Chapter 134#

The Past — VIII#

“I don’t understand.” That was how Sather had answered him.

“You don’t need to.”

“Suit yourself.” The elf said languidly. “I’m sleepy.”

And with that, reached out, asking to be gathered into his arms.

He didn’t move. So Sather took the initiative, looping both arms around his neck and pressing against his chest.

“I love you.” The elf said. “You’re very beautiful, and you smell nice.”

Without any warning, a young, living being nestled against him like that — delicate, tender fingers clutching at his robe.

He slowly reached back and held Sather’s small body, lowering his eyes, a look of quiet bewilderment crossing his face.

In his long existence, it had been far too long since he had been this close to another living thing.

Sather fell asleep without the slightest wariness, breathing slow and steady and peaceful. The wind was gentle. The stream chimed. The seedling grew. And he held Sather like that until dusk settled in.

The little elf woke and gave him a sweet, unburdened smile.

“I love you,” Sather said again.

He had nothing to offer in return. He bent down and lightly kissed Sather’s forehead.

The tender kiss was brief and gone in an instant. Sather rubbed their eyes and murmured, “You’re clearly quite practiced at that. Surely many people love you.”

He thought for a moment. “No.”

Memory pulled him somewhere distant for just an instant, and he added, “Perhaps there once were.”

Having no wish to linger on the subject, he said, “I imagine many people love you too, Sather.”

But the elf gave an equally unexpected answer: “No.”

“They say I’m too clingy and tell me to go off on my own and be quiet.” Sather’s mouth drooped a little. “But I’m only happy when I’m with other people.”

He smiled gently, understanding at once.

The elven race Sather belonged to were by nature independent and aloof, rarely having much contact with others of their kind. This little elf’s personality was entirely at odds with its whole people — running into walls was inevitable.

He said, “When you’re a little older, you might try venturing out of this valley. There are warmer races beyond it.”

Sather nodded thoughtfully. “Then you could also try loving other people. That way many people would love you back.”

Night fell over the valley.

He stayed with the little elf called Sather for a full twenty days.

Until at last he recognized what kind of plant the seedling was.

Sather said the wind had blown its seed from somewhere far away, and finding it had been pure chance.

But in the moment he recognized it, he understood — fate had its signs, woven quietly into everything.

The memory settled.

The images and sounds within that recollection were vivid and clear, yet reduced to words they amounted to only a few quiet lines.

“What was it?” Yu Feichen said.

Anfi, leaning against Yu Feichen, tilted his head back and saw a sky vast and boundless as an open sea of stars.

“It was a Sleepwell Flower,” he said. “Where I grew up, they were everywhere.”

That day, he had told Sather: “I need to go.”

“Why do you have to leave?”

“There are things I must do.”

Sather said, “Then take me with you.”

The little elf lowered their head, voice subdued. “I will never be able to understand them, and they will never understand me. Staying here, I am in pain — even having been resurrected, I am still in pain. The pain is too great for me to go on living.”

Before that guileless grief, he was silent for a long time.

“…In the end, I took Sather with me, and built a dwelling in the heart of Landenwarren. I had expended too much power that time, and it was many days before I could re-enter the Eternal Night. In the time I spent in Landenwarren, I began to learn how to establish fair and equitable laws, to forge covenants between races and realms, to spread acts of kindness and virtue. I tried to ease the suffering that lay… beyond life and death.” Anfi said.

As Sather had told him — when he began to love his people in these concrete ways, they returned that love with equal reverence and devotion.

He did not know how that transformation had gradually come to pass.

He only knew that many years later, when he next withdrew from the Eternal Night and paused on a road in Landenwarren, it had already become the heart of the entire divine realm — a sacred place in the hearts of all people.

Of the destruction and rebirth that had once occurred, he had never made any secret. Era after era, resurrections continued to take place, but many among the people kept silent about it.

Until today — the primal, blood-soaked wars had quietly receded into history. The Eternal Day shone in splendor. The Tower of Creation rose in solemn grandeur. The Paradise carried out the divine will. The means of gathering shards had come to resemble salvation. As for that chapter of the past, all that remained in legend and hearsay was the vague epithet “the Land of Sacred Redemption” — and yet Landenwarren had somehow become the most devoutly faithful place of all.

Perhaps that was a form of forgiveness. Or perhaps time had simply buried it in forgetting.

And so people said: the God loves the world.

In the end, he had become the god of legend.

Anfi’s story was finished.

In truth, the blood-drenched Anfi was the deity Yu Feichen had originally imagined.

As for the compassionate, tender one — that was the god of fantasy, the kind that only existed in daydreams. To the point that whenever he had once heard the faithful singing the Chief God’s praises, he would privately scoff.

Yet the truth had turned out to be that both versions of this god were real, and both were faces of the same being.

And this deity was now leaning against him.

There was, however, one unanswered question within the telling.

Yu Feichen shifted slightly toward Anfi and brushed his fingertips a few times beneath his right eye.

Even in his younger form, Anfi’s teardrop mole sat exactly where it always had.

——And yet the person himself had no idea it was there.

What made even less sense was that the people of Landenwarren did know.

“I’ve heard that the people of Landenwarren mark themselves with teardrop moles in memory of the first tear you shed for them,” he said. “But in the vision, you didn’t cry.”

Anfi blinked. A look of resigned amusement rose in his eyes.

“That was the Painter’s fabrication,” he said.

Yu Feichen: “…?”

“After he disappeared for a long time, he produced a series of works… He painted the scene of me before the altar as well, though it wasn’t entirely faithful.”

To this, the Painter had claimed: “Your body did not move, but your soul shed one tear for what had happened — so I painted it. That too is a form of realism.”

As a work into which the Painter had poured countless hours, the painting possessed a singular, tragic, sacred power. Many people wept the instant they laid eyes on it.

The painting spread far and wide. Through the passing of stories from one mouth to the next, at some point in Landenwarren a trend of marking teardrop moles had taken hold.

Several more eras later, the trend had become tradition.

On the subject, Yu Feichen’s view was that artists were a menace.

And so the thread of the teardrop mole disappeared again — it had nothing to do with the markings of Landenwarren’s people. Now, aside from having seen it with his own eyes, there was no proof at all of its existence, and Yu Feichen nearly doubted it was anything more than his own imagination.

“What are you looking at?” Anfi said.

A god was, after all, a god. One glance and he could tell something was off about where Yu Feichen’s gaze had landed.

“Nothing,” Yu Feichen said. “Your eyelashes are out of place.”

Anfi: “?”

The wind had picked up again — wrapping someone fully in your arms was no help against it.

Yu Feichen said, “Let’s go.”

Anfi nodded. They had stayed here too long; their joints had gone stiff. Yu Feichen helped Anfi to his feet, and thought again of the two strange episodes Anfi had shown today.

He glanced at the path leading down the mountain.

The Yona Mountain visit was over — there was no need to take the vine ladder back into town. A different path, steep and difficult, led down the other side of the mountain to its base.

“Shall I carry you?” he said.

Anfi didn’t object. He silently draped himself onto Yu Feichen’s back.

A thought surfaced in Yu Feichen’s mind, but he said nothing.

The mountain path was shrouded in darkness, tree shadows all around. Light from the stars and moon filtered down, then was swallowed by the dense forest canopy.

None of this affected Yu Feichen. The only thing that had any effect on him was the person on his back. Anfi’s breath fell in shallow whispers against the side of his neck — quiet as could be, yet impossibly present.

“I forgot to ask you something,” Yu Feichen said.

Anfi: “What?”

“How did you come to be in the Eternal Night?”

There was no question that Anfi had arrived in the Eternal Night very early.

Yet he bore no resemblance to someone who had arrived as a stranger.

No one knew where the Chief God of the Eternal Day had come from, nor when his realm had first come into existence. Moving through intact worlds, taking their power, even resurrecting the dead — it was as if Anfi had been doing these things before any of the other outer gods had even been born.

To this day, there was not a second deity in the Eternal Night capable of resurrection.

Anfi’s lashes slowly lowered.

The past wound around him.

The sealed layers of memory stirred again, peeling back at one corner, and fragments from long before surfaced before his eyes.

Fate had always meant for him to recall this moment — for it was the moment his body had looked exactly as it did now, after crossing the river of the past. And the one asking the question was this person.

An aged, hoarse voice sounded in his ears.

“Look there… look behind you!”

Beneath a sky churning with black clouds, tens of thousands of armored knights and archers formed an iron formation — a wall stretching across the horizon before him.

He stood high above it, and turned to look back.

The old priest stood on white stone steps, a pool of blood spreading at his feet. An arrow had pierced through his chest. His breath heaved in rapid, labored bursts. It was from his lips that the ragged voice came.

His gaze lingered a moment on the bloodstain, then moved further. Beyond — a sea of Sleepwell Flowers, and the temple stretching on and on within.

The old priest rasped: “You dare deceive everyone… you would forsake the temple… you would abandon the sacred duty you were born with… you disregard the fate of your holy homeland and would go toward that irresistible darkness, to stand beside those people whom the light has already abandoned!”

He said: “Yes.”

“You shall bear your homeland’s curse for all eternity… from this day forward, the joy of others will be your suffering, and the suffering of others will not lessen your own. The faith and admiration of others will carve through your soul like a blade. The praises of others will pierce your heart like a dagger… The wider your dominion, the more hollow you become. The firmer your conviction, the nearer your unraveling. You are steeped in sin, beyond all forgiveness, you — cough, cough, cough!”

A violent fit of coughing broke out. After a trembling note, the aged voice shifted from fury to anguish. “I raised you… from the time you could not yet read… look there…”

——There was the temple.

Between the pure white, solemn buildings, countless obelisks rose toward the sky.

“Generation after generation, those who were like you — they rest here.”

“And you…”

“You will die without a grave to hold you.”

The old priest closed his eyes. Tears ran down, mingling with the blood.

His body fell with a crash.

The temple’s guard-soldiers screamed hoarsely: “Loose arrows! Stop him!”

For one instant the light of the sky poured down, and before the arrows left their strings, all the world went silent.

Every one of them wanted him to go no further — yet his gaze passed over ten thousand soldiers and fixed on the unknowable distance beyond, as if seeing his own final end.

On Mount Yona, in the dead quiet of the night, draped across Yu Feichen’s back, something flickered through Anfi’s eyes — a smile that was neither wholly joyful nor wholly sorrowful.

He drew his arms closer, pressing nearer to this person. His voice was very soft. “I too only… fell into the Eternal Night through a rift. Only earlier than most.”

“And your homeland?”

“It shattered long ago, I imagine.”