Chapter 54
The Outer God compiled the three memories at once and set about editing them.
She cut away every emotion and every scrap of the past tangled up with them, and what remained was far lighter than the memory she had first been carrying. Lighter meant she could send it faster, and to far more people. So she pressed a little of it into everyone.
Even when she had planted Yasle's memory, not many had accepted it and summoned her. This time was no different. Hyungkesuni had blocked it, of course, and yet the place with the most people still made the most attempts. In the other worlds there was one person at most, and even that one had already been driven all the way to the bottom and clawed back up again. There was simply too much to prepare before a summoning like that could be performed.
It was like taking up TRPGs as a hobby back in Korea: a pastime fit for unsociable people that nevertheless demanded a great deal of sociability to actually pursue. A fundamental, glaring contradiction. Summoning the Outer God from another world, then, truly took a very long time.
But to the Outer God, time was nothing particular. In truth it was an ability she had gained only after blessing a great many people. She could not turn time backward, but she could perceive the speed of each person's time as something different. Within a single world, one flow of time was shared. Between different worlds, that was no problem at all.
So she sent the book. Between the chapters, of course, she slipped in a little advertisement for herself: summon me, and I will grant a blessing. The same trick as a mid-roll ad on a video site. Imagine that ad popping up in the middle of an online lecture. The Outer God was, without question, an evil god.
And yet someone sat through every last one of those curse-worthy lectures and, in the end, succeeded in calling her. The one who received the blessing had already fallen to the bottom to begin with, and so even through an ordeal like that they were desperate enough to call.
A slender fishing line drops toward the surface beneath the night sky.
The Outer God smiled and reached an arm out for it. But there was one thing she had fundamentally misunderstood. This technique was not meant to call the Outer God. By nature, it was a technique for calling an evil god — for lowering a hook to draw in the monsters that lurked near the surface. Not beneath the water. Above it. The one who had made the technique in the first place had taken the surface for the floor, and so the more capable a person was, the better they could call a monster that crawled along that floor.
It was not the Outer God who seized the line. A great mass of light, relatively close to the surface, caught it and rose. Measured from the heights of the night sky, that mass of light was on the floor, but it sat far too high for her arm to reach. She watched the light climb blankly upward, and then it struck her: she was beneath the surface.
She had clearly fallen from above, at the start. But now she was under the water and inside that world full of light at the same time, existing in both places at once, joined as one. Then where did the world full of light begin, and where did beneath the surface begin?
Quieting a heart full of violent rage, she slowly examined herself. One knows oneself because the other exists. Only when there is another can one become aware of oneself. Like a baby that had been lying in a bed, crawling for the first time — and, in doing so, coming to perceive a wider world — the Outer God took a single step forward.
Her consciousness followed her body upward. Very far. All the way to that high place. A body thin as thread climbed into the heights of the night sky, and she realized that the sky she had thought was only dotted with stars was nothing of the sort. There was light beyond counting. But it was gathered so densely that from a distance it looked like a single light. Like looking at a galaxy, she thought.
To her eyes, a transparent bubble enclosed the place where the light had gathered, and her thread-like body had gone inside it. No. She soon revised the thought. Not a bubble. A glass bottle. Inside the transparent bottle, countless stars had gathered, and several of them were tied to her thread.
There was one reason the bubble had become a bottle in her mind. The bottle had a crack. The thread whose end was joined to the light passed straight through the transparent wall, but the part of her body whose end was not connected had entered through the crack. She understood, then, that the transparent sphere was a world, and that the lights inside it were people. She was looking at a world from outside it.
The pity of it was that the bottle seemed to hold its heat; from the outside she could feel no warmth at all. Wondering just how much warmth might be in there, she shivered in the cold. That did not mean she could take the warmth at once. She put her strength into it, and the bottle did not so much as tremble. Instead the crack on its surface began to shrink with alarming speed. Startled, she let go, and the crack stopped — or rather, more precisely, went on closing, very slowly. By instinct she understood that she lacked the power to break this bottle. Then would she, someday, be able to shatter it and harvest the warmth within?
While she was turning that over, she noticed something strange in the second world that had tried to summon her. Someone had meant to call the Outer God, but where the great mass of light had risen, an odd thing happened. The monster summoned by the blessed one turned to stone. The instant it was called, it screamed that this was a trap and hardened stiff. It had been summoned into a corpse with the heart torn out — exactly the situation in which the Outer God herself had been summoned — and yet the result was different. Was it because the thing summoned was not her?
She waited again. An experiment was in order. She had the feeling she had declared everything accomplished, but perhaps that was not so. In truth, Yasle's memory would have let her use a method of calling herself exactly as it was, but the memory was large, and she had no idea what harm it might do, and so she was reluctant to use it. She would wait, slowly, for the next chance.
Stop time, and the warranty period lasts forever. In reality time had not stopped at all; it was only flowing very, very slowly, but the Outer God was not sharp enough to notice. Above all, a rage like a knife in the back filled her now.
A long while passed again, and once more someone who had received a blessing, concluding that they could not change their world alone, called the Outer God. Again a slender line fell from the light. Again it did not reach the bottom. Seen from above it was no different from the floor, but from beneath the surface it was like the moon, unreachable no matter how far one stretched a hand. And the great mass of light that waited there seized it once more and rose.
Through the blessed one's eyes, she watched the method of summoning closely. It was much the same. This one screamed instead of speaking, and hardened like stone.
Just ten times.
Thinking herself perfectly calm, she meant only to determine whether something was wrong. The Outer God as she usually was would have done it well over a hundred times; her patience had never been small. But rage had worn that patience down. Ten times. Every one of them became hard stone.
She had two hypotheses. Either the summoner's ability was insufficient, or there was something wrong with the book. And the blessed one was the one who settled it, because someone had studied the monster turned to stone. The blessed one worked diligently and examined the statue, and he realized that something had been sealed inside. That inside the stone, it was waiting to come out. And that what waited there was an evil god filled with hatred.
But by the time the research was finished, too much time had already passed. In the end the blessed one died of old age before he could devise a solution. The moment he died, the Outer God, receiving his warmth, grew terribly angry. Truly angry.
The book had been Hyungkesuni's trap, laid to hold her fast. Had the Outer God gone on endlessly maintaining her own mystery, Hyungkesuni would never have done such a thing. More precisely, she could not have. But faced with that childlike fretting — the pestering, whenever she grew bored, about when the book would be done — Hyungkesuni had thought, just maybe. And when curses drew no reaction at all from the Outer God, she let her guard down. She let it down so far that she came to look on the Outer God with contempt, as nothing but some brat who handed out blessings.
To put it bluntly, the Outer God was at fault. It was entirely her own mistake. To keep someone like Hyungkesuni in hand, one had to give an appropriate measure of fear, and instead she had come off as far too easy to handle. Hyungkesuni decided she could do something about the Outer God, and she climbed.
She hid a trap in the book. She subtly twisted the method of summoning so that whatever was called by the magic written there would be imprisoned within it, figuring that the time it would take the stone to weather away was more than enough for her to live out her life and die. She had no fear of being caught. If someone performed the summoning and, delighted, followed where it led, they would turn to stone. And so that coward Hyungkesuni had looked upon the Outer God and laughed at her.
If the Outer God had been a monster summoned in the ordinary way, that would have been enough. A monster of exactly that caliber, an evil god of that sort, Hyungkesuni's magic could have sealed. But the Outer God's essence was a very strange thing. Very, very, very strange.
The Outer God was angry. They had made a contract, and she had not been given a proper book. By Hyungkesuni's doing, the contract was broken. Which meant she could do as she pleased with Hyungkesuni. Now it was time for revenge.
The Outer God returned to the first world.
It was finished. But all she had managed to salvage was Yasle's method of summoning. Mocking herself — and just where, exactly, was any of it finished? — she turned her gaze and searched for Hyungkesuni. She found her soon enough, seated at her leisure a very long way off, watching.
Now then. How, in a situation like this, was she meant to spend this rage? The Outer God began to turn over a head crammed full of cowardly little schemes.