WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 719: In Heaven - 4

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Everyone must be having a hard time. They've been through a lot. If they chose to shoulder a greater burden, they must be suffering all the more for it.

What if I carried that burden for them? I could. If I read their minds and guided their wishes, like I did in the Arcane Federation, it might somehow work.

But it wouldn't end there. Wishes don't disappear. What would truly disappear would be their wishes.

They're struggling and suffering because they want to take those burdens on.

I'm right. I can share their burdens. But I can't carry them in their place.

The same goes for anyone else.

"I can still make them happy. More than you could imagine."

The faces of those in pain flashed through my mind. They were full of anxiety and worry. But that was longing. They were striving to achieve something because they desperately wanted it.

[…Even you, the King of Civilization in some future, have yet to reject savagery. We have no choice.]

"But I can't make you happy. Please understand. I belong to everyone."

So this was what it felt like to reject a confession. It wasn't bad. If anything, it was refreshing.

It felt a little strange to ask after that, but still.

"Let me ask you something now. Are these all the Demon Gods that make up the Celestial God?"

The First Holy Maiden answered at once.

[Yes. That's all of them.]

"That can't be true. Light, wind, waves, lightning. They're clearly powers deeply tied to the Celestial God, but... one crucial power is missing, isn't it?"

Foresight. The power to see the future. These alone couldn't explain it. At most, the Demon God of Space I'd recently seen could interfere with time in limited ways.

Information from the future. I had to learn where it came from. That was probably the Demon God of Knowledge.

[Contemplating where one comes from is the beginning of philosophy. Even you, the product of philosophy, have begun to explore philosophy. You, who call yourself a beast....]

"Would you answer my question?"

Instead of answering, the First Holy Maiden showed me directly.

The Celestial God was a single illusion made by combining the Demon Gods' powers, countless people's mental images, and religious sorcery. Behind that enormous veil sat the First Holy Maiden at its center.

The Demon God of Light was powerful. But the power to see the future was impossible through light alone. Show me that power. Having come this far, nothing could be hidden from me.

The First Holy Maiden, who had kept herself tightly concealed in Heaven, revealed her presence to me.

Light pierced the darkness and descended upon Heaven. It was so bright that I had to squeeze my eyes shut. Within the white-hot light, only the First Holy Maiden's murmur reached me.

[Spilled water cannot be gathered again, and scattered fragrance cannot be collected again. A life that vanished into nothingness cannot be breathed back into being.]

Then a strange phenomenon followed.

The flashing lightning flowed backward and scattered in every direction. Condensed clouds turned to vapor and drifted apart. Heat and cold that had wandered about seized each other and gathered.

It was a strange phenomenon unrelated to light. Rather... it was closer to turning time backward!

What? Light had the power to reverse time? I'd never heard of anything like that!

[When the universe was born, God turned over an hourglass. Its hot sand can only slowly fall downward, never rise again. That is time. Something that scatters and disappears, never to be recovered.]

Yet the phenomenon continued before my eyes. Restoration, regeneration, suspension, or reversal.

The power to undo irreversible phenomena.

As though an hourglass had been flipped over, the moving world came to a complete stop. The wind no longer blew, and falling droplets hung motionless in the air. It looked as though a moment of nature had been cut out and preserved.

Seeds of lightning waited to sprout within the clouds, mingling winds regained their own colors, and droplets stopped, curled tightly before they could spread.

The First Holy Maiden murmured within the severed world.

[It is sad that things cannot be undone. Because they can never return to how they were before.]

Or... could it be?

It was an absurd hypothesis, but if it was the First Holy Maiden, the origin of all this...!

"Two... Demon Gods...?"

The Demon God of Light.

And the Demon God of Time.

[That is the power by which I created the Celestial God alone.]

The First Holy Maiden gathered the scattered light back into her hand. The light, returned to a crystal of pure power, slept with the potential to become anything. The First Holy Maiden shaped a form from that light.

It was authority truly close to that of a god. With two Demon Gods contained within her one body, the First Holy Maiden established a world law as naturally as breathing.

"With power like this, you could replace the King of Humanity again and again...! No, you've already done more than enough...!"

Irreversible sand. Those disorderly fragments flowing down in blazing heat gradually scattered and grew more chaotic. Like time, they only flowed and never returned.

The First Holy Maiden could stop them, or at least turn them back in limited ways.

It probably wasn't the kind of power that could manipulate time at will. The law she had realized was that of irreversible phenomena. A reversal of the entropy that had only increased since creation.

By observing it through the medium of light, she glimpsed the future.

Tch, it wasn't a Demon God of Knowledge? It had nothing to do with that?

Still, every Beast King had gained a human form only after the First Holy Maiden was born and observed the entire future. Then why had the Beast Kings changed?

[But it differs from what you asked. The power to see the future is mine, but that future is not mine.]

"What did you say?"

[The answer to your question lies in the future. But you denied the future I promised. I have no answer for you now, so find it yourself.]

Time began to move again. The First Holy Maiden hid herself within light, clouds, and lightning. In Heaven, which had returned once more, four, no, five Demon Gods stared down at me at once. An immense repulsive force radiated from the Celestial God.

It was trying to drive me out of Heaven!

"Wait! I still have one question left!"

I needed to find a clue about Shei's existence too! If I was thrown out already...!

But the Celestial God was resolute. It was an aggregate of five Demon Gods and a mask of faith created by the First Holy Maiden. It resolutely sought to exclude me from Heaven.

[…It wasn't us who abandoned you. You abandoned us.]

The voice sounded resentful. At the same time, immense pressure bore down on me. The unified will of the five Demon Gods was devoted solely to excluding me.

It went beyond wind and air pressure. The entire atmosphere and every air mass moved as one, raising a colossal storm to blow me, and me alone, away. The swirling wind ground down even clouds hardened like bricks.

Waves split into thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of branches and rushed toward me. Vibrations that had held no power merged into one upon reaching me, becoming a distortion that would tear even space apart. Through it all, the hymn ringing clearly in my ears was driving me mad.

A tingling sensation ran over me. The crackling static was the seed of lightning. It meant the Thunder God's lightning, about to fall from the clouds, was aimed at me. My hair stood on end in an instant, crackling like straw in a bonfire.

Then a torrent of pure power, not yet given form, would crush me at a speed rivaling light. There was no dodging it or blocking it.

[If you still believe civilization is the strongest form of savagery, then we, too, have no choice but to choose force to preserve civilization.]

Maybe this was my karma. I considered civilization another kind of savagery, and I knew it imposed itself through greater power. If that was my argument, then it was only natural for the power held by the five Demon Gods to impose itself on me through force.

If I had answered that justice existed in the world, that all things moved according to right and wrong, this wouldn't have happened. This too was my choice.

But.

This was right.

[She will become the King of Divinity. You will become the King of Sin. That is the result of you, a king of civilization, affirming savagery.]

That made us even. Now the Celestial God stood on the same starting line as me.

I was now the same as that thing. The world law, the rule newly written by the faith of hundreds of millions, was equal to my rule as a single person. We stood on the same logic.

Whether I broke.

Or the Celestial God broke.

It wasn't a challenge against a higher concept. It was only a dispute between humans.

The First Holy Maiden's voice vanished. In its place came the Celestial God's thunderous voice. The voice of the enraged Celestial God shook the world.

[Fire and lightning shall burn the unbeliever. Let him be cast aside as ash.]

"Humans aren't burnable trash!"

My cry was swallowed by the world-shaking voice.

The Celestial God's strike to exclude me tore the world apart.

Storm. Waves. Lightning. And time, coordinating all those powers alongside light. My body was thrown about in a gale of immense and overwhelming power. Cast out of Heaven at a speed beyond sound, I was swept up in the shock of the world turning upside down.

The Celestial God. A world law gathering together all the world's great concepts. Before that rule, I was only a weak human. I could neither resist nor endure it.

Torn, cut, burst, burned, frozen, scorched, bent, broken. Planet-scale phenomena pursued me without rest, trying to dissolve my very existence into the world.

Humans were no more than bugs in this world. No one cared how a worthless bug disappeared. It would only be buried in dirt and sand, then forgotten.

And yet, I was still alive.

Just as humanity had survived even as the world endured tens of thousands of years, froze and thawed, and storms swept across the earth, I too was still alive.

Even as the storm carried me away, I pulled out my cards. They fluttered as though they would fly away at any moment, but I used every ounce of strength I had to draw out five cards and stack them together.

Footnotes:

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