Chapter 131: Social Ties and Cult Schemes (6)
Orthes couldn’t read the parasite’s mind in its entirety, but by catching a few fragments in the storm of words swirling in its consciousness, he could roughly discern the direction of its thoughts.
The parasite suspected that Carisia and Orthes might have been created much later than itself.
‘Just a moment ago, it was treating me like an ancient monster. How flexible your thoughts are.’
However, this wasn’t an entirely unreasonable assumption.
A normal human body has a limited operational lifespan. Of course, transcendental mages who attempt ascension or cyber-wizards who replace their bodies with machines to extend their lives would be exceptions.
‘Perhaps it noticed the passage of time in Carisia’s body. Since it thinks I’m a similar mental entity, it wouldn’t be odd for me to have a younger body, but Carisia is different.’
It wasn’t a completely wrong line of thinking. The only grand mistake was assuming that Carisia and Orthes had been created by the same entity as itself.
“Are you thinking, ‘Why is the creator, who has been silent all this time, only now revealing their will?’”
Orthes intended to use this misconception to further irritate the parasite.
“It’s because the time has come. The time to dispose of failures like you and for the creator to reveal themselves.”
Based on his experiences in this world, Orthes knew that the more outlandish a bluff was, the more effective it could be.
In truth, he didn’t even need to bluff.
The parasite had already been deeply shaken by Orthes’ declaration that he was younger.
‘So it wasn’t something far older than me…?’
The parasite knew better than anyone how many obstacles it had to overcome to obtain such a powerful body. Even if it had been active since the Mythical Era, a single misstep would result in being sealed by a cult for centuries, unable to see the light of day. That was the fate of its species.
For this reason, the parasite had considered Orthes to be a patient being, one who had engaged in cautious and secretive activities to locate an exceptionally compatible body. It also believed Orthes to be an ambitious entity, waiting for the perfect offering, Carisia, to finally be within its grasp.
But Orthes had declared himself to be a much more recent creation, contrary to everything the parasite had predicted.
The highly compatible body Orthes possessed, and the perfect offering that even the parasite couldn’t obtain after all those years of searching—these must have been gifts from the creator.
Jealousy and inferiority flared. But the parasite could accept it, for the creator was as terrifying as they were magnificent.
It questioned why such blessed conditions, which had not been granted to itself, had been given to such a young being. However, it dared not second-guess the creator’s grand plan, for doing so would be blasphemy.
The parasite didn’t believe Orthes was superior or more deserving of those gifts.
What truly troubled the parasite was the implication of Orthes’ existence—the creator’s true intentions.
The creator wanted to purge the parasites of this era.
‘Why?’ The question filled the parasite’s mind. Why had the creator, who had tolerated its kind’s activities for countless ages, suddenly decided to intervene?
What had disappointed the creator?
Orthes gripped his sword and scanned the space around him for information. The provocation had worked better than expected. The other bodies of the parasite that had been moving toward him suddenly froze. A sign that the mental shock had been greater than anticipated.
However, Orthes didn’t feel entirely pleased with the parasite’s shocked silence.
His suspicions about the true nature of the ‘creator’ were growing stronger.
‘No, it could still be my own prejudice. It’s not too late to gather more information before making a final judgment.’
“Do you have a plan for after your ascension?” Orthes asked.
It was a bizarre question. The parasite responded with layers of compressed hostility and silence.
Orthes nodded leisurely, though in reality, he was carefully maintaining his calm demeanor.
“You don’t, do you? You must be thinking something like this: Just as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, or a child becomes an adult, ascension is a natural process. You’ve probably never really thought about what comes afterward.”
Which is why you’re a loser.
“What was that?”
“Isn’t it strange? The creator gave you the instinct to ascend but didn’t provide any guidance on what to do after that? Think about it again. What did your predecessors do after they ascended?”
The parasite thought back to ancient times. In the Mythical Era, those who completed their ascension, embedding themselves in sacred relics, played at being gods. Just as it was trying to do now.
While it had never personally socialized with those beings, it was easy to guess that some of the cults branded as heretical and exterminated by the Divine Cult were its kin.
‘Just as I thought.’
Orthes continued his line of reasoning.
From ancient times, parasites must have quietly infiltrated the cults. They would have gradually turned originally legitimate religious orders into heretical ones.
The parasite in Algoth City had bleached the identity of an entire cult and had acted as a nameless god.
Its predecessors wouldn’t have stopped there. Just as the parasite in Algoth City was attempting to ascend by acquiring a magical core, its kin would have tried to ascend using the relics of their cults as cores.
“Your proud kind. Those who played god, ascended as false deities, and what happened to them? The war with the Divine Cult, their defeat, and eventually, their deaths.”
“Don’t you see that this was the creator’s will?”
Why were those who shed their cocoons and became false gods no longer present in this world?
Orthes’ experience and intuition quickly led him to the answer.
It was a strange thing if you thought about it. From the time the Mage King disappeared after being betrayed by his disciples until now, in all that long period…
Why had the Divine Cult never once regained the upper hand in its war against the Ten Towers?
Despite the fact that, weakened as they were, the Ten Towers had also faced times of internal chaos due to successive conflicts over succession, the Divine Cult had never once reclaimed its former strength.
‘The reason the Divine Cult never recovered its power must have been due to the false gods.’
False gods that caused internal strife at every critical moment when recovery seemed possible. Each time they were purged, the Divine Cult essentially engaged in self-mutilation.
False gods, implanted like ticking time bombs, to prevent the consolidation of divine power and ensure the eternal dominance of magic.
A question arose in the parasite’s mind. If opposing the Divine Cult was a mission given by the creator along with the instinct to ascend, wouldn’t ascension be needed now more than ever to confront the cult, which had become more threatening than ever—
“The efforts of those who ascended before you were admirable, but the command to eradicate the cult ultimately failed, didn’t it?”
“So you’re saying the creator has abandoned me?”
Because others had failed? That unspoken sentence burned within the parasite’s thoughts, and Orthes could sense its overwhelming despair.
“It’s not just you. It’s a failure of your entire species. The creator has grown deeply disappointed in all of you who never managed to break the cult.”
‘The creator isn’t some general constantly handing out reprimands. I doubt they’d discard the entire semi-permanent sabotage mechanism just because it failed once.’
Orthes pondered the fate of the vanished false gods. Surely not all of them had been destroyed.
After all, the parasite in Algoth City had managed to survive to this time without ascending.
What had happened to the false gods who weren’t used to weaken the Divine Cult’s power?
And this question…
This was the starting point of Orthes’ most dangerous hypothesis, one that his intuition warned him about. False gods, who periodically appeared to cause internal strife within the Divine Cult. Once the cult was sufficiently weakened, what would those false gods, now unnecessary for further war, decide to do?
Orthes was aware that even the original novel had gaps in its lore.
***
The method by which the Mage King was resurrected.
It was a foggy piece of the narrative, the factor that allowed the protagonist to be revived in 2077. The ‘something’ that had ‘coincidentally’ revived the Mage King.
A mental parasite could attempt ascension by using an object with an immense magical storage capacity, like the magical core of the Dark Tower. If it possessed a body with overwhelming magical talent, like Carisia, it could ascend more perfectly.
Even if it wasn’t a perfect ascension, it clearly had enough power for the Divine Cult to consider it a threat worth purging.
If it had ascended perfectly, it would have naturally become even stronger. Beings that looked human but wielded powers that transcended individuals.
…I know of such beings. The tower lords who wield the powers of the Ten Commandments.
Given that the weakened Divine Cult was still able to exterminate them, it’s clear that the individual strength of false gods couldn’t match that of the tower lords—specifically, those connected to the Ten Commandments. However, in some cases, quantity could replace quality.
Just as Adoosiam had done in the Temple of Pluton, the Mage King was capable of designing magic that functioned even after his physical death.
Now, this creature before me, anguishing over whether it had truly been abandoned for not receiving a post-ascension mission, likely hadn’t been discarded at all.
Once it had ascended, it would receive a new mission. In other words, ascension was akin to an official certification. Only after having that ‘certified ascension’ could it access the mission designed for the post-ascension phase.
If the parasite’s creator was the Mage King…
He would have encoded a conditional command, assuming the scenario in which he was ‘gone.’
The surviving false gods had become sacrifices.
The Mage King’s reserve bodies. If a perfectly ascended false god existed, he would have possessed it. Alternatively, he might have used multiple imperfectly ascended false gods as offerings to forge a new body.
I considered the span of time from the Mage King’s disappearance to now—2074.
How many gods had the Mage King devoured?
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