Chapter 500: Shelly, Robbed?

Ray swung the Sun's Wing in a wide circle above the desert and climbed steadily along the cloud layer, until the vessel broke through into the stratosphere. Only then did he begin to slow, gliding on through the sky tens of thousands of meters up.

It also meant Ray's first test flight had succeeded, and that gave him enormous encouragement.

The whole way up, Ray kept checking over every condition of the Sun's Wing, while inside the vessel's hull swarms of maintenance dolls scurried back and forth, hunting down whatever had been missed and patching it up.

"Power furnace normal."

"Wings normal."

"Energy conduits normal."

"Ritual formation normal."

The maintenance dolls called this out as they scurried about, their voices stiff and utterly without inflection.

Inside the control room, two enormous panes of glass filled the wall directly ahead. From outside they looked like a pair of eyes set into the mechanical head. From inside, they let him look straight out at everything beyond.

At the same time, Ray could swing the bird-shaped head from side to side, or tilt it up and down.

That way he could make out most of what lay around them, though a few rough edges or blind spots still went uncovered.

Beyond that, the Globe went on gathering data on their surroundings without pause, ready to sound a warning the moment anything unusual turned up.

Ray turned to look at Number Two and Number Three, a smile breaking across his face.

"We did it."

Number Three leaned back in his seat, a smile spreading over his own face too, though he still could not seem to muster any real energy.

"We did it."

Number Two sat perched on the glass window, gazing out at the sea of clouds beyond, her lips parted slightly, something stirring in her eyes.

"It flies so fast."

Next, Ray meant to put his plan into motion, the plan to board the floating island.

The Sun's Wing, of course, could never match the floating island for speed, but if he could predict its flight path far enough in advance, and the position it was about to reach.

He still stood a very good chance of flying up onto it.

By the time the Sun's Wing returned to base, quite a few demon spirits had already gathered below to wait, sizing up this oversized magic tool.

This was the very first Myriad Magic Tool. It could fairly be called the ultimate goal of the whole demon spirit race, the kind of colossal mechanical creation a demon spirit might spend an entire lifetime striving to build.

For an ordinary demon spirit, simply owning a magic tool like this one was already the stuff of dreams.

"Three Seal Imprints in one Mental Domain. So does that mean if you get a few more third-rank partners in on it, a Myriad Magic Tool ends up with an even stronger Mental Domain!" A few demon spirits, catching sight of the field radiating off the Myriad Magic Tool, were struck with a sudden idea.

"That's assuming your core can even take the power of three Seal Imprints." Someone spoke up at once to point out the problem. The core, naturally, meant the Mythical Organ. Only a demon spirit whose own body could bear the power of multiple Seal Imprints could ever pull off something on that scale.

"A magic gold machine that big, and a Myriad Magic Tool at that. What would it even look like if we fire demon spirits built one?" A Myriad Magic Tool was named "Myriad" precisely because what each demon spirit could build was never quite the same as any other, and that set their imaginations running at once.

Word that Ray had built a Myriad Magic Tool spread quickly, reaching the domain of the winged people, and even the domain of the snake people.

The first to hear of it, naturally, was the Abyss Royal City.

The winged people marveled at the mechanical beast soaring through the sky, trading talk of its speed and its power.

In the Abyss Royal City, more and more demon spirits made ready to head for Magic Tool City, burning with curiosity over everything the place had to offer. Even the demon spirits who preferred to stay shut up at home wanted to see it for themselves, wanted to build a first magic tool of their own, and even if they never set foot outside, well, they could still take one for a drive around the city, couldn't they.

Ray paid no mind to the commotion outside. He had not so much as stepped off the Sun's Wing since.

He lit the fire-essence gas lamp inside his cabin.

Bent low over the table, he worked through the Globe and the latest data he had gathered, again and again, trying to predict the path the floating island traced as it circled the world.

He had to work out precisely the window of time in which it would pass that position, so that he could seize the one instant in which he might board it.

It truly was only an instant.

The floating island swept across the whole sky in the space of a single moment.

Clatter clatter clatter clatter!

A spherical mechanical doll pushed the door open from outside and rolled in, and kneeling atop its head was a slight girl in a white slip dress.

"Number Three's done cooking in the kitchen. He sent me to call you for dinner."

None of the three of them actually needed to eat, not in any ordinary sense.

And yet, ever since they had taken on God's Form, they had found themselves wanting to eat all the same.

But just then, Ray seemed not to have heard her at all, his eyes still fixed on the blueprint spread across the table.

The spherical doll rolled up to the table, and the girl kneeling on it leaned down to look over the blueprint.

"What's wrong?"

Ray kept his eyes on the blueprint.

"It's getting higher and higher above the ground."

Number Two asked, "Why?"

Ray guessed, "Probably getting ready to head beyond the sky."

Ray rose to his feet and wrote a precise time on the wall, the final moment his simulations and calculations had produced.

"That's the moment."

He stared at it for a long while before finally turning to follow Number Two toward another cabin.

But just then another mechanical doll came scurrying up and pressed a letter into Ray's hand.

The moment Ray took the letter, his eyes fell on the familiar signature at the top.

"It's from Lady Elena."

He tore it open, delighted, and the very first line brought congratulations from his teacher, the God of Demon Spirits.

"Ray, congratulations on building a Myriad Magic Tool of your own, wings to carry you to the sun, and on becoming a God's Grace Priest."

Elena, the God of Demon Spirits, had filled her letter with praise for him, and through her words alone he could feel how genuinely pleased she was.

Ray beamed.

"Teacher already knows I built the Sun's Wing. She mentioned you and Number Three too."

For once, a look of longing crossed Number Two's face.

"Lady Elena mentioned me?"

Ray nodded.

"Of course. She's never once forgotten you."

But by the latter half of the letter, Elena had turned to the subject of Ray's plans for what lay ahead.

She did not try to stop him, but she did lay out her own worries.

She set it down plainly on the page.

"Ray, you have become an apostle, and you have forged a Myriad Magic Tool of your own."

"But set against this world, against that vast and endless unknown, you remain far too small and weak."

"You have not yet become a myth. Do you truly possess the strength to race beyond the sky, and to bear the price of leaving this world behind?"

"To this world, myth is the summit."

"But we who come from the primordial age know this. Myth is only the beginning."

Ray stood there unmoving for a long while after he finished reading. Elena's letter had gone a long way toward cooling a mind that had been running hot.

He had become an apostle. He had built a Myriad Magic Tool, but was that really enough?

Just then, the three of them arrived at the cabin that served as both dining hall and kitchen.

Flames burned inside the oven, sending out the smell of roasting meat, and the table was already laid with food of every kind.

A window here looked out onto the world beyond.

Ray tucked the letter inside his robe and sat down.

Outside, night had already fallen, but something in that boundless dark seemed to be calling to him.

He seemed, faintly, to see the sun rising once more, the sky turning blue, the clouds an especially brilliant white.

He saw again that kingdom of the heavens adrift above the sea of cloud, saw its impossible gardens and its city.

He even seemed to see it drifting away, out beyond the sky, and if he did not move quickly, it might slip entirely free of this world.

Once that happened, he would never catch so much as its tail again.

Ray murmured to himself.

"But there's not much time left."

"If I miss this chance, will there really be another?"

By then, Number Two and Number Three had settled into their own places.

Each of the three had a very distinctive way of sitting. Ray sat bolt upright, hair combed back without a single strand out of place, his back never once touching the chair, every inch of him careful and precise.

Number Three sprawled in his chair, muttering under his breath, over and over, about how tiring it was to cook, how tiring it was to tend the fire.

Number Two crouched on hers, the chair beneath her balanced on a single leg, turning slowly in place.

It was then that Number Two noticed how distracted Ray seemed, and she suddenly spoke up.

"Ray!"

He finally pulled his gaze back.

"What is it?"

Number Two said, "They say you're a phantom chasing a dream from a hundred million years ago. That the one who really wants to chase the sun isn't the you sitting here now. Is that true?"

Ray did not deny it. Instead, he answered her earnestly.

"That's right!"

"It was a longing from a hundred million years ago, a refusal to let go, that split off one me after another in every age that followed."

"I am a phantom chasing the sun. A doll chasing a dream a hundred million years old."

Then his words took a different turn.

"But so what."

"It doesn't matter where that wish first came from. It doesn't matter whether it's outlived its own time."

"I still want to go."

"And I want it more than anything."

"The flame of that wish has burned for a hundred million years and never gone out, never been forgotten."

"And by now, why it began doesn't matter anymore. I don't care why."

Number Two turned slow circles with her arms wrapped around the back of her chair, and when she finally stopped, she was facing Ray dead on.

"Then you and I aren't so different. Because I'm a kite."

"Chasing the wind and the sky has never needed a reason."

"Because..."

Ray laughed, and finished the thought for her.

"You're a kite."

---

Ray wanted to board that floating island because he sensed some enormous secret hidden within it.

He suspected the island might well be some kind of vessel bound for beyond the sky, one that held the secret to a path out of this world.

In truth, that was exactly what it was.

At that very moment, atop the floating island, the witch doctors had gathered to discuss something among themselves.

They wanted to raise the floating island beyond the sky, high enough that it would no longer plummet even without Floating Stone holding it up. Once that was done, they could go on expanding their own kingdom without fretting so much over whether the Floating Stone could bear the weight.

More than that, whoever got there first would claim a good position beyond the sky.

Having spent so long at the side of the Supreme Divine Beings, the witch doctors naturally saw farther than most.

They could already sense, however dimly, that a position beyond the sky would one day become something fiercely contested, a prize fought over among mythicals.

To become a true god, one had to build a Divine Kingdom and a divine system in the mortal world.

The one place in the mortal world best suited to building a Divine Kingdom was up there, high above the sky.

But that height sat at least several hundred kilometers above the ground, and getting an island this large all the way up there was no easy thing.

Not even a mythical could manage it.

"How in the world do we even find a way to get the floating island beyond the sky."

A good deal of back and forth produced one result. There was no way.

So they lined up once again and came before God Yinsai, hoping to draw an answer from a Supreme Divine Being.

After all, the very idea that raising the floating island several hundred kilometers would carry it beyond the sky had come from God Yinsai in the first place.

He had mentioned it offhand, back when the Ruhe Great God's Star of Death had gone beyond the sky.

The Supreme Divine Beings were there now, at the very top of the floating island, inside the glass-domed greenhouse.

The Mythic Domain and the barrier held back the wind and the cold of the sky above, and kept far more of the sun's warmth inside than would otherwise have lingered.

Compared to outside, the pressure and the temperature inside the greenhouse stayed comfortable, every reading of it near enough identical to conditions on the ground.

Only that way could the plants and animals and insects, every living thing inside the greenhouse, actually go on living.

Only that way could this single stroke of green survive at all, hanging as it did so many miles above the earth.

Shelly sat on a white stone, a hapless lizard clutched in her hand, swooping it back and forth through the air like an airplane.

"Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom!"

"Vroom, vroom!"

Whenever God was home, she turned especially cheerful.

As for the poor little lizard, it could not fly at all, and all four of its legs thrashed helplessly at the empty air.

The witch doctors knelt before the Creator, and once the six of them had finished explaining why they had come, Shelly turned her head toward them.

"You're all so useless."

The moment she opened her mouth, out came her signature catchphrase.

The witch doctors could no longer count how many times the Life Sovereign had called them useless. All six of them wilted at once, heads drooping.

Putting on her best little-adult face, Shelly did not even wait for God Yinsai to weigh in before handing the witch doctors the "correct" answer herself.

"You don't even know that one. Just fly up there!"

"Hmm... jumping up would work too."

The witch doctors had no strength left to argue.

It was, admittedly, a method, but they could not fly.

As for jumping, jumping straight out into space, what did that even mean?

God Yinsai did not answer directly. He turned instead to Hila and Shelly.

"What do you two think is the key to reaching beyond the sky?"

Little-genius Shelly, who had learned the trick of jumping in with the answer, shot her hand straight up into the air.

The lizard she had been clutching dropped straight to the ground with a smack, then scurried off in a panic, deep into the greenhouse.

Shelly declared, "Being strong enough, obviously!"

It was not wrong, exactly. It simply did not apply to anyone else.

Hila said, "As long as the Floating Stone is large enough, it should be able to resist the earth's pull and make its way beyond the sky!"

That method was not bad either. Ordinary people simply could not afford it.

Not everyone could do what Shelly did, wave a hand and have the Lava God deliver a Floating Stone more than a meter across, one whose field alone warped the entire sky.

Try demanding blood from the Lava God like that, and the great god would make sure one learned the price of angering it.

Yin Shen said, "In truth it is not so difficult. Once your speed passes a certain threshold, you will break free of this world's gravity and enter an orbit around it!"

"And if you travel faster, you may do as the Star of Death did, and enter an orbit around the sun itself."

Shelly listened with her ears pricked up, then wrinkled her mouth once he had finished.

"Only useless people would use a method like that."

The witch doctors, meanwhile, were listening with the utmost seriousness to the very method Shelly had just dismissed as useless, committing every word of it to memory.

They were exactly the useless people Shelly meant.

After all, what was the point of explaining first cosmic velocity to a being like her.

Get her angry, and she could smash to pieces the very world beneath her feet, the one whose gravity produced that first cosmic velocity to begin with.

Yin Shen turned to the witch doctors and spoke.

"Most of you can fly by drawing on some extraordinary power. But high above the sky, most of those powers are of no use at all."

"Take your most common flight divine technique, for instance. What it actually does is control the flow of the air."

"But the higher you climb, the thinner that air becomes, until you find you can no longer fly at all."

"Even by your more unusual methods, you would be hard pressed to reach that threshold of speed, let alone carry your own Divine Kingdom out beyond the sky and into the Star Realm."

The witch doctors listened to God Yinsai's words, sinking deeper and deeper into despair.

They felt, more keenly than ever, the gulf between themselves and the Supreme Divine Being. The distance between one god and another was beyond imagining.

What stood before them were gods.

They themselves, to put it kindly, were merely myths.

Shelly said, "I could just reach out my hand and grab them all up there myself."

Yin Shen looked at her.

"They are only the first to want to go beyond the sky. What of everyone who comes after them?"

It seemed Yin Shen had already known, long before now, that the people of this world would one day fly up to the high heavens, fly out beyond the world itself.

In the end he said, "Build a Star Realm Gate!"

The witch doctors lifted their heads, startled and delighted, though not one of them understood yet what a Star Realm Gate even was.

Hila asked, curious, "If the speed is not there, what use would a gate be?"

Yin Shen said, "A gate can take many forms. The word is only a name."

"You might, for instance, carve a large enough Floating Stone into an altar, draw the Lava Monster's power through it, and summon every Floating Son to stand as the anchor points of a great ritual."

"Using the Floating Stone's repelling force together with the Floating Sons, you could form a great ritual array, layer upon layer of light rings reinforcing each other."

"Carry your Divine Kingdom, or your floating island, through those rings, and that enormous repelling force would stack layer after layer onto it, accelerating it again and again, until at last it drove the speed up to that threshold."

"Then it could rise swiftly up above the high heavens, and stand at last within the Star Realm."

None of them had ever imagined such a method existed.

In that same instant, a single question rose in every mind.

"A Star Realm Gate!"

"What would we even build it out of?"

God Yinsai had just said, it seemed, that it would take a fairly large Floating Stone carved into an altar.

As it happened, the very Floating Stone Shelly was sitting on was exactly that large.

Shelly caught the look in Yin Shen's eyes, in Hila's, in the witch doctors', and it suddenly dawned on her what they were thinking.

"Ah!"

"My Floating Stone."

She glared at the witch doctors and waved her small hand at them.

"What are you all staring at!"

"No looking!"

"No looking at my treasure."

She could not have cared less about the witch doctors, and she was not afraid of Hila either.

Hila, after all, was gentle. She cared about everyone around her, and her only worry had always been whether Shelly was happy.

But there was one other person who was different. He had already confiscated no small number of her things before.

Shelly threw herself flat onto the stone beneath her, sprawling out across it like the character for "big," clutching it tight as though terrified someone might steal it out from under her.

She hugged the stone with her feet pointed down and her head pointed down too.

That left her body forming a kind of triangle, her rear end sticking straight up in the air, while she twisted her head around to fix Yin Shen with a pleading look.

The whole picture looked more than a little absurd, and more than a little pitiful.

The snake people and the winged people down in the mortal world would never in a hundred years have guessed their own creator could look like this.

Yin Shen looked down at her with an expression halfway to a smile, as though the words were already on the tip of his tongue.

"I will keep that safe for you."

But in the end, he did not say it.

Instead he echoed something someone else had once said.

"Everything in this world belongs to me."

The line struck Shelly as strangely familiar.

Sure enough, Yin Shen went on.

"Even you belong to me. So of course this stone belongs to me too."

Shelly felt thoroughly wronged. Until now, she had only ever been the one doing the robbing.

But there was one person in this world who could rob her right back, and that was God Yinsai.

Seeing how wronged she looked, Yin Shen lifted her straight up off the stone, and Shelly flailed her arms and wailed at the top of her lungs.

For some reason, watching the scene unfold, the witch doctors found their minds jumping straight to the lizard Shelly had been clutching only minutes before.

Yin Shen set her back on her feet beside him, an arm around her shoulders, and spoke.

"Did you not say before that you wanted to lift things up into the sky?"

"With this, from now on you will be able to lift anything at all."

"And once the Star Realm Gate is built, it will belong to you."

"Asking the Lava Monster to do a thing naturally comes at a price."

"So from now on, every being who wants to use the Star Realm Gate, who wants to begin the ritual to open it, must offer a sacrifice to the Lava Monster."

That price was steep, but it still beat every other method for reliability and value.

All it took was a modest Floating Stone. Raise one's own kingdom into the sky to a certain threshold, summon the Star Realm Gate, and a Divine Kingdom would ride up into the Star Realm at last.

Yin Shen never forced Shelly to give up her Floating Stone. The witch doctors, for their part, would have to pay some price of their own as well.

Power like this could hardly come free, after all. For those who came later, simply being able to draw on the great god's power through the ritual would already count as an enormous grace.

Shelly's pouting lips changed course at once, her wronged look breaking into something bright and delighted.

Happy and unhappy, and only a heartbeat between the two.

"It's mine once it's built?"

"And people have to hand over treasures to use it?"

Yin Shen said nothing more. He simply turned to the witch doctors.

"Once you are ready, make your sacrifice to the Lava Monster and begin the ritual!"

With that he turned and walked off toward the far end of the greenhouse, his figure fading slowly into the air.

Shelly threw both hands high into the air and shouted, delighted.

"The Star Realm Gate is mine!"

Then she turned to look at the witch doctors again, something suddenly occurring to her.

"Mm!"

"I remember now."

"Don't you all have a lot of treasures?"

Shelly's eyes lit up. She stepped forward and pointed a single finger at all six of them.

"You traded with the little spirits for a greenhouse this huge, after all."

The witch doctors went rigid, not daring to speak.

They were suddenly struck with the distinct feeling of being about to get robbed.

Shelly fixed them with her big round eyes, suspicion plain in her stare.

"Are you thinking something disrespectful right now."

The witch doctors trembled and denied it over and over.

"We were only wondering what offering could possibly be worthy of the Great Life Sovereign..."

Shelly corrected their mistake at once, sneaking a glance over her shoulder to make sure a certain someone really had left.

"Not for me!"

"It's for Big Fireworks!"

"The Great Lady Shelly is the kindest there is. Why would she ever want anything of yours?"

The witch doctors nodded like they were pounding garlic, and the words came tumbling out without a stop.

"Right, right."

"Of course."

"Kind and merciful Lady Shelly, we misspoke."

Then, choosing their words with great care, they asked.

"Lady Shelly, would you know what sort of offering the Lava God likes?"

"We have never once met it, after all. You understand the Lava God better than anyone."

"Could you tell us?"

Shelly tilted her little head back and thought it over for a long while.

"What does Big Fireworks like?"

"I'd really have to think hard about that..."

She caught herself just before the slip, snapping her head back straight and putting on her most serious face.

"I'd have to ask it about that."

---

The City of the Divine Kingdom

The other witch doctors went off to gather what the ritual to open the Star Realm Gate would need, while Witch Doctor Torso and Witch Doctor Left Hand were assigned to prepare its array patterns and the true name it called for.

Witch Doctor Torso held a brush, wearing a look of deep thought, every bit the philosopher.

They thought about it for a long while before turning to Witch Doctor Left Hand.

"How do you write the Lava God's true name?"

"Like this?"

Witch Doctor Torso wrote out a name, the Lava God's oldest true name, every character of it set down in Wisdom Script from start to finish.

Witch Doctor Left Hand glanced at it, and spoke up at once.

"That is wrong."

"In the Wisdom Language it should be the four characters for Lava Monster."

Witch Doctor Torso made the correction at once, and Witch Doctor Left Hand spoke again.

"You wrote Ruhe wrong too."

Witch Doctor Torso looked it over. The two characters for Ruhe were clearly written correctly!

"That is Ruhe. I did not write it wrong."

Witch Doctor Left Hand pressed a hand to her forehead. To think Witch Doctor Torso was supposed to be one of the ancient powers left over from the last era.

"Ruhe originally meant fusion. Back at the very dawn of the primordial age, the full and proper way to write it was Fusion Monster."

"You must write it the way Fusion Monster is written. Rendered in the Wisdom Language, you are missing a character here."

Witch Doctor Left Hand hesitated a moment, then shouldered Witch Doctor Torso aside.

"Let me just do it myself!"