WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 604

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???? Regressions and It Still Gets Cranky

The Heavenly Mirror was made to defy the heavens.

Talent is something heaven-given.

You are emotional, simple-minded, and rash. A child with as little talent as you should never have taken up energy training. Separating the self from the world, placing one's will into the physical body and expressing it outward, that is the foundation of energy. It is not a garment that suits you.

When others take ten steps, you will struggle to follow with one. When others sprint forward, you will drag yourself on your belly like a newborn.

Yet even for someone as ungifted as you, the Heavenly Mirror is fair. It is honest to everyone.

Regardless of any talent heaven may have bestowed, so long as you carry a human body, you can reach greatness by engraving experience and effort into that body.

Without will, through nothing but pure experience and sensation, you will control your body and move it through the unconscious. Master the Heavenly Mirror and you will become a powerful being whose name echoes across the world.

...Though. To reach a principle through energy without will. For a plodder who chose the second-best path to reach the summit, it requires effort several times, dozens of times, hundreds of times greater than others. Experience and effort so vast that a single human lifetime could never hold it.

If you are someone who regresses each time you die, then perhaps... you might reach that height.

But I hope, Shei. I hope you never reach it.

That so many scars are not carved into your fragile physical body and heart.

That you save the world before the infinite shackle crushes you.

...That is all I can do. Wish.

***

Killing Shei had not stirred much in Nevida. She had been sharp enough and impressive enough, but she was only one of the many formidable enemies Nevida had faced across a lifetime. Nothing so exceptional.

There was just one thing that nagged at her.

"Was she not a Holy Maiden?"

Fighting Shei, she had felt something like the feeling of facing a Holy Maiden.

Occasionally a combat-focused Holy Maiden like the Steel Maiden would appear, but at their core, Holy Maidens are not fighters. A Holy Maiden's dominion is seeing the future and twisting its flow.

Politics, strategy, scheming, coincidence. Stealing victory through any means available, that is the true nature of a Holy Maiden. So from the moment a Holy Maiden appears, victory is already promised. Everything that follows is mere thrashing, unrelated to the tide of battle.

Paradoxically, that is precisely why the only way to face a Holy Maiden is to ignore all of that and press on regardless.

"..."

After a moment's thought, Nevida changed course. Rather than returning to the Spirits' Chamber, she moved to confirm Shei's death. Of all the threats before her, a Holy Maiden's was the greatest, and that was what drove the decision.

The trail was easy to find. Shei's body had carved a path through the forest like a bulldozer flattening dozens of trees. Nevida dropped down lightly onto the wreckage.

At the far end of her gaze, a bloodied hand hung limply. Shei's hand. The rest was buried under rock and fallen timber, hidden from view. The blood seeping out from beneath told the rest of the story.

Dead, without question. Even the King of Hell, had he come calling, would have ruled the same. So did Nevida. Now there was nothing left but to return and grind up the druids who had dared interrupt her lord's resurrection and use them as compost.

"Born of nature, returned to nature's embrace."

She offered the obligatory druid's eulogy and turned to leave. As she did, a small sound reached her ears.

"Ah."

Too clear and transparent to be a death rattle. The sound was so strange that Nevida turned back without thinking.

It was Shei.

She looked like Shei, and she could not have appeared in that spot if she were not Shei. So Nevida understood: this being was Shei.

"There it is. The bookmark I had tucked in place."

And yet, in another sense, she was nothing like Shei.

There is a toy called a thaumatrope. A disc printed with two different images on each side, attached to strings or a stick and spun rapidly, so that the afterimages of both pictures merge into one. That was how Shei appeared.

Her hair, bleached white, shimmered like light. Whether it was long or short was impossible to gauge. A face serene and detached from life blazed with a welling, overflowing vitality.

Fleeting beyond measure, seemingly on the verge of vanishing, yet Shei was unmistakably there.

Gone, then present. Laughing, then crying. She was both and neither. Even Nevida, who had weathered every storm the world had to offer, had never seen anything like it.

If there was one point where the two afterimages overlapped, it was Shei's gaze. She stared at the top of the Root Tree with eyes that shone in seven colors.

"Is Hughes still up there? You're waking the King of Humanity, yes? It'll be a little longer still, I think. Yes? I can stay and watch... can't I?"

Her voice was eager and aching, raw with feeling.

There had been no sound, no presence. Nevida looked at the boulder that had buried Shei a moment ago. The rock sat where it always had, as a natural thing would. Only Shei was gone from inside it.

"You were hiding your strength."

Shei answered with her gaze still lifted toward the heights above.

"No. What I hid was memory."

"...Memory?"

"Yes. If energy can control the physical body, and memory is a signal etched into the brain, then energy can block and conceal parts of that memory. The Heavenly Mirror is energy that governs the unconscious, so as long as it is operating, it seals off even the chance of those memories surfacing unbidden."

Nevida would not know it, but that was the lightning thief's insight. The Demon God who had feared his own truth being misused and turned himself in to the Sanctum. Shei was applying that insight as though it were nothing.

"In moments like this, when I take a hit strong enough to shatter the Heavenly Mirror, they come flooding back all at once, like a life flashing before the eyes."

If the Heavenly Mirror shatters under a blow strong enough to kill outright, the consciousness locked inside Shei awakens. Like something breaking free from a hard shell to be born.

Nevida looked at this transformed Shei and asked, "Why do something like that?"

Memory is accumulated experience. To block it? Nevida asked the question with genuine incomprehension. There was no obligation to answer, but Shei had been waiting for exactly that question. She smiled brightly and replied.

"Because Hughes can read minds."

She said it easily, without a trace of concern for having her thoughts invaded, and laughed as though the fact delighted her.

"...What?"

"You know. Did you know? Hughes always helps me. No matter when, no matter where, no matter how we meet. The fastest way to find him is to enter the Abyss, but even without that, Hughes ends up helping me regardless. Without me saying a word, without me wanting anything. He reads my wishes!"

Nevida's reaction did not seem to matter to her in the slightest. With a dreamy voice like someone fallen in love, Shei chirped on happily. Then, all at once, her expression darkened and she murmured,

"There is only one exception. When I know about his mind reading. That is the only time."

Sudden, but that too was new information. Nevida asked.

"Does your lord read the hearts of humans?"

"Yes. Hughes reads wishes. And then he asks. He asks whether that wish is worth sacrificing your life for, worth killing everyone around you. He dislikes wishes that throw away lives, but he respects them. So he gives you every last chance to see your wish through, and if you still choose to abandon living, he fulfills that wish and sees it to completion. Wishes to save others, on the other hand, he recognizes as valid on their own merits."

Veiled in lies and deception, swept up in ceaseless monologue. Only cold results, stripped of all feeling, tell the direction a wish is pointing. Through dozens, hundreds of regressions, Shei had come to understand it.

"He is not savage. Hughes is merciful. He gives everyone the chance to see their wish fulfilled, good or evil alike. Perhaps that itself is the savagery."

One could say she had been too slow to see it, or that he had hidden it well. Maybe mercy given equally to everyone has very little to do with goodness. Not enough to stop the world from ending.

Having poured out feelings long kept sealed inside, Shei let out a small sigh.

"Is that why, I wonder? When I know he is reading my mind and I cling to Hughes, trusting my wishes to him, he invariably ends up leaving me. I had no choice but to hide my memories. Otherwise, he would leave me in the end."

For Nevida, who had none of the context, it was hard to feel any of it. But in that moment, one clear truth came into focus.

"You are a Holy Maiden after all."

Only a Holy Maiden speaks incomprehensible words through foresight no one else can share. And a Holy Maiden is Nevida's enemy. A druid who had lived since the ancient world knew one truth: simplicity is the wisest way to think.

Shei watched Nevida prepare to fight and said, idly,

"Perhaps. But I don't think it matters. What matters is Hughes. Memories that repeat meaninglessly, that refuse to accumulate no matter the effort, that fade away into nothing, when I am with him, they connect in the end. The memories piled up one-sidedly inside me flow through my heart and begin to pile up inside him as well."

Nevida, who had been drifting for thousands of years since losing her king, must have been in a position not so unlike Shei's. Worse, perhaps. Nevida's king could not laugh and talk the way Shei's king did.

Shei felt something like sympathy for Nevida. And she was certain that Nevida would understand her as well.

"I will take it back. The one person who can walk this journey with me."

Shei reached out.

The next moment, her hand was already inside the small Root Tree. It had passed through the thick leaves and dense branches and closed around Jizan, trapped within.

Passed through?

Even that was not quite right. To Nevida's energy sense, Shei's hand had simply skipped the process of traveling toward Jizan and appeared there.

Nevida reacted, swinging the small Root Tree. Within a handful of milliseconds, the undergrowth swollen with vital energy exploded and crashed over Shei.

"Ow."

Pushed back by the green explosion, Shei stumbled and lost her footing. But she had already gotten what she came for. Jizan, which had been sealed in the Root Tree's roots, was now held whole and undamaged in her hand.

A strange power. It was probably connected to that faint flickering playing across her body. Nevida watched Shei carefully.

"A phasing ability, then."

"A little... different. Step-Climbing. It limits the unit steps of the world and walks through the spaces between them like stairs."

"What?"

"The world is not stairs but a slope. If you can take one step, you can take half a step, and half of half a step. Half of half of half of half, you can walk in steps broken infinitely small, or so you would think. But that's wrong."

Tap, tap, tap. Shei's movement broke apart and rejoined several times. Just as she described, like climbing stairs, like catching on some kind of step. An unnatural motion.

"The world is in truth infinite stairs. Looking down at hundreds of billions, trillions of stairs through a giant's eyes, they appear as a slope. But we all live straddling those stairs. I simply leapt a few of them."

"A needlessly complicated power."

"It's fine. I didn't understand it myself, honestly. A miraculous prodigy who found it by chance across countless cycles of regression, a Demon God who does not exist at this point in time. There's no guarantee I'll find it again either."

A Demon God's principle: the kind only an exceptional genius born once in an age could discover, and only then through obsessive fixation and a near-miraculous opportunity.

Across countless regressions and countless futures, there were very few new Demon Gods Shei had found. But she did not feel the lack. Even a handful of Demon Gods was already more than she could handle.

"I have only etched them into this physical body."

No matter how hard she studied and trained and learned, Shei could not reproduce a Demon God's principle from her own intellect. The seat of a Demon God was strict and gave no place to someone as untalented as Shei.

But does one think of a lever when using scissors? Does one consider a pulley when drawing water from a well? Understanding principles is not a requirement for using tools.

And Shei had etched Demon Gods into herself through sensation alone, carving countless marks into her own flesh.

Too base, too incapable, too stupid to call a principle. A principle as blank as a white page, with no real power of its own.

But Shei, at the end of countless regressions, had touched a principle.

The Infinite. The opposite extreme that the Heavenly Mirror arrived at through regression.

The principle of engraving Demon Gods not in the mind, but in the physical body.

Nevida tried to seize Shei, recognized there was no hope in it, and changed her plan.

"Then I will simply crush you whole."

Even phasing through matter would have its limits. Nevida stretched roots beneath her own feet and linked herself to the Root Tree. Root met root, crossing and winding together, and Nevida and the Root Tree became one.

Using a plant as a familiar, something unable to move or sense, is dangerous for very little gain.

But Nevida was a Demon God, and the Root Tree carried the vital energy of a World Tree. The Root Tree, whose branches and leaves could transform into any living plant, had no ceiling.

The earth heaved upward. The roots hidden beneath the ground, a sea of them, broke through to the surface. The roots became legs and stamped down on the earth; the branches became arms and clenched into fists.

The Root Tree rose like a giant from the age of creation.

"Root-Tree Colossus."

Whether the word for colossus meant a great beast or a great tree.

The Root Tree, no longer anything like a tree, let out a great roar and raised its branches high. The movement alone raised a storm and swept the surrounding trees away all at once.

Like a primordial giant about to stamp its foot. What was coming could no longer be called an attack. It was a force comparable to a calamity.

The Root Tree drew its branches back, gathered its power, and brought the full weight of itself crashing down toward Shei.

Branches of overwhelming mass, falling. The displaced air hammered down with staggering pressure. Shei felt the atmospheric crush compressing the very space around her, and smiled with something like longing.

"...It has been a while since I last saw this."

She murmured it and called up once more the principle written into her physical body.

A Demon God's insight, from a future now erased, from one who had drifted through the vast emptiness beyond the sky to plumb the depths of a principle. Simple beyond imagining and powerful beyond imagining, reproduced only indirectly by colliding the relics of heaven and earth, because to reproduce it directly would be a miracle. And a catastrophe.

The flickering grew worse. The Heavenly Mirror reproduced the principle recorded in Shei's physical body. She took Skywarbler in one hand and Jizan in the other, and pressed them together.

Jizan, condensed mass. Skywarbler, compressed space. Two relics, one the symbol of the earth, one the symbol of the sky.

Shei had always layered Skywarbler over Jizan. Earth must be covered by sky for the sky to shine blue, and sky must cradle earth for the earth to rest easy. Together they transformed in myriad forms like this life-filled planet and gave rise to every kind of wonder.

But for killing, the reverse worked better.

Even the countless stars drifting through the universe meet their end. A star whose time has come gives one great last expansion, cries out in a death rattle, then slowly contracts and goes dark.

Condensation. Compression. Contraction. Shrinking, collapsing inward, the very composition of matter coming apart. The Earth Mother's relic followed the path of a dying star to the end.

Diminished Dark Blade.

A small, wretched, single black sword.

The end of a world unfolded in Shei's hand. The degraded Jizan was no longer a sword or a club. Even calling it a skewer, or a needle, would be too generous. It converged toward a one-dimensional line and reached the absolute limit of collapse.

Wind orbited around it. Air particles drawn in by nothing but that gravity met and ground against one another and threw off sparks. The ionized air blazed with an electromagnetic storm.

The surroundings flashed with light and noise. At the eye of that storm, everything was still black and quiet.

"This is a sword I cannot hold long. The planet is in danger. Put everything in, and let us end this quickly."

Nevida swung the Root-Tree Colossus. A vast slash tore through the air and drove down into the earth, warping the ground beneath it. A blow from myth, like a primordial giant crying its fury at the Earth Mother.

A force visible from the opposite end of a continent, against a thread so fine it could barely be seen even up close. The gap in scale was such that calling the two evenly matched hardly seemed to apply.

But if size and weight were all that mattered, why would anyone call it a principle?

Shei put her right foot forward and raised her back heel. The earth seemed to struggle under the weight; her foot sank into the ground, pressing it down, melting it. From soil turned to rock, Shei locked herself in place and gripped the Diminished Dark Blade.

At the surface of a star that had reached its end, one last breath burned brilliant white. Shei caught that force and swung.

Earth-Heaven Technique.

New Star.

A corona of light that should only appear on a stellar surface swept across the earth.

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