A colossal mountain range that looked immense even from far away.
And—
Me, “looking down” on that range.
‘...This has to be that, right?’
It should have been the kind of thing to panic over.
But fortunately, I’d been through this once before.
So I grasped what was going on right away.
‘It’s the same as when I read the Chef of Dasmur’s memories...’
What I had seen at the end—
A god’s corpse.
The will seeping from that corpse had been so intense that—
Its memories had poured into my head.
This was the result.
I looked down at the scenery before my eyes.
A gigantic mountain range within a natural landscape...
—or so I thought.
It was a little different.
‘A mountain range being made.’
As if left half-finished.
A planet with gaps everywhere.
Before I had time to be puzzled by that sight,
the body I had entered—
“Me”—swung those massive hands without my will.
Transcendent omnipotence, filling every inch of the body.
As that overwhelming power exerted its influence—
‘Holy hell.’
On the empty land, earth heaved up.
Water burst from underground to form a colossal river.
Each time the being of absolute power so much as flicked a finger,
enormous nature took its place in empty air where nothing had been.
What was happening
wasn’t hard to understand.
‘Creation of heaven and earth...’
And—
The “me” causing this creation of heaven and earth was probably
that huge slab of flesh I’d seen down below.
When I saw it, it was nothing but meat, screaming in pain.
But that had only been its fallen state.
‘Lord of Magi—Morzan.’
A being who shared its name with the world itself.
A being like Dasmur, who had held godhood in Dasmur.
The being that created a world—
the absolute god of that world.
‘...There was no god in the Dwarven histories.’
Going by what [System] told me,
and by the histories written in their research labs,
the Dwarven people might have had faith,
but up to their annihilation, there were no traces of any being worthy of “god” intervening in their world.
Just like ours,
I thought maybe this was another world “without a god.”
‘It wasn’t.’
There had been a god.
Only—
in the middle...
‘It was brought to a state close to annihilation.’
It had been erased.
****
The will that entered my head—
that will replayed, against my own will,
the memories that slab of flesh carried.
A god whipping its hands about, creating heaven and earth this way and that.
While I stared blankly at that sight,
I realized one thing.
‘The flow of time is different.’
Is a transcendent being’s sense of time different from a human’s?
Blink, and the season had changed.
Let a brief moment pass, and a running river had dried up.
‘Probably a span of thousands, tens of thousands... maybe hundreds of millions of years.’
That enormous span
flitted by as if it were but a moment to the god whose memories I was in.
[The Great World of Magi — Morzan]
The god who had finished shaping the world’s form
sought to create the races who would live upon it.
A vast hand emitting blue light.
With one great motion of that hand,
the earth wriggled up and took the shape of life.
A slow but wise race—
[Entilor]
A simple but brave race—
[Ougar]
Small but overflowing with creativity—
[Dwarven]
I couldn’t help but be shocked at the sight.
‘Those are all the ones I saw in the underground mine.’
The owner of the memory I was experiencing now was a being who could even create life.
‘Holy shit.’
And—
upon seeing the creation of life,
one question arose.
It was something I’d quietly wondered for a long time.
If we assume creationism is right,
and if there is a god who created living beings,
‘How does that god regard the lives it created?’
It could treat them like mere tools.
Or maybe it wouldn’t care at all.
‘He cherishes them?’
From Morzan, who watched those small, frail beings,
the emotion I felt
was very warm.
‘...In the other worlds, too, the gods ultimately got their children out somehow.’
It’s only my conjecture,
but maybe beings called gods care quite a lot for their creations.
Anyway—
I hadn’t realized it during the fight in the mine,
but seeing it like this, I could roughly tell
what thoughts had guided it when it made those races.
‘Harmony.’
The creative Dwarven people would lead technological development.
The wise Entilor would decide how that technology gets used.
The strong, diligent Ougar would cultivate the world using that technology.
Thus the primordial races were born,
and under normal circumstances, after slowly growing,
‘they were to achieve something greater than “Dwe Morzan”...’
—erect a civilization of magi.
****
But—
one day, as the god of this world, “Morzan,” proceeded with creation,
an anomaly occurred.
Tch—
On the world’s outer wall,
a small fissure formed.
Crack, crack...
‘What is that?’
The blue-lit giant’s gaze turned there,
and I looked toward the fissure as well.
If my guess was right, that phenomenon was precisely—
the cause that turned this being—drunk on overflowing omnipotence—
‘into a ravaged slab of meat.’
Before long—
Scccchrrrkkkk—
In the middle of the cosmos,
something like a gigantic mouth appeared.
Crunch!
It bit into the barrier between
this world and the outside world.
—...!
Once a hole opened in the barrier,
a being from the outer cosmos crawled in from beyond.
‘What the hell is that?’
So vast and mighty
that it was hard to take in at a glance.
I turned my gaze toward that being.
Just what kind of thing was it,
that it was attacking this world from outside the universe? I tried to see—
but the moment I looked there...
‘...Gkk.’
A sensation like my head was twisting dominated my whole body.
It felt like my eyes would pop out.
Like my brain would melt and slump out as it was.
With the brain of someone like me—a normal human—
I could neither comprehend it
nor even look upon it.
An outrageously colossal being,
filled with endlessly infinite information.
Even though I wasn’t seeing it directly,
but through the eyes of another god,
I could be certain.
‘If I look any more, I’ll die.’
If I truly saw that thing,
I would no longer be alive—
I could feel that with absolute certainty.
The problem—
‘I have to turn my head.’
This was, after all, someone else’s memory.
Just because I didn’t want to see it didn’t mean I could choose not to.
Something
preposterously immense—
not only in bulk, but in the very concept it embodied, bloated to absurdity—
kept coming in through my eyes, into my brain.
Crkk.
From the vastness of the concept, far beyond what I could bear,
a sound like some part of my brain tearing away boomed inside my skull.
‘Die?’
No matter what I tried,
a death I couldn’t even resist.
‘This absurdly?’
My brain was about to rupture
and burst—right then.
[Warning!]
What appeared before my eyes, as I was about to meet death, was—
[An excessively colossal entity.]
[If you try to take too much into your eyes, overload may occur. Please be careful!]
a System window.
****
[Warning!]
[An excessively colossal entity.]
[If you try to take too much into your eyes, overload may occur. Please be careful!]
It popped up suddenly before my eyes,
a clunky UI and message that blocked my view when I couldn’t even turn my head.
‘Huff...!’
Thanks to that,
I barely managed not to look at “that.”
The font, clearly larger and thicker than usual.
Unlike the usual windows so transparent that you could see right through them,
this status window had its transparency turned down so low that the back only showed as a blur.
It wasn’t hard to understand the intent.
It was ridiculous enough to make me snort, but probably—
‘It protected me?’
A status window that would normally vanish as soon as I read it
stayed up even after I’d read the message,
continuing to block my view.
I narrowly escaped the brink of death,
but even so, the fear remained.
Even though I was inside someone else’s memory,
my back felt cold, and it felt like cold sweat was running.
‘Just from looking, it’s this bad?’
Just from looking,
I nearly died mentally.
And the reason was absurd.
According to the System message—
‘Because I looked at something too colossal and tried to understand it.’
My eyes, which weren’t capable of seeing such a thing,
and my head, which wasn’t broad enough to comprehend it, let out a scream of pain.
‘Holy shit.’
A thing like that...
exists in another world?
My astonishment was brief.
As if it wouldn’t give me any time to be horrified—
—Begone!
The god of this world began to resist that being.
A being that would grant mental death if looked at properly.
In the end,
the events that followed, I could only watch through the blurred pane of the status window.
‘I may be a normal human, but this one is different.’
According to [System], the being whose memories I was reading now—
Morzan—was undoubtedly a mighty god.
‘So it’s not a being so feeble it would just sit and take the invasion.’
Just as I thought,
soon—
the being from the outer cosmos
and the god of this world clashed.
Boom...
The battle between great beings
was on a scale altogether different from the wars I waged.
I couldn’t watch the fight directly,
but I could catch the aftershocks in the corner of my eye.
‘...It’s breaking.’
From the fight’s aftershocks,
the world that had once been beautiful,
that was being made according to the creator’s design—
was being ravaged to pieces.
—O god!
—Great Morzan! Please, quell your wrath...!
The fledgling civilizations that had taken tenuous root.
Their inhabitants set out in search of their god at the sudden crisis, but—
Boom!
with a single clash, that civilization was half-erased.
The surviving races could do nothing but flee in terror from the sudden cataclysm.
—Why!!!
The land rose into the sky.
The sky crashed down into the land.
—Why, of all things, me...!
As the world it had been cultivating was ravaged,
Morzan wept blood and resisted the invader, but—
—Why... this world...!
Crunch!
With that gigantic mouth,
the god who looked down on mountain ranges and created heaven and earth—
Morzan—was swallowed in a single bite.
‘Grrrk...!’
A sensation of the whole body being torn away at once.
I nearly blacked out,
but that flesh wasn’t my real body.
Inside this memory,
I had no ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ body capable of the chemical action of fainting from pain.
‘Aaaaaaaaah—!’
Even in pain,
with only the mind left intact, I relived the memory.
In the end,
the otherworldly being, after devouring Morzan,
returned to the outer cosmos through the hole it had made.
—Why...
—Why, of all things...
Only—
it would have been something if it had simply gone wholly extinct then.
But perhaps because the god had been so mighty,
the invader, in the act of swallowing Morzan whole,
left a tiny portion—a scrap it couldn’t finish.
‘Like leaving leftovers while eating.’
From the once-great god,
a portion of the thigh—
and even within that, a minuscule part.
Thud.
On the earth overturned by the clash of great beings,
a piece of flesh fell to its deepest depths.
Rrrrrmmm...
When the fight ended,
land that had fallen to the ground rose back up to the sky,
and land that had surged into the sky returned to the earth.
Over the flesh sunk deep underground,
fragments of the broken land piled up.
—It hurts.
For an ordinary living thing,
that state would warrant a death ruling on the spot.
But—
‘They say great beings... even when they die, they don’t die easily.’
This wasn’t an ordinary living thing. This had been a great god.
Even with only a piece of flesh left—
it did not wholly die.
If it had willed its own death, it might have died,
but no matter how great a god is,
with only a scrap of flesh remaining, it had no reason left to decide its own death.
—...It hurts.
And so—
that piece of flesh
—Why only me?
kept only the pain and resentment of being eaten,
—Why...
and fell into a long sleep.
****
......
......
‘...Huh?’
I thought the memory would end there,
but unexpectedly,
it continued.
‘It can keep accumulating memory even in this state...?’
It was absurd,
but what followed wasn’t much.
Just memories of spending time,
as it slept within deep darkness.
‘...I’ve no idea how much time passed.’
With this thing’s sense of time different from a human’s,
I couldn’t tell how long it had been.
Only—
I could guess that more time had passed
than what it had invested in “creation.”
Then, one day—
Tic...
From above the flesh,
a tiny tremor was felt.
—...
The flesh still slept,
but it could feel that tremor.
Yet the flesh ignored it,
to keep sleeping.
Which was understandable.
‘If it opens its eyes... a horrific sight will be waiting.’
There are times when
you don’t want to wake from sleep.
However—
whether the flesh wanted it or not,
the noise that wakes you came to it.
= A Mana Stone of this purity...?
= The concentration is denser than the finest Mana Stone kept in the Imperial Museum...?
= Did our ancestors get to mine and use Mana Stones like this at will? I’m envious to death.
Clang, clang.
Bzzzzzzzt—
The sound of drilling down into the earth was deafening.
Beyond merely loud—
= By order of the Royal House!
= You slave dogs. Can’t you dig any deeper!
By drilling endlessly deep,
at last—
Thoom...!
= Huh!?
= What’s going on?
= Below... there seems to be some kind of cavity.
= Hm?
they reached the chamber where the flesh lay.
...Blink.
The flesh, which had slept long and deep,
awoke from its long slumber.
—My world...?
The great old god,
by instinct, looked down on the surface.
Even if only a piece of flesh remained,
for a god, to look down on the world it had created
was like a human looking down at their own hand.
When it first looked back upon the surface,
what the flesh felt was hope.
‘A civilization of magi...’
The once-great god, Morzan,
had planned for the beings on the surface to unite and erect a great civilization of magi.
The landscape spread out on the surface fell short of his design,
but it was undoubtedly a civilization of tremendous level.
—Ha-ha.
Even though he had vanished early,
his children had ultimately achieved what he had arranged.
With a glad heart,
the flesh meant to cast off its lingering attachments and enter eternal rest, but—
= A cavity in a place like this—something’s odd.
= Let’s investigate. Number 3027!
At the sounds from above,
that rest was delayed a little.
= Drop it down.
Vroooom...
Crunch!
From the sky above,
something was dropped, shattered, and scattered.
= What? Did it die?
= It would be proper to call it “activity suspended,” Inspector. It was already dead.
= Ah, right. I forgot most of the slaves in this mine are dead.
= It’s something only possible here, so it wouldn’t be easy to get used to. Anyway—if it got “activity suspended” like that, the height must be higher than I thought. We’ll have to bring proper equipment and investigate again...
What had fallen right in front of the flesh,
and smashed—
[Brave Ougar]
was his creation,
its once-honest face hideously stained by pain from horrific oppression.
