WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 378

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Lightning Did Not Fall from the Sky - 3

The wall that had turned into a card fluttered down, and a narrow, dim room revealed itself.

In the first Thunder Lord's secret space, a small bookshelf stood alone with a desk attached to it. The shelf was packed tight with all kinds of books, their spines worn with use, as though they had been pulled out and read many times over. A single notebook sat by itself on the desk, a lightning lamp casting its light down onto the pages.

A notebook holding the Thunder Lord's secrets. I had already gotten a rough sense of its contents from reading the Thunder Lord's mind, but what I had read was only "the notebook as the Thunder Lord had read it." Humans filter information through the lens of their own knowledge, so if I wanted the truth, I needed to look at the notebook directly.

What kind of secrets had the first Thunder Lord kept? If my guesses were right...

I turned to the first page. And there it was.

"A today no different from yesterday is a guarantee of all the tomorrows to come."

Not even trying to hide it. That settles it.

The first Thunder Lord. The one who built Claudia was the Sanctum.

"The Golden Mirror kneaded the world the Creator had made. Because of that accursed Demon God, solidity vanished from the world. One thing can become something else, and the iron promise that bound everything together has been reduced to scraps of paper. A today the same as yesterday is no longer possible. The irreversible changes that Demon God brings will turn humans into something else entirely."

"Yet the current Golden Mirror, fearsome as it is, is a monster that has lost its reason. If we stand on this hill and watch over it, holding back the changes it makes, we may yet endure forever."

"We will reclaim the lost order."

Endure forever. Order. Anyone could tell this was the Sanctum. The Thunder Lord probably didn't recognize it, living so far from anywhere that theology could be learned.

I clicked my tongue and turned the page.

After that, the notebook was filled with methods for telling the Golden Mirror's fake gold from the real thing, the limits of alchemy, and a long list of techniques to be wary of.

"It even creates food? The very grace of the Celestial God and Mother Earth?"

From a certain point onward, the focus shifted heavily to the crops the Golden Mirror was producing. Beneath frantic scrawls of astonishment, the handwriting steadied into something more composed as the observations were set down.

"The crops the Golden Mirror produces are unnatural things. When humans eat them, serious problems arise. The severity is greater the younger the child, whose body has not yet finished growing."

"A fortunate thing. Or perhaps inevitable. Crops crudely imitated through alchemy could hardly be healthy."

After that, the writing grew lively and scattered for a while, then gradually shortened, until at the very end a single small line had been added.

"According to Frang's investigation, the side effects diminish the more the Golden Mirror's crops are fermented or altered. If starvation truly leaves no other option... it is not recommended, but process the food as thoroughly as possible before consuming it."

"Be wary of the homunculus. This land must not end up in the same state as the duchy beyond the mountain range."

Then came a detailed discussion of food processing methods and how to gather and dispose of the Golden Mirror's produce. An entity that followed the Golden Mirror around, harvesting its crops all at once for processing. Anyone could see it was the model for the Suppression Lord.

Perhaps a little soured by having to compromise with reality, the notebook barely mentioned crops after that. Instead, its attention turned elsewhere.

"Alchemy is certainly dangerous, but used properly it is efficient. The ability to work steel freely has dramatically reduced the facilities and resources needed for metallurgy. The burden on the sages has lessened especially because the time spent on trial and error has been cut to almost nothing."

"Sage Frang argued for making active use of alchemy. Once it has been revealed to the world, it cannot be hidden. I agree, but we must always be careful in how we use the power."

"If alchemy can make imagination real, perhaps it can make our ideals real as well."

The Sanctum doesn't simply reject Demon Gods. They fear irreversible change that dismantles existing order, but when it comes to using the power of Demon Gods, no one is further ahead. They are the faction that has gathered more of that power than anyone in the world and put it to better use than anyone else.

And so, sheltered by the Sanctum's blessing, those who walked under fortune steadily built Claudia forward.

Alarms that announced when lightning was coming. Lightning Rod Towers to deflect and weather it. A Thunder Wheel to let humans harness the force of a bolt. A catalogue of inventions detailing how that force could be applied and how it could benefit people. The ideas that make up the Claudia of today were laid out one after another.

Under the Sanctum's blessing that smiled upon the future, Claudia's brilliant rise continued. And then, in the middle of all that:

"Frang. I told you so many times to be careful. Why did you..."

A single sentence, soaked in dark despair.

Sage Frang. The person mentioned most frequently in this notebook, the engineer who laid Claudia's foundations. He had probably been dispatched as a sage to support the notebook's owner, and yet, why had this line been left here.

"Perhaps it is better this way. Lightning was the Celestial God's to begin with. If it was always going to appear someday..."

"There is simply one more thing I must protect. I will become the Thunder Lord, and I will guard the lightning."

After this, mentions of people or technology dropped off noticeably. What followed was nothing more than a plain chronicle.

No more information here. Tch. If only it were a person, I could read it out of them easily, but I'm no king of notebooks.

At any rate, one thing was certain.

Like so many other gods, the Sky God had become part of the Celestial God. It may not always have been that way, but it was now. Just like the old faiths dismissed as myth and folklore, it had dissolved into the sky, to serve as an attendant lending glory to the Celestial God.

All thanks to the Sanctum stealing the lightning.

I was flipping through idly when I reached the last page. Nothing of particular note. At the bottom of that final page, one line remained.

"...A successor is needed. Someone powerful and exceptional who will guard all these secrets from generation to generation."

I was turning that line over in my mind when the basement door flew open. The city's guardian, who had blasted the iron door open with lightning, fixed me with a restrained look of irritation.

"I don't recall giving you permission to come here. What is the meaning of this?"

Tch. Fast as ever. I spun around quickly.

"That's exactly why I snuck in without asking. How did you know to come? There's a Sky God hunt going on right above us. Structurally speaking, there's no way you should have been able to catch me."

"I felt something like insects gnawing inside my body. A persistent crawling, irritating sensation that wouldn't go away, so I came to check... I never imagined, of all things, that a thief would have slipped in during the commotion."

A Sky God hunt is happening right outside! She sets everything aside because something was crawling around inside her? She should have gritted her teeth and dealt with it later!

No use appealing to reason. Because this proves something.

Objectively and subjectively, there was no way the Thunder Lord could have come to find me. A showdown between the Sky God and the regressor was playing out directly above. How could she have any attention left to spare for down here? No room to pay notice, and it would never even have occurred to anyone that someone might try this.

And yet the Thunder Lord had arrived impossibly fast.

Pure coincidence? Animal instinct?

Those don't happen at such convenient moments. Not for me, and not for the other side either. If I play my best hand and my opponent slaps down a joker, that's not the bad luck of a lifetime, that's someone working behind the scenes. Take it from a professional.

This wasn't instinct. It was a revelation.

The way a priest answers the Holy Maiden's call, or a communications officer picks up a transmission. Someone had sent word, and she had come. Nothing else explains that discontinuity in the chain of thought.

Either way, I had been caught in the act. No talking my way out of this now. I said:

"Thunder Lord-nim. There is a truth I've uncovered."

She dismissed it in an instant.

"A truth obtained through improper means has no legitimacy."

"It's still a truth, isn't it? Shouldn't you at least hear it out?"

I was trying to get a word in, but the Thunder Lord was bristling and showed no sign of listening. She advanced on me with open hostility, one deliberate step at a time. Before she reached me, though, she ran into a small obstacle.

"T-Thunder Lord-nim..."

Jeri, who had been knocked down, grabbed the hem of the Thunder Lord's robe and choked up.

"That person is saying terrible things. That the Thunder Lord is... hurting the children."

The Thunder Lord's footsteps stopped. Unable to shake off the small hand gripping her hem, she turned and tried to calm Jeri down.

"Jeri. Don't listen to him. We are not wrong."

"Right? That person was lying?"

"That's..."

"Wasn't he? Thunder Lord-nim. You could have saved these children, couldn't you?"

I used the opening Jeri had made and drove in with the sharpest words I had, straight at the crack in her armor. A fracture opened in the face of the Thunder Lord, who had seemed so flawless that nothing should have been able to touch her.

"The disabilities in the Lesser States occur because the Golden Mirror's food has mixed into people's bodies. As the body grows, it twists or breaks down. You know this too, which is why you cultivate food inside the Lightning Rod Tower."

Whether the Thunder Lord was good or evil, she was clearly good. Her sense of duty and every action she took were for the city's sake. There was no malice in any of it. Taking care of these children was ultimately an act of goodwill.

"But you know, don't you. If mixing is the problem, the answer is not to mix."

And yet, while carrying that goodwill in her heart, she had followed the notebook's contents as written, and somewhere along the way something had gone terribly wrong.

"Someone went out of their way to gather the newlyweds and children of the Lesser States in one place and provide them with food. Which is why the Lesser States has never been free of disability."

Others might not know. But one person, the Thunder Lord of Claudia, knows. Because she is both the beneficiary and the cause.

Mix the two and disability follows. Left alone, time would naturally separate them. That is how things ought to work.

But because someone had artificially forced them together, the dark shadow hanging over the Lesser States persists even now, centuries later.

"Humans can do anything they put their minds to. But was this really the result you wanted? To keep passing the curse hanging over the Lesser States down to every generation that comes after?"

"Shut up."

"It wasn't, was it. If it had been, there would be no reason for you to personally look after these children."

The sound of crying swelled and filled the room. The Thunder Lord stared at me like I was an enemy, she who had both neglected and protected the shadow of corrosion spreading across the whole of the Lesser States. Receiving that reproachful gaze, I put one question to her.

"Don't misunderstand. I'm not blaming you or condemning you. I just want to ask what's in your heart, Thunder Lord-nim. Do you, yourself, find what's written in this notebook acceptable?"

"We are not wrong. This notebook belongs to the first Thunder Lord, who built Claudia's order. Thanks to their efforts, Claudia has prospered."

"You really believe that? Even knowing that tragedy after tragedy in the Lesser States was born from the order this notebook created?"

"That is a problem caused by the Golden Mirror's existence. It is not the responsibility of the previous Thunder Lords, nor of Claudia."

"Fair enough. I have no interest in a childish blame-passing game that just chases its own tail. The Golden Mirror's existence is genuinely at the root of every problem. But then why are you still not at ease? Why are children crying out in pain, hidden away underground?"

To avoid other people's eyes? There's no need for that. It's common knowledge that of every child born in the Lesser States, one third dies, one third is born with a disability, and only the remaining third comes out looking whole. Having a child in the Lesser States is like entering a dangerously high-stakes gamble.

Claudia, where those mothers and children flood in, inevitably has many children who die or suffer from those disabilities. If anything, every last person would be nothing but admiring of the Thunder Lord for taking them all in and caring for them.

"Isn't it simply that you want to look away, Thunder Lord-nim? Can you really call yourself unashamed?"

But there is one person, the one who has touched the truth. The Thunder Lord would want to bury the guilt of having contributed to that Lesser States underground, out of sight. Because she is not unashamed at all.

A shadow fell across the Thunder Lord's face. Apparently unable to watch the Thunder Lord she admired being tormented any longer, Jeri leaped to her feet and cried out sharply:

"Stop saying terrible things to Thunder Lord-nim! Thunder Lord-nim is the one who protects us.... Thunder Lord-nim?"

The Thunder Lord silently let go of Jeri's hand. A Thunder practitioner who had once been similar to the Thunder Lord but had not been chosen, and had therefore become something different. The Thunder Lord looked at the young child and sank briefly into thought.

'I am a chosen being. Until now, I have wielded my ability to protect Claudia, just as written in the notebook. But it is also true that there is suffering among the children here. It would be a lie to say I never felt something was wrong, just as he said.'

...That thought is clearly there. I read it with mind reading.

The Thunder Lord as a human being had pitied the suffering children and tried to protect them. The mindset of someone arrogant but genuinely good.

'But in this world, you cannot live however you please.'

Yet from another corner of the Thunder Lord's mind, different thoughts came flooding in.

Pouring out like a flood, with no trace of human anguish. Leader of Claudia, guardian of the Lesser States. One who receives the Sanctum's revelations. The duties to fulfill are without number, and the obligations she carries are immense. On her word, on her single action, Claudia trembles. A burden no ordinary human could bear had forged her into iron.

"To protect a today no different from yesterday, that order must be maintained. If that means suffering, then it is the original sin that those born into this land must endure."

Having shed her anguish, the Thunder Lord spoke with unyielding composure.

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