stjorthotic Chapter 114: Legends Were True [3]
Chapter 114: Legends Were True [3]
"Have you ever wondered... why ’status’, ’skills’, and ’classes’ are structured like a game?"
As soon as the Sovereign asked that question, Elowyn’s eyes widened.
It was a simple question. A child could have asked it. But Elowyn could not answer.
Because until the Sovereign spoke those words, she had never thought of it. Not once. Not even for a moment.
She had seen her status interface countless times. She had watched her skills grow, her class evolve, and her rank climb.
She had accepted it all as natural, as normal, as simply the way of the world.
But now she realized. She had never questioned it. Never wondered why. Never asked who made it this way.
As if she had not been allowed to think about it. As if something had been preventing her from asking.
But after hearing the Sovereign’s words, Elowyn felt something shift.
A fog that had been covering her mind began to lift, slowly, piece by piece. The haze cleared, and for the first time, she could see beyond her own perspective.
She could see how strange it truly was. How arbitrary. How... designed.
As Elowyn pondered, a hand softly ruffled her hair. Or at least, that was what she felt. She looked up.
The Sovereign stood in front of her, close enough to touch, yet still untouchable.
"Do not overthink it."
The Sovereign said and continued,
"That question is something even I have not been able to answer."
Elowyn sat in silence, processing what the Sovereign just admitted: that even she, a being of immense power, does not have all the answers.
The Sovereign added, her crimson eyes narrowing.
"But I have my suspicions, this world was not always like this. Someone made it this way. Or something."
Elowyn softly muttered,
"I see."
Then suddenly out of nowhere, Sovereign asked,
"Do you still remember the fairy tale of the Rain King?"
....
A long time ago, in a vast desert where the sun burned, and the winds carried only dust, a peasant knelt on cracked earth.
He had lost his wife and children to drought. Their graves were unmarked, swallowed by sand.
With nothing left to lose, he begged an unknown deity to bless his land with rain.
In return, he pledged himself as servant and follower.
The deity heard his plea. Rain fell for the first time in decades.
The peasant wept as water soaked into the parched soil. The deity blessed both the man and the land, then turned to leave.
But before the Deity left, he said,
"One day I will return; until then, worship me and make your people worship me. This is my price for saving your lands."
The peasant agreed without hesitation.
He took the deity’s blessing and used it to save a dying plant at the edge of his field.
Time passed.
The parched fields bloomed. Rivers swelled. For the first time in centuries, rain fell across the land.
The people, awed by the miracle, gathered around the peasant, and they crowned him their Saviour King.
When drought threatened, he summoned rain himself, using the gift he had been given.
Seasons passed. Belief shifted.
In the eyes of his people, their king was no longer merely human. He was the Deity of Rain and Harvest.
Power bred arrogance. Pride swelled.
The king removed the deity’s statues from the temples and replaced them with his own.
With newfound power and reverence, the king concealed the truth of his blessing.
He told no one of the deity. He told no one of the vow.
As generations passed, the history of Deity, who gave the blessing to the king, was erased and forgotten.
The people prayed to him now.
They worshipped his face, his name, his crown.
He never turned his tyranny against his own people; he fed them, protected them, gave them water.
But he, too, had forgotten the one who had made it all possible.
Under his rule, the kingdom grew into a great civilization. Towers touched the clouds.
Canals carried water across the desert.
The plant, which was saved by the king, still small and green, sat forgotten at the edge of the king’s garden.
Centuries later, the deity returned.
It saw the statues. It saw the worshippers bowing to a mortal king.
It saw the servant who had broken his vow and claimed the god’s place as his own.
In wrath, the deity tore at the kingdom’s foundations.
Towers cracked. Fields blackened. Waters turned foul. The rain that had once been a blessing became a curse, falling in endless, flooding sheets.
The king watched his life’s work crumble before his eyes. In defiance, he raised his power against his former master, the very blessing the deity had given him, now turned to a weapon.
For eight nights and seven days, their battle raged. Lightning split the sky. The ground shook. Rivers changed their courses.
In the end, the king fell. His body crashed into the earth.
His blood spilled onto the very plant he had saved at the beginning, the small, green thing that had never grown, never aged, never withered a single leaf.
The plant drank his blood.
The deity’s fury was not sated.
It looked upon the land and spoke a curse,
"You begged me for rain. Then rain shall be your land’s doom. A storm without end. An unyielding flood."
The kingdom drowned.
The peasant who had risen to celestial fell beneath the very blessing he once sought.
The towers crumbled. The canals overran.
The people scattered, and within a generation, the great civilization was nothing but a memory buried under vines and silence.
The land became a vast, untamed woodland, where rain fell every day and night never cleared.
"What if the king had never stopped the people from worshiping the deity?"
"How did a mere blessed mortal grow strong enough to challenge a god?"
"Did the foolish king ascend to godhood?"
No one knows the answers. But some say, if you walk deep enough into the rainy woodland, you will find a small green plant growing in a clearing.
It does not grow. It does not wither. It simply waits for the fated one.
....
Inside one of the forbidden lands, named Aranya Varsha.
Lucian Vayne and Kira Crimson, or rather, Lysanthra Mara, walked through the dense forest.
The canopy above blocked most of the sunlight, leaving the ground in a perpetual twilight.
Lysa kicked a loose stone and asked,
"Why are you telling me this story now?"
Luke did not turn his head as he led her through the winding path.
"Do you think fairy tales are real?"
Lysa raised an eyebrow.
"Huh. Are you seriously asking me that? Of course, they are fake. It is literally a bedtime story for human children."
Luke’s lips curved into a faint smile.
"Oh, really? Then how do you know it was a children’s bedtime story?"
Lysa fell silent. She did not answer. The question hung in the air, unanswered, as they walked deeper into the muddy swamp.
The silence stretched between them, broken only by the squelch of their boots in the wet earth.
"It is boring."
Lysa finally complained.
They had been walking for hours, and the worst part was that she did not know what Luke was searching for.
He had given her no destination, no explanation, only the command to follow.
Luke sighed. It was not that he wanted to hide the truth from her. It was simply that even if he told her, she would not believe him.
This was a scientific world. Even though mana and miasma were variables in the natural order, just like electricity, humanity had long since grown accustomed to them.
Mana has been commonized, studied, and integrated into daily life.
In the end, people believed what they could see. What could be proven.
He pushed the thoughts aside. To keep things lively, he asked,
"What do you think of deserts in the story?"
Lysa muttered the word under her breath.
"Desert."
The truth was, there were no deserts in their world. Not anymore.
For many generations, due to the climate and weather patterns, the great sandy wastes had vanished.
The word "desert" had become a myth, a legend from a time before recorded history.
"I have no opinion about it."
Lysa said and stated,
"Well, a place with a lack of water source and life is ’bad,’ I suppose."
Luke nodded.
"I guess so."
They continued their journey for a few more hours, the forest growing denser, the light growing dimmer.
Then, suddenly, Luke stopped.
His breathing quickened. His eyes scanned the area ahead, sharp and focused. Then, without warning, he began to run toward a specific direction.
Lysa was bewildered, but she followed closely, her boots splashing through shallow puddles.
Soon, Luke stopped. His eyes landed on a small pond.
The entire pond was covered with thick branches and vines, forming a natural dome over the water.
At the center of the pond was a small piece of land, barely large enough for a single person to stand.
Luke took one step forward and looked down at the small, red-colored plant growing on that tiny island.
Its leaves were crimson, its stem dark as dried blood, and it seemed to pulse faintly, as if it had a heartbeat of its own.
"The legends were true, the blessed plant which devoured the blood of a celestial."
"It really... existed."