Chapter 1536 — "The Solution"

"This is Amber, my bodyguard."

Gao Yang's voice rang out calm and level, and it gave the cowering Amber behind him a bit of much-needed courage. She lifted her head and glanced at the three half-human, half-deer goddesses before her, forced a smile onto her face that was uglier than crying, and raised a hand in greeting: "Hello there..."

The corner of Gaia, Goddess of the Earth's, mouth visibly twitched. The smile she squeezed out looked even more like weeping than Amber's had, and she waved back: "Hello..."

The moment Amber heard that "hello" delivered with such formal deference, her fear evaporated on the spot. She practically floated upward, eyebrows taking flight—and Gao Cen caught that instantaneous change in her expression at once. He gave her shoulder a quiet nudge. "What are you so smug about? That was obviously a slip of the tongue—she was talking to the one *behind* you."

Having said his piece, Gao Yang turned his attention back to the Earth Goddess before him. He cleared his throat twice to draw her notice, then found his gaze drifting to her face despite himself. After a moment's hesitation he could hold back no longer: "Perhaps you three should wipe the blood off your faces first? Tend to those head wounds, or something..."

He had noticed it the instant they met—the blood running down all three goddesses' faces—and in that same instant his mind had conjured up a thousand wild explanations. And by the look of things, the three of them had come running all this way to find him exactly like this, heads lumped and half their faces smeared red. Truly, the scene could hardly have been more bizarre. Gao Yang flattered himself that he had seen a great deal of the world in his time, but scenes of such refreshingly grotesque originality could be counted on one hand. If he really had to dig for a comparison, the only thing that came close in sheer strangeness was the business of the Dragon God turning into a Tea-Egg Spirit—but at least Madam Egg had gone through a gradual transformation, nothing like these three goddesses showing up at his door wearing what amounted to second-degree crippling injuries. That was a whole different level of stimulation...

Gao Heng knew that a similar exchange had taken place not long ago. Amoen's eyebrows rose instinctively at the words, while Gaia, evidently of a gentler temper, kept her mild, easy smile. "These wounds are the result of shadow divinity boring into us. Only time will heal them, slowly. But please, do not worry—though they look rather severe, they are mere flesh wounds. Pay them no mind."

Gao Yang very nearly said, *Easy for you to say, but what about the people standing here looking at you?*—yet on second thought he kept the words to himself, because he had a feeling that pursuing this topic could only grow stranger and stranger. At the same time, the Earth Goddess's answer confirmed a great deal of what he had pieced together recently, which let him force his attention onto the matter at hand: "So... you really have met Lady Night, and those wounds are her doing?"

The three goddesses exchanged a glance. The Goddess of Harvest gave a slight nod. "You truly do know a great many things. Lord Amoen said you might well be the wisest and bravest mortal in this world, and the one most thoroughly versed in the affairs of the gods. It seems he was right."

"I may know more than you imagine," Gao Yang said, eyes smiling. As he spoke he fought to ignore the grotesque spectacle of three beautiful ladies with blood seeping from their heads. "For instance, I know that what stands before me is not the complete Triad of Abundance—you are the human halves of the Triad of Abundance, aren't you? Lady Night found some way to unbind your humanity, and your divinity is still fixed upon your thrones, answering the mortal world's calls like so many answering machines."

Eve finally showed a flicker of surprise. After a moment's consideration she nodded. "That is so. We did not expect you to know even this much. Then it seems we can save ourselves a great deal of explanation and get straight to the point."

"Then let us get straight to the point. What brings you here?" Gao Cen looked gravely at the three ladies. "If our guess is right, you had already been trying to make contact with the mortal world before this. Those 'phantom plants' at the edge of this courtyard must be your doing, no? Among all the gods of the world, you three seem to have been the first to act."

"They are indeed ours," said Flora, Goddess of Spring, with a nod. "We mentioned this to Lord Amoen just now—it was precisely the mortal world's active efforts that loosened the gods' bonds somewhat, and the moment we sisters sensed that loosening, we made a bold attempt. Only at the time the 'loosening' was still very slight; all we could do was leave a few 'traces' outside the divine realm. And since the Shadow Realm serves as a kind of buffer zone between the mortal world and the divine realm, and Lord Amoen's power is connected to ours in some measure, we chose this place.

"Our thinking at the time was simple. We merely wished to send some signal to the mortal world, to let you know your efforts had begun to bear fruit. And Lady Night's appearance... that was sudden for us as well."

Here Flora could not resist another glance at Amber, then quickly looked away and turned a serious face to Gao Yang. "By Lady Night's account, it was precisely the 'Divine Authority Council's' correct 'handling' that opened a breach in the chains binding the gods—one that could be broken. That was how She found the opportunity to intervene. She amplified the 'results' of the mortal world's impact upon the chains of divine authority and severed the connection between our divine halves and our human halves."

"How exactly did She do it?" Gao Yang asked the question that had never stopped nagging at him. By now he was utterly certain that Lady Night's method of solving problems really was a simple, brutal "raise the club and bring it down"—and yet how could a method so simple and brutal as to be almost comical have succeeded in cutting apart the gods' divinity from their humanity? Considering the far-reaching consequences of all this, he had to get to the bottom of it now. "Did She really... and pardon my bluntness... did She really just beat the lot of you up?"

This time even Gaia, the steadiest and most composed of the three sisters, could not keep a hint of something strange from surfacing on her face. The corner of her mouth twitched slightly, and she fought to hold her expression. "In terms of the process... that is roughly what happened. But She explained a very persuasive principle to us—She was using a Pathfinder device called an 'Anchor Generator' to 'cut' us. According to Lady Night's description, an Anchor Generator can deliver a shock against the projections of thought-tides, and divinity and humanity respond in completely different ways when faced with such a shock.

"Divinity operates according to reason and rule. Its first instinct is to preserve the office itself; therefore 'protecting its stable connection to the divine throne' is divinity's priority response. Humanity, by contrast, is rich in emotion, and when threatened it changes in more complex and violent ways; therefore 'avoiding danger and minimizing harm' is humanity's priority response. Under normal circumstances divinity and humanity are bound together, and the latter cannot oppose the former. But now the Divine Authority Council has already chiseled a crack into that chain, so the powerful shock released by the Anchor Generator was enough to tear the two halves of a god apart..."