WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 36

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Tantalus, Castle of the Underground

Leading two trainees and one beast to the training room on the fourth floor, I got straight to business.

"Alright, settle down. Everyone quiet! Today's lesson begins now."

Azzy yawned on pure reflex as always, then shuffled behind the management office and flopped onto her belly. Well, fine. But not a trace of will to understand anything, let alone actually try. With the gap between language's wisdom and raw animal intelligence this stark, did human words really reach a dog's ears the same way barking reached a human's?

But a person of character finds something to learn even from the rude. A dog may know nothing of manners, but a human can't afford to sink just as low. I addressed the trainees with as much dignity as I could manage.

"I'm about to tell you something mind-blowing, so get ready to be amazed. Warm up your hands for enthusiastic applause while you're at it."

"If it's not impressive, a dagger flies instead of applause. Get on with it."

The regressor fired back, sharp as ever, still clearly unhappy about being dragged here. Couldn't even land a joke in peace. Was I really going to get through this with her breathing down my neck?

Lamenting the state of my authority, which hadn't just hit rock bottom but been buried in the Abyss itself, I began the lesson with one human and one corpse staring back at me.

"To gauge your attention spans, I'm switching today's format to active participation. The Abyss. Does anyone know what that word means? Yes, Trainee Tyrkanzyaka?"

The vampire tilted her parasol slightly and answered at her leisure.

"Is it not a term used in the Mother Earth faith to mean something close to hell? The final fate of a land cursed by the Earth Goddess, stripped of the Earth Mother's blessing."

"Correct! Ten points to Trainee Tyrkanzyaka! These points feed directly into my personal inner rankings, so do treasure them!"

I paid for her answer with a check I had no intention of honoring, then pressed on.

"That's right. The Abyss is the hell described across many religions, and specifically the hell of the Mother Earth faith. When envisioning the most horrifying space imaginable for punishing sinners, the first thing those devoted mama's boys of the Mother Earth faith came up with was this. True to form, their hell is simply a place without their mother. How embarrassing."

More than purgatory with its burning sulfur. More than any underworld of eternal suffering.

Those who followed the Mother Earth faith feared their feet leaving the ground. They didn't look far for their fear. The fall itself. The dizziness of feet no longer touching earth. The terrible ruin that followed. That was the hell of the Mother Earth faithful.

"Here's the thing, though. That land, which should only ever exist in doctrine, this hell too simple and too tame to leave an impression, appeared in reality because of a certain event. And that place is right here. The Abyss, Tantalus."

I tapped the floor with my foot, driving home the point that all of this, the very ground beneath our feet, was part of the Abyss.

"Since the military state came up with the idea of using the Abyss, a hell from a major religion, as a mere prison, Tantalus had been treated as something like a holding facility for serious criminals. But at its core, it's not a prison. It's land where you cannot set foot. A chasm where you fall forever, dying alone, stripped of time and space. That is the Abyss."

But.

This was where they needed to feel something strange. To catch the inconsistency and call me out on it.

Why, in the middle of the Abyss, could we stand on solid ground at all?

One-sided knowledge transfer wasn't real teaching. Helping the learners think and reason for themselves, that was the educator's duty.

I threw out the question and read the trainees' thoughts.

"Oh. How interesting."

"Already knew all that. When are they going to get to Tantalus's actual structure?"

"Woof..."

Better to stop expecting. Not one of them had any drive to figure something out on their own.

And the last one wasn't even a thought. That was an actual bark.

"Isn't anyone curious? About how we can actually stand here, in an Abyss like this?"

"Curious, yes. Explain it."

Honestly. Not a drop of intellectual ambition between them. They weren't baby birds screaming to be fed, and yet apparently everything had to be spoonfed directly into their mouths.

I picked up a piece of white chalk and walked to the blackboard. In the center of the green board, I drew two long vertical lines. The Abyss.

"Now, watch. The Abyss is, at its most basic, land with no bottom. A pit so deep you fall forever. So if someone were to fall in."

I spun the chalk between my fingers, pulling magical energy up from my elbow and shaping it. A faint alchemical glow shimmered at the chalk's tip, proof of something arcane, sparkling as if dissolving into the air. With the enchanted chalk, I drew a small stick figure between the two lines.

The figure spread its arms and legs wide, glanced down once, looked back up, and fell, in that ridiculous way you'd only see in an outdated cartoon.

"No bottom to reach. Just falling. And falling. A rare experience, where death comes before impact."

As if a real abyss had swallowed it, the figure flailed its limbs all the way to the bottom corner of the board and vanished below.

A simple enchantment on the chalk was enough to make anything drawn with it move at my will. The magical cost was nothing, easily within reach of someone with as little magical energy as me.

Military state blackboards were double-sided. The figure that had gone around the back was now crawling upward in reverse. Before long it reappeared at the top and fell again, exactly as before, looping endlessly.

So. What did they think of my technique?

"Moving pictures seem to be common these days. Interesting, but... since nobody looks impressed, it can't be that special."

"Fairly delicate control of magical energy. Hmph. Right. This is just the baseline, isn't it."

I'd pulled out tricks worthy of a star lecturer and the reaction was completely flat. Nothing to show for the effort. Even stocks, notoriously fickle, would be more honest than these two.

Tch. Enough tricks. Just explain.

"That said, the Abyss has no floor, but it does have walls. No ground to stand on, but cliffs surround it on all sides, right? And if there happened to be a small ledge somewhere on those walls. Or if someone made one."

I drew a small protruding bump on one of the vertical lines. The figure that had been falling this whole time struck the bump and bounced upward. Its short arms flailing wildly, it barely managed to plant its feet on the ledge and stand.

"Like that. Something to hold onto, even for a moment. Even in the Abyss, the falling stops."

Of course, it was still no place to eat, sleep, or actually live. Human life demanded at least that much space.

Being a corpse who needed nothing more than room for a coffin, the vampire looked at the drawing with a puzzled expression.

"Hmm? Would that not be enough to live quite normally?"

I shook my head.

"The curse of Mother Earth isn't that gentle. This is just a workaround. If it's soil you can stand on, it counts as earth. And that earth will eventually erode and sink into the depths."

The moment I finished, the chalk ledge began melting away, slowly flowing downward, and the figure standing on it hopped anxiously from foot to foot and pressed itself flat against the wall. Nothing to be done. The Abyss was cursed ground. The Mother of All, here and nowhere else, would not permit anyone to stand.

Before long the footing was gone. The tiny sanctuary lost. The figure resumed its endless, hopeless fall.

"So. Many adventurers threw themselves into the Abyss in search of treasures sleeping at the bottom, only for their remaining worldly goods to become the treasure instead. They hammered nails into the walls and tied themselves with ropes, but with the ground itself sinking, they were swallowed by the Abyss all the same. Over the graves of those fools who had to taste something to know if it was poison or food, people finally gained the wisdom to stay away. Our proud military state, though, decided to put even this to use."

On top of the Abyss drawing I sketched a large circular disc, and on top of that, a five-story building with a tall floodlight. Anyone not completely thick would recognize it immediately.

A small sound escaped the vampire.

"This place."

"Yes. The military state built an enormous structure. Enormous enough to cover the entire mouth of the Abyss, like a manhole cover over a drain."

"Manhole?"

"Ah, right. A person from a thousand years ago wouldn't know what a manhole is. Just think of it as a well cover. Anyway."

I waved a finger like a conductor. The chalk drawing of Tantalus slowly descended toward the Abyss, heavy and deliberate as a massive meteorite.

A deep thud seemed to resound in my ears. Just chalk settling on a board, obviously nothing to hear. But the weighty motion and the chalk dust drifting loose in the air made you imagine a sound that wasn't there.

Pleased with my own staging, I went on.

"To the military state's engineering corps, concrete is the stone of all possibilities. They shaped it into ground, raised columns from it, and placed the resulting enormous structure over the Abyss. Prisoners were released onto it. Standing on ground under Mother Earth's curse, every one of them should have been dragged below."

But.

Earth could sink. Concrete could not. Not a mass of dirt and sand, but one separate, solid object.

"Extracted by human hands, processed by human hands, poured into molds by human hands with steel for a skeleton, and designed piece by piece by human hands, this concrete structure could never become earth, even though it was made from things that came from the earth. At its core, it was a massive structure 'made' by 'humans.' A thing. Ordinarily a thing would fall into the Abyss, but this one spanned wider than the Abyss itself, so its edges caught on both walls. As a result, Tantalus doesn't fall. It only sinks. Like this."

The Abyss walls flowed down like wet clay. The great structure covering it sank steadily with them.

But it did not fall. A manhole cover might tilt, but it won't drop through. Caught on both walls, it slid slowly downward, somehow keeping its balance as it sank.

"This is how we live. On ground that is sinking. Like a piece of bread lodged in a throat."

Thanks to Gamma.

If he hadn't thought to descend through the management office basement all the way to the bottom, I would never have known any of this. Thanks to him, my knowledge had grown.

The last knowledge you left behind. I'll put it to good use.

"To think all this ground, all of this, is an artificial object... I thought it felt strange for rock, but this is remarkable."

Tyrkanzyaka gazed back and forth between the blackboard and the ground, face alive with fascination. She even perched lightly on the edge of her coffin and tapped the floor with her toes.

No. Don't just marvel at it. Feel something.

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