Chapter 885 — An Invitation?
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
A fragment of metal of unknown origin, most likely the wreckage of some ancient installation that had fallen from space, possessing energy radiation similar to the "Eternal Slate" yet not the Eternal Slate itself—the members of the expeditionary army, knowing nothing of its nature, had worked this metal into the Shield of the Kingdom's Guardian, and afterward Gao Yang Cecil had lived side by side with this piece of equipment for nearly twenty years of his life. This "relic of the starry sky" did not, like the Eternal Slate, immediately produce mental guidance and instillation of knowledge; instead, over many years it had subtly and imperceptibly influenced Gao Yang Cecil, and ultimately enabled a human to establish a connection with an ancient installation out among the stars.
Gao Yang could not determine how this change had come about, nor whether there had been any critical junctures in the course of it—for the relevant memories had all vanished. Whether those gaps were of Gao Yang Cecil's own making or had been erased by some external force, the Gao Yang of today could no longer learn how the original owner of this body had been influenced, bit by bit, by the "relic of the starry sky." At this moment he simply found himself associating it with another matter:
In elven legend, the earliest "primordial elves" had once reached a towering spire and, within it, been subjected to mysterious energies, thereby diverging into several subspecies—gray elves, silver elves, sea elves, and others—and all the subspecies had suffered large-scale memory impairment and far-reaching technological discontinuity. From intelligence gathered later, Gao Yang surmised that the tower the primordial elves had encountered was likewise a relic of the god-slaying fleet; it likely lay in the southwest of the continent, and was in some way connected to the tower that Gao Yang Cecil had encountered when he sailed southeast in those years...
These ancient relics all seemed to possess similar powers: ceaselessly emitting mysterious energies, instilling memories or knowledge into any race that came into contact with them, and under certain conditions even capable of altering the life-form of those who touched them...
This prompted an involuntary question in Gao Yang's mind: Gao Yang Cecil, who had also successfully reached a "tower" in his day... after he entered that tower and came out alive, was he really still "human"?
He instinctively looked down at his own body, and for the first time felt that this body he had "picked up" out of thin air was the greatest secret he faced in this world.
"Is something the matter?" Metzen noticed Gao Yang's odd behavior and could not help asking.
"No... nothing. I just suddenly thought of some things from long ago." Gao Yang steadied himself and suppressed all the surging thoughts in his mind. Then he frowned, pondering whether he should answer Metzen's question directly, and looked at the two senior agents before him—they simply stood there quietly, wearing smiles that betrayed no true intent, full of patience and professional courtesy.
At last he let out a slow breath and said, in a slow, low voice: "Yes. In the course of my contact with this 'relic of the starry sky,' I learned certain things."
Noretta asked instinctively: "Specifically...?"
"The gods are dead," Gao Yang said, looking into her eyes and enunciating each word, "and it was a massacre."
A brief silence fell over the room. Metzen and Noretta regarded Gao Yang with a certain inexplicable solemnity, while Gao Yang continued unhurriedly: "And yet in this present age, the gods still hang high above the heads of all living things; divine oracles and divine power seem unchanged since antiquity. So my greatest curiosity now is this—those things that answer mortal prayers from the divine realms, what exactly are they? What is their purpose, and what is their true relationship to the mortal world?"