Chapter 768 — The Birth of a God

"The secret of how gods are born... perhaps it lies hidden within Sandbox One," Gao Yang said in a firm voice. "If the shadow of divine power truly stands behind the 'Upper Narrator Church,' then the very concept of god... will be overturned from its very foundations."

"It is not that gods created humans, but that humans created gods..." Pi Yun murmured to himself, when his hand suddenly twitched and several whiskers were once again yanked out.

Virodai, who held a platinum-white scepter with a faint holy light wreathing his form, had been silent since a moment ago, seemingly sunk in long thought. Only now did he suddenly raise his head. "This... is in fact one of the hypotheses behind the Defiance Plan."

"You once speculated in this direction?" Gao Yang looked at Virodai in surprise. "You speculated that gods are in fact born from the process of human faith?"

"We did not speculate so deeply, so directly. But we did speculate that human faith—or the shared currents of thought among a great multitude of mortals—would to some degree influence the activities of gods. Yet this conjecture was too shocking, and it could neither be proven nor disproven—or rather, the difficulty of proving or disproving it was so high as to be nearly impossible. So until the collapse of the Gondor Empire, this remained nothing more than a conjecture."

"But now the bold attempt of the Dreaming Ones will likely prove your conjecture of those years..." Wright said with a sigh. "It's truly unimaginable—those gods that inspire fear and awe in mortals are, in essence, things created by mortals?"

"Do not draw conclusions on that account, and even less should you grow blindly confident and underestimate 'gods,'" Virodai said gently. "The faith of billions of living beings is projected into some dimension beyond our comprehension and becomes a god. The changes wrought in that process already exceed our understanding. Perhaps gods truly are produced by mortal faith, but we are not yet qualified or capable of calling them our 'creations'... Perhaps we ought rather to regard it as a terrifying, uncontrollable, yet inevitable 'natural phenomenon.'"

"A natural phenomenon..." Gao Yang could not help repeating the phrase in his mind, lost in thought.

Then he nodded. "Indeed, as Virodai says, perhaps it is a kind of natural phenomenon, and... an inevitable one."

Faith and religion may almost be called an inevitable stage of social activity.

Civilization will always have its periods of weakness and impotence. Mortals emerged from ignorance and came to face this mysterious, unknown, and perilous world, to face a nature both incomprehensible and inscrutably mighty. As intelligent beings possessed of spirit and reason, they could hardly fail to feel awe toward nature, nor to feel fear or reverence toward those natural phenomena they could not explain.

And in the journey from the unknown toward the known, in the attempt to comprehend all things in the world, mortals would surely strive to fashion explanations for those things that inspire their awe and their fear.

In an age when knowledge was scarce, power feeble, and civilization still in its swaddling clothes, these explanations... would inevitably come to point toward gods, or something of the like.

Inside that sealed Sandbox One, in that artificial world that had run on for countless centuries, the inhabitants must surely have faced the same question: Where did we come from? Who created this world?

Perhaps some "prophet" had accidentally glimpsed the streams of data behind the world; perhaps some adventurer had strayed to the sandbox's very edge. They must have been struck with unspeakable terror by the vast, chaotic sea of minds beyond the world, and seen the script running behind it all and the records of commands left by the operators.

And so they arrived at an explanation for their own world: it was the "higher narrators" who created all of this.

And then, there truly came to be "higher narrators."

"The Dreaming Ones were brilliant soul-engineering technicians, excellent researchers, but unfortunately they fixed their eyes only on the technical domain and never understood how a society runs," Gao Yang said, shaking his head, his tone tinged with regret. "Had they studied the mechanisms by which a society operates, studied every stage of a civilization's development, then even if they could not have foreseen that Sandbox One would spiral out of control, they would at least have foreseen that the emergence of 'religious activity' inside Sandbox One was inevitable, and taken precautions and made contingency plans for it."

For a moment the conference room fell rather quiet.

Though everyone present knew of the Defiance Project, though everyone present had, to one degree or another, taken part in Gao Yang's plans to defy the gods and "betray the way," what they were discussing today still came as too great a shock to them all.

Each person was earnestly digesting it; each person was repeatedly testing every link in those hypotheses.

Pi Yun pressed a hand to his chin, carefully repairing his beard as he spoke: "If that is truly the case, if a 'god' has been made inside Sandbox One... this is a matter that likely cannot be contained. The deer that the All-Ending will create, we can still deal with by cannon fire or by the legion of the sea-wraiths, but a god operating within a dream—how does one contend with that?"

"No need to be so pessimistic just yet," Gao Yang said calmly. "Even if that thing really is a god or 'god-like,' it has only just been born, and it is still trapped inside a dream. So long as we can figure out its mechanism, it will not be hard to deal with. And the Dreaming Ones, for their own survival, will certainly throw everything they have into resolving this crisis."

Pi Yun's face was full of worry, and he could not help twisting his beard hard: "Ah... I never should have listened to Amber back then. Not a moment's peace in my old age..."

The sigh faded, and the old druid looked down at the beard he had just pulled loose in his hand, his face growing even more careworn.

"Then just stop grafting it back on," Wright said with some concern from across the table. "I don't think it'll reattach anymore."

"...Ah..."