Chapter 136 — The Girl
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Whether his own perception was at fault—this was indeed a matter that vexed Gao Yang beyond measure, yet he still lacked further control groups and avenues of exploration, so for the time being the question could only be set aside. And compared with this shelved problem, what concerned him more was something else: the matter of the gods.
The fragment of the eternal stone tablet was real—so were the things recorded upon it also real? And if those things were real as well... then Gao Yang was forced to confront a fact that, upon reflection, was rather horrifying:
The gods are dead.
Those jumbled, fragmented call records explicitly mentioned the names of the gods, and from the contents of the calls themselves one could piece together a shocking war of god-hunting. According to the records, the gods in that war were almost entirely at an overwhelming disadvantage—it was less a war than a systematic, one-by-one extermination of those deities, and the gods of every major contemporary sect known to Gao Yang were conspicuously among them.
So if the gods are dead, then what exactly are the tens of millions of mortal worshippers in this world bowing down to every day?!
What is it that answers the prayers of mortals, what is it that controls the flow of divine power, what is it that sends down all manner of miracles, what is it that transmits secret and indescribable whispers to the faithful during their meditations, and through those whispers hands down one "divine oracle" after another?!
When those devout priests pray with all their hearts, they hear murmurs from the divine realm in the depths of their souls—and if those murmurs do not come from the gods at all, then their source is enough to make one's blood run cold.
And then Gao Yang could not help but think of the "Fall of the White Star," the event that had split the Senming Sect and degraded it into the Druidic School.
A matter of three thousand years ago—even for the once-flourishing Gondor Empire it belonged to the realm of "ancient events" beyond historical precision. Short-lived and ever-changing humanity could scarcely record such ancient matters with any clarity, but the principal inheritors of the Senming Sect were elves, and the long-lived elves could record matters spanning thousands of years with perfect clarity.
In the elves' historical annals, the "Fall of the White Star" was a "dark miracle" observed and sensed only by the druids. At the time all the druids experienced a unified "vision": they saw the sky split in two, the dark starry heavens descending to a height that seemed within reach, while blazing white stars shook violently in the firmament and fell toward the earth—yet apart from the druids, none of the ordinary people of that era saw anything at all strike the ground.
The Fall of the White Star was therefore regarded as a colossal collective hallucination; but because its scale was so immense and the event itself involved the gods, scholars dared not casually dismiss it as mere "hallucination." Instead they reinterpreted it as a meteor shower occurring on a higher plane, parallel to the current space-time—they held that something had fallen from the divine realm and landed in the crevice between the mortal world and the divine realm, which ordinary people lacking spiritual talent naturally could not perceive. Such was the "Fall of the White Star."
But whatever the truth of the Fall of the White Star, it was after that event that druidic divine magic ceased to function.
Gao Yang had initially assumed the Fall of the White Star was the fall of the nature gods, but now the information in the eternal stone tablet fragment made him doubt this: the history of the eternal stone tablet was far older than the Fall of the White Star!