Chapter 1510 — The Lady of the Night Is Very Active

The Triad of Abundance—masters of agriculture, the earth, and renewal, and a rare case of "sister deities"—commanded a broad following, though their church as a whole tended toward the mild and the withdrawn. The mortals of the world believed that these three goddesses held every authority pertaining to the domain of farming and crops, and that the greening of spring, the growth of things upon the earth, and the patterns of many a shift in weather were all bound up with the Three. And because of these offices, the Three belonged among the gods to that class which is unskilled in battle and averse to strife.

But They could run very fast.

The Lady of the Night felt she had never in all her life seen figures that could run so fast. She had only just laid a hand on Flora's shoulder, only just greeted the other in a kindly, friendly manner, when several shrieks reached her ears—and then the three goddesses, woman-headed and deer-bodied, burst from the garden like three bolts of lightning, smashed through the bramble barrier, and hurtled toward the border of the divine realm. What was more, with perfect tacit understanding they fled in three different directions; in the blink of an eye, all three figures had vanished.

Fortunately, however, the boundary between light and shadow is everywhere. For an ancient god who had survived from the age of the Voyager to the present day, and who now had alien technology to back her, the little tricks these young deities used to conceal themselves were beneath contempt—even upon the enemy's own ground. The information-stabilizing anchor woven by the anchor generator let the Lady of the Night ignore the effects of the "alien divine realm" upon her person; and the three goddesses, hidden deep within their realm, were ferreted out one after another within a few minutes.

"Relax, all of you," said the Lady of the Night beside the long table at the center of the Garden of Harvest. She had shrunk her form until she was about the same size as the three Abundance sisters before her, and seated herself at a distance that would not provoke their alarm, a gentle smile upon her face. "I have only come for a visit. Surely you need not treat a guest who comes knocking so coldly..."

The three half-human, half-deer goddesses exchanged glances, still shaken to the core. In the eyes of mortals they were lofty gods enthroned on high, yet even as gods the sisters had never encountered such an outlandish affair! What was this? They had been holding a feast at home in perfect peace, eating roast meat and chatting, offending no one and provoking no one, when suddenly someone smashed through the barrier of their divine realm, and an ancient god of power so monstrous and uncanny that it defied description charged straight into the Garden of Harvest. At the eleventh hour the three sisters had barely managed to flee and hide themselves, and within a few minutes of hiding they had been caught and hauled back one by one...

To be fair, these past years the mortal world had changed swiftly, mortal hearts had grown cunning, and the currents of thought and the hosts of projections in the deep sea had never ceased their turmoil. The three goddesses had foreseen a precarious future and made some mental preparation for unforeseen, unprecedented great events—but their mental preparation had not included this... And they were certain their "neighbors" had never considered such a case either!

The awkward and tense standoff lasted a moment; at last it was Gaia, the eldest of the Three, earliest born and most steady of temperament, who first broke the silence. She studied the unfamiliar deity with the scepter before her, her expression unusually grave: "You are the Lady of the Night."

"Ah, so you can recognize me—that makes things much easier," the Lady of the Night said with a faint smile, looking rather pleased that Gaia, Mother Earth, had been able to identify her. "But I truly did not expect that, after so many years apart from the mortal world, there should still be young deities who can recognize me at first sight... How did you judge it?"

"One who wields the authority of shadow, with power such as yours—it could only be you," Gaia said, lowering her eyelids slightly. "There is no mightier or purer sovereign of shadow in this world. But I am surprised that you should appear here so suddenly, and in... such a manner."

"Mightiest and purest sovereign of shadow..." Hearing these words, so full of reverence, the Lady of the Night wore a rather peculiar expression. She shook her head gently. "To bestow such an appraisal upon a planet's 'god' trapped within gravity may well be presumption. Against the vast scale of the cosmos, I think none of us is fit to be called any sort of 'sovereign'... But that is no great matter—we are all limited by our own level of understanding of the world. As for my appearing here..."

The ancient god who wielded the authority of shadow suddenly smiled, her gaze sweeping slowly over the three "juniors": "Are you still wondering, even now, why I can exist so stably within your domain, and why to this moment I have not been met with the instinctive rejection and counterattack of your realm's laws?"

Flora instinctively studied the Lady of the Night more closely. She had noticed from the first that the other's figure seemed veiled in a fine, dense radiance, within which many tiny points of light flashed rapidly—as though two forces were locked in fierce conflict upon the ancient god's very surface, and in that conflict maintained a delicate balance. Clearly, the currents of thought that constituted the divine realm had already identified the anomalous intruder within its domain; yet for some reason, every counterattack the realm launched was being nullified.

"I have employed a few small measures to evade the repulsion effect of an alien divine realm. This allows me to enter another god's domain for a limited time without being affected," the Lady of the Night said mildly. "So my time is limited. Let us attend to business first."

"...Business?" Eve, Goddess of the Harvest, wore a wary, guarded look. "What exactly do you intend to do?"

"To help you," the Lady of the Night said, her expression turning serious. Her gaze fell upon Flora, youngest of the three sisters. "Has the separation of your human nature and your divine nature already shown its signs?"

"...How could you know that?!" After a brief moment of stupefaction, Flora could not help but cry out. "You—"

"I live in seclusion, but that does not mean I am wholly ignorant of the world's changes—especially those that occur upon the plane of thought. I have my particular channels of observation," the Lady of the Night explained vaguely, plainly not intending to let the three goddesses before her know too many details. "I wish only to confirm one thing: has the separation of your human nature and your divine nature begun? And to what stage has it progressed?"

The Triad of Abundance exchanged glances. After several seconds of hesitation and deliberation, the eldest sister, Gaia, seemed at last to have decided something. She drew a soft breath and slowly spread her hands.

In the next instant, some change came over the goddess's figure all at once. Her solid body abruptly turned illusory and blurred, the outlines at its edges dissolving into trembling phantoms in the air—as though two figures were superimposed upon one another at the same time, and that superimposition had now begun to slip out of alignment. As the deviation widened, another "self" at last appeared just behind and beside Gaia's hazy, ghostly body.

A goddess Gaia with a blurred face, cold as a statue, calmly looking down upon the whole of her divine realm.