Chapter 893 — Double Chains

Break the cycle.

It was an answer Gao Yang had never once anticipated, and yet the instant he heard it, countless associations flooded his mind at once, as though many scattered clues and pieces of evidence had suddenly been drawn into a single web, letting him at last vaguely grasp the outline of something.

"A cycle... what kind of cycle?" Gao Yang fixed his eyes on the light-forged eyes of the Giant Deer Amon, curiosity plain in his voice. "What kind of cycle could trap even a god?"

"We are born, we grow mighty, we watch over the world, we fall into madness... and then all returns to silence, awaiting the next cycle, over and over, without end, without meaning..." Amon's low, slow voice came like a murmur. "So then, interesting 'human,' how far has your understanding of the gods progressed?"

A storm surged in Gao Yang's heart. This was the first time he had heard from the mouth of a god those things that had until now existed only in his conjectures—and the truth was more direct than he had guessed, more irresistible. Facing Amon's counter-question, he could not help hesitating for several seconds before he spoke in a low voice: "The gods are all walking step by step into madness, and our research shows that this maddening is connected to the shifts in human thought..."

"...You have gone farther than I imagined," Amon seemed to let out a sigh. "Far enough to reach a rather dangerous depth."

"What lies one step further?" Gao Yang could not help asking.

"The truth. It may be very dangerous, and it may also solve everything. In all the history I know, no civilization has ever successfully walked out from that direction—but that does not mean the direction is a dead end..."

Gao Yang frowned. He had already noticed that this God of Nature always answered questions in a way shrouded in mist and clouds, disclosing information through metaphor and indirection at the crucial points. At first he had assumed this was simply how the creatures called "gods" spoke, but now a guess suddenly occurred to him: perhaps the Giant Deer Amon was deliberately avoiding saying certain things with His own mouth... Perhaps the moment certain things were spoken from His lips, they would bring unforeseeable changes to the future.

This was no random speculation on his part. It was because he had suddenly recalled something Amon had told him earlier: where matters concerning the gods were involved, the more one came into contact with them, the further one drifted from humanity; the more one understood, the closer one drew to godhood...

The answer to some questions was not merely an answer; the answer itself was a trial and an impact.

Read from another direction, that sentence could be explained thus: if the answer to a question was told to a mortal by a god, then the instant that mortal learned the answer, he lost the ability to solve the problem as a mortal—for he had been permanently changed by "knowledge," and had become a part of the god.

To the Gao Yang who had first arrived in this world, this would have been utterly unimaginable, illogical, sheer nonsense. But the Gao Yang of now knew—this was precisely the logic of this world.

Gao Yang calmed himself. He knew he possessed a certain "peculiarity," and that this "peculiarity" might allow him to avoid the influence of certain divine knowledge. But clearly the Giant Deer Amon was more cautious than he was. The God of Nature's indirect manner might well be a form of protection—though of course, it was also possible that this god was simply not forthcoming and had some scheme of His own. Yet even so, Gao Yang had no recourse. He did not know how to pry open a god's mouth, so he could only let the conversation continue as it was.

"There is one thing I want to know," he said, looking at Amon. "The God of Nature... was born from mortals' worship and awe of nature, was He not?"

"Yes... and no." The Giant Deer Amon spoke slowly, a note of amusement in His voice clearer than before.

The answer made the corner of Gao Yang's eye twitch instantly. Such a classic and maddening reply was the last thing he wanted to hear—but faced with a god he had no way of handling, he could only force himself to be patient. "Specifically?"

"'I' was indeed born from mortals' worship and awe of nature, and yet that 'deep sea' which holds the reverence for nature existed long before mortals were born..." Amon said evenly. "All the tendencies of this world—light and darkness, life and death, matter and void—all of them surge within that deep sea, in primordial chaos, indistinguishable from one another. It reflects upward and forms reality; and within reality mortals are born, and mortals' currents of thought reflect downward, and a portion of the elements in the deep sea become a concrete god...

"So the more accurate answer is this: the reverence for nature is eternal and self-existent, and yet it was not until a group of mortals living upon this planet began to revere the nature around them that their own, unique God of Nature... was truly born."

Gao Yang's eyes went wide. In that instant he found that his own thinking and knowledge could scarcely keep pace with what the other was telling him, so that the tangled, complex thoughts in his mind churned for a long while before he broke the silence as though speaking to himself: "The mortals of this planet's own... unique God of Nature?"

Amon laughed softly, and asked in return, quite casually: "If there is life on other planets, do you think the gods shaped by those living things according to their cultural traditions could possibly be like Me?"

Of course not!

Like a bolt of lightning across his mind, Gao Yang felt a fog that had long shrouded him suddenly split apart. He remembered that he had once vaguely entertained doubts of this sort, and yet only now did he realize where the sharpest, most fundamental point of the question lay—

This universe is vast. It has other galaxies, other planets, and on those distant worlds whose environments differ utterly from the Loren Continent, life might also arise.

The Loren Continent faced the threat of the magic tide, faced the predicament of the gods, and Gao Yang had always fixed his eyes on such things. But if he extended his thinking outward—if the gods and the magic tide were both products of natural evolution under the fundamental laws of this universe, if... the laws of this universe were "uniform" and "common"—then... did magic tides and gods also exist on other planets?

Of course, another, more chilling conjecture might overturn that possibility: perhaps the planet on which the Loren Continent lay existed within a vast artificial environment, possessed of an environment and natural laws utterly different from the rest of the universe. In that case the magic tide was unique to this place, and the gods were likewise unique to this place. Considering those ancient devices drifting above this planet, that possibility was not out of the question...

Thoughts rose and fell in Gao Yang's mind, but Amon seemed to have seen through his reflections, and an ethereal, holy voice passed directly into Gao Yang's mind, cutting short his further speculation—

"The laws of the universe are uniform and consistent."

Gao Yang started from his musings and asked urgently: "In other words, magic tides will also appear on other planets, and so long as a civilization exists, gods corresponding to it will be born anywhere in this universe—so long as currents of thought exist, gods will exist forever, like a natural phenomenon..."

Amon answered with silence, as though tacitly assenting.

"But you destroyed your own divine seat," Gao Yang pressed on. "You just said that no new God of Nature has been born..."