Chapter 963 — Echoes
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
"Do you like an eternity cradle such as this?"
Gaoyang suddenly thought of the young dragon that had just woken from its hatching sac, and of the cheerful cry it had made at him; he thought of those "inferior citizens" in the lower city who had already grown muddled on boosters and hallucinogens, reduced wholly to nutrients for the gods; he thought of that dazed, frenzied arena, of the dragons slaughtering one another there... a dozen or so cold steel machines locked in combat, with brains and nerve ganglia strapped to them, drowned in booster-induced hallucinations.
These dragons were indeed still alive—but Tarrond was already dead.
"How terrible," he said suddenly, softly. "Life and death alike, without value."
Then he paused, and asked again: "Can the eternity cradle be broken?"
"It would come at a great cost," the Dragon God said quietly, "and the odds of success are vanishingly slim—in the end, this cradle itself is already the price of failure, and the laws of nature are never forgiving toward the failed. Any species—even the mighty dragons—can scarcely afford the right to fail twice."
At this, He lifted His eyes suddenly, settling them on Gaoyang's face: "So. Do you wish to help Tarrond break this 'eternity cradle'?"
"Me?" Gaoyang pointed at himself and could not help laughing. "Where would I get the ability for that?"
"You could destroy it with a single command," the Dragon God said with a faint smile. "So why not suppose that you also have the power to break the 'cradle' of this continent?"
It seemed a joke, yet Gaoyang could not help but consider it seriously. After a few seconds of thought, he still shook his head: "No. Not at least for now."
"Why?" The Dragon God showed a flicker of curiosity. "Did you not find this cradle terrible?"
"I am not the dragon race's savior—there has never been any savior," Gaoyang said earnestly. "And as you said, breaking the eternity cradle would come at a great cost—I can imagine what those costs are, and I can imagine who would pay them. No one has the right to sacrifice what belongs to others to satisfy their own drama of 'salvation,' so I have no right to decide for the dragons either, no right to choose on their behalf whether to sacrifice or merely survive.
"So whether they sink into the eternity cradle and rot, or rise up and strike a blow to seek a future for their whole species—that is the dragons' own affair. It should be they themselves who decide, who choose whether to pay that price.
"Cecil does not meddle in other nations' internal affairs—that is my rule."
Gaoyang finished laying out his thoughts, yet the god before him looked him up and down with an odd expression for several seconds before speaking, half-smiling: "Hearing those words from the mouth of one the human world universally calls a 'hero' is truly remarkable. I had thought you had already cast yourself as the human world's 'savior,' but it seems that is not the case."
Gaoyang spread his hands: "I haven't saved anyone. All of us are saving ourselves."
"...You seem to have wholly taken yourself as one of humanity, as one of this world—wanderer from beyond the realm," the Dragon God said, watching Gaoyang with some curiosity. "And now I find myself curious—in your homeland, do people face the same difficulties as they do in this world? For instance... when you confront vast social upheaval, when your social groups must undergo enormous shifts in thought, when your faith is tested, when you too must abandon tradition and dogma and face a transformed environment... how do you deal with all of it?
"Ah, or perhaps I should first confirm—do you also have races, societies, faiths, and nations?"