Chapter 60

An astonishing number of people had gathered in the capital square of the Kingdom of Anselus. So many that every street was packed solid, and along the great roads the lines of them reached all the way to the city walls. They knelt as one, bodies turned in a single direction, and prayed. That direction was the square before the royal castle. At its center lay the place where I died.

Dakota, a grown woman ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠now, stood in a gown of extravagant, trailing layers. She drew out an old cloth and held it up. On the cloth were the words that had been spoken when the contract was made. It had been fashioned to look like a document of tremendous age. No such thing could possibly have existed.

Dakota read it aloud.

"The Outer God asks this of you."

The faithful of the Outer God Church prayed, every one of them rejoicing. In other words, they accepted. Their skin turned white, and their hair turned purple. Only a very few were otherwise. Those who carried fatal wounds or disease had their skin turn blue.

Yes. That's right. Even now, sunk beneath the surface, I am making contracts with people. I never imagined I would bind myself to more than ten thousand of them at a single stroke, but I could. And one suspicion I had been quietly nursing was gone.

I had wondered whether contracting with too many might leave me unable to divide myself any further. There were more than ten thousand, and I felt no lack anywhere. No sense of room to hold still more, and no sense of having run even slightly short. The sensation itself simply was not there. That was enough. I could try a greater number later.

With so many specimens before me, I came to understand the standard by which an ability appears. When someone yearns for a thing with great force, and that yearning is a problem that cannot be solved by improving the body, an ability is likely to arise. Only, even when the yearning is there, I cannot tell by what logic it is read, or in what form it is handed back as a power.

Wide is easy to understand. Wide wanted a distinctiveness unlike anyone else's, and that wish was tangled with the desire to sit in the highest seat. Fire carries the image of immense power. Perhaps that is why Wide received the power of a mighty flame.

And Tisaha? Tisaha had come to feel that the organization they belonged to was wrong, and wanted to flee it. Shouldn't that, ordinarily, have become a speed no one could catch? So why did regeneration appear — a regeneration that heals at once, whether an arm is torn away, a leg is torn away, or an arrow buries itself in the eye? Between the yearning and the ability there is a gap whose nature I cannot name. It isn't urgent, though. I'll think it through one step at a time.

What matters is that an enormous number of harvesters have come into being, and that I can now draw up a plan for mass production. A human who holds power walks only one road.

Yes.

As expected, the Outer God Church spread explosively. And in the midst of that, Rebecca did something curious.

A holy site. When the Outer God Church speaks of a holy site, there is only one place it can mean: the place where I was executed.

Rebecca gave each person who came to the holy site and received the blessing a sort of guestbook, and had them write their own names. Then she gave them a single scrap of cloth as proof. At first I had no idea what it meant. Several months later, I understood. The effect was right in front of me.

Every believer of the Outer God Church came to share the same goal. Come to the holy site, receive the blessing, leave one's name in the guestbook kept there, and go home carrying the proof. That's right. Rebecca had deliberately made a pilgrimage of the holy site, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and a tremendous number of people came seeking the headquarters of the Outer God Church.

Traveling a long way is an ordeal. In an early modern age, with the roads still poorly kept and transport scarce, it is truly a matter of staking one's life. And yet arrive here, and every wound is healed in an instant — one might even receive a blessing that makes one stronger. Truly, everyone, from every place, set their teeth and came.

Where people move, wealth moves. Goods flooded into the headquarters along with them, and a vast market rose in the capital of the Kingdom of Anselus. The kingdom had begun to grow rich.

Once those whose hair had turned purple began to spread like a swarm of locusts, the Holy God Church staked its very survival on denouncing the Outer God Church. Live the present as well as you like, they said. A person who has sold themselves away has nothing after death.

From beneath the surface, I offered a rebuttal that was not quite a rebuttal. I simply leave the light I take for a soul where it is. Of course, if I touch it, it turns black, and if I take only the warmth, the light shrivels and crumples as if its body had been a balloon. But it remains. Might it not live again someday? Honestly, whether it revives or not, once I have the warmth I couldn't care less about residue like that.

At any rate, the Holy God Church chose war, declaring it was for the sake of humanity and staking everything it had. The believers of the Outer God Church had grown more numerous than those of the Holy God Church, and yet the balance still clung, just barely, at five to five. The royalty of every nation, however, believed in the Holy God Church alone. Among the nobility by itself, the ratio stood near one to nine. Even as I saw it, this was the Holy God Church's last chance to defeat the Outer God Church.

It gathered the kingdoms that followed it and invaded Anselus. But they began to come apart before they ever arrived. To say that those above were mostly of the Holy God Church was to say that those below were mostly of the Outer God Church. An army might hold a knight worth a hundred soldiers, or a mage who could slaughter a thousand, but the moment the troops beneath them walked away, that scale shrank in an instant.

There were people who belonged to the Holy God Church and believed in the Outer God all the same. Those with purple hair, especially, were put to use here and there for gifts beyond the ordinary, and yet within Holy God society they sat at the very bottom. They had ability, and they were treated badly. At first they spent great effort trying to persuade those above them. When the superiors would not listen to the end, they began to slip away, one after another. Seize them by violence, and this time they turned and attacked their superiors in a fury.

Once someone with a special ability runs wild, even a knight who could kill an Outer God believer one against one without taking a scratch is hard-pressed. To face many of them unhurt, in the middle of a crush, is close to impossible. The army had begun to dwindle before it reached the Kingdom of Anselus. It had not vanished, of course. Half a percent, at the very most? Even after they trickled off like that, plenty of elite soldiers remained, full of faith in the Holy God.

For my part, I was pleased. It was a war from which I could harvest warmth without number. All the same, it was plain that if things went on this way, the Outer God Church stood in a little danger. Even among those with abilities, not everyone held a power that was any use for killing. One had come from the mines and gained the ability to see in perfect darkness. Another had come from tending sheep-like creatures and gained the ability to speak their tongue. The Church of Future Hope, circumstances being what they were, had simply produced an unusual number of people with aggressive gifts.

The roots of the Outer God Church were people who had lived at the bottom. They knew neither strategy nor tactics, and the only fighting they had ever done was the brawling of street toughs. However many they were, they fell badly short of what a war requires. I know that if one of them breaks and flees in blind terror, the rest will flee with them. Numbers or not, they can lose. So I gave up on victory, and watched the war hoping a great deal of warmth might come to me. It came, just as I had hoped. People died until the blood ran in rivers.

But there was something strange. It was a battlefield where even a hardened fighter, let alone an ordinary person, ought to have screamed and run. Almost no one ran. I had never told them to fight until they died. To begin with, I do not twist minds. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠The only exception is the sending of Yasle's memories. I watched the whole time through their eyes, and still I could not tell what they were thinking.

I receive memories in the moment I touch the light. The moment someone becomes a harvester, I take the memories from the light, and that is the end of it. If a person is killed by a harvester, then in the moment of the killing I touch the dead one's light, and from that light I receive memory and warmth together. If a harvester dies for some reason of their own, what I carry off at the moment of death is warmth alone. The memories I already received, long ago, in the instant I licked the light. I cannot receive them a second time.

That does not mean I am ignorant of a harvester's life. From the moment of contact I go on watching the world through that person's eyes, so the memories are not necessary. I am watching. But memory and observation are not the same thing.

Memory is arranged a little more cleanly, and yet it is often thin on detail — the warmth of sunlight in one particular moment, a peculiar smell, the feel of something against the fingertips. Measured by sheer quantity, watching the harvester gives me more. Only I cannot know clearly what they are thinking. I have to guess from the reactions of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the body. So I do not know what thought it is that sets them against the Holy God Church, resolved to die. They are plainly afraid, and still, with no one telling them to, each of them chooses to fight and to die. I don't know why they choose death. I am glad all the same, because even when a harvester dies, I receive warmth.

I already possessed a function that could copy harvesters. The Outer God Church could have lost, and it would have been fine.

No.

That would not do. I could not afford to lose — not until I had landed one solid blow on Hyungkesuni. What was I to do? Was there no method at all? Should I edit the memories of someone skilled in the martial arts and send those along? No. That would take time.

All through the fighting I studied the harvesters closely, searching for a way. It was not like the time I learned that speaking the words of the contract could make harvesters even if I myself were gone from that world. This time, nothing of the sort showed itself.

In the middle of that blank helplessness, the army of the Holy God Church arrived at the headquarters of the Outer God Church, and the fighting turned savage. Many harvesters died. A great many of the Holy God Church died with them.

What surprised me most in that war was none other than Rebecca. I had wondered how she had been living, and she was considerably strong — strong enough, at least, that whether she met one person or a crowd, she was not about to die just anywhere.

The middle of the battlefield. Rebecca stepped forward all alone, and I wondered what she meant to do. Then, with her chest as the source, light flared in a discharge, and a sphere of light appeared. Before I was summoned, I had made the heart of a creature that seized warmth by exploding. That thing, it seemed, had been the heart of something considerably evolved.

When the sphere shone, the armor and weapons around it rose into the air. They spun about her, turned to dust, and vanished. And people? What do you suppose happens when meat and bone are fed in among spinning metal? They are ground apart. She became a living grinder, and went about quite literally milling people down.

But a person's might has its limit. Before long, a power that simply crushed individual force brought her to a stop. It was not magic. I am quite sure that if magic struck her, even she would die — but she went hopping and bouncing, and she dodged it well.

A colossal pillar of light fell out of the sky. In that instant every harvester standing there melted and was gone. Yes. Every harvester. Even those who had been fighting on the Holy God Church's side evaporated. Everyone present understood what it meant. The Holy God had used its power.

Here, I thought, the Outer God Church would lose. Honestly, by what means does anyone beat that? However strong a harvester may be beside an ordinary person, they cannot stand against a god with a power like an orbital bombardment.

And yet, at the center of the ground where the pillar of light had vanished, Rebecca was perfectly unharmed. She was smiling. Just like that she turned and went back to where the believers of the Outer God Church were gathered. I was still wondering why she would smile when Rebecca, standing before them, cried out that the Holy God had burned the blessed who stood on its own side.

Across the field, the Holy God Church heard her and cheered. I took it for a favor done their way. I could not tell what Rebecca thought of the Outer God Church, and I watched while turning over one guess and then another. The situation began to run strangely.

The light had burned harvesters without sorting enemy from ally, hadn't it? That became proof that the Holy God's embrace was a counterfeit, and the story changed. And this is the shape in which the story was finished.

The words spread far in an instant, and everyone who stood even a little outside that entrenched class began to attack them. Crying that the Holy God had never accepted them in the first place, soldiers of the Holy God Church — friends they had been fighting beside only moments ago now melted away — stabbed royalty and nobility in the back. Confusion spread.

The army the Holy God Church had summoned was stalled with the headquarters of the Outer God Church directly before it. There the Holy God had shown its power, and that very showing brought the Holy God Church down. It was not only the Outer God Church that moved. Those of other faiths moved, and even those of no faith at all. The Holy God Church had become the religion of a narrow god, and that god was no longer worth believing. In this war, the Holy God Church fell utterly.

On the words of a single person, the Outer God Church had not merely won a battle. It had taken, as well, the standing of a universal religion. On that day the Holy God Church was, for all practical purposes, finished. Those who survived fled. The Outer God Church celebrated its victory.

And immediately after the war, in a season when even the work of recovery was not yet done, Rebecca — now treated as the incarnation of a god — declared a witch hunt. A festival was held. Its program was as follows.