Ascension Ritual
“From here on, what you need to do is raise your soul’s rank.”
After I told her I was willing to cooperate, Edel laid out her plan for me.
“What’s rank?”
“Authority to seize greater power. The right to step beyond providence. Proof of existence…. There are other ways to put it, but that probably doesn’t mean much to you, does it?”
“So it’s like a realm?”
“Not exactly. But if it’s hard to understand, I suppose you can think of it that way. Realm and rank are very closely related. Does that make a little more sense?”
“No. I still don’t get it. So why do I need to raise this rank thing?”
“Because you have to raise your rank if you want to defeat the Dimensional Beasts.”
“...Just keep talking.”
Every time Edel finished a sentence, another question rose in my head, but if I started challenging every single point, I felt like we’d be here forever.
She might chat at her own pace and then vanish on a whim the way she had the first time we met, and I wouldn’t even know what had happened.
She claimed that would never happen, of course, but unfortunately I didn’t trust Edel all that much.
“I told you I lowered the world’s rank and placed Silia under Earth’s authority so we could stop the Dimensional Beasts. I made it sound easy, but it was anything but. It’s one giant mass of energy—a world—being placed beneath another mass of energy of equal size. There’s no way that could be simple. If you make one wrong adjustment, both worlds could be ripped apart so completely that not even their shapes remain.”
That had been possible only because the world of Silia had already been invaded by Dimensional Beasts and was no longer in a complete state, and because even then Edel had not lost her administrator privileges.
With Edel, who still held administrator authority, cooperating fully, Earth’s administrator had been able to incorporate the shrunken mass of energy that was Silia into her management.
“Being subordinate to another world isn’t automatically a good thing. To use an example: think of a higher dimension as a person standing atop a very high waterfall, and a subordinate world... a lower dimension, as someone standing below it. The one above can affect the one below in any number of ways, but is it really easy for the one below to affect the one above?”
Even if you hurled a rock with all your strength, it would never reach; it would only fall short. And climbing upstream through the raging current was even more absurd.
“Can’t you just use Sword Qi?”
“Like you said, you can fling Sword Qi, or cast magic, or even brute-force your way upstream against the torrent with a strong body. But those aren’t things ordinary people can do, are they? Those are things you can only do when you’ve got rank.”
“Hmm....”
She had said it was the right to step beyond providence, hadn’t she?
Listening to her explanation, I thought I might finally understand a little.
In short, whether it was a sword or magic, rank was the thing that gave you the means to influence what was above you?
...Mm.
She was probably reading my thoughts, and yet she didn’t outright deny it, so maybe I wasn’t too far off.
“Would you please not use divine power for something so trivial...? Anyway, affecting a higher dimension from a lower one is that difficult.... No, it’s even harder than that.”
“I understand that much. So? What does that have to do with me raising my rank?”
“Geez, this is embarrassing as hell....”
Edel muttered under her breath.
“Until now, the Dimensional Beasts and I stood on equal footing, or maybe I was a little above them. But after losing to them and becoming subordinate to Earth’s lower dimension, I ended up beneath them. Even a slight advantage is still an advantage. In the Silia dimension, I can’t deal with them effectively. That’s also why I made the whole thing into a game.”
“So you used higher-dimensional beings to hunt lower-dimensional enemies.”
“Exactly! You understood that faster than I expected.”
“...Expected?”
I narrowed my eyes at the way she said it, as if she’d assumed I wouldn’t be able to follow.
That sounded weirdly familiar....
“Oh, I remember.”
That was how windbags with full lungs of hot air always talked. They could sense mana, sure, but they were too stupid to wield magic, so they just swung swords around instead.
Of course, whenever I heard that sort of nonsense, I’d kindly correct their misunderstanding.
As a bonus, I’d also straighten out the backs they’d bent rotten from sitting at desks all day, and they’d be thrilled to death about it.
Could Edel be one of those types too?
“Ahem! That’s not what matters right now, is it? All right, from here on I’ll explain how you can raise your rank.”
Ignoring my sharp stare, Edel awkwardly changed the subject.
And what came out of her mouth was the ridiculous self-destructive act known as the Ascension Ritual.
So she’d gone from talking about some trump card sword or whatever to casually recommending suicide, and now she was even suggesting Laxia, a famous suicide hotspot.
I stared at Edel in disbelief and asked, “You want me to do something like that?”
That made no sense. None at all.
You could find plenty of historical records and old documents about idiots who tried to force their way to a higher realm by flooding their bodies with more mana than they could handle.
Why idiots?
Because those same documents also recorded how they died.
Maybe there were successful cases that never made it into the records, but at the very least, I’d never seen a documented success.
If something like that could easily raise your realm, then every dog and cow out there would be running around with a Master badge.
“Relax! Your soul already endured the whirlpool of the dimension, so you should be able to endure that level of trial too.... In theory!”
“Wow. That’s really reassuring.”
For someone talking about theory, I had a lot of memories of things going horribly wrong, so the sarcasm came out naturally.
“—That was a joke! I’d never actually do that to our precious little Canaria. Besides, this is for the one and only sword in the world. Why would I do that?”
“I only said it because it sounded like exactly the kind of thing you’d do.”
The Edel I had seen so far had been nothing but light and casual, so even if I wanted to trust her, I couldn’t exactly force it.
Just because I’d decided to cooperate with Edel didn’t mean I was going to gamble my life like chips on a table.
If, a few months—or even a few weeks—ago, someone had offered me the chance to “give you the power to tear snakes apart and kill them, though you might die if your luck is bad,” I would’ve taken it.
But not now.
“It’s beautiful to cherish life. That’s a privilege only living beings can have.”
“If you’re going to start spouting off a sermon about humanity, could you maybe do it by yourself later? I’m not the type to think humans are beautiful, so I can’t exactly agree with you.”
“It’s not a hymn to humanity, it’s a hymn to life. But if our dear Canaria wants me to be quiet, then I’ll be quiet.”
Having said that, Edel actually shut her mouth.
...And that’s exactly why I can’t trust her.
At this rate, she’d probably go, “Oh! Looks like I’ve run out of divine power.... I did use a lot, huh~” and disappear, and then I’d have to come all the way back here to find her again.
That kind of miserable, annoying mess was not something I wanted any part of, so I hurried her along.
“Just explain it already.”
“All right?”
The moment I said that, Edel started chattering as if she’d never once closed her mouth.
At first I listened with little interest, half-distracted, but as she kept laying out her arguments and supporting evidence, I slowly started to understand why she was so confident.
“You raise your rank, the poor kids are freed from their mission, and I recover my power. Isn’t that exactly what ‘killing three birds with one stone’ is for?”
“Yeah. Except for the part where, if it fails, everything goes to hell.”
“If you’ll die just by doing nothing and die if you fail too, then wouldn’t it be better to try something before you die? You’re not the kind of person who’d just lie down and let yourself be crushed, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
Being helplessly trampled had been more than enough during childhood.
“All right. I’ll do it.”
“Excellent choice.”
Even so, the possibility of failure—and the penalty for failure—still remained.
But if Edel’s explanation was correct, it wasn’t exactly some absurdly reckless gamble either.
And, as she said, there wasn’t exactly another method available, so I couldn’t really complain.
“But is it really okay to pin the fate of the world on just me?”
“If you think of it not as one ordinary human, but as a hero who crossed worlds to save the world, wouldn’t that make sense?”
“Ha. A hero, huh.”
I let out a laugh so dry it was almost wrung out of me.
A hero. That title had absolutely nothing to do with me.
Still, Edel didn’t seem to have meant it all that seriously, so maybe I should leave that there.
There were still far too many things I wanted to ask.
“You said that if I raise my rank, I’ll be able to interfere with the higher dimension.”
“Mm-hmm. I already told you that, didn’t I? ...Aha, so that was what you were curious about~?”
...
Edel, having read my thoughts, curved her eyes mischievously and flashed an utterly shameless expression.
With a smile that suggested she understood perfectly, she nodded.
“Of course, you’ll be able to do what you’re thinking of too.”
“I told you not to read my mind whenever you like.”
“If you don’t like me reading your mind whenever I like, then hurry up and raise your rank.”
If I successfully completed this so-called Ascension Ritual, would I be able to hit that infuriating goddess too?
If so, I felt like I could go through with the ritual in a pretty good mood.
Tsk. I clicked my tongue.
“What if people lose interest in this world and leave, and the game dies? Then won’t this world disappear too?”
“Don’t worry. Even if it fails, it’ll remain in lower-dimensional form, and if it looks like interest is dropping, we can just apply some suggestion. Something like, ‘You find this game fun and want to keep playing it...’ That sort of thing. And that won’t happen anyway.”
How could anyone possibly get tired of the world I made when it was this appealing?
Edel’s face was full of pride as she said it.
“Appealing, huh...?”
It wasn’t a word that especially resonated with me.
I tilted my head, then shook it off.
No. It didn’t matter.
What Edel thought about it wasn’t my concern.
From the moment she explained her plan, there had been one thing I’d been most curious about.
I asked Edel the question I’d been holding back all this time.
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