WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 588

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A Story from the Past. The Old Testament

Why I had suddenly changed my attitude, what exactly I was about to do, all of it was a mystery even to Nevida. But Nevida was not the sort to waste her own will worrying over things she could not control. With her power, I arrived at the top of the Root Tree in an instant.

The Root Tree had grown a little since the last time I saw it. Eyeballing it, I'd say it had put on nearly twenty meters. Apparently even World Trees have a growth phase.

'Over two thousand years, the human species itself has changed. Nevida grew the Root Tree to bridge the gap between humanity before the first year and humanity of the present. The King of Humanity waiting up there should be nearly the same as me.'

I walked upward, using the human fruits as steps, climbing toward the cloud-wrapped crown of the World Tree. My legs trembled a little, but there was nothing to be done about it now that I had come this far. I kept my eyes on what was in front of me and walked.

'I can read something else stirring inside the echo. Nevida must have breathed her vital energy into it. A half-wakened consciousness pulses in there. And deeper still, within that... an immeasurably ancient memory flickers.'

Every time I put my foot down, the fruit-laden branch bent slightly under my weight. So this is what it feels like to climb over people. Unpleasant, as expected.

Stairs are supposed to be firm. You cannot properly climb steps that give beneath you. Every time you take the next one, you have to hold down the fear that the whole thing might collapse.

'In essence: the King of Humanity. And yet because of Nevida's obsession, two Kings of Humanity now exist across a span of time. But the Beast King is a conceptual being, and for any single concept, only one individual can exist.'

At last I reached the great flower bud and looked down at the slight gap at its base, breathing slowly. The King of Humanity was inside. And unlike before, an overwhelming presence radiated from within, pressing against my very existence.

Was this actually the right call? Had I done something foolish?

'One of them is about to disappear. A fine stage has been set.'

But there was nothing to be done now that I had come this far. One short breath, and I jumped in. The ripe bud parted slightly as I went, as though to welcome me.

My body fell into the bud.

And at the same moment, my consciousness fell into an unfathomable depth of time.

***

Nevida had been the king's warrior. She had survived through ages long enough to blur even history, yet not for a single moment had she forgotten that she was the king's warrior.

Because of that, the current King of Humanity was also worthy of her respect. Nevida bowed her head and saw the King of Humanity off as he entered the bud.

Only as a gesture of respect, though. The king she served from the bottom of her heart was one, and only one.

Flap. A parrot flew in. Nevida turned her head slowly, like a dry old trunk of deadwood.

"Hexia."

"Nevida. Squawk. I have something to say."

"I know what it is. The druids."

"Squawk. Right. Those people, they may look like they ran off with their tails between their legs. But they're never going to just leave it at that. They'll find a way to interfere."

The great witch's parrot kept fluttering as she spoke.

"We need to get ahead of it. They are never going to stand by and watch a human be born from that fruit. Hmph, laughable. Acting like they have some right to it when they contributed nothing to growing it!"

The parrot was still worked up, circling the air without landing anywhere. Nevida watched her loop erratically and spoke after a moment.

"What about you?"

"Squawk. Me? What about me?"

"Hexia. You were the one who made the meat fruit. But you were also the one who wanted to burn it. You too refused to allow a human to be born from the meat fruit."

For a moment the parrot's wings froze in midair. She dropped a short distance before catching herself and beating back upward.

"The meat fruit was something I made! That makes me different from them. I had the right to do that!"

The voice was fierce, but the edge behind it was not quite what it used to be. Nevida noticed, but chose not to point it out. Hexia was one of the few allies she had, and nearly her only disciple. She had no wish to undercut the morale of the one who had truly carried on her teachings.

"...And besides, everything would have been fine if not for them! The beasts inside the meat fruit couldn't move anyway. They were no different from corpses. What's wrong with using something that's basically a corpse like a corpse? Why bring up the value of beasts, their dignity?! What happened with my mother was only the trigger. Those people intended to burn every last meat fruit from the very beginning!"

The parrot's shouting gradually trailed off into something closer to murmuring.

"If only a human hadn't been born in there. If only those people hadn't kept pointing at me and calling it my fault, making me out to be the villain. I could have just... not known, and been happy."

"You are right, Hexia."

Nevida had lived before the first year. In that age of savagery, common sense and order were undefined, and law and morality were nothing more than a laughable joke. The logic of force was all that ran through the age. Predator and prey was the only absolute truth.

"Taboo, morality, law, order, those were carved by the wicked wanton woman who drove the king out by treachery, reshaping the world according to her own measure alone."

And Nevida was still living in the age of savagery. From where she stood, this age too was the product of vast violence. She had witnessed with her own eyes the First Holy Maiden transforming the world through transcendent power. Standing one step removed from the world, Nevida understood that even what called itself civilization was a product of savagery.

"There is only one reason you became a problem: because they chose to make you one. They moved to judge you by force."

The ability to impose law, to demand morality, to require norms and order, all of it theirs, because they were the strong.

"Judge the world by your own strength. Do what you intend to do. You have the power for it. There is no need to hesitate."

Nevida turned and looked out toward the forest on the far side. Her pupils shifted into those of a hawk.

The jungle moved. The trees filling her field of vision drew themselves aside to make way for her. Without any wind, the trees that had come to know the Demon God's will shrank down in fear of obstructing Nevida's gaze.

Through that single cleared line of sight, Nevida spotted Nenyaph watching from across the way and murmured.

"They too will come to judge you and me."

***

Nenyaph, having been detected, moved her position at once. There was no time to hesitate. Her opponent was the primordial druid, a monster whose authority reached the farthest edges of the sky. Nenyaph was among the stronger humans around, and precisely because of that she understood all the more clearly how terrifying a sky above the sky could be.

"You are still a monster, Teacher."

She had once studied under Nevida. Having witnessed that power up close, she also knew its weaknesses. Nevida, linked to the Root Tree, carried that enormous presence with her at all times. A being of that scale did not react sensitively to the movements of an insignificant creature, it would only make life exhausting.

And yet Nevida had sensed Nenyaph, as though proving she had chosen not to notice rather than been unable to. Nenyaph immediately pushed through the trees and ran to throw off pursuit.

But it was not enough. Before she knew it, a great serpent had come up alongside her. A vine serpent with bark instead of scales, born of Nevida's authority, chased after Nenyaph and opened its jaws wide. The Root Tree creature, a cursed beast born of Nevida's dominion, burned its brief life to tear into her.

Nenyaph drew out a seed and breathed a small breath into it. She slipped into the gap between large boulders and scattered seeds in every direction at the same time. Behind her the vine serpent let out a roar and gave chase, its body slithering through the gaps between branches with startling flexibility.

At that moment, Nenyaph released the authority sealed inside the seeds.

Druid secret art, Vine Root.

Vines exploded outward and coiled around the vine serpent. The vine serpent cried out in pain, twisting its body in every direction. Its bark scales scraped against the sharp rocks, cracking and scattering, and something that bled like sap ran free, yet the vine serpent looked as though stopping was even more agonizing than slamming into the rocks.

"Teacher. You are wrong. Having power does not mean one may do anything at all. To wield power, one must have justification. Power that cannot earn the sympathy of all is nothing more than savage violence. It will become an original sin that binds humanity in chains."

The vine serpent was a creature Nevida had made. It could never have lived long to begin with. It gave its brief life over entirely to carrying out the command it had been given.

What a sinful creature this was. Nenyaph felt a brief flash of sympathy for the Root Tree creature. At the same time, her conviction only grew more certain.

"The weak being trampled one-sidedly by the strong... even if that is reality. It must never be treated as natural."

Renewing her conviction, Nenyaph caused the seed in her grip to germinate. There was no soil, and the light was poor, but the seed took root in her faith and drank her resolve as it grew. The seed went through change after change until it became a sapling with countless leaves and sturdy roots.

The leaves that had grown were giving off their own light. A brilliantly white, sacred light.

Nenyaph was full of faith, and she had earned the right to wield that faith as strength.

A sword forged from faith, a holy sword. Nenyaph realized belatedly that she was Holy Sword Corps. The unfamiliar power was natural, as though it had always been part of her.

Nenyaph took up the holy sword and approached the vine serpent. The moment she drew close, the vine serpent thrashed as though it had been waiting for exactly that. Its eyes held nothing but the thinnest possible hostility and rage.

"Because it was created, because it dies quickly, because of some other reason yet, I cannot let even sympathy and grief for that poor life be turned into hypocrisy."

The vine serpent opened its jaws wide. Inside was a tangle of small branches and leaves. As mercifully as she could, Nenyaph drove the holy sword up beneath the jaw.

Light flowed down the vines. The vine serpent's eyes went wide. The creature born with a fixed lifespan, the creature that had thrashed without ever knowing the sweetness of water or the warmth of sunlight, tasted the grace of light for the first time.

The expression on the vine serpent's face slowly eased. The body that had been howling in pain found calm. The Root Tree creature that had been struggling against its coming death, in its very last moment, nestled into the light it had always been searching for and went to sleep. The vine serpent had returned to being nothing more than a vine.

Having gained the power to kill a Root Tree creature, Nenyaph murmured to herself.

"It seems you have no time to come here in person. Are you busy?"

It would not be strange for Nevida to appear at this very moment and cut Nenyaph down. Even having once been her disciple would make no difference to her. The reason Nevida had not appeared yet was probably that something was preventing her.

"...The King of Humanity. Is it truly not enough for you, Teacher, unless you create even your own king with your own hands?"

The Root Tree was consuming its vital energy at a rapid pace. For a World Tree that had monopolized one land for hundreds of years to burn through its energy this fast, what kind of being would require that.

It was frightening, but within that fear Nenyaph found a thread of hope. Now, with the Root Tree consuming its energy and Nevida's feet bound, this was the only chance to cut away that sin.

***

"Right and wrong, savagery and civilization. Order and propriety. What is and is not permitted."

I walked slowly through the darkness. The inside of the flower bud was not that large, yet no matter how long I walked, no wall appeared. I walked until the whole thing stopped making any sense at all, and then I understood.

This was a mindscape.

"What even is all that? It's not something you can eat. You can't see it. It can't tell me anything, can it? So how am I supposed to know about it?"

Then the owner of this voice was ,

I turned around. There was a girl with wild gray hair, wiggling her toes as though pouting about something.

"El says I'm just too special to understand it. Says a king can't grasp it. That because I'm not ordinary, I'll never come to realize it, and I'll go on ignoring it forever. But what am I supposed to do? I just say that what isn't there, isn't there."

Endlessly free, endlessly guileless. Full of a beast-like optimism. As though she had never once been conscious of how tragic her fate had been, the previous King of Humanity, who had died betrayed, her body torn apart, looked over at me with innocent eyes and spoke.

"Well? How do I look, now that I'm ordinary? You know, don't you?"

We've barely met and you're acting like we're old friends. I don't know what you are.

"But you do now, don't you? You're ordinary too. Instead of representing all of humanity, you represent just one single person standing right in front of you. You can't take in everyone, but for that one person, you read all the way to the deepest part of their heart."

Wait. How did she know that?

My mind reading was practically a side effect. For someone who was supposed to be the King of Humanity, the representativeness that should have come with the title had lost its form and twisted into something strange. And she knew about that?

"Big sister knows. That was the pact."

On top of everything else, the strange talk kept coming. Big sister, she says. The most baffling thing I had heard in recent memory. Where exactly was I supposed to have a big sister?

At that the girl threw her shoulders back and declared with complete confidence.

"I was born first. I'm the older one."

...I had no argument for that.

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