“...”

As the heavy, grating sound of the door shutting rang out, Oliver lowered his head slightly inside the room and stared down at the diary resting on his lap without a word, as if lost in thought.

A moment later, he let out a weary sigh, stood up, and out of long habit placed the diary into the second drawer of the desk in front of him.

The dim glow in the room vanished, and with it the few ghostly blue afterimages. The room returned to silence.

Vinny pondered for a moment, then walked over to the drawer where Oliver had placed the diary before disappearing and pulled it open. Inside lay an old notebook, damp, mildewed, and badly worn.

He took the diary out of the drawer, brushed the dust off it with his fingers, and opened to the first page.

What was written on it was standard Ancient Empire script. It had a great deal in common with both the present Imperial language and the royal language of Camella. If there was any difference, it was mostly in pronunciation and in certain phrases and grammatical forms. Most of it was the same. After all, nearly all human languages had developed from Ancient Empire script as their foundation.

Vinny could more or less read it. There was no real obstacle to understanding it.

Looking more closely, Vinny discovered that many pages had been torn out of the diary. There was no telling whether Oliver himself had done it, or someone else had.

‘Year XXX, Day 16, clear weather.’

‘Today is the first day since graduating from Carillian Academy and taking a brand-new step forward. I received this assignment from the headmaster. I heard it was a personal commission from His Majesty the Emperor himself. At last, the time has come for me to serve His Majesty. What an extraordinary honor. I have heard people say the work here is grueling, but I do not care. Over the past four years, weren’t all the skills and knowledge I learned meant for this very moment, the moment when I could finally give them full play?’

‘Even though I still do not know where I am going or what exactly I will be doing, I absolutely must not disappoint the expectations of the headmaster and His Majesty the Emperor.’

This should have been written on the first day that senior named Oliver arrived at Gaflei Fort.

Vinny kept turning the pages.

‘Year XXX, Day 23, weather unknown.’

‘The seniors here are all very kind, and the guards do their utmost to satisfy every reasonable request we make. It’s just that staying this deep underground all the time is unbearably stifling. Still, I believe I’ll adapt to both the work and the environment soon enough. Hang in there, Oliver. You can’t drag everyone down!’

Turning further, Vinny found that several more pages had been torn out. The content on the next remaining page had obviously lost much of its continuity with what came before.

‘Year XXX, Day XX.’

‘Perhaps... perhaps I have been taking too much for granted all along. Nothing is as simple as I imagined. Even if it is a Demon Pillar, I still feel that our technology is not enough to support such a reckless undertaking. Even if I cannot say exactly where the problem lies.’

Reading that, Vinny frowned.

Beside him, Milian was frightened, but at the same time intensely curious about what Vinny was seeing that had him frowning like that. She edged closer, rose onto her toes, and leaned over his shoulder. Her olive-colored eyes looked like those of an overly curious Persian cat.

The more Vinny read, the more he felt that the person writing the diary had grown heavier and heavier with time. At the beginning, the entries had dates, though for some reason those dates had all been blacked out. But further in, the writer had become too lazy even to write the date anymore. It no longer looked like a diary. It looked more like a way to vent emotion.

‘No, no, that’s not right! There has to be a mistake! Something must have gone wrong!!’

On the next page, there was only that one simple sentence. But just from the way it had been revised over and over, with black ink crossing out and blotting away who knew how many words, and from the mess of the handwriting itself, Vinny could imagine the writer’s state of mind at the time.

The earlier handwriting had been neat and elegant.

Now all that remained was scrawl.

Each character stabbed at the eye like a patch of crazed, overgrown weeds. It was hard to imagine they had been written by the same person.

Vinny’s brow furrowed more deeply as he looked to the next page.

‘Last night, last night... I dreamed of the true body of that statue. Yes, that one—the God of Greed and Intrigue, Filerom. I saw His true body! I told people about it, but they all think the pressure of work, plus suggestion and my own mind, caused me to have an unusual dream. But I know it was not a dream! It was as real as you and me! What we are doing has already drawn the notice of a Demon Pillar!!’

Dreamed of that statue??

Vinny immediately thought of the Demon Pillar statue that kept appearing throughout the institute.

The God of Greed and Intrigue, Filerom?

Was that the name of that Demon Pillar statue?

‘As expected... what we are doing is no different from using a knife to cut off a horn from a Demon Pillar. Of course He would notice. But why... why is He smiling at me? It is a smile of extreme contempt, the kind one gives while looking at a swarm of stupid insects... I have a very bad feeling about this.’

After that page, several more had been torn out again.

‘So that’s how it is. So that’s how it is! They already knew. Our gods will never answer us, because They simply XXXX....’

Vinny wanted to keep reading, only to find that the next few words had all been blacked out so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell what had been written.

A line this important had been blotted out?

Was that a coincidence, or had someone done it on purpose?

Vinny kept reading.

‘This is a secret I only learned today after accidentally overhearing their conversation. The Emperor knows. The imperial cabinet knows. Only the commoners and nobles know nothing about it... They explained that if the truth were revealed, it would provoke panic among the people, so the masses and the nobles must be soothed. But I still cannot believe that they knew long ago that the gods cannot hear our prayers!’

The handwriting became even sloppier, so sloppy that even Vinny had trouble making it out. He could feel that the mental state of that Carillian Academy student named Oliver was deteriorating more and more, as though the worldview he had built since birth had been utterly shattered.

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore. Should I simply never have investigated this? Never have learned any of it?? The divine protection I have believed in from birth until now was a complete lie from beginning to end! Thinking about it, that makes sense. Ever since I was little, the divine envoys and the clergy praised the holy spirits as if they were beyond all wonder, yet I have never seen a single one of them. Instead, the first thing I encountered was a Demon Pillar.’

‘Yes. If holy spirits truly existed, then how did the Demon Pillars invade the Tyrelis Continent in the first place?’

‘Perhaps I should accept one fact: compared to those vague and intangible holy spirits, at least Demon Pillars can hear the talk of mortals. And when They are in a good mood, They may even grant some of our wishes.’

Vinny turned the page again.

‘The Demon Pillars undeniably exist, while the holy spirits remain doubtful. Perhaps from the very beginning this was never an equal struggle. I think I finally understand why the Demon Pillar in my dream smiled at me. In Its eyes, this is nothing more than the self-directed little performance of a swarm of foolish mayflies. We are definitely going to fail.’

‘These past few days, I have been dreaming of Him constantly. Today, when I woke up and walked out of my room, the statue at the end of the corridor frightened me so badly I screamed, and I was sent to the counseling office again... I think the way they look at me is wrong. That look... it is not the way one looks at ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) one of one’s own kind.’

‘Could it be that they think, because I can dream of the Demon Pillar, they want to make me?? ...No, no, I cannot just sit here and wait for death. I have to XXXX!’

Another large section had been blacked out.

Vinny stared at those words in shock, wondering whether this person had been preparing to do something extreme.

When he turned the next page, he found that more than half the rest of the diary had been torn out. On the next remaining page, most of the contents had again been blacked out in great swaths, leaving only a few scattered words.

‘Our gods are a pile of fragments XXXXX...’

‘The last Ragnarok’s XXXXXXX High Heaven God-King, He XXXX...’

‘XXXX... Dawn Goddess XXXXXX... Twilight Demon God.’

The moment Vinny caught the keywords Dawn Goddess and Twilight Demon God, his attention sharpened at once.

Combined with that earlier line from Oliver—our gods cannot answer us—Vinny found it bizarre, because he himself had seen his own ancestress in a dream, the very Dawn Goddess herself. How could it be said that the gods could not hear mortal prayers?

And what did our gods are a pile of fragments even mean?

And how could there be a passage that mentioned both the Dawn Goddess and the Twilight Demon God at the same time?

Vinny remembered that when he had been in the Secret Realm (Marsmo), the King of Marsmo had suddenly asked him what his relationship was with the Twilight Demon God.

At the time, Vinny had assumed the King of Marsmo had either mistaken him for someone else or was speaking nonsense.

But later, during the trip to Kamov Mountain, that unfamiliar male demon race entity had also spoken to him about the Twilight Demon God.

Could it be that the Twilight Demon God, Medilia, truly had some hidden connection to the Dawn Goddess, Facilis?

Vinny’s gaze shifted again to another divine name mentioned in the previous passage.

High Heaven God-King.

Who was that?

Why had he never heard of such a god before?

That page ended there as well. Vinny turned it, and found the last sentence written at the end of this diary.

‘Dawn and Twilight are, in the first place, merely different manifestations of the same thing at different moments.’

Vinny’s eyes widened.

Right.

Marsmo.

Something clicked in Vinny’s mind.

‘I understand now. We were always destined to fail, because this blade was never falling upon a Demon Pillar’s head. It was falling upon our own heads!!’

‘The Empire wanted to refine [Divine Authority] in order to become gods and fight against the [Demon Pillars]. To prevent the world from collapsing, they sought to seize [Divine Authority] from the Demon Pillars themselves, reasoning that this could be used for experimentation without fear of consequence, but XXXX’

‘Too late. Everything is too late. Far too late!’

‘It was never that one step went wrong. From the very beginning, we were already walking a completely erroneous path. No matter how careful or cautious we were, success was impossible from the start?!’

‘We overlooked one thing. The target of the seizure—those two authorities, [Greed] and [Intrigue]—can never be seized. Because [Greed] and [Intrigue] are bound to bring forth [Strife] and [Conflict] and also XXXX. In other words, the root of the existence of Filerom, the God of Greed and Intrigue, lies in those authorities, and the holder of those [Divine Authorities] is XXXXXXX...!’

‘He is very likely one of the supreme gods who brought about the formation of the world, XXXXXXX and the High Heaven God-King was XXXX...’

A huge stretch after that had been blacked out.

‘We... succeeded??’

‘[Divine Authority] was truly extracted by human hands??’

‘No, no, that’s not right. There is something deeply wrong with the state of this [Divine Authority]. My instincts tell me it is very likely neither the authority of [Greed] nor the authority of [Intrigue]. As for what concept this [Divine Authority] actually represents, or from which god it was torn, no one can say.’

‘It is possible it was never taken from a Demon Pillar at all.’

‘My time is running out. They have already decided that I am a mentally deranged madman... Lately, the space here has become extremely unstable. Which makes sense. The Empire laid the groundwork for hundreds of years, and after carrying out an experiment this insane, the spatial frequency of this place is already on the verge of collapse.’

‘It isn’t only me. I have seen many senior students lose their minds and get carried out of the laboratory. I do not know what became of them in the end.’

‘When all is said and done, in the face of trying to extract [Divine Authority], we were nothing but expendable material.’

‘But none of that has anything to do with me anymore.’

‘Still, if the concept represented by the extracted [Divine Authority] is something vital to humanity, then the moment anything happens to it, humanity will also reach its end.’

Frowning hard, Vinny turned to the last page.

‘[Nym-Gud Vine] has lost its power supply. The magic elevator can no longer be activated. Our retribution has come at last. Though I had already anticipated this day. The feeling became especially strong that day when the core researchers, escorted by countless elite soldiers from the Imperial Capital, took [Divine Authority] away.’

‘That day, I saw it. The transport gate behind the Divine-Authority Extraction Facility was being watched by those imperial elites from the capital. They had received orders not to let a single person here leave. If necessary, they were permitted to use extreme measures.’

‘That makes sense. Did people who knew this much really think they would ever be allowed to walk out of here?’

‘Perhaps from the very moment the elevator brought us down, we were already destined to be buried underground forever.’

That was where the diary ended.

Vinny finished the final page.

As he silently digested that enormous amount of information, he suddenly felt the little hand resting on his shoulder press down a bit harder.

“?”

Vinny turned back to look at Milian, puzzled, and found that she too was staring at the diary in his hand, lost in thought, her eyes full of confusion and sorrow.

“You could read that?”

“...You were turning the pages too fast, so I didn’t really catch much of it. But from the handwriting alone, I could vaguely feel the emotions of the person who wrote it.” Milian paused.

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