Chapter 133#

The Past — VII#

The Chief God steadied himself against the stone altar and slowly straightened, opening his eyes.

“I can no longer resurrect any more of them.”

The Painter released his hold and watched Him in silence.

He had witnessed everything this deity had done.

“If you loved them, you should not have destroyed them. If you did not love them, you should not have resurrected them. Perhaps when you destroyed them, you had already come to terms with this.” The Painter said softly, “Do not grieve. All the suffering of this day was the price you were destined to pay, because what you sought to do was something impossible.”

The deity gave a small nod.

He raised His blood-soaked right hand, palm facing toward Himself, and lowered His gaze.

A dark-silver knight’s helmet materialized from the void and took solid form in His hand.

The helmet was covered in dents from blades and arrows, and dried bloodstains. Now His own fresh blood stained it as well — new blood layering over old, until even that fresh blood darkened to a deep crimson in the cold wind sweeping across the mountaintop.

He cast His eyes downward. In His pupils there arose a look of desolate, sorrowful stillness — yet having gone so long without human emotion, even this grief lacked vitality, appearing hollow.

“No love. No beauty.” He said suddenly.

His voice was cold and hoarse: “Only sin. Only punishment.”

The Painter shook his head. “That is not so. Love and punishment always walk together. Sin and beauty are not so different.”

The deity said nothing. He only held the helmet in silence, pressing it against His own heart.

The Painter took a few steps back, putting some distance between them — from further away, he could see the deity’s full form more clearly.

“This is what I have wanted to paint.” The Painter said. “In you, I have finally found… the way to make them one. Thank you.”

The deity said calmly, “Are you leaving?”

“No.” The Painter said. “I will pursue you for all eternity. I witnessed your beginning, and I intend to witness your end.”

The deity suddenly smiled.

His smile was so faint, and yet so pure — like a child seeing the world for the very first time.

The silence and the suffering both fell away. What He had accepted, and what He had left behind — no one could say.

“You will get what you want.” He said.

“And what about you?”

“I will suffer for all eternity.”

With that, He turned, cradling the helmet, and walked down the mountain.

In that moment, He severed all ties to His past.

——He truly became the eternally solitary God.

The Painter watched His retreating figure with near-obsessive intensity. He had followed the deity here in pursuit of inspiration and beauty. Today, one form of beauty had been extinguished, and another had risen in its place.

“But you have no regrets.” He said softly.

He fell into step behind the deity.

Heaven and earth opened as if from primordial chaos. A thread of morning light broke through the rift between sky and cloud, falling straight upon them both.

In the distance, some unknown race was holding a celebration — magnificent fireworks screamed skyward, blazing brilliantly for one fleeting moment before vanishing without a trace.

At the foot of the mountain, the Chief God came before the malformed butterfly-people.

As His fingers touched those strange, twisted limbs, a pale golden radiance rose. Power entered their bodies and repaired the places where they had been warped.

But for the others — the many, utterly chaotic shadow creatures — even a God could no longer restore them into whole human beings.

“Where do you wish to go?”

The creatures could no longer speak. They let out low, anguished shrieks — in such a form, no living thing could truly survive.

The deity let out a quiet sigh.

His fingers passed through their murky, shadowed forms.

“Disperse,” He said. “You will become the streams and flowers and trees of Mount Yona, forever one with this place, until you take part in the birth of a new life and become part of it.”

The deity’s decree fell, and ten thousand shadows gradually faded and vanished. On the wind of Mount Yona, soft weeping drifted through the air.

Where there is birth, there is death. In this world, lives slip away every single second.

Just as in the Eternal Night, worlds shatter every single second.

The Chief God departed. In the long years that followed, He never returned to Mount Yona.

The vision ended.

The shadow creatures had already surrounded Yu Feichen and Anfi completely.

The foremost creature reached a phantom sickle-claw out from the darkness — covered in razor-sharp markings — and stretched it toward Anfi’s eyes.

A cold silver scabbard blocked it.

Even on leisure outings, Yu Feichen carried a weapon suited to the local power system.

The creature’s eyes turned toward Yu Feichen.

“Before he left back then, he had already made you fully disperse,” Yu Feichen said. “You still exist now — did the townspeople resurrect you again?”

The creature let out a low laugh.

Anfi stepped forward, standing shoulder to shoulder with him.

“That you still linger here is my fault,” Anfi said. “The day I left this place, I did not destroy the resurrection altar.”

Yu Feichen glanced out of the corner of his eye at the town below the cliff.

——With this, everything fell into place.

The resurrected butterfly-people had made their home in the Yona mountain range. Then one day, they discovered a resurrection altar hidden beneath dense forest.

Had anyone else found it, it might not have mattered. But the butterfly-people were a race that had personally experienced resurrection — some among them had even witnessed the deity on the mountaintop with their own eyes. They were also the only race that had suffered an error in the resurrection, left in a state of half-revival. And so they imitated what they had seen the Chief God do, performing resurrection rites — what was now known as “Offering Day.”

And so the townspeople offered up sacrifices and blood, and prayed with fervent devotion, beseeching the spirits of the dead to return.

And so those forces that had once dispersed gathered anew, becoming creatures even more malformed and chaotic than before. Yet the townspeople possessed nothing like the God’s power, and did not understand the principles of resurrection at all. Even when summoned, they were only fleeting phantoms — dissipating again after a single night.

In the eyes of the townspeople, it was simply their ancestors’ spirits appearing for one night, drawn by longing for the world of the living.

Year after year, generation after generation. The tradition of Offering Day passed down through the ages. Until today, those souls had been twisted into complete chaos through each successive summoning, warped beyond description.

What sustained their reappearance, beyond the prayers of the townspeople, was likely nothing but hatred for the God.

Having their origins spoken aloud, the creatures let out low laughter — and in that instant, every creature surged upward at once, lunging at the two of them — like the vast maw of an abyss opening wide, snapping down toward them!

Anfi’s expression did not change.

The young man’s voice was cold and quiet. He let two words fall: “Enough.”

He raised his hand with casual ease.

——Ten thousand creatures froze dead in midair.

“I permitted you to appear tonight only because someone wished to know of my past, and I had no intention of concealing it. I did not come here to flagellate myself in atonement.”

His refined, measured tone was like the recitation of scripture — yet in this dangerous, frigid setting, it sounded more like an irrevocable declaration.

“I destroyed you all those years ago. I can do so again. Though I have no desire to repent, I know well that my sin cannot be redeemed and your hatred cannot be extinguished. Today, I offer you another path.”

Beside him, a jet-black rift slowly split open, leading into the boundless Eternal Night. Glacial wind poured through it, as if from the deepest reaches of hell.

“I have no shortage of enemies — a few more will not trouble me.” He looked toward the abyss of Eternal Night. “If you wish to regain your freedom, or to find the strength to seek your revenge, then go there.”

The creatures howled and thrashed — and then Anfi said, one word at a time: “I will be waiting for you… in the Eternal Day.”

The moment his voice fell, the shadows surged like maddened beasts into the rifted abyss.

The wind tore at Anfi’s golden hair and robe hems, yet it could not alter his expression by a single fraction — as austere and still as a sculpture carved from ancient cold.

He had never had regrets.

He had never run from anything either.

——The last trace of shadow vanished. The rift slowly closed.

On the mountaintop in the deep of night, only Yu Feichen and Anfi remained.

Some townspeople had already reached the foot of the mountain; scattered lights were flickering to life throughout the town below.

That dim radiance reflected in Anfi’s eyes.

“This is the past of Landenwarren,” he said.

——And one particularly significant fragment of his long, long history.

The rock carvings on the cliff face were beautifully done — countless lives born from the bodies of dead butterflies. Calling it a depiction of creation would not be wrong, for to the people of Landenwarren, this was creation.

It was nearly midnight now. Night mist had begun to rise.

“Are you cold?” Yu Feichen said.

From the moment they had entered the vision, he had held Anfi’s hand without letting go, and still had not released it.

Having witnessed that piece of the past, this person’s attitude toward him seemed unchanged in any way — he appeared entirely unbothered. Anfi thought to himself.

He had just been about to answer “not cold” when a violent pain laced with dizziness swept suddenly through his body.

Yu Feichen caught Anfi as he lurched forward — the slender young man nearly hung against him entirely.

“What’s wrong?”

Anfi caught his breath and shook his head.

“The wind is too strong,” he said. “…Take me somewhere over there to rest for a moment.”

They sat side by side on the ancient altar.

After a moment of weakness, Anfi seemed to return to his usual state. Yu Feichen recalled that earlier today, when Anfi had first climbed up this cliff, he had also swayed.

In the cold of the night, the white robes looked especially thin, and the young man’s frame was slight — he seemed like someone who could easily be sheltered. Over these past days, he had grown accustomed to certain small gestures of closeness. Yu Feichen reached out and drew Anfi’s shoulder in against him.

As if receiving some gentle, unspoken invitation, Anfi leaned against him in turn.

Resting against his shoulder, the young man spoke in a loose, unhurried way, and Yu Feichen was glad to listen.

“When I first arrived in the Eternal Night, the vast majority of worlds were still intact.”

He paused, then revised his wording: “No world in the Eternal Night is truly intact — they will all shatter eventually. When I say ‘intact,’ I mean those worlds still had wide territories, living people, and stable power.”

“But that was a very early time — advanced magic and science had yet to emerge. In the last world, you broke through the barriers of the secret language and changed the course of that world. But in those days… there were not yet so many refined structures. Sometimes there were not even opposing factions.”

Anfi did not continue, but Yu Feichen understood.

At the very beginning of everything, there were not yet so many ways to change a world.

Only war. Plunder. Conflict. And slaughter.

No innocent or guilty — only victors and the defeated.

The victor took power and territory, and built their own kingdom. The defeated received a loser’s end.

What you wanted, you took. Grudges, you repaid.

Yu Feichen did not find this surprising. He did not even find it wrong.

In his understanding, this was simply what the world looked like — though he had no idea where that understanding had come from.

He said, “And then?”

“And then?” Anfi thought for a moment before answering. “Once more shattered worlds accumulated and more and more people drifted into the Eternal Night, other outer gods gradually appeared. By then I had Landenwarren, and had established a divine realm of considerable size, and later the Paradise as well. ‘Chief God’ was a title those who wielded power called themselves — I never claimed to be a deity. But later, others began calling me that too. And then… it became what it is now.”

The story of a god sounded almost simple when told this way.

That breezy “it became what it is now” surely made no shortage of outer gods who coveted the Eternal Day’s territory grind their teeth in envy — Claros especially.

“That’s not the ‘and then’ I meant.” Yu Feichen even took a moment to find the words — he rarely spoke in such long sentences. “That night you said you weren’t the kind of god… the kind people imagine, who cherishes their people. But the way you seem now, you genuinely are.”

The Chief God of the very beginning had seemed almost like a villain who deserved to be brought down.

Hearing this, Anfi gave a small smile.

“I have never changed. Nor do I think there was ever a moment when I stopped loving them — it only appeared to others as though I had changed.” Anfi’s voice grew softer and quieter. Leaning against him, as if on the verge of sleep, about to sink into some sweet dream: “If you’re asking what caused that change… it should have been when I met Sather.”

After leaving Mount Yona, the Painter had gone elsewhere — he said he had new paintings to finish.

“You consumed far too much power this time. You should not return to the Eternal Night again for now. You have given more than enough. Go and walk through your own kingdom for a while.” The Painter had said.

“That was my first time wandering through Landenwarren.” Anfi said. “Not long after that day, I met Sather.”

The wind blew Anfi’s hair into Yu Feichen’s hand. He curled his fingers around those strands, as if holding Anfi himself.

Yu Feichen knew Sather, of course — the elf of ambiguous gender, the God of Life in the Paradise.

Anfi said he had met Sather during that first wander through Landenwarren. That meant Sather was from Landenwarren — which is to say, Sather was someone who had once died at the Chief God’s hands.

Anfi gently took hold of Yu Feichen’s hand, looking out into the distance, his gaze slowly becoming distant and hazy.

He recalled the past once more.

Time was like a mist — and when the mist parted, the scenes of long ago were still clear.

It was a beautiful valley. The air was moist and fragrant, and sunlight danced on the smooth river stones along the bank.

When he had passed through, Sather was there by the stream — small, barely reaching the waist of a grown person, the white pointed ears still downy with new fur.

Elves were a species of innate beauty; a young elf was an even more remarkable creature.

——The young elf was tending carefully to a tiny seedling.

In those days, unless necessary, he rarely spoke to anyone, let alone having any skill for communicating with young beings. And so he only passed by, with no intention of stopping.

Yet the elf called out to him.

“Hello.” The elf’s voice was soft and sweet. “Do you know what it will look like when it grows up?”

He stopped and looked at the seedling. There was something familiar about it — yet it was too small to tell anything yet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It would need to grow a little larger before I could tell.”

The elf said, “Then will you wait with me for it to grow?”

He agreed.

The two of them — one grown, one small — stayed beside the little seedling, both pairs of eyes fixed upon it.

Finally, the little elf could hold back no longer, and said, “My name is Sather. Sather Nal.”

“Hello, Sather,” he said.

“Why did you come here?” Sather tilted its head. “Are you also someone who died and was brought back to life?”

“I am not.”

“Then who are you?”

From the very beginning, the teaching he had received said that he must not lie to those who were his own people.

He said: “I am the one who brought you all here.”

“Oh.” Sather considered this. “Then you are also the one who killed us.”

He said: “Do all of you know?”

“Some say yes, some say no. I don’t know.” The elf’s eyes were guileless and clear. “So are you? I hope you’re not.”

“I am.”

The elf nodded thoughtfully. “Then why did you do it?”

“Because I wanted to establish my kingdom, and make it endure forever.”

“Did you succeed?”

“I did.”

The elf looked at him quietly for a long while without speaking.

After some time, it was Sather who broke the silence again — children always cannot help but say what is in their hearts. And he himself had far too many things he could not say, and no one to say them to anymore.

“Then is there nothing you want to say to us?”

He thought for a moment.

Faced with an innocent child, somehow anything felt possible to say.

In a child’s eyes, mistakes were sometimes not mistakes. Confusion was sometimes not confusion.

“Someone told me: if I loved you, I should not have destroyed you. If I did not love you, I should not have brought you back.”

The elf blinked. “Then do you love us?”

Perhaps he did.

On Mount Yona, in the instant he glimpsed the unbridgeable chasm of fate, a hopeless anguish had seemed to carve itself into his very soul.

But every pain each of them had ever suffered had also been given by his own hand.

He thought for a long while, so his words came out slowly.

“When I was… as young as you are,” he said, “many people told me I must love all those who were my people. But they seem to have forgotten to teach me what it actually means — what doing so would look like.”

Sather laughed. When the elf laughed, its ears trembled with each peal, and the vines around them, hearing that clear and lovely sound, shook their leaves in answer, filling the air with soft rustling.

“Does love need to be taught? I was born already knowing.” The young elf said. “You’re already so old — do you really need me to teach you?”

He smiled a little. “If you are willing to teach me, I am willing to listen.”

“Love means treating someone as your own life. Their pain is your pain, their joy is your joy. So you are willing to do anything, so long as they may be free of suffering and find happiness — and in that way, you yourself live in eternal joy. This is the purest, most genuine happiness in the world. Only love can bring you to such a paradise.” The elf said. “So from now on, you must treat your own people this way too.”

When Sather finished, he thought for a moment, and said, “Thank you.”

“So will you do as I said?”

“I will,” he said. “I understand it all, in truth. But I am not yet in a position to do so.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Eternal Night is still out there.”