I am God LSLCCF

City of Fire Protection

Inside the study of the royal palace, the kingdom's highest echelon had gathered to discuss matters of state.

Maidservants and attendants stood outside. Within, the ministers came forward one after another to give their summaries of the past year.

"Last year's tax receipts from every province, the revenues of every port city, and the royal family's alchemy workshops on top of that, and on top of that..."

The kingdom's Minister of Finance was laying the year's taxes out before His Majesty the King, and went on for a good several standard hourglasses before finally coming to a stop.

"Your Majesty, last year's taxes surpassed every year that has come before. They surpassed even the reigns of the Divine Blessed Kings."

That was only natural. In the days of the Divine Blessed Kings, the whole of Suinhor had been nothing more than a loose alliance of city-states, and it could hardly stand beside the state Morabi had built it into now.

"This year we press harder," King Morabi said. "We shall not merely bring in alchemists and tower keepers from abroad. We shall raise up alchemists and tower keepers who are the kingdom's own."

"In the same way, we ought to bring up the next generation of contract lawyers."

Ever since becoming the first mortal king of Suinhor, King Morabi had come through his struggles against the Scarlet Pontiff, Menro, and had witnessed the signing of the Contract of the Gods.

He had brought in alchemists and tower keepers, appointed contract lawyers and revised the legal code, carried the province system through to full implementation, and refined the taxation system.

Struggle after struggle had brought him here, and as nothing more than a mortal he had at last made this seat of power secure.

What all of it had cost in risk and hardship, perhaps only he himself could ever truly feel.

The white hairs that had come to King Morabi's head, and the wrinkles these past few years had added, told the story plainly enough.

King Morabi heard out his ministers one by one, and at last brought his gaze to rest on the Royal Steward.

"And Menro. How do matters stand with him?"

"Has there been any stirring at all?"

Menro's influence in Suinhor ran far too deep. He had once swayed the very power of the throne and held it under his control, and Morabi could not help keeping a constant watch on him.

The Royal Steward answered at once, "Of late the Temple of Life, the Miracle Temple, and the Temple of Knowledge have been contending with one another for the faithful, raising temples in one city after another."

"And it is not only those three that stand beneath the Temple of Life. The Moon Sanctum, the Cult of Ruin and Calamity, and the Starlight Ascetic Order have all been swelling their own power and influence of late, and hunting everywhere for seeds who might be made into witches. Menro presses down on them, but he does not dare truly drive them out."

As he said it, the Royal Steward could not keep a smile from his face.

Sometimes, to deal with an enemy, all one had to do was give him enough enemies of his own.

"As matters stand, our Lord Pontiff is run quite ragged. He no longer has the strength to hold back so many powers joining hands and pouring into Suinhor."

"Though of late it is said Pontiff Menro has turned his strategy about. He is spending his own power to send more divine servants into every region, to raise more temples and more shrines, and he has even begun dispatching missionary ships overseas."

The Scarlet Goddess had more followers than any other god. In wealth and influence her temples were rivaled only by the line of the God of Desire and Alchemy in the Land of Sunrise, and now that they were moving with their full strength, there truly was no one who could match them for sheer numbers and coin.

King Morabi nodded, satisfied. "Menro has recognized at last where his true strength lies, it seems, and what it is he ought to be doing."

"He has even sent missionary ships overseas?"

"Have the Avel who came out of the New World consented to share their charts and their seafaring craft, then?"

The Royal Steward replied, "He has spent a fortune on it. He has even granted several of the Avel a divine technique seed inheritance, and promised them that after death they shall enter the Kingdom of God."

"The Scarlet Temple has been busy indeed of late, turning out powerful ability users one after another by the granting of divine technique seeds."

"There is a rumor..."

King Morabi asked, "A rumor of what?"

The Royal Steward said, "The rumor is that an entirely new extraordinary profession may be about to be born."

"And those who have received a divine technique seed now may prove to be the reserve army of that new extraordinary profession."

King Morabi nodded, but did not dwell on it further.

So long as Menro kept his mind on preaching and faith rather than on him, that was good enough.

Sometimes a person was driven by habit, by the pull of the past.

Words like since ancient times and it has always been this way could lock a mind in place, leaving it unable to break free.

Menro had always thought of nothing but inheriting the glory of the Divine Blessed Kings. Now that his eyes had finally opened, he had realized all at once that compared with the Divine Blessed Kings, compared with Suinhor itself, there was a far wider world outside, holding possibilities without end.

King Morabi looked around at everyone present one last time. "Has anyone anything further to raise?"

"If not, we shall end here for today."

The Royal Steward stepped forward again, with a further matter to raise.

"Of late, Governor Anu of Moonlight Province has made a divine artifact, and its name is the Ancestor Totem Pillar!"

This was the first King Morabi had heard of the matter, or of that name.

"The Ancestor Totem Pillar?"

"Meaning what?"

The Royal Steward told King Morabi, "It is said Governor Anu took up this totem pillar at the festival of sacrifice to the gods and proved that a lizard person can be made into a snake person. Every soul present was struck dumb."

"Before every citizen of Moonlight City he declared that the snake people are all changed from lizards, and that snake people, lizard people, winged people, and every beast in this world share one and the same ancestor."

"He said that we were all one and the same from the very beginning, and that all of us alike are called people."

"The name of the Ancestor Totem Pillar comes from that very ancestor he spoke of."

King Morabi laughed, and nodded.

"There is something to this account of his. Perhaps he has discovered something."

"And an artifact of his own making can genuinely turn a lizard person into a snake person. It passes all belief."

Then he raised his head and asked, "Lizard people into snake people, and nothing more?"

The Royal Steward added another point. "No. Governor Anu turned a snake person into a lizard person as well, there and then before them all!"

King Morabi fell silent a moment, and it was a good while before he came back to himself.

"That is the whole of it?"

"Nothing more?"

The Royal Steward said, "Nothing more, for the present."

He waved a hand to dismiss them all, then gathered up every document on the table and set to reading through them.

These were the state policies he had pushed through year after year, and one by one he was watching them come to fruition at last, or at least take their first steps.

"The weakening of the fiefs and the drawing back of power, the province system, the reform of the legal code and the institutions, the taxes. Every one of them I have truly done."

King Morabi laughed, rose to his feet, and paced about the study.

There was pride on his face, and no small amount of self-satisfaction.

All at once he recalled the day of Osis's departure, when before the eyes of the multitude Osis had pointed at him and said,

"The rest, I leave to you."

"This is your kingdom now, a kingdom that belongs to mortals."

Morabi believed that if he could stand before him again, he could hold his head high with pride.

"Your Majesty Osis, look. I have built the Kingdom of Suinhor into the very thing you wanted it to be."

He was too stirred to hold it in, and yet no chance remained to speak these words aloud to anyone.

Only when he looked into the mirror, only when he saw himself reflected there, did Morabi's smile slowly fade.

What he saw was not a man in the vigor of his middle years, but a snake person growing old with each passing day.

It struck him all at once.

No matter how exalted his position, no matter how many people knelt before him, he remained nothing more than an ordinary mortal, one no longer young, one already on his way into old age.

"A pity that I am not you. I am not of the divine race."

"I am nothing but a body of mortal flesh, and the years will turn me to dust in the end."

"I shall scarcely live to see the future of Suinhor."

"But I shall let you see it. I shall let you, looking back from the future, see what a great kingdom I have left behind."

Morabi turned from the mirror and went back once more to his desk.

Night had already fallen. He lit a lamp and read on through the documents that had come in from every quarter.

The older he grew, the more fleeting time felt.

And the more he wanted to seize hold of it, to finish everything it lay within his power to finish.

After all, the only things he could leave behind were this great kingdom and achievements that time could never erase.

He would let nothing stand in the way of this kingdom's rise to greatness, nothing slow it down, not even himself. Every waking moment he reminded himself that he could not afford to grow slack or complacent.

Lava Mountain, Black Rock City

Inside a temple built mostly of glass, two figures, one large and one small, huddled close together to look at something.

It was a strange glass tank, and inside it sat a tiny continent grown out of mold.

Threads of mold wove together to form the earth. Balls of mold swelled up into mountains. Countless tiny specks of mold mimicked the shapes of every living thing on Ruhe Beast Island. Clusters of mold gathered in the sky of the glass tank and condensed into white clouds, and out on the pale sea at its edge, ships too small for the naked eye to see could just be made out.

The one difference from before was the lid that now sat on top of the tank.

Shelly proudly showed Hila this creation of her own, comparing it against Hila's mirror.

"Hila, inside my glass tank you can see the whole world changing, every single thing that's happening!"

"There's not one secret in this whole world that can hide from it, not even something happening off in the smallest corner!"

Hila's mirror could look into the past, while Shelly's glass tank held the present.

Hila said, "The Magic Mirror can see the present as well. Whatever is happening around people, the mirror shows that too."

Shelly pouted. "My glass tank hasn't finished evolving yet. It'll be even more amazing later on, definitely!"

Hila pressed her cheek to Shelly's and snuggled close against her, smiling as she said,

"What I mean is that my mirror is your mirror as well. Anything of mine, you may use."

"We are one and the same. There is no yours and mine."

"Only ours."

Shelly pressed down on her own glass tank, and laughed.

"Then you can use my glass tank too! Only your power's all inside the Dream Realm, so you can't do what I can. One poke and I can punch a hole clean through the world."

Hila didn't think poking a hole through the world sounded fun in the least.

Still, the spirit with the long golden hair was deeply curious about what was going on inside the glass tank, and found this world made of mold utterly fascinating.

Especially since it had gone so far as to simulate the whole of Ruhe Beast Island, which only sharpened her curiosity about how the island was faring.

Hila tried to communicate with it, but the Void's Mold did not answer her.

"Why does it not have wisdom yet?"

Shelly said, "What do you mean, no wisdom? Of course they've got wisdom."

Hila asked, "Then why do they not answer me?"

Shelly told Hila, "They're having an argument right now, so they haven't settled yet on which one of them gets to answer you."

Hila, quite astonished, glanced into the glass tank.

"They?"

Shelly went on, "Void's Mold isn't one thing. It's made up of a whole lot of Void's Mold, so it's got a whole lot of consciousness."

Still, any single mold's consciousness was faint, none of them terribly clever, and for the most part they simply obeyed Shelly's arrangements and commands the way ants or insects would.

But Hila's question just now seemed to have set off some dispute, some shift, among the Void's Mold.

Shelly put her eye to the glass tank, then shifted and put her ear to it instead.

It was as though she were listening to whatever the Void's Mold inside was saying, and after a moment she turned to Hila and said, "They're holding a meeting right now, to decide which of them answers you."

Before long, Shelly turned back and said to Hila, "Their council's done."

Hila asked, "Has it been decided, then? Are they going to speak with me?"

Shelly answered, "No. They figured a meeting can't settle anything, so now they're deciding who answers by force."

"They're fighting!"

In the blink of an eye, everything inside the glass tank fell into chaos.

The little world inside the tank collapsed entirely, breaking apart into countless tiny specks of mold, all of them attacking one another.

Bit by bit, the mold fused together into threads, and those threads seemed a good deal smarter than ordinary Void's Mold. They actually began developing tactics and battle formations.

The threads, in turn, grew into full strains, and these strains had somehow learned teamwork, had even learned to use strategy.

In the end, the strains devoured one another until only a handful of mushrooms, large and small, remained.

The mushrooms then spun in circles inside the glass tank, nodding again and again toward the world outside.

Shelly, delighted at the whole performance, clapped her hands happily and said, "They've picked five kings!"

"And the five kings have decided they're going to take turns..."

Before Shelly could finish, she glanced outward, as though a voice had reached her from somewhere far off.

"Oh no. The Void's Mold out on the outside won't accept kings being chosen without their say-so."

"So now they won't recognize these kings at all. They say the kings can't speak for them, or for the rest of the Void's Mold, when it comes to talking with you, Hila."

Hila stared into the little glass tank, and an expression impossible to describe crossed her face, perhaps something close to bewilderment.

In the space of a single instant, the tiny glass tank seemed to have played out an entire drama of civilization.

Hila said to Shelly, "Then let it be, Shelly. Tell them to stop fighting."

"I had no question of any real meaning to ask them anyway. I was only a little curious what manner of beings they were."

"But now I understand very well what manner of living things they are."

Shelly rapped on the glass tank. "Hila doesn't want to talk to you lot anymore. Hurry up and put the sand table back the way it was."

She played the little grown-up, lecturing the Void's Mold.

"You lot never do your work properly. All you know is fighting and squabbling over who's the favorite."

The glass tank shook, and inside it every last bit of Void's Mold was terrified.

The five mushroom kings collapsed at once, breaking back apart into countless threads of mold. The threads tangled and layered over one another, and once again gave shape to the whole of Ruhe Beast Island.

One by one, the tiny specks of Void's Mold fell back into sync with every living thing on the great island, and the whole scene unfolded again before Shelly.

Hila let out a breath of relief. "None of them were killed just now, were they?"

Shelly replied, "They can't die. They only change from one form into another."

For the Void's Mold, death and rebirth answered to a different definition and different rules than they did for other living things.

But Shelly wasn't thinking that far into it just now. All she cared about was the state of things unfolding inside the glass tank.

Shelly pointed at one spot after another inside the glass tank, and said, "Look, right here it's about to pour with rain."

"And here, a wildfire's about to break out."

"And over here, a plague's about to start spreading."

Hila, hearing all this, was thoroughly puzzled.

"A plague?"

"How could you possibly know such a thing?"

Shelly said, "Because Void's Mold knows every single thing that's happening."

"It knows every secret this world's got, because every living thing has microbes inside its body, and it can control those microbes."

Hila said, "But this has not happened yet."

Shelly told Hila, "In the world of the mold it already has. They've watched the plague spreading, watched it creeping wider, watched it breaking its way out of people's bodies."

"Just have a think about it and you'll know the plague's bound to happen."

"And that plague's going to be a bad one. Lots and lots of people are going to die."

After that, Shelly pointed at a patch of mold threads shaped into a cloud inside the glass tank. "Look at this cloud, it's already like that. In a little while it'll move over to here, and then down comes the rain."

Next she pointed toward that stretch of forest. "The heat here keeps climbing and climbing. Soon it'll hit the tipping point, and then a great fire breaks out."

Hila felt this had already gone beyond simply capturing the present inside a glass tank. "Are you not predicting things that have not happened yet? Things belonging to the future?"

"Your Void's Mold is truly formidable."

"Every person alive carries microbes within their body, so through them you can know every secret that person holds, know their birth and their aging, their sickness and their death."

"And through the living and the dying of all these people, through the changes the microbes feel, you may even come to know things that could yet happen in the time to come."

Through this one small glass tank, Hila seemed to be seeing the entire world as though it were itself a single living being.

"If this world is itself a living being, then are the snake people, the winged people, the lizard people, the beasts and the fishes not simply microbes within that being's body?"

Shelly grew a little excited, and asked Hila, "Oh, does this count as me predicting the future?"

Catching the rest of what Hila had said, Shelly let her thoughts run away with her at once.

"Are you saying I should make this glass tank into a living being?"

"Yes, the glass tank turns into a living being, and it stands for this whole world. Every last bit of Void's Mold turns into all the life and all the species, mimicking everything that happens."

"And then if I put conditions on it, and made everything inside evolve faster..."

"Then it wouldn't only know every secret of right now. It could work out the secrets of the future too, however I wanted them worked out?"

"And that way I'd know what the future is going to look like?"

"I wouldn't only be fitting the world of right now into my glass tank. I'd be fitting the world's future in there too!"

Hila immediately shook her head. "That is not foreknowledge. What you describe is only conjecture, and the future holds possibilities beyond counting."

"Take what you said just now, that the plague is certain to break out, and certain to be a terrible one."

"But the plague may well be discovered the very moment it begins. Or the first person to fall ill may chance upon a physician of great skill at once, and be cured before it can spread at all."

"Were that to happen, the plague might never break out at all."

Shelly said, "Oh. So that's how it is. Boring."

"And here I was thinking that whatever future happened inside my glass tank, the whole world would go and turn out that way too."

It was not only that Shelly wanted to use the glass tank to observe the world and bring her own power to bear upon it.

Through that very tank, she had even wanted to control the world's future.

Hila shook her head. "The future cannot be controlled."

"Your Void's Mold can mimic how every person looks and how every person fares in the present, but it cannot mimic what that person is thinking, or what that person will do next. You can mimic this world, and still you cannot reckon with what lies outside it."

"And more important still, say you could predict what everyone else was going to do. What of you yourself? Will the you who knows the future, standing in the present, change and wreck the very future you predicted?"

"And even were you able to lay your power upon every single individual, the will of the gods could overturn every influence you brought to bear."

"So, however many futures you work out inside that glass tank, they are only ever futures that belong to the glass tank. They will never become the future of this world."

In the end, Hila told Shelly very seriously, "And Shelly, even if the future truly could be controlled, I would still not want you to control the future of this world."

Shelly said, "Why not?"

Hila said, "A future already settled in advance has no hope left in it."

Shelly gazed down at her own glass tank, a little dejected.

"And here I thought it'd turn out more fun than this."

"Looks like all it can do is predict a bit of weather, predict the odd plague."

Shelly rapped on the glass tank again, and the Void's Mold inside felt the whole world shake once more.

Shelly said to them, "You lot are completely useless."

Not long after, Shelly carried her glass tank in her arms into the temple corridor, and there she caught sight of God Yinsai.

She rushed straight up to Yin Shen and asked Him, "God, do You know what the future is like?"

She had not, it seemed, given up on fitting the future into her own glass tank as well, and hoped to find the answer here, from the all-powerful Creator Himself.

It was the very method she had used last time to sway the Creator, Yinsai, and change a fate that was supposed to be unalterable and unpredictable.

In the glass corridor, God Yinsai stood before a clear window, dressed in a plain white robe, and told her, "The future that I know is not necessarily the future of the present."

Shelly's eyelids lifted, her eyes rolled upward, and she tilted her head, a puzzled look crossing her face.

"Um~ So does that mean you do know, or that you don't?"

God Yinsai laughed softly. "Perhaps I shall know only when I have come once more to the other end of time."

Shelly felt these words were far too deep for her, and though she puzzled over them a good long while, she still couldn't make sense of them.

But just then, she suddenly remembered something else entirely.

The little girl at once put on her sweetest, most well-behaved expression, and pulled a candy wrapped in gold paper from her pocket.

She held it out before God, as though she had something wonderful and simply couldn't wait to share it with Him.

"God, have some candy!"

"This candy's so good! It's a brand new kind the spirits made."

God picked up the candy, and glanced at Shelly.

Then He unwrapped the gold paper.

Shelly could hardly wait. The corners of her mouth curled up despite herself, both hands clenched tight into fists behind her back, and she even rose onto the tips of her toes.

She had already thrown her earlier question completely out of her mind.

What was happening right in front of her was so much more exciting than fitting the world and its future into a glass tank.

She wanted to see just what it would look like if God Yinsai's hair exploded outward.

But when God Yinsai popped the candy into His mouth, it was Shelly's own hair that exploded outward instead.

Shelly's brown hair stood straight up into spikes, just like a spike ball beast unleashed at full force.

She looked at Yin Shen with an air of pure innocence, patting down her own exploded hair, but even after a good long while it would not lie flat again.

God asked her, "Shelly, did your glass tank predict this outcome?"

Only then did Shelly finally understand that predicting the future simply wasn't reliable. If her Void's Mold wanted to progress any further, it would have to try developing some other ability instead.

Moonlight City

A corpse was carried into the Medical Fortress. The Lizard Man Anu and several others stood there in black robes, wrapped up so tightly that not an inch of them showed.

He asked a physician who had just stepped out from inside, "Is it certain now?"

They nodded. "It is certain. It is a plague."

In this age, confirming a plague did not mean identifying which particular disease it was. It meant only establishing that the thing could spread from one person to another.

Anu's expression changed completely. He had no idea where the plague had come from, or where it had first broken out.

His first move was to give the order at once. "Issue the ban. Seal the city, all of it."

"Every physician and physician's apprentice in the city, every veterinarian, and every person who has received medical training of any kind. Have them all come to this Medical Fortress at once."

The plague the Void's Mold had predicted had truly arrived.

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