed.

She knew this was the witch doctors remaking the place, and at once she wanted to call Shelly out to go with her.

Hila understood well enough what the witch doctors had in mind. All their haste to remake the floating island had been so that she and Shelly could see it.

Hila called out Shelly's name from inside the boat's cabin.

"Shelly, the witch doctors have made the floating island so very beautiful. Let us go and see it together!"

But Shelly, busy with who knew what, seemed not to hear her at all.

The second layer of the hot air balloon boat held far more space than the outside of it promised. Shelf stacked upon shelf gave the place the feel of some towering building, and though every crisscrossing passage was marked with numbers and directions, a person could still lose their way in it easily enough.

Shelly, just then, was sitting in a corner, pressed up close against the glass tank, whispering to her own servants inside.

"...the Floating Stone... need more..."

As Hila drew closer, she caught the faint sound of Shelly's voice.

The nearer she came, the more clearly she could hear.

Shelly talked away, waving her arms and stamping her feet as she went, her face unusually animated.

"Big Meteor makes Gravity Stones! And Big Fireworks makes Floating Stones!"

"So what about the rest of you? What fun stuff can you make?"

Shelly gripped the mushroom person's big head, her eyes pressed right up against the glass tank.

From outside it looked like nothing much. From inside the glass tank, looking out, the sight must have been terrifying indeed.

Even a Ruhe Great God, hearing Shelly's questions put to it like this, would probably have been trembling.

Just then Hila came around a row of shelves and looked toward Shelly in the corner.

"Shelly, come out and play."

Shelly shot to her feet at once.

"Play?" she said loudly.

A look of anticipation lit up her whole face.

"I'll be right there!"

Hila said with a smile, "I will wait for you, then!"

In a matter of seconds Shelly came storming out with her mushroom people in tow. She never simply walked anywhere. She always ran.

Hila had been the one to come calling, and yet it was Shelly who could not wait, tearing out ahead of everyone and shoving the cabin door open with all her strength.

Slap!

Clang!

The cabin door was flung wide, slammed into the side of the boat, and let out a heavy crash.

Not far off, the Mythology Spirit Vellen threw both hands over their head.

Outside, everything had changed beyond all recognition from before.

With the door open, what met their eyes was a city of the Divine Kingdom, built into the mountainside and wreathed in cloud and mist.

Towering pillar after pillar held up the elevated water channels above. A great surge of water ran the whole length of the cliff face, breaking here and there into waterfalls that poured down in torrents, and the rush of it could be heard even from far away.

The city was adorned throughout with ornament of every kind, planted thick with potion plants of every sort, each one giving off an extraordinary glow.

The island, in all, was divided into three levels.

The middle level held the city of the Divine Kingdom, hollowed straight out of the mountainside. On the lower level lay a sea of Cups of Desire and a garden of Rainbow Trees, complete with pavilions built in the style of the trilobite men's God-Moon Era and paths laid with flagstone.

The topmost level was planted thick with Blood Mist Cups, and held a vast botanical garden sealed beneath a glass dome, from within which came the faint sounds of animals.

Hila gazed at the floating island.

"How beautiful!"

The six witch doctors had already gathered before the God's Mount, waiting to receive the two of them.

Hila led Shelly through the artificial lake and the plaza of fountains, the witch doctors trailing behind them, explaining as they went.

The water ran perfectly clear, clear enough to see the reflections of fish down in its depths.

Shelly leaned so far over the water's surface that she nearly dunked her whole head in.

They entered the city of the Divine Kingdom. It was built straight into the mountainside, laid out level upon level, so that walking through it felt like climbing a mountain. They would go in through one door and come out through another on the level above.

The next moment, they would find themselves on the corridor of yet another building, one level higher, or standing before the window of some other structure entirely.

They walked along the water channels held aloft on their towering pillars, watching waterfalls burst from each outlet in turn and plunge down into the city of the Divine Kingdom below.

Where the sunlight fell unbroken by cloud, the spray of water bent it into a rainbow.

Finally, they arrived at the botanical garden.

The vast botanical garden beneath its glass dome felt like a small world unto itself, holding plants of every kind, and living beings of every size that made their home within it.

There were insects. There were lizards. There were beasts too.

Hila asked, "So large a glass dome. And yet, is that a familiar scent I catch upon it?"

Hila could tell the dome was the work of a Miracle Technique, and she even knew which spirit had made it.

The witch doctors said, "We traded for it with a spirit of our acquaintance. The metal frame we made ourselves, and then we fitted the glass over it, pane by pane."

Shelly was licking at a rainbow lollipop that had come from who knew where, slurping loudly at it without a shred of restraint, and only on hearing this did she look up.

"Oh, you had to trade for it?"

As though something had occurred to her, Shelly lowered her rainbow candy.

She narrowed her eyes and studied the witch doctors, which left them a little at a loss.

Shelly asked all of a sudden, "A garden this big, the spirits must have asked for a whole lot of things, didn't they?"

"Have you got a lot of treasures? Where'd they all come from?"

No sooner had she said it than a look of sudden understanding crossed her face.

"Oh, I get it now."

She pointed her lollipop at the witch doctors.

"This is corruption. Bribery."

The witch doctors shook where they stood, and hurried to explain, one after another, that back in the last era, when they had walked the mortal world spreading the art of healing, they had come to own no small number of treasures.

Some things that had not even counted as treasures in the last era had, by this one, become rare and precious things indeed.

Once Shelly understood, she popped the candy back into her mouth.

"What are you all so scared of? It's not as if I'd snatch anything of yours."

One of the witch doctors wiped the cold sweat from their brow, wanting badly to say, "Of course You will not snatch them. That is because You already believe everything in this world belongs to You."

But Shelly seemed to be in fine spirits regardless. She wasted no time diving headlong into the botanical garden beneath the glass dome with her mushroom people, chasing the animals into a wild scramble and having the time of her life.

Hila said to the witch doctors with a smile, "Your Divine Kingdom is very fine indeed. It is beautiful."

The witch doctors, for their part, were overjoyed to have earned the approval of a supreme divine being.

After so long a stretch of hard work, the witch doctors gradually let themselves relax.

They stood quietly, looking out over the sky-borne Divine Kingdom they had labored so hard to build, one that belonged to them alone. Then all at once Witch Doctor Left Hand spoke up.

"Do you still remember our old Witch Doctor Cottage?"

Of course the others remembered. It had been the home they built for themselves back in the First Era.

Witch Doctor Skull said, "In those days the trilobite men were forever blowing anything mysterious out of all proportion. The story even got about that a visitor had to pass three trials before they could set foot at last inside the House of the Witch Doctors."

Witch Doctor Torso joined in.

"The first trial was the Bone Suspension Bridge, and to cross it one had to endure the battering of the wind and a true testing of courage. The second trial was the Mist of Good and Evil, and only the good of heart could pass through it. The third was the Gate of Judgment, and the monster's skull above the door would devour anyone who passed without first being judged."

In truth, the bridge had been nothing more than an ordinary suspension bridge. It only felt so dreadful because it happened to span the Great Chasm of Death, and swayed violently whenever the wind picked up, enough to strike fear into anyone's heart.

As for the rest, it was only an ordinary bank of mist meant to keep the careless from wandering in by mistake, and a door that simply announced any visitor with a loud shout the moment they arrived.

Not one of the witch doctors could keep from laughing aloud, and each of them sank into memories of days gone by.

In those days, the witch doctors had taken on quite a few students of medicine, though most of them had no extraordinary power of their own, and learned nothing more than ordinary healing.

Among them had been one called Holy Hands Lester.

That stretch of time had been, for the witch doctors, something singular, and something worth remembering fondly.

Witch Doctor Left Hand felt an especially deep fondness for all that had faded into the years since.

"Our little cottage. And the Great Chasm of Death. And that door monster who so loved frightening people."

Witch Doctor Skull nodded.

"We went out at a god's own bidding, to seek the answer that would let life ability hold wisdom. We never thought so much would come of it in the end."

Witch Doctor Right Leg leaned against a nearby wall and said, "All of it was in service to a god's will, true enough, but we did so many interesting things along the way. We taught many students, we wrote medical texts, we cured all manner of illness."

The task itself had been given to them by a god.

But the joy of it, and the sense of a life well lived.

That much was real.

Witch Doctor Left Leg laughed.

"There are things worth remembering fondly. And there are many things, too, that went well beyond what we expected."

Witch Doctor Torso wasted no time undercutting them, speaking with a face full of feeling.

"Back then we gave God's Form to Anhofus, and never imagined such a turn would come of it in the end. How did that fellow ever go and end up an evil god?"

"And this, too. All we did was teach Lester how to save lives, and in the end it brought forth the God-Created Man Stuen, who fought that evil god to the death."

Everyone fell silent at once. At last, Witch Doctor Skull spoke.

"The moment we set foot in this world, we became a part of it as a matter of course. The good and the bad alike come with that."

"Not one of us can promise what the outcome will be. But the thing we set out to do at the very beginning was a good one."

Witch Doctor Left Hand looked round at the other witch doctors.

"Well then, let us begin once more. Shall we build ourselves another Witch Doctor Cottage?"

Witch Doctor Right Leg looked out over the whole of the floating island.

"Surely it ought to be a Witch Doctor Kingdom by now?"

Witch Doctor Right Hand and Left Hand exchanged a look.

"What will it be like this time, I wonder?"

Witch Doctor Torso clapped Right Hand on the back.

"Who do you take yourself for, God Yinsai? Knowing the future before you have so much as begun? What is the use of thinking so much about it?"

Witch Doctor Skull spoke last of all.

"Wait until our task is finished, and then we shall see!"

---

The Sacred Mountain of Light

Ray brought out his aircraft and finished packing up his belongings.

He meant to set off again soon, and see this journey around the world through to its true end.

From here, he wanted to finish his Globe, and he would need other demon spirits to help him build his own Sun's Wing.

At the same time, he meant to pass on to every other demon spirit the road he had found for their own kind, and the wholly new Art of God's Grace he had discovered along the way.

Once Lomier learned Ray was about to leave, he came to see him off.

Lomier gave Ray a few gifts that could only be found in the winged people's own lands, nothing especially precious, but singular all the same.

Ray accepted the gifts, and found himself recalling a rumor he had heard from the other sky messengers these past few days.

"I hear you mean to become an Apostle, Lomier?"

Lomier nodded.

"Ray, by your tone, you do not think much of my chances?"

Lomier smiled.

"Many sky messengers have tried to take this step over the years, but I am the youngest among them. I believe I can certainly do it."

Ray sounded a little concerned.

"Your gift is a good one, but it's a stretch all the same. The odds are very low. I wouldn't advise you to force your way to Apostle."

A good gift, and yet a stretch with very low odds. The two hardly seemed to go together.

Lomier asked Ray, "What is talent, in the end? Is there any way at all to change it?"

Ray said, "You can think of talent as the amount of Divine Blood you were born carrying."

"First rank through third rank is really only your own Divine Blood going through a metamorphosis. That power is already there inside your body. All you're doing is drawing it fully out."

"Only once you've reached Apostle do you truly set foot on a wholly new road. That is the threshold leading from mortal to Mythology."

Ray looked at Lomier, and noticed the expression on his face.

"Cruel, isn't it?"

Lomier nodded.

"It is cruel, yes. As though effort changed nothing at all."

Ray laughed.

"But that's exactly why the view on the far side of your own limit is beyond anything you could imagine."

"There are always a few in this world who manage to break clean through their own limits."

A faint light flickered in Lomier's eyes as he looked at Ray.

"Who, for instance?"

Ray said, "I know a fair few of them. One is the Scarlet Goddess."

"Her talent was nothing to speak of. Truth be told, it was a good deal worse than yours. Even reaching third rank, back then, took a sage's own blessing."

Lomier looked utterly astonished.

"But she is a god. What on earth happened afterward?"

Ray said, "She was the first ever to change straight from a Wisdom Seed into a Life Seed. It was nothing like the way the rest of the most ancient race managed it later on. The agony of that direct transformation, and the razor's-edge line between living and dying, went far beyond anything you can imagine."

"Everything you are is destroyed and reset. Your Spirituality, your wisdom, your Divine Blood, your body, all of it."

"Of everyone I know of, only two ever managed to change directly from a Wisdom Seed into a Life Seed. The Scarlet Goddess was one. The Earth Witch was the other."

"Though from what I've heard, the Earth Witch drew on a portion of the Life Altar's power for hers, so whatever she suffered cannot have come close to what the Scarlet Goddess went through in her day."

Lomier asked, "How did she manage it, then?"

Ray said, "Duty and a promise, I'd guess. She took up a promise from her own teacher, and carried far too much weight because of it!"

"Some things grow so heavy that you don't even dare to die, and you can't even bring yourself to let go."

Lomier said nothing for a long while. Perhaps he was turning something over in his mind. Or perhaps it was that the Scarlet Goddess's story could only ever be something to admire and look up to, with little enough in it for him to learn from.

It was then that Ray named another.

"There's someone in this very era who broke past his own limit as well. And you already know his name, Lomier."

Lomier looked at him, and Ray gave the name.

"Yafuan. His own aptitude was never enough to make him a fourth-rank Apostle, so he accepted an Equivalent Exchange from the God of Knowledge and Truth."

"His story after that, I think you know already."

"He succeeded, in the end. But the price he paid for it was beyond terrible."

"Nothing at all comes easily. Even when the price isn't obvious at the time, it only means it's collected later on."

Lomier, of course, already knew Yafuan's story. Even in the plainest, most straightforward written record, it was harrowing enough to make a person hold their breath.

Ray asked Lomier, "Do you have that kind of tenacity in you? That kind of courage, Lomier?"

Ray stood beside him.

"I haven't come to talk you out of it. But before you take this step, I want you to at least think clearly about how hard the road ahead really is. Whatever you do, be careful."

Lomier gave no answer.

In truth, there was one more example that stood out sharpest of all in Ray's memory, the sky messengers' own former Lord of Radiance.

But Ray said nothing more of it. He seemed unwilling to let that particular figure become a precedent for Lomier to chase.

After a long while, Lomier lifted his head and let the subject drop.

"Once you have gone back, will you go looking for the Floating Stone?"

Ray nodded.

"I'll find a way. And if I ever learn what the Floating Stone really is, I'll write and tell you."

Lomier asked him, "And how do you mean to find it?"

Ray reached into the collar of his clothes and drew out a compass.

"A miracle tool, More Than Just a Compass."

The name was a bit of a mouthful, long and unwieldy, but it suited the style of a miracle tool perfectly well.

Lomier looked at the compass.

"What is this?"

Ray told him, "Whatever your heart wants most fiercely, in the very moment it wants it, that is where the needle points."

Lomier looked utterly stunned. He had never imagined such a thing could exist in this world at all.

"Then this is already beyond the rules of reality itself?"

Ray told him, "It's the very first miracle tool the mortal world ever had. It belongs to my teacher, Lady Elena. She is the true owner of this miracle item."

That a god should own such a thing was perhaps not so strange.

A god was, after all, already a being that stood outside the rules of reality.

Ray held the compass out for Lomier to see, and all at once Lomier noticed the needle turning, then stopping short.

Lomier raised his head and asked, "Is it working? What is it you are thinking of just now?"

Ray paused a moment, looking down at the compass, then answered.

"I was wondering. What is there that could fly out beyond the world?"

Lomier and Ray leaned in together over the compass, and found that it really was pointing somewhere.

Ray said nothing more, and moved at once.

He climbed aboard his own aircraft, and Lomier squeezed into the seat behind him.

Ray worked the control stick a few times. The aircraft leapt into the air at once, trailing a rainbow behind it, and was soon lost at the edge of the sky.

Number Three, the Big-Head Demon Spirit, who had been busy packing, chose that very moment to step out of the house. They looked toward the edge of the sky and gave chase, waving their arms without pause, seeming to shout, "I haven't gotten on yet!"

Turning back, they found Number Two had drifted over as well and settled right beside them.

"You got left behind too?" they asked.

Number Two said, "Ray must've had something come up. He'll be back soon enough."

Number Three said, "But it's dark out already. Are we still setting off once he's back?"

Number Two drifted through the sky, unbothered.

"Then we'll stay another day."

Number Three looked at all the packed belongings, and scratched their own big head.

High above in the sky, the aircraft trailing its rainbow tail soared swiftly onward, climbing ever higher.

Curious, Lomier asked, "Where is it?"

Ray looked at the compass.

"It seems to be somewhere very high up. Very high indeed."

Ray pulled the aircraft up, its nose punching through the clouds, and banked it out above the sea of cloud.

But it did not end there. The aircraft kept climbing higher, cutting through cloud layer after cloud layer.

Lomier said, "Just how high is it? Can there really be anything up here at all?"

Ray did not know either.

"The compass only tells me, higher."

Only when they had broken through the very topmost cloud layer did the whole sea of cloud lie beneath them.

This was already ten thousand meters and more above the ground, the very highest Ray had ever climbed before.

Lomier looked around them.

"There is nothing here at all?"

Just then, Ray looked at the compass, a note of excitement creeping into his voice.

"It's close now. I can feel it coming toward us, too."

Ray focused on the sensation carefully, and slowly his mouth fell open.

"Fast... very fast... impossibly fast."

Ray cried out in a rush.

"No. It's already here."

Ray and Lomier together searched the sky closely, but saw nothing at all.

All at once, the compass in Ray's hand began to glow.

It was that very light, strange and wondrous, that let his sight pierce straight through the wall between the real and the unreal, and there he saw it, some colossal shape looming higher above.

In an instant, Ray's pupils blew wide and unfocused. In that moment his mind and spirit alike had come utterly undone.

"What is that?"

There, in a stretch of sky that should have held nothing at all, an island stood, impossibly.

"An island, floating in the sky?"

That magnificent island of the sky swept past overhead, and the reflection of a Mythology fell across Ray's aircraft.

Ray tilted his head back, staring up at the island's underside.

But it moved swiftly, and in no more than an instant it had already crossed directly overhead.

Ray whipped his head around to follow it at once, and caught sight of the mythic domain upon the island.

In that single instant, what his eyes had seen burned itself into Ray's memory forever.

It was a Mythology's own realm, a kingdom abloom with flowers from end to end, tall stone monuments rising up throughout it.

A magnificent city stood upon the island, waterfalls and fountains flinging spray up into the sky, breaking the light into rainbow after rainbow.

The island held plant life and jungle both, and a vast dome like a birdcage that covered the jungle within it.

It was beyond imagining.

This was a sight to be found in a sky the clouds themselves could not reach, in a place forbidden to all things.

Ray wrenched the aircraft around with all his strength, and gave chase after that island in the sky.

"Wait for me..."

"Just wait..."

But that floating island was not only impossibly high. Its speed, too, went beyond all imagining. It looked, if anything, as though it were not moving at all, and yet in a single instant it had vanished at the very edge of the sky.

It was as though the earth itself, far beneath Ray's feet, were dragging him along in the opposite direction, away from that island in the sky, so that he could never catch that shadow, not ever.

Before Ray had even truly begun the chase, in the space of an instant, that beautiful kingdom in the sky had vanished into the sun's golden light above the sea of cloud.

Ray came to a stop, staring off into the distance, staring at the sky, murmuring to himself.

"How did you fly so high?"

"So fast, too?"

Ray understood that with this aircraft alone, he could never hope to catch the floating island. Not ever.

This aircraft belonged, after all, to the Dream Realm. It had never been of the mortal world at all, not from the very start.

Lomier watched Ray standing there in his seat, dazed and muttering to himself, and at last could not help asking.

"What exactly did you see?"

From the very beginning, he himself had seen nothing at all, only Ray talking and gesturing to himself, alone.

Ray told Lomier what he had seen, and Lomier's eyes went wide at once, looking even more worked up about it than Ray himself.

"A Divine Kingdom, floating in the sky?"

"A floating island, a real one?"

---

By the time Ray made it back, night had already fallen.

But compared to how he had been before he set out, Ray now seemed weighed down with thought, his mind still turning over that Divine Kingdom floating in the sky.

As far as he knew, there was no one in the mortal world who could lift a true Divine Kingdom into the sky.

The Miracle Garden belonging to the God of Desire and Alchemy was, in truth, only a mountain peak in the Land of Sunrise. It had assimilated the upper half of that mountain, caught somewhere between the real and the unreal, and that alone was why it looked as though it floated in midair.

Even the realm of the God of Knowledge and Truth was, in the end, nothing more than a clever fusion of mirage and mist, drifting through the sky in the form of vapor and illusion.

In that fleeting kingdom in the sky, Ray had seen a real island, real jungles, a real sea of flowers, even real rivers.

"The Floating Stone?"

"A stone out of the sky?"

All at once, Ray truly believed what Lomier had told him.

To break free of this world, free of the earth's own hold, one would need the power of a Floating Stone.

It was exactly that thought the compass had sensed within him, and that was why it had pointed him toward that floating power.

It followed the wish in his own heart to give him direction, and only by finding that floating island could he ever find the power to fly beyond the world.

Ray made his way to the edge of the Sacred Mountain of Light, seeming to wander without any purpose at all.

He came to an archway, and sat himself down there, looking off at the moon in the distance.

The lovely Kite Demon Spirit circled round and round the archway's pillar, blue sky and white clouds behind her.

Again and again she wove through the sky and the archway, looking utterly free and unhurried.

Ray suddenly looked up and asked Number Two, "What would you say to us building the Sun's Wing here?"

Number Two saw through Ray's thoughts in an instant.

"You've decided to stay, then?"

Ray nodded.

"There are a lot of monsters here. I can turn them into demon spirits as well, and then have them help us build the Sun's Wing."

Of course, that was only the reason on the surface.

The true reason was that Ray had seen the floating island.

He had a feeling it was sure to pass this way again.