Why Use a Sword? — 1
In a single instant, the greatest of my harvest grounds vanished.
A hundred and seventeen individuals remain, though no world holds more than one. I meant to call them people, but one is something like a whale and another looks rather like an octopus, so the word for a person doesn't quite sit right.
Anyway.
I shook out every memory I had gained from swallowing an entire world, and it took a considerable amount of time. Back in the first world, at the moment the harvesters had multiplied the most, I was watching all of them at once. So it is strange that a mere increase in number should cost me this much time.
I can form a hypothesis, at least. The ordinary one first: there were simply too many of them. Every living thing truly did fall to the bottom.
When I don't understand something, I sort it. Insects have light, but no warmth. Stones have light too, for that matter. No—but when the glass bottle shattered, nearly everything material seemed to blow away all at once, didn't it? Anything too small for a human eye to see seems to have no light. If those things had light, a person would glitter from head to toe. Single-celled life and bacteria, in other words, have none. A nervous system seems to be the condition, but for now I'll leave it as a hypothesis.
Once something is an animal, light is a given. Warmth, though, differs from creature to creature. A small animal may carry a great light and abundant warmth, while a large one may hold only a small light and very little warmth. Sorting through them, the ones that seem more intelligent have more warmth. Individuals vary wildly, of course, but on average humans have the most. Their floor is high, and so is their ceiling.
They are not the highest, though. There are beings with greater light and more warmth. Half of them were beasts once, before they gained intelligence and a special power. According to the faded man's memories, the closest comparison would be yokai. But they cannot breed with the species they came from, and they do not particularly need to eat people in order to live. Some of them do seem to have unusual appetites—there are those who marry other races, and even those who take humans as mates.
In sheer warmth they exceed an ordinary person more than tenfold. Put another way, it is also the amount ten ordinary people could gather by praying.
Hmm. If there are too many harvesters, the glass bottle breaks. So should I aim for this sort instead? I'll file them under harvester candidates.
I also considered using the verses the Outer God Church named the Contract Scripture. But if I swell their numbers all at once, the way I did last time, and the world falls—
If it falls... hehe.
No.
Mm.
Honestly, it was magnificent. But—no. I am far too drawn to it. What am I supposed to do?
Even so, I have to forget. I know I cannot gain much that way.
I think of the game the faded man used to play so often. So many people played it that you could almost call it a folk pastime, and like a folk pastime, it was forgotten just as quickly. It had something called a population cap: a fixed limit on how many you could rule. I only need to set a limit like that. The cheap and plentiful, and the strong and costly.
I must not make a universal religion the way Rebecca did. Something more secret, more shadowed. A secret society. That fits.
There was a secret society in the first world, too. Remnants of the Church of the Sacred God were still wandering about in earnest, hunting down traces of the summoning magic Rebecca had experimented with in secret, organizing what they found, preparing to bring the Outer God Church to ruin. Far too late now, of course.
And there were surprisingly many secret societies besides that one. None of them spanned the whole world, but at the scale of a village or a city there were quite a few—vigilante bands, that sort of thing. Still, that will have to wait until I rise higher, or until the number of people has grown.
Right now there is only one way to touch another world. If someone happens to sink all the way to the bottom beneath the surface, I catch them and make them a harvester. I can do it now without detonating a single one. Then they gain power, sometimes a special ability, and go off to change their own lives.
But those who have known the bottom use only the methods of the bottom. It is a path that always stalls somewhere. Violence is powerful, yet without wisdom you cannot go far, and a person who has suffered something too terrible finds it hard to make room for anyone else. So they are left alone, and they fall. Becoming a harvester does not make you a flawless superhuman.
Even if someone has the wisdom to surpass that somehow, sadly, not one of them has made a home. The abilities I hold now are not connected to one another in any organic way. I wish that becoming a harvester immediately created the conditions to call me. If only there were a function that could increase the harvesters, even at the bare minimum.
It is difficult.
A person sunk deep in despair—no, any sapient being—can be made into a harvester. Pour Yasle's memories into them over the course of about ten years, and they can call me. Have them read the Contract Scripture while thinking of me, and they can make a harvester.
Perhaps a compromise is needed. Or an order of operations.
The first step is already decided: whoever draws near the surface becomes a harvester. That comes first. The next step would be better if I could adjust it. And after that, rather than immediately implanting Yasle's memories, would it be better to have them recite the Contract Scripture?
When you think about it, this is a proxy for blessing. I will slip in an advertisement—read these words, and a blessing can be yours—and send the Contract Scripture into the harvester's head. First I will try increasing the harvesters a great deal. Waiting for a light to fall all the way down near the surface takes far too long. Besides, even aside from what must be done down here, there is plenty to experiment with once I go up. The more I try, the more I will know.
But rather than growing too greedy, I will build it up one piece at a time. I have done well enough that way so far, haven't I?
So that is what I did.
A great many memories still remain unprocessed, but those too will sort themselves out slowly, given time. Living things by the tens of quadrillions are rather a lot. I cannot simply throw the microorganisms away as useless for lack of warmth. Through them I can see a world on the verge of ruin, so I cannot discard them yet. I can work on more than one thing at once, so I will take the analysis slowly.
I looked up.
Lights float in the sky. Once I thought they were sparse, because there were lights moving close to me. But now I know. This sky is, quite literally, a night sky, and above it lies the universe. Just as tiny stars gather into galaxies, and galaxies into groups and clusters, truly countless lights are drifting there.
There is, however, a difference from a night sky seen from a planet. This place is a flat universe. Some people would be horrified to hear it, but it really is. I am spread out without end. I do not even know whether I truly have an edge or not, because there is no beside. Every light is above me. I once wondered whether I might be a sphere, but after I raised an arm upward, I knew I was not. From every direction I could see an arm rising up. There is no curvature to begin with.
Is death even truly possible?
I take the question that rises so quietly, force it onto the faded man in a corner of my mind, and turn instead to how I might obtain warmth. I will insert an advertisement and hand over the Contract Scripture. Once we are connected, each of us can speak in our own language anyway, so there is no need for translation.
Hmm.
Mm.
No matter how long I wait, the numbers do not grow. There was definitely someone who spoke. They recited the Contract Scripture clearly. But it failed. Someone who was not a harvester repeated it, and still it failed.
What? Is there some condition? That I must have visited that world at least once, for example? The failures go on. Do I have to wait through an eternity of years again? Do I have to wait for someone like Yasle to happen to draw me up? How many attempts would that even take? How long am I supposed to wait?
If I divide time infinitely, I believe I can rise with certainty. But does that mean I am meant to wait out that time? How, when the heat is still so vivid in my mind?
Clink.
Huh?
A thread came down. It was not sent by a harvester, and it was different from the magic of Yasle or Hyungkesuni, which had been like a fishing line. But before I could think, I seized it. If a chance has come, I cannot let it slip.
Less a thin thread than a cord closer to a length of cloth. It dragged me upward. Up. Up. And up again. As before, glass bottles I was not connected to flickered past at the edge of my rushing sight, and I went inside one of them.
And I opened my eyes.
Only one, because the other was not there. My body lay twisted, bound in countless cloths. The cloth was damp, and it stopped my breath. Through the innumerable layers, a sound came faintly.
Violet Fanatic, Chaos of the Four Seasons
They called me by that name. Another cult? There was muttering besides, but it did not seem to be a language this body knew.
I tried to raise an arm. The wet cloth stopped me. No—was the arm even there? When I tried to wiggle a finger or a toe, the cloth bore down. They had bound me with something close to paranoia. More than anything, I could not breathe, and it was infuriating. This time I would have to weave the flesh completely anew.
Crack.
Taller than Rebecca Rolf, though the body was nearly that of a plain, solid-built woman. She had once had black hair and skin with a faint yellow cast. Now the hair was violet, and the skin was white. Fissures split open in every direction, and the wet cloth was sucked into them. With a grinding creak, even the pillars the cloth had been tied to were swallowed down. Worried this world might be crushed the way the last one was, I stopped making imagined things real.
I looked ahead.
No—why could I see out of only one side?
Ah. The eyeball still was not there?
Something was caught there. Lodged, perhaps. Something was asserting a claim of ownership, so I stamped the claim flat and restored the eye. Then, looking at the people with both eyes, I greeted them.
"Hello."
The people around me bowed, the words Violet Fanatic, Chaos of the Four Seasons on their lips. This body seemed to be another victim.
Heehee.
Even so, I had come out into a world again.