I am God LSLCCF

Chapter 438: The Lizard People's Extraordinary Profession

In the end, Anu still chose not to go back. The reason he gave was this."Even if I return, there is nothing I could truly accomplish. In all the time I have been away, the rest of you have managed our village just as well without me."

"Everything has already found its proper course. Whether I am there or not makes no difference."

Anu looked at the ones who had come. "The few of you have done well, truly. Better than I ever could have."

"Cultivating the potions, holding the Harvest Sacrifice, raising up our descendants."

"All these things, you are already doing."

"My returning would help no one at all. Staying here, if anything, lets me do far more."

"And more important than that, if I went back now, everything would fall apart at the final step. Lord Kurmis lies gravely wounded and sleeping, all to seal away the King of Ghouls, Akmanmon. For what was that?"

"We came all this long way to take part in this war, and fought and bled for so long. And for what?"

"To simply walk away now, and let it all go to waste, that would be too great a pity."

It was true.

Indeed, the whole Lizard tribe numbered only so many souls at present, and there was little for Anu to do even if he did return.

And so Anu believed that by remaining here in the City of Fire Protection, he could in fact offer the Lizard People far greater help.

What the Lizard People called guarding Kurmis was, at this stage, far more a matter of Kurmis protecting them. All they truly did was believe in Kurmis and offer him sacrifice in keeping with ritual.

Whenever some genuine crisis or trouble arose, it was Kurmis, if anything, who worried over their coming to harm.

One of the Lizard People said, "But Lord Kurmis wanted you to return..."

Anu told him, "Of course I will return. The Volcano Forest will always be our root, and Lord Kurmis will always be our faith. But I must first finish what I have begun here."

Anu asked after the affairs of the Lizard village and gave his instructions on them. Then he handed his Miracle Tool, the Pouch of Woven Hope, over to the ones who had come.

He told them, too, that he would next put together a caravan, to open up a trade route between the Lizard People of the Volcano Forest and the City of Fire Protection.

"A caravan of our very own. This is something we sorely need."

"We have the Pouch of Woven Hope. We have the rich bounty of the Volcano Forest. We have fertile land and crops nourished by the power of Lord Feathered Serpent."

"But it is still not enough, because the Lizard People are too few, and too weak."

"Even praying to the Pouch of Woven Hope demands a price in return. Nothing it gives comes out of thin air."

"But the City of Fire Protection and Suinhor are strong, and they have all things. Through this trade route we can make ourselves strong, make every Lizard Person stronger still, and make the faith of the Feathered Serpent God Kurmis grow mightier as well."

"This is what we should be doing now."

One of them asked, "And what will the caravan be called?"

Anu said, "The Volcano Caravan. I have already settled on the name."

Anu's words won the newcomers over, and so he placed the Pouch of Woven Hope in their care and saw them off with it.

And after this exchange with the Lizard People come from the Volcano Forest, Anu at last made up his mind.

He looked to the companions present, those who had fought in the war beside him and come with him to the City of Fire Protection.

"I have decided. We accept King Morabi's invitation."

Little by little, the castle filled with more and more people.

Anu bought a number of slaves, and hired on some Snake People who were not overly afraid of the Lizard People.

In truth these slaves and hired hands were fearful enough at first. But after a while in one another's company, they found the Lizard People much the same as ordinary Snake People, and found that they spoke the very same tongue besides, and so bit by bit they warmed to them.

The whole castle gradually settled into its rhythm, and every building was put to its proper use.

Anu also gathered a caravan in the name of the Lord of the Volcano, and bought up a great many goods, which piled up in the castle's storehouses.

In the animal pens stood a dozen or more newly bought pack beasts. Soon the caravan and its beasts would carry these goods off toward the Volcano Forest.

It seemed that he truly meant to settle down in the City of Fire Protection.

One day, the Lizard Person Anu pulled on a white undershirt and draped chainmail over it.

He pressed an iron helmet firmly onto his head, then threw on a hempen cloak dyed a pale yellow.

Upon the cloak was the mark of the Feathered Serpent, the emblem of Anu's faith.

Then he belted at his waist a fine sword forged at the "Black Fire Alchemy Workshop" in the Land of Sunrise. Paired with the towering, fierce frame of a Lizard Person and a face that, to Snake People eyes, carried a hint of savagery, it pressed upon others an unseen weight of raw power.

Mounted on a Land Dragon, a long spear gripped in his hand, every Lizard Person could rightly be called a machine of slaughter.

Only a few days before, he had become the Guard Captain of the royal palace.

This was no ordinary post. It was one of the few key positions in the City of Fire Protection that held military command, an office of long lineage and no small standing.

Riding a Land Dragon to the royal palace, he saw, even from outside, a good number of clergy gathered together and waiting.

Though the City of Fire Protection had of late been host to divine servants from every part of the kingdom, Anu still knew at a single glance which temple these ones came from.

"Divine servants of the Temple of Fire Protection."

Had Menro, newly risen to Pontiff, come?

At the royal palace, even from outside, through the latticed windows, he could hear King Morabi locked in a furious quarrel with Menro, the man just raised to the office of Pontiff by the joint nomination and election of the various temples. Neither would give an inch.

Anu had meant to go straight in to see King Morabi. Now he stopped short in his tracks.

"Impossible!"

"I will never agree to this!"

"Morabi, mortal, you are forsaking your faith!" Pontiff Menro shouted, all but consumed by fury.

Even without seeing it, one could picture the robed clergyman flailing his arms about, his beard trembling wildly.

King Morabi's words were calm, yet his stance was utterly unyielding.

"Menro, you should address me as King."

"I am the King of this nation."

"I am the successor King Osis named, the one who holds this land in his command."

Pontiff Menro, without a shred of respect, replied, "You are the king of mortals, and I am the spokesman of God."

King Morabi answered, "Then, spokesman of God, do you mean to reach for kingly power?"

"The age of the Divine Blessed King has ended, true enough. But the will of God is that faith belongs to God, and kingship belongs to mortals."

"Or is it that you would set your own will above God's?"

At this, Pontiff Menro's tone finally dropped. "What God desires is faith. I am God's Chief Shepherd in the mortal world."

"But as King of Suinhor, as a follower of the Divine Being, you would let the faithful of a foreign god run riot as they please in the Scarlet Goddess's land of faith."

"This I can never tolerate. Nor can any of the faithful."

King Morabi told Menro, "This was decreed by King Osis, arranged long before now."

Menro would not yield an inch. "Even King Osis had no right to let those foreign-god believers lay hands on the goddess's land of faith."

King Morabi said, "Menro, it is nothing of the sort."

"It is only that Witch Spirits and Alchemists have been allowed into our nation to lend us their aid. It is nothing so grave as you make it sound."

"God's name is no excuse of yours, and your notions do not speak for the goddess's will."

Menro cried out, "I will be watching you! Give me no fault to catch you by!"

"The day you utterly forsake your faith is the day divine punishment descends."

King Morabi said, "By the sound of it, you are the divine punishment."

Menro answered, "I am the goddess's thunder, the whip that lashes down upon the mortal world!"

Menro, granting King Morabi no face at all, flung his sleeve and turned to go. As he reached the doorway, he caught sight, all at once, of the Lizard Person Anu waiting outside.

His expression turned uglier still. He whirled back toward the room and shouted, "Witch Spirits! Alchemists!"

"And now a Lizard Person too!"

"Morabi, is Suinhor still the Suinhor of the City-State folk?"

"Is Suinhor still the Suinhor of the Scarlet Goddess?"

Pontiff Menro stormed off in a rage. The whole exchange had let Anu see just how nearly irreconcilable the conflict between Menro and Morabi had become.

Here were two figures who stood for divine authority and royal power. The one held himself to be the true master of the nation. The other believed divine authority reigned above all else, that even the king ought to bow to the temple's guidance.

Anu stepped into the royal palace and bowed toward the figure seated in shadow within.

"My King!"

King Morabi rose, took up a silver goblet, and poured Anu a cup of wine, speaking with the ease of an old friend. "Ever since Menro crowned himself Pontiff, he has grown more and more carried away."

"As if he had not become a Pontiff at all, but a Divine Being."

Anu did not take up the thread, and Morabi did not carry the subject any further.

King Morabi asked, "Have you gone to see the Palace Guard yet?"

Anu nodded. "I saw them a few days back. Well-disciplined."

King Morabi said, "There is no need for such pleasantries. The Palace Guard rotted through long ago, rotted down to its very roots."

"I invited you here to help me, not to hear you speak sweet nothings."

"When King Osis marched to war, he did not take this force with him. Who does not know that, its name aside, this army holds not the faintest scrap of fighting strength?"

"But now that you have become captain of the Palace Guard, I hope you can breathe fresh life into this force of ancient lineage, and win back for it its once-resounding name."

"Can you do this?"

Anu answered, "I will do it."

King Morabi nodded and clapped Anu on the shoulder.

"But there is no rush in it. For today, come with me first to another place."

King Morabi led Anu to the district where the City of Fire Protection's workshops clustered together, where a tall, tower-shaped structure had risen not long before.

Around the tower stood all manner of supporting buildings. Great heaps of woven cloth lay piled together, and busy workers, sweat streaming down their faces, hurried in and out.

To the left stood shops that bought up Silk-Weaving. To the right, finished cloth of exquisite beauty was on sale, where merchants gathered in throngs to haggle over the price.

The cloth was so light it seemed to weigh nothing at all. Loosen one's grip even a little, and it would slip free of the palm and drift up toward the sky, as though it meant to float away entirely.

King Morabi was invited inside by the master of this place.

That master was a peculiar Ability User, one of a wholly new extraordinary profession that had appeared not long before.

Anu gazed at the tower, and could feel a powerful extraordinary force turning within it.

"A Tower Keeper, and their Alchemy Tower."

"A new profession born of the line of the God of Desire."

Anu knew what this place was. He had heard tell of it before ever coming here.

But he had only heard of it. This was the first time he had set eyes on a thing like an Alchemy Tower.

It was said that this Alchemy Tower could run for but a single hour each day. Yet in that one hour it could surpass the daily output of a thousand workers across several great workshops, and its quality outstripped normal handiwork besides. Marvels of consummate craft that no mortal hand could ever fashion, this Alchemy Tower turned out with ease.

Were it not that the cost of building an Alchemy Tower was beyond all words, and that the Tower Keeper itself was so rare an extraordinary profession, it would surely have overturned the whole world long ago.

Even so, its fame had long since spread through every nation.

Anu followed King Morabi on a tour of the Alchemy Tower. He watched spinning frames and looms, row upon row, move entirely on their own, needing no one to work them. Anu was utterly dumbstruck.

Not a single person could be seen within the Alchemy Tower, yet it was as though some vast, unseen hand were guiding it all.

King Morabi fared little better than Anu. He said to the Tower Keeper, "I have now seen for myself the power of you Tower Keepers, and the singular wonders of Alchemy."

The Tower Keeper replied, "It was only with your help that I could raise this Alchemy Tower. Without you, none of what you see here would exist."

"Every last thing made here holds within it a part of you, my King."

The Tower Keeper spoke truly. Of all the extraordinary professions in the world today, this one demanded by far the greatest cost to advance.

For a smaller nation, a single Alchemy Tower might take the whole realm's strength to build. Only a nation as wealthy and powerful as Suinhor could raise one without the slightest strain.

The Tower Keeper had built their Alchemy Tower with the backing of King Morabi and King Osis, and so the royal house held a share of its profits as well.

And that share was written into a contract.

Indeed, the contract of a Contract Lawyer.

Then King Morabi brought him next to the Contract Guild of the City of Fire Protection, where the guild's head received the King and Anu in person.

Here Anu witnessed the mysteries of the Witch Spirits and the codex of contract law. Every contract was witnessed by God, and so carried a special binding force.

The higher the contract's rank, the stronger its binding force.

Even the most ordinary document, once signed with one's own name and notarized by a Contract Lawyer, would take on extraordinary force.

King Morabi watched all this and said to the head of the City of Fire Protection's Contract Guild, "This is exactly what the kingdom needs."

The guild head replied, "We too wish to carry the power of order and contract to every corner of this world."

As a ruler, the thing one loathes and fears most is, of course, disorder.

"Next, I also wish for you to work together with the scholars of my nation to compile a new legal code for Suinhor, and to grant that code a Spirit of Legal Code."

"Just as the Executive Nation of Ten Thousand Serpents has now."

"But this code must be compiled according to Suinhor's own circumstances, and the final granting of the Spirit of Legal Code must have my approval."

The head of the Contract Guild rose, bowed, and said to King Morabi, "Of course."

"We are merely those who uphold the rules and keep them running."

"The laws of this nation, the laws of this land, can be laid down by none but the master of this land, by you, its king."

The Contract Lawyer had affirmed King Morabi's standing, and this pleased King Morabi greatly.

The head of the Contract Guild was well pleased too. After all these years, they had finally made their way into the very heart of Suinhor.

This day's excursion had truly opened Anu's eyes.

Two wholly new extraordinary professions had shown Anu just how vast and wondrous this world truly was.

At the same time, Anu suddenly understood why King Morabi had brushed aside all opposition to invite the Witch Spirits and Alchemists into his nation. They represented the future itself.

After a long day's work out in the city, Anu returned to his own castle and set aside his full armor.

He leaned back in his chair, thinking over all he had seen and heard that day.

"The Contract Lawyers."

"The Tower Keepers."

"Extraordinary professions, and the servants of the gods."

In the service of the God of Knowledge and Truth, and of the God of Desire and Alchemy, there stood two unique extraordinary professions each.

And what of the Feathered Serpent God?

And what of the Lizard People?

What path should they walk of their own? In this very moment, Anu suddenly found himself pondering the question.

In a world ruled by extraordinary power and the Divine Beings, strength meant everything.

"What is special about our power?"

"Our power, like the Snake People's, is an innate command of earth-and-stone Seal Imprints. But the Snake People turn theirs outward, while we turn ours upon ourselves."

"Does that even count as a special profession?"

There was something special to it, yes. But set beside professions like the Witch Spirits, the Contract Lawyers, the Alchemists, and the Tower Keepers, it fell far, far short.

Not only did their power hold no especially formidable uniqueness, it had no system to it at all.

After all, they had come into being too recently, and their foundations ran too shallow.

Once more Anu turned over in his mind what set them apart, and whether they held any special power at all.

Lately Anu had been rebuilding the Palace Guard, reforming this so-called force of glorious history and tradition.

He meant to fold all the Lizard People he had brought with him into its ranks. They were, after all, powerful Ability Users with mature command of their strength, fit to serve as its backbone. Later on, he could even summon more Lizard People from the Volcano Forest to join the corps.

The original ranks were already too few, and most of what remained were the old, the weak, the sick, and the crippled.

Anu planned to recruit more strong Snake People soldiers besides, and to purchase Alchemical Artifacts to arm them.

In truth, the Palace Guard had not so much fallen into neglect as been left behind by the times.

Historically, the Palace Guard had been the personal escort of the Divine Blessed Kings, the guards of the court.

But with the rise of the Land of Sunrise, the Alchemy Corps had become the standard of every nation and the mightiest force of all. The interplay among the various extraordinary professions, and the combined use of all manner of powerful artifacts, these were what now measured a legion's true fighting strength.

The Palace Guard, meanwhile, remained just as it had always been, ordinary Land Dragon riders bolstered by a handful of divine servants and Ability Users borrowed in the traditional way for defense. In such a state, it could not possibly have held on to any real fighting strength.

The later Divine Blessed Kings never reformed this force either. Instead they raised a separate Alchemy Corps, leaving the Palace Guard to sink into nothing more than gatekeeping sentries.

It was only when Morabi ascended the throne that the new king finally thought to restore this Palace Guard Corps.

Such had been Anu's original plan.

But after seeing the Contract Lawyers and the Tower Keepers, a new idea had taken root in his heart.

"Could the Lizard People not have an extraordinary profession of our own? A power that belonged to us alone?"

Anu bolted up from his chair all at once and sat bolt upright.

"That's right. We still have the Potion Plants, and those mutant beasts."

"Could we not put these Potion Plants to use, and the power of those mutant beasts as well?"

In truth, the Lizard People had entertained this very idea before.

Could the power of the potions be harnessed? And those mutant beasts that held extraordinary power within them, could they be controlled, to grant strength both great and rare?

But they had never once succeeded. A potion was itself an extraordinary material, and to devour one recklessly was to devour the divine blood of an alien kind. It was nothing short of courting death.

The end was either to go utterly mad, or to be consumed by the backlash and turned into extraordinary material oneself.

The mutant beasts were exactly this. They might have devoured potions and gained the Power of Wisdom Ability, but the moment they swallowed a potion was the moment they fell into madness. Devour a few plants more, and their bodies would burst apart on the spot, a wretched end.

These maddened mutant beasts were even harder to control, utterly impossible to tame the way ordinary monsters could be tamed.

Anu shook his head. There seemed to be no solution to this at all.

In the days that followed, Anu set about drilling the Palace Guard Corps into shape. All the Lizard People he had brought with him took up posts within the corps as well, becoming its officers.

Then he summoned a group from Maya City to join the corps too.

Utter decline had its advantages as well. At the very least, there was little resistance now to taking control, and King Morabi backed him with all his might.

One day, the Volcano Caravan returned from afar.

The caravan carried goods brought from the Volcano Forest and the Lizard People, and along with them came two Lizard People as well.

The moment the two Lizard People stepped down from the convoy, they rushed toward Anu, who had come to greet them.

The Lizard People said warmly, "Everything you sent is so useful. There's just too much of it, more than we could ever use."

Anu said happily, "Better too much than too little."

Anu glanced at the convoy and asked, "You've brought quite a lot yourselves."

The Lizard People said, "All of it things found only among us. We sold plenty along the way in town after town, and bought up plenty of new wares to bring back and resell here in the City of Fire Protection."

"Some of the rarest pieces we couldn't bear to sell on the road. The people in your caravan said to bring them to the City of Fire Protection to sell, that only here could they fetch a truly high price."

Having a caravan of their own seemed to breathe fresh vigor into the Lizard People.

This delighted Anu all the more, and the smile did not leave his face.

But then the new arrivals brought up something less pleasant. "Lately the Volcano Forest has seen a good many more thieves and poachers. They come for the sole purpose of stealing potions and poaching mutant beasts, and they have stirred up no end of trouble."

Anu asked, "Has anyone been hurt?"

The answer came, "We broke the hands of those wretches and handed them all over to Maya City for judgment. The least they'll face is being ruined down to their last coin."

This group of Lizard People held no small influence in Maya City these days.

Anu let out a breath as well. So long as there had been no serious casualties, all was well.

The other Lizard Person then produced a potion and set it down before Anu. "This is a potion that's been showing up in the markets lately. See if you can tell what's wrong with it."

Anu frowned as he looked it over, and all at once he felt there was something strange about this potion.

It carried none of the pure quality of an ordinary potion, and its color was muddled and mixed.

It was like the difference between a common plant and a poisonous one.

Anu lifted his head and looked at the two of them. "What is going on with this potion?"

The Lizard People said, "Lately some people have been stealing potions from the Volcano Forest before they've ripened, then hastening the Potion Plants to maturity by feeding them the flesh and blood of monsters."

"This ripened potion was born just that way. It's the first time even we have ever seen such a thing!"

The Potion Plants were the offerings the Lizard People made to the Feathered Serpent Kurmis, used upon the Harvest Sacrifice.

The Lizard People would never have dared to meddle with them, to add anything of the sort to them.

These Snake People, by contrast, knew no such restraint.

"These wretches."

"We must find some way to deal with them. I am the Lord of the Volcano, and if they trespass on my territory, we have every right to..."

The more Anu thought on it, the angrier he grew. But halfway through his words, he suddenly stopped.

Anu's gaze fell suddenly to the "force-ripened" potion in his hand, and something in his eyes changed.

"Nourishing a seed with divine blood?"

Of late Anu had been turning over, again and again, the question of an extraordinary profession that could belong to the Lizard People, and of some way to give the Lizard People's power a mature system of its own.

Such a thing could make the Lizard People's Ability Users far stronger, and at the same time give them a mature system that could be passed down through the generations.

At the same time, he wished to use this very method to train both the Palace Guard Corps and the Lizard People's Ability Users.

It was only that, in all this time, he had never found an answer.

And now, in this very moment, an idea suddenly came to Anu.

If potions could be force-ripened with the flesh and blood of monsters, with mingled divine blood, then could he not, from the very beginning, weave his own divine blood into a Potion Seed, and little by little nurture it into a Potion Plant with that same blood of his?

Would that not solve the problem of the potions being unfit to consume?

A Potion Seed was a thing formed from the Feathered Serpent's spirituality, its flesh and blood, and its Seal Imprints. In such a case, it would surely fall under the Feathered Serpent's influence.

By then, perhaps it would not be his own power alone that changed.

Even his consciousness, even his very appearance, might be transformed under the radiance of the Feathered Serpent's power.

But to Anu, this was no problem at all. They were, after all, followers of the Feathered Serpent Kurmis.

Without a word, Anu took the potion and returned to his room.

He pushed aside the training manuals he had been compiling and the books he had been studying, and brought out every record he had concerning potions and mutant beasts.

And amid all his writing and sketching, yet another new idea took shape in Anu's mind.

"Raise a Potion Plant to form with my own divine blood."

"And if I feed that plant to a mutant beast, could I not then command that beast through ritual and contract, could I not even make the beast a part of my own power?"

"Just as the Witch Spirits have their Book of the Witch Spirit, the Alchemists their lamp, and the Tower Keepers their Alchemy Tower."

A brand-new door seemed to be opening before Anu.

"This is a profession for Ability Users, one that commands extraordinary beasts."