Chapter 64
Hyungkesuni passed the time in laughter that never broke. She was laughing, so let us believe she was happy.
In any case, once the Church of the Outer God had captured the Witch of Rapture, it meant to summon the Outer God at once. Unfortunately, Hyungkesuni's magic alone could not call the god down. Only by adding the secret art Yasle had brought back from the Yeongnang Theocracy could they clear the bare minimum required to reach it.
There was a problem. The knowledge the Outer God sent grew harder to hear the clearer a person's mind remained, which was why Tisha, all her life, never once sensed the summoning method the Outer God had been transmitting. The fainter the self and the more wrecked the mind, the more readily that malignant information slipped in. It was for this reason that the Mirigan Church had so quickly gathered people who knew how to perform the summoning. Most of them already had their self-worth shattered by a cult's indoctrination and lived dependent on others, so they drank the method down without resistance.
The Church of the Outer God pointed a slightly different way. It did not seek to annihilate a person's character. It was, rather, a faith of forgiving others and taking them in — a religion for enlarging the heart. They analyzed Hyungkesuni's knowledge, yet through it they could not reach the knowledge that would call the Outer God. That required the particular secret art Yasle possessed.
After several attempts failed, Rebecca gave up on summoning the Outer God directly and chose another method. Set the intelligence received from the Anselus royal house beside what they had wrung from Hyungkesuni while they hurt her, and the two agreed: the more people received the Blessing, the easier it became for the Outer God to appear. So they resolved to make a very great many.
Rebecca began by scattering across the whole world the Blessing that had been performed only in the Holy Land, proclaiming the verse outright in the Church's name. An age had come in which anyone who wished could receive it. She went further still, drawing on what she had seen and learned from the histories of other worlds. Modeling herself on the universal religions glimpsed in the Outer God's memories, she built a doctrine meant to spread as widely as possible.
This was no Abrahamic faith, casting other religions out. It resembled Hinduism, which swallows them. The ambiguous stew Rebecca had mixed together from this and that became, by that very vagueness, a powerful weapon, and it spread. One reason it spread so quickly was that legends of the Outer God already existed everywhere: a god of salvation who came to those in despair and lent them one last strength. Before the Church ever traveled, it was as if the Church had already been there.
Cults had, of course, branched from that primitive religion, but they did not last. They were soon broken up and absorbed, because there was the Blessing. Anyone who believed the Outer God existed and read a single verse could receive it. No arms, no legs, a skin disease and all its pain — receive the Blessing, and the body was made clean. Once a person had felt the Outer God's greatness, an entirely new doctrine came to meet them.
To believe in a god is humankind's freedom. The doctrine went so far as to recognize the freedom not to believe in the Outer God at all. The Blessing was not a thing given against faith as collateral. Whatever you did, the promise held: in the end, the Outer God would come for those who had received it.
At a glance, the sentence seemed to weaken faith. If one need not believe, then surely one need not believe? But the sentence showed its true power when another religion stood beside it. Where two faiths exist, people compare them without thinking. To hold up similar things and ask which is more efficient is an instinct human beings have carried since before recorded time.
A person takes only the Blessing from the Church of the Outer God and returns to the religion they originally believed. What waits there, though, is other people. The Blessing turns the hair purple and the skin white. When someone appears who is stronger than you and cleverer than you — someone who became so all at once, by a Blessing — and when that someone used to be lesser than you, what does a person think?
They cast them out. They say you sold yourself to the wicked, and they forbid those with purple hair from entering their domain. And then? They do not walk straight into the Church of the Outer God. They have a faith they were born into, and they took the Blessing only because they were told it would make them strong. They still believe in the local god, and that god's house rejects them. So a place arises where the Blessed go on believing in the local god.
It is closer to a disease. To someone on neither side, or merely neutral, it looks like nothing more than two temples of the same god. To a third party the difference is not great, and those who have visited the Church once still feel awkward enough to go, at first, where there is no purple hair. In that fashion they keep attending the place they always attended. But if you are human, once or twice in a life there comes a moment when you wish for a god. Where, then, is the place that helps a person most directly?
The Church of the Outer God. Receive the Blessing, and most troubles are resolved. You may even take only the Blessing and go on believing in your original god.
The Blessed multiply. Suppose there is a family. The head of the house is hurt at his work, receives the Blessing, and his body is healed. Which way does the family turn — the temple he cannot enter, or the temple he can? In the end, people gather at the second. The first, by its culture of exclusion, thins and falls to ruin.
Little by little, people grow used to the Blessing. By then, even if they know nothing of the Church, the profit is already the Outer God's. Many harvests have come into being. But where the Church truly takes root is the next generation. Every head of hair is purple. The once-alien look of the faithful, living in the same village, has become simply how things are, because most people already have purple hair. Resistance thins. Familiarity grows.
And then a chance comes to learn the Church's free doctrine, and to compare. A god who gives only if you believe, and a god who blesses you even if you do not, and comes for you at the end. Which is the greater?
Not every village or city is assimilated in quite this way, but the result follows a similar course. It is not a religion practiced because someone ordered it. Little by little, the doctrine seeps into the cultural root, and with it that single sentence about freedom. Room for any other faith is torn away, piece by piece.
Where faith is absent, there are two kinds of miracle. The Blessing is given first, and the price collected later. The miracles of other gods demand faith first and deliver the wonder afterward. People prefer the miracle that is easy and quick. Why go out at a fixed hour every week to pray? Many other religions, besides, ask for a great deal of money. Every religious body demands money for one reason or another. However much a faith sets mercy before all else, eating and living in the material world still requires it. And when the demand is small, where do people turn their eyes?
In faith and in money alike, the Church of the Outer God was simply too strong. So it was not strange that, in less than forty years, most of the people on the continent came to have purple hair and skin of an uncommon whiteness.
Once such people grow numerous, a stigma takes hold as well. Even if you are not of the faith yourself, purple hair and snow-white skin are enough for others to count you as Church. It is the same rash generalization as looking at a Muslim, in the country where the Outer God once lived as a human being, and deciding without fail that they are a terrorist. From the side of the one misjudged, it may be easier to grasp if you imagine that abroad an East Asian is assumed, without question, to be Chinese or Japanese.
And scale sometimes draws a greater scale after it. Anyone living in a modern society — where opinion can be manufactured, and where there are people to be swept along by it — knows this from experience. Look up the word McCarthyism and study what followed from it, if you like. True or false, a crowd will now and then commit an absurdity with a light hand.
At the center of the continent lay the Adu Jungle and the Skard Rocky Desert. Taking that as the line, painting every region to the east in purple hair took less than thirty years. And when sixty years had passed since the Outer God died in the Holy Land, most of the people on that continent had been dyed purple.
Most unfortunately, that is how it came to be.
From a certain day, people heard a sound like something splitting. Nothing happened. They went on living under the assumption that somewhere far off a natural disaster, or some great event, must have occurred. They were not yet in an age that approached such things scientifically; they still dwelt in the realm of faith. Humanism had only just begun to stir, born of the Church's doctrine, and it was easier to lay a question at a god's feet than to go looking for the phenomenon that would answer it. A few did try to find the cause of the splitting sound. They never found it. Over some eight years the sound grew more frequent, and people grew used to it. The last hope vanished with their familiarity.
There was, however, one person who had heard this sound before, and one person who knew what it meant.
Beneath the old headquarters of the Church of the Outer God, which hardly anyone used anymore, lay something closer to a lump of meat than to a human shape. Once, it had been a person. Generations ago, that person had borne the name Hyungkesuni, Witch of Rapture. Torture as ordinary as breathing had already destroyed the mind. A young woman came to that place.
Dakota. She had not aged either. People supposed it was because she was a saint, but she knew she possessed a certain ability. Some who received the Blessing gained a special power, and hers was this: until Hyungkesuni died, her body would not wither. Beside her stood a middle-aged woman whose hair had gone white. Her name was Rebecca Rolfe. Nearly two hundred years had passed, and at last she, too, had begun to age. She was still short, of course.
Rebecca stepped up before Hyungkesuni.
"It's been a while, old witch."
Behind her, something cracked. A deeply uncanny sound. Hyungkesuni, who had heard it before, opened the single eye still set in the leather of what remained of her. She had no muscle left with which to smile. With the one ear that remained, she turned the sound over in what was left of her mind. Very long ago — before the pain began in the middle of hell, when there was something one ought to fear, very, very, very much — there had been a sound like this.
The Outer God had been there.
Crack. The sound came again: a pane of glass splitting because it could not bear the weight of something heavy set upon it.
The witch looked at Rebecca, who was smiling. She tried to speak and could not. The organs of speech were already gone. She tried to laugh, but the muscles that might have laughed had been cut out of her body, with obsessive thoroughness, long ago. All she could do was fill the eye — that window of the mind — with terror, and stare at Rebecca.
Crunch. Something failed, and broke.
In that instant Hyungkesuni felt the pain of burning, a pain she had now endured hundreds of times. Dakota had driven a flaming blade into her body. But that was the last moment in which a human being could still do anything.
Do you remember? When the Outer God blesses a person, it sets itself inside them. Do you remember that every time the Outer God entered this world, a fissure opened, as if something had been broken beneath a heavy weight?
Crash.
They were flung outside the world. Not only them. Every living thing in that world fell in a single direction. The glass bottle called a world shattered under the weight of what it held, and they plunged into a place that could only be called an abyss. It was less a matter of above and below than of the space itself changing servers — downward, toward a light grown old, worn, and on the verge of failing.
For the living things of the one world now falling, there was no longer a world to protect them. They dropped through innumerable worlds. These were not simply people living other lives. In one place, things blazed like light. In another, they scattered like paint. As if passing from world to world, they endured a mad environment changing again and again, downward, downward, downward.
And then the bottom.
Splash.
More precisely, they struck a surface of water and sank beneath it. Immediately afterward, a tremendous cold drove into the depths of the soul.
Let me summarize.
The Holy God was right.