Chapter 501: Star Realm Gate

The floating island drifted quietly through the night sky.

The witch doctors had finally finished preparing everything the Star Realm Gate ritual required, finished preparing the array that would reach the Lava God.

Most important of all, they had prepared the offerings the sacrifice would need.

They made their way at once to the glass-domed greenhouse to present themselves before the Life Sovereign. Witch Doctor Skull led the way, and the rest of the witch doctors followed behind, some cradling boxes in their arms, others hauling crates.

The whole procession looked grand and painfully careful all at once.

The witch doctors had brought out almost everything they owned. Ordinarily, enough to open the gate once as an offering to the Lava God would have been plenty, but this time was different.

The one they truly needed to satisfy with this offering was not the Lava God at all, but the Life Sovereign.

The moment they stepped into the greenhouse, they heard the Life Sovereign's voice.

"How'd you get all wrinkled?"

Shelly sat perched on the white Floating Stone.

She had changed her outfit today, out of her earlier little dress and red leather shoes and into a priest's long robe styled after the First Era.

The cut had been altered here and there, though, and instead of the gray the trilobite men usually favored, the robe was black.

A whistle God Yinsai had once given her hung around her neck, a blood-red badge was pinned over her heart, and a pair of tall boots covered her feet.

Besides that, there should have been a pointed hat resting on top of her head.

But the point of Shelly's hat had gotten wrinkled, and right now she was holding it in her hands, smoothing the crumpled tip back into shape.

Void's Mold Mother stood guard at Shelly's side, her broad mushroom-cap head drifting gently through the air, her whole body light as a feather and remarkably soft.

The witch doctors fell into a line and bowed to the Life Sovereign.

"Lady Shelly, everything is ready."

Shelly put her hat back on and looked down at the things the witch doctors had laid out on the ground.

She clapped her hands.

At once, every crate and box before her sprang open.

A few items had been draped in cloth, and now those covers were pulled away as well.

For a moment, the things inside those boxes gave off light of every color, dazzlingly bright.

Shelly's eyes went wide, and she swept her gaze from left to right, only to find nothing at all that struck her at first glance.

"Hmm~"

"What kind of junk is all this!"

The most precious things among it all amounted to no more than an item or two ranked somewhere in the top two hundred of the Sequence, nothing like a mythical artifact, nothing worth a second look.

There were also a few objects left behind by Stuen, the God-Created Man of old, and a handful of historical relics passed down from the age of the trilobite men.

Beyond that, there were a few things so rare and strange that their worth was almost impossible to judge, an ancient sword that could speak, fossils of peculiar species from the primordial age, and the like.

Shelly had whole trilobite cities preserved, piles of them. Why would she be short of something like this?

The witch doctors did not dare speak, and could only wait while Shelly looked things over at her own pace.

They had a fair sense of Shelly's temperament by now. She was never really after anything genuinely valuable. All it took was one single thing among it all to catch her interest.

Her interest rose fast and fell just as fast. She could not care less whether a thing was precious or not, though by the same token, no one could ever quite guess what she actually liked.

Shelly's gaze wandered, then suddenly landed on one of the things that had been draped in cloth a moment ago, something that struck her as oddly familiar.

"What's this?"

It was a statue, a little over a meter and a half tall by the look of it, nothing especially large.

It was cast entirely from metal, though not ordinary metal. Something like the rhythm of life ability stirred faintly within it.

The statue took the shape of a little girl, seated.

The block of iron beneath her looked as though it must once have been some kind of altar, though the altar itself had long since crumbled away with the passing years, leaving only a single corner intact.

At first glance, the statue's pose looked remarkably like the way Shelly was sitting on her stone right now.

"What is this!"

"It's got a bit of an Iron Skull feel to it."

This was a statue of the Mother of Life, made by the trilobite men, though of course not the kind of statue enshrined in a main temple. It felt more like a piece of art cast by some trilobite master craftsman.

But the witch doctors had brought it out for a reason. This particular statue was special.

It had been cast back in the era of the Royal Bloodline, by the Sele family, and once stood enshrined within their family's palace.

The metal itself came from the shell a Ruhe Beast had shed on entering its cycle of reincarnation, melted down and poured anew.

To the trilobite men, a thing like this was beyond price.

Had the witch doctors not lived so long, had they not lived through every upheaval of the trilobite era, a treasure like this would never have been lost to the world, never have ended up in their hands at all.

The witch doctors told Shelly that the statue depicted her.

She was honestly astonished.

"This is me?"

The witch doctors nodded again and again, answering with the utmost reverence.

"That is right. This is the Great Life Sovereign, Lady Shelly herself, and it is a work left behind by a trilobite master."

"Just look. How lifelike this carving is, and how much reverence the trilobite people poured into it for you."

Shelly leaned her head in for a closer look, studying the metal statue in earnest.

The Shelly on the statue wore a cold, distant expression, and more than that, its eyes carried that old demonic-god air about them, the kind that made anyone looking at it want to shrink back.

But from Shelly's own point of view, it looked nothing like that at all.

The thing in front of her was short, wore a sour, deathly scowl, and had a pair of hollow, faintly idiotic eyes.

She was not about to admit this was her.

"No way."

"I don't look anything like that."

Shelly frowned and gave Void's Mold Mother beside her a pat.

She began imitating at once, and shifted at last into an entirely different shape.

She became a towering, dignified, statuesque figure of a divine being, the kind that looked as though it belonged in some vast and sacred hall.

The figure stood tall, its expression gentle, its gaze full of force.

This was how the snake people enshrined the Life Sovereign in their temples, nothing at all like the trilobite one.

Shelly nodded, satisfied, and pointed at the figure as she spoke to the witch doctors.

"See that."

"That's what a statue of me looks like."

And so, Shelly pointed at the "cheap fake," then pointed again at Void's Mold Mother, still holding her statue shape beside her, and spoke to the witch doctors.

"Take that made-up forgery of a statue and remake it to look like this one."

The witch doctors turned from the statue that looked exactly like Shelly to the one that bore no resemblance to her at all, and exchanged glances.

A statue, after all, was much like a portrait.

A portrait could never afford to be too honest. Skip the flattery, and one could very easily leave its subject unhappy.

But once Shelly had spoken, the witch doctors hardly dared do nothing.

Witch Doctor Left Hand shoved the others, still standing there dumbstruck, and they all sprang into motion at once, speaking over one another.

"Of course, Lady Shelly, you are absolutely right."

"This must be the work of some bungling craftsman from who knows where, one who captured nothing of your wisdom and might at all, Lady Shelly."

"We will have someone see to remaking it right away."

Even as they said it, the witch doctors were in agony.

This was a treasure both precious and historic, a genuine masterwork at that.

Remaking it now would be no different from melting down a priceless antique and recasting it from scratch, would it?

Shelly went on rummaging through the pile for a good while longer, until at last something caught her eye and she picked it up.

"A cane?"

"A scepter?"

It was a divine artifact forged from Abyssal Magic Gold, though one glance was enough to tell it was worthless.

Its extraordinary aura was faint, its power so weak it could not even earn a place among first-rank items.

The witch doctors flinched at once, trading looks, their eyes asking the same question of each other.

"What is going on?"

"Who put this piece of junk in with the rest?"

"Someone actually dared put a thing like that in?"

This was not like the "junk" Shelly had complained about a moment ago.

This time, it really was junk.

Whatever caught Shelly's eye did not have to be anything precious, but even so, this thing was simply too shoddy.

It was the kind of thing used for sounding an alarm in wartime, the lowest grade of mass-produced tool, without any real destructive power to speak of.

Not much force behind it at all. Its kind went by one collective name, the Blast Wand.

What "blast" meant, in practice, was firing off a burst of air and a ring of light at a distance, along with a great booming crack.

At most, it might knock an unwary apprentice ability user flat on their back.

Shelly took the wand in hand and gave it a few practice swings.

As for why something like this had caught her attention at all, for some reason she felt it matched the outfit she was wearing today remarkably well.

Witch Doctor Skull, meanwhile, trembled in fear, ready to drop to their knees and beg forgiveness at once. Something like this should never have been used to fob off a Great Sovereign Deity.

But right then Witch Doctor Left Hand stepped straight forward.

"Lady Shelly, this thing is called a Blast Wand."

Shelly asked, "What does it do?"

Witch Doctor Left Hand explained, "It can set the air alight and let out a tremendous crack."

She took the Blast Wand back carefully, and showed Shelly how to use it.

"Like this."

Witch Doctor Left Hand swung the wand. A ring of light shot outward at once, and somewhere in the distance came a booming crack.

Then the blast of air rolled out and stirred up a great gust of wind.

"It can throw up a blast of air as well."

"Point it at someone, and it can blow them right off their feet."

In an instant, Shelly's expression changed completely, her eyes all but lighting up.

There was no denying it, Witch Doctor Left Hand really understood her, especially with that last line.

Point it at someone and blow them right off their feet, that had gone straight to Shelly's heart.

"Ooh!"

"So you've got a few decent things after all!"

In her black priest's robe, she swung the Blast Wand back and forth, pouring more and more power into it.

At the same time, a scene rose up in her mind.

She was standing in the Sun Cup Flower Sea, the Blast Wand in her hand.

Swinging it wildly across the Spirit Country, crack after crack after crack, a thunderous roar rolling out, whipping up wave after wave of wind in the sky.

Blowing the little spirits drifting overhead into a dizzy spin, scaring them half to death.

That way, it would not matter how fast those little spirits flew or how high they climbed, none of it would do them any good.

"I want this one."

"This one, I..."

Shelly waved the wand happily and turned to speak to the witch doctors.

"Mm, Big Fireworks will definitely love this."

Shelly was thoroughly pleased, and the witch doctors finally let out a breath of relief.

Of course, everything they had brought was meant to be offered to the Lava God in the end, but keeping the great god satisfied was never really the point. What mattered was keeping the one standing in front of them satisfied.

Whatever Shelly wanted, she would ordinarily just take outright, but not this time. This time there was a proper process to follow.

A certain someone might be nowhere in sight, but he was watching her, every single moment, all the same.

So she set the Blast Wand back into its box, her whole face awash with reluctance.

Then, thoroughly displeased, she looked over at the witch doctors, still standing there in a daze.

"You useless, stupid things. You were never clever to begin with, and you dawdle over everything you do."

She was imitating Yin Shen's tone, though the words themselves were the kind he would never in a hundred years have actually said.

"Creatures like you, a beat behind in whatever you do, just like those little spirits. You will never amount to anything!"

The witch doctors rose and fell into a line.

They set to work at once.

The six of them rushed through the prayer ritual, writing out the divine's true name, and through the power of the Dream Realm, they reached out and made contact with the Lava God.

The ritual's light swallowed the offerings laid out before the witch doctors, and successfully carried the Lava God's power across to this side.

But once the ritual made contact with the Lava God, a long while passed with no response at all.

Even Shelly found it strange.

"Well, open the gate then?"

Far off, atop the Ruhe Beast Island, Big Fireworks belched out great gouts of black smoke, and a booming roar rolled through the sky.

"Rumble, rumble, rumble~"

Roughly translated, it meant, I don't know how.

The sacrifice alone was not enough, because although the Lava God held the power to open the Star Realm Gate, it had no idea how to actually carry out the ritual.

The ritual had been devised by God Yinsai, and only the Creator himself actually knew how to work it.

Once she understood the reason, Shelly did not get angry. Instead, she found herself pressing a hand over her mouth to hide a laugh.

This time, the one who had gotten something wrong was God Yinsai himself.

This was, after all, the first time she had ever seen God Yinsai like this.

Shelly put on her best grown-up face and shook her head.

"Oh dear, oh dear!"

"God really is too unreliable. Why does he always go and forget half of what he's doing?"

Now that she had finally caught him at it, Shelly could turn the tables and scold the "unreliable" Creator, the very same way he had always scolded her.

No sooner had the words left her mouth than something beneath her seemed to catch fire.

The girl leapt up with a startled cry.

"Ow!"

"So hot."

"So hot..."

Shelly's hat tumbled to the ground as she clapped both hands over her rear end, utterly bewildered.

A body like hers could fall straight into the molten core of the earth and call it a bath.

So what on earth could possibly make her feel burned?

But she saw it at once. Her Floating Stone had begun to change.

The stone, once an irregular, formless mass, was transforming rapidly, reorganizing itself in midair like something liquid.

Threads of white light wove back and forth through the air, condensing together again and again.

In the end it became a cylinder, made up of ring upon ring fitted together, its surface fine and smooth, its structure remarkably intricate.

It was stone, unmistakably, and yet it gave off the exact precision of a machine.

The exquisite, intricate structure was mesmerizing, and the mysterious, glowing runes across it were nothing short of intoxicating to look at.

At last, the Floating Stone cylinder became a streak of light and shot off into the distance.

At the same moment, a voice reached them from the edge of the floating island.

"Come to the garden of the Cup of Desire, in the valley."

Both the witch doctors and Shelly could tell at once. It was the Creator Yinsai's call.

---

The witch doctors made their way to the edge of the floating island.

God Yinsai, Hila, and Vellen were already standing there waiting. Only the witch doctors had arrived late.

The witch doctors bowed with great reverence.

"God Yinsai!"

Shelly made a face at Yin Shen, grumbling under her breath, displeased.

"God, my butt's cooked right through."

Hila took Shelly by the hand and led her aside, straightening the hat that had gone crooked on her head.

"God was only playing a joke on you."

Now that everyone had gathered, they finally caught sight of the vanished Floating Stone.

The Floating Stone cylinder hovered there now, right in front of the Creator.

Shelly had still been making faces behind Yin Shen's back a moment ago, but she suddenly turned to look off into the distance, as though she had sensed something.

"Ah, here comes Little Fireworks."

Yin Shen's eyelids lifted slightly, his gaze traveling from the floating island out toward the distant horizon.

The instant his gaze reached the edge of the sky, thousands upon thousands of points of red light surged up all at once in the distance. Endless light kept spreading outward along his line of sight, sweeping the full three hundred and sixty degrees around them.

The night sky turned to day.

As far as the eye could see, the whole world seemed to have turned into a sea of fire.

Heaven and earth changed color.

That never-ending twilight had come again, only this time no sun hung anywhere at the edge of the sky.

Summoned, a great host of Floating Sons came rushing toward them.

The corner of Yin Shen's mouth lifted slightly. Across a hundred million years of time, it was a rare thing indeed for something to catch his interest.

"It is about to begin."

"Open the gate to the Star Realm."

Hila and Shelly stood at Yin Shen's side, one smiling as she watched the witch doctors, the other glaring up at him in displeasure, still rubbing her own rear end.

Behind them, the witch doctors, Void's Mold Mother, and Vellen stood in a row, watching with something like longing as the Floating Sons converged on them from every direction.

A weight suddenly settled over their hearts, and their expressions turned deadly serious.

They seemed to sense, too, that this would be a moment recorded in history, the beginning and the origin of an age about to change.

Everything stood ready.

The whole scene held, frozen.

The Creator raised a single hand, and the divine power of creation poured down from the high heavens into the world below, reaching into every corner above the sky and beneath it.

At once the Floating Stone cylinder before them began to spin, and spin fast.

The rings fitted along its length spun rapidly too, each turning in its own direction.

"Whirrrr!"

The sound of the rings turning rang out across heaven and earth alike, audible even down on the ground, and the noise alone was enough to tell it was spinning faster with every passing moment.

"Whirr!"

At last, with a single crisp crack, the cylinder came apart into a whole mass of separate rings.

A blazing shaft of light shot out from the center of the rings.

The pillar of light ran straight through heaven and earth alike.

One end shot upward, hundreds of kilometers into the high heavens, out beyond the world itself.

The other end shot down into the earth below, connecting straight to the mortal world.

The light swallowed everything, and with it, the ritual to open the Star Realm Gate had truly begun.

In an instant, dense array patterns went racing outward, radiating from the Floating Stone cylinder at their center.

A vast ritual array, its complexity beyond any description, blotted out the sky, covering the entire heavens.

The Floating Stone cylinder vanished.

But a surge of power drove itself into every Floating Son gathered nearby.

The Floating Sons linked together, merging into the ritual array, becoming its very anchor points.

The whole sky had become a single ritual altar.

In the end, they became ring upon ring of colossal light, towering up into the vault of the sky, stacked one atop another all the way to some unending height.

Every one of those rings did more than give off a brilliant light. Within that light ran the mysterious patterns of a Seal Imprint.

Looking closer, those sky-blotting rings were made of countless runes, nested one inside another without end.

The Floating Stone rings had not vanished after all. They had simply been magnified beyond measure and cast across the heavens.

Even Shelly, still nursing her rear end, let her hands fall away, staring wide-eyed up at the sky, at that beautiful and mysterious circle of runes, her mouth falling open around a single word.

"Whoa!"

Even in Hila's eyes there was plain astonishment. She had never seen a gate like this one either.

"What a beautiful ring of light."

Not to mention the witch doctors, Vellen, and Void's Mold Mother behind them.

Not one of them could get out a single word. Their minds had all gone entirely blank.

This was the first step from earth toward the sky, the gate through which the mortal world would walk out into the cosmos.

Once Yin Shen had opened the Star Realm Gate, he spoke two words that not one of them understood.

"Coordinates locked!"

"Position docking."

In that moment, the towering rings of light circling the horizon, layer upon layer, held perfectly still.

But the world beneath their feet, that great blue sphere, did not stop at all.

It went on turning steadily, and with their own eyes they could see land and sea sliding past far below.

The Star Realm Gate stood fixed, forever.

The world spun on.

To the witch doctors' eyes, the sight before them was simply too terrifying to take in.

From where they stood, it looked for all the world as though the Creator held the Star Realm Gate fixed in the heavens with one hand, while turning the very planet beneath their feet with the other.

They could almost catch, faint at the very edge of hearing, the sound of some great dial turning, click by click.

Before long, another continent came into view, directly beneath the Star Realm Gate.

The shadow of the Lava Mountain, in the Forbidden Zone of Death, appeared below, lining up perfectly with that colossal ring in the sky.

The Star Realm Gate above and the blue sphere below came together like two links of the same ritual chain, locking into place.

Only now, at this very moment, could the ritual to open the Star Realm Gate truly be called a success.

Deep within the volcano, the Lava God, amid its sea of fire and molten rock, opened one eye.

An immense force linked itself to the rings of the Star Realm Gate hanging in the sky, and the terrible power of Law burst forth as mythical light, surging up toward space.

"Hummmm!"

The whole world heard that thunderous vibration, but it did not rise up from the ground beneath their feet. It came down from the boundless sky above.

In that moment, the Lava God had, in truth, no control of its own at all.

It felt as though it had lost all command of its own body and power, as some being of unimaginable greatness took hold of its strength instead, demonstrating for it exactly how to master and control this colossal Star Realm Gate.

How to open it. How to close it.

How to send a Divine Kingdom up beyond the high heavens, into the Star Realm.

It committed every one of the Creator's steps to memory, because it knew he would only ever show it once.

Beneath the high heavens, a sight this terrible and awe-inspiring stirred more than just the Land of Light, more than just the Ruhe Beast Island.

It stirred the whole world.

---

Land of Light

The Sun's Wing had long since set out from the Desert of the Fallen Sun, leaving Magic Tool City behind.

Ray needed to reach the position well ahead of time, and wait there for the floating island's arrival.

The great mechanical creation cut through the sea of cloud and the open sky like some colossal beast in flight, its wings, more than a hundred meters across, beating steadily as it went.

Inside the control room, Ray set a specially made hourglass down on the floor, a large one, heavy-looking.

He settled it in place with great care, then turned to tell Number Two and Number Three.

"The moment the last grain of sand falls through this hourglass, that floating island will appear."

Ray's eyes were full of hope and anticipation, and he seemed to carry some inexhaustible well of drive within him.

Much as he had once built flying craft again and again, launching them out into the darkness beyond, no matter how many times it took, he would never give up.

The young man with burnt-orange hair asked, "Is it really that amazing? Ray, can you actually make prophecies?"

Ray answered Number Three with confidence.

"It's simply the result of my own precise calculations."

Number Three said, "So calculation lets you know things nobody could ever have known. Isn't that just what a prophecy is?"

Hearing that, Ray suddenly found himself deep in thought.

"Hmm~"

"There might actually be something in what you say!"

The girl in the white slip dress sat perched at the very top of the window, watching Ray.

"Once you've found that floating island, Ray, what do you plan to do?"

Ray looked over at Number Two.

"Go meet the island's master, of course."

Number Two asked, "And then?"

Ray said, "See exactly how they managed to keep an island that size afloat in the first place. And... How that floating island can move so fast."

Ray rubbed his face, a little embarrassed, and went on with a broad grin.

"And it'd be even better if they could tell me how to build a floating island myself."

But Ray also knew that this was not the kind of knowledge that could be had in a few words.

Many days later, Ray and the others reached the northern coastline of the Land of Light.

A little farther on, they arrived at the very spot Ray had predicted.

Long ago, an island must have stood right here, but now there was nothing but an empty stretch of sea.

Ray waited here for a long while, the sand in the hourglass falling grain by grain, the critical moment he had calculated drawing steadily nearer.

The day finally arrived, and he had the Sun's Wing circling high in the sky well ahead of time.

The three of them held that circle, watching the sky without pause for the slightest sign of movement.

Ray crouched in front of his hourglass, watching the last of the sand trickle away, grain by grain.

"It's almost here."

The instant the last grain of sand fell, Ray shot to his feet and ran to the window.

"There it is!"

His voice came out perfectly steady, because he trusted that he had not miscalculated.

He was certain, beyond any doubt, that the floating island would appear on the horizon.

Sure enough, the compass around Ray's neck began spinning rapidly, giving off light of every color.

Far off, a black speck slowly took shape before Ray's eyes, a speck closing the gap at a speed almost impossible to believe.

"Look, quick!"

"It's the floating island."

Ray shouted, pointing at the black speck.

"It's coming straight toward us."

"Quick, fly for it, just like we planned."

The Sun's Wing had long since made ready, already in position at the appointed spot.

Even so, the three of them adjusted their course at once to match the island's approach, Ray's mental power turning the Globe, arrows and symbols of every kind flying wildly across its surface.

"There's a small margin of error in the angle. We need to make some adjustments."

"According to the calculations, we'll meet it right here."

The exchange of consciousness passed in a single instant, and Number Two, following Ray's direction, piloted the Sun's Wing onward, racing toward the floating island, racing toward the appointed position.

Number Three pushed the power furnace harder, giving everything he had to speed the Sun's Wing on.

The two paths cut two lines across the sky, and barring any mishap, they would cross at a single point somewhere above.

Then Ray would be able to board that floating island, that kingdom of the heavens, without a hitch.