Chapter 131 — The Eternal Slate

Some say that the boundary between life and death can utterly transform a person; others say that those who survive a brush with death tend to see things with uncommon clarity. On both counts, Gao Yang believed, Viscount Andrew was at this very moment intimately acquainted.

During the days he had spent under the cultist's magical control, Viscount Andrew had remained lucid throughout. His consciousness had been trapped within a steadily weakening shell of a body, enduring day after day the corrosion and torment of the cultist's frenzied thoughts. He had watched helplessly as "he himself" issued the decree of martial law across the city, as his family and servants in the castle were seized by the cultist, as this glorious ancestral seat sank day by day into darkness and distortion. In those days, which felt as long as a hundred years, he had come to understand that the King, so distant beyond the horizon, could not save him; that the little chapels in the town, which claimed to enjoy the gods' favor, could not save him; that not even the Leslie family's centuries of glorious inheritance could save him.

In the end, the one who had saved him was, astonishingly, that ancient duke from seven hundred years ago, who had come up from the lower reaches of the Whitewater River.

Fate was a truly inexplicable thing. A bold "investment" made months ago had now, in a manner utterly beyond imagining, yielded an extraordinarily generous return—a life.

In the lord's council hall, which now gaped with a great hole, Viscount Andrew sat in his capacious chair, somewhat recovered in strength, and with a bitter smile told the truth of how disaster had been invited: "Because a new crystal vein was discovered in the mine, I sent men to sink a new shaft. During the digging the shaft collapsed, and the overseer reported back that beneath the collapsed tunnel they had found a vast open space..."

At this, Gao Yang's heart stirred: so this was how Viscount Andrew had discovered the secrets beneath his own domain?

Still, his earlier judgment had not been wrong—the Viscount had indeed known nothing of those Gondo ruins before. His discovery that there was another world beneath the mine was a recent affair...

And Viscount Andrew's account continued: "They were ancient ruins—old walls and supporting structures of a stone-like material, broad as the colonnades of a palace rather than cramped, narrow tunnels. Most of them had collapsed and been buried, but some parts remained intact. I sent men to explore the ruins, and later they found a chamber that had been tightly sealed off. The magical seal on the chamber had failed, so the mages in my domain easily disabled the mechanisms inside. Afterwards we found a number of antiquities in there... among them a fragment of the Eternal Slate."

The Eternal Slate was no unfamiliar term to Gao Yang. It was said that all the secrets of the gods in this world came from that mysterious Slate. In the ancient era, before mortals had ever come into contact with the divine, the Eternal Slate had been a single whole. Later, the sages of humanity and the other races discovered it, and in the instant they touched it, knowledge of the gods poured into their minds—the inheritance of divine arts, the distribution of divine stations, the names and offices of the gods, and so on. And those first sages who came into contact with the Eternal Slate became the earliest "Awakened" among mortals, the first Popes and Holy Sees.

The Eternal Slate itself, not long after, was shattered into pieces—as though the gods were unwilling to let mortals come into contact with divine grace beyond what they could bear. The Slate, possessed of boundless power, became countless fragments and scattered across the world of men.

In the years that followed, the great sects that rose with meteoric speed among mortals found some of these fragments. Among them were the now most powerful Church of the God of War, the Church of the God of Holy Light, and the Church of the Three Gods of Abundance. They regarded the fragments as holy relics and kept them in their respective sanctuaries; only the highest-ranking members of the churches had the chance to touch the Slate and receive revelation. Though the Slate was broken, no small amount of its residual power remained—mortals who touched it could grasp knowledge pertaining to the gods. And the reason several orthodox, powerful churches had been able to maintain their strength unbroken through the centuries was, by half, owed to these fragments of the Slate.

According to the churches' own accounts, those "sacred knowledges" had all been taken into the keeping of the great sects, and the Slate fragments were all currently in the hands of several powerful churches. But Gao Yang knew very well that what the churches had collected were only the largest few fragments. Who knew how many tiny shards were still scattered throughout the world? Some were secretly kept by small and middling churches; others had fallen into the hands of kings, dukes, even great collectors. Only, the "divine grace" borne by these small shards seemed negligible—far from enough to raise a person's divine art rank or grant complete knowledge of the gods. That was why they could persist half-openly among the common folk without the great sects hunting them back with all their might.

What Gao Yang had not expected was that Viscount Andrew should be lucky enough (or unlucky enough) to find a fragment of the Eternal Slate scattered abroad.

And hard on the heels of that, his thoughts turned to the ancient ruins in the Dark Mountains, to the experiments of a thousand years ago that Nikoxi's egg had mentioned, to those "samples unearthed locally," to those conjectures about the "godfiends."

So then—that Slate fragment had been discovered by the Mage Order of the old Gondo Empire and buried in these underground ruins? Could it be that the "locally excavated samples" those researchers spoke of were fragments of the Eternal Slate? No, surely not. Valuable as the Eternal Slate was, the Gondo Empire of those days had stood at the zenith of its power; the great churches had not dared confront imperial authority head-on. Gao Yang was confident that the emperor of the Spark Era had kept a few Eternal Slates on hand to roll about like wenwan walnuts. So the Eternal Slate fragment buried deep in this land was perhaps only one part of what had been unearthed back then...

Gao Yang's thoughts raced, but it was all the work of an instant. A look of precisely calibrated astonishment came over his face as he regarded Viscount Andrew: "So the cultists had their eye on the Eternal Slate in your possession... That makes sense. The Order of the End of All Things evolved out of the Church of the Gloaming, and they have preserved their twisted faith; an obsession with divine relics would be only natural. But how did they come by this information?"

"My steward," Viscount Andrew said with a bitter smile after a moment's silence. "I should have known. When he brought me all those potions, when he showed his understanding of the occult—I should have known then. He had been one of the Order of the End of All Things all along!"

Gao Yang was taken aback, and then recalled who that steward was—mainly he recalled that Amber had stolen a watch from the man, which had left a deep impression.

Beside him, Amber was also stroking her chin and muttering: "Well, then it looks like I don't need to give the watch back."