Chapter 611

Chapter 611: Memories at Dawn and dusk

Vanna wondered where this giant wanted to take her.

Curious and confused, she followed in his footsteps and walked into the endless yellow desert. In the distance, the wind raised the sand into a hazy wall that blurred the line between sky and earth. At some point, the ruined city built from jagged black rocks had vanished into that wall of sand. When Vanna tried to look back, she could no longer see it at all.

The light in the sky grew brighter bit by bit, and the heat of the desert rose with it.

Vanna waved her hand and summoned her greatsword of solid ice. With the Storm Goddess’s protection she fought against the discomfort the desert brought her. At the same time she lifted her head and glanced up at the sky.

The huge crack that shone with an ominous red glow still covered the whole world. She was not sure if it was just her imagination, but the blood?like strands spreading from the edges of the crack seemed a bit wider than the first time she saw them.

She still could not see the Sun anywhere she looked, yet the entire sky kept growing brighter. It gave Vanna the feeling that the very idea of “sunlight” had been branded into some kind of cycle that ran through heaven and earth. Even though the Sun had disappeared, the light and heat it left behind still appeared in this world “on time”.

The giant’s gaze was drawn to the icy greatsword in Vanna’s hand.

He had seen the sword in her hand before, but he had never seen the process of her summoning it. He seemed to find this power very strange.

“Your sword is shaped by a power that does not belong to this world,” the giant said. “This power is very unusual. It can draw sacred miracles even in these yellow sands—I have not seen ‘ice’ for a long, long time.”

“This is an ability granted by the deity I worship,” Vanna said at once. “He is the lord of storms and the sea. Ice is the divine authority that stretches out from storms.”

“A deity who rules the sea?” the giant murmured thoughtfully. “Storms and the sea… We are very, very far from any coastline now, and what people once called the sea has already dried up. But I still remember they once built a splendid city by the sea. The city had pure white walls and many blue roofs. They named that city after a kind of gemstone, and in that city they built the first ship that could cross the great ocean…”

Vanna listened quietly as the giant told her these old, forgotten things. At the same time, she passed what she heard to the others who were acting inside the dream. The heat around her kept climbing, so she lifted her greatsword to her mouth and took a bite from it. While she chewed on the ice, she asked curiously: “And then?”

“Then that city vanished inside a bubble. When the corruption happened, many things changed in ways I could not understand,” the giant said. He lowered his head and could not help glancing at Vanna twice, at the icy sword with a bite missing. “…So that is how it is used?”

“It’s a bit hot here,” Vanna said, a little embarrassed. “I… don’t handle heat very well.”

“Not handling heat is good. Feeling discomfort in your surroundings is proof that you are alive,” the giant said. Then he stopped walking. “We are here, traveler.”

Vanna stopped as well and followed the giant’s gaze. Her expression went blank with sudden shock.

Ahead of them lay a huge… sinkhole, set into the earth like a shocking scar. Somehow, she and the giant had already reached the edge of the pit and now stood only a few steps from the wall.

After a brief daze, she took a careful step forward and looked down into the pit. The walls of the pit shone like glass. The black rock there had melted and cooled just like the ruins of the city before. The yellow sand around the edge had fallen away, exposing ground split into terrible cracks. The pit was enormous. It looked big enough to hold a city?state as large as Pland.

In the center of the pit she could faintly see something tall standing upright. It looked like a tower of incredible size, but now only a twisted, hideous shell remained. Around the “tower” she could just make out melted roads and scattered, uneven piles of stone.

“What is that?” Vanna asked in surprise, pointing toward the tower.

The giant did not answer her directly. Instead, he walked slowly to the very edge of the pit and sat down. He set the huge Gatekeeper’s cane beside him and fell into deep, quiet thought.

After an unknown length of time, he finally broke the silence.

“I have forgotten many things, but I still remember this place,” he said. “After they realized that the entire world was slowly collapsing and that human effort could not save it, they built a great archive here. The pit you see is the archive’s ruin. They tried to leave proof that they had once existed in this world, all inside a single building.

“Everything you can think of—culture, art, history, countless scrolls and crafted objects, seed vaults, and giant statues—was piled into solid, well?protected vaults. They also made huge stone slabs from the most stable materials and carved simple introductions to the world and their civilization into the stone.

“Books decay quickly. Advanced recording devices are prone to failure. Delicate storage media cannot be read directly. But words carved in stone can last for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, maybe even longer. So those stones were placed at the very center of the archive and treated as its ‘heart’.

“They could not find any method of recording that was safer or more lasting than that.”

“Then… what happened?” Vanna could not help asking, even though she already knew the answer before she spoke.

“The stones turned into bubbles,” the giant said, lowering his head to look into Vanna’s eyes. “In a single second.”

Vanna suddenly felt as if she were choking.

“The artworks melted and flowed like water, seeping into every crack. The scrolls turned into shadows burned onto the walls. The statues sublimated into the air and turned into pale mist. Then the entire building began to sink and shatter, and the whole stretch of land sank with it,” the giant said as he lifted his hand and pointed toward the deep pit. “People gathered there—the last survivors. They wanted to mourn their civilization there and be ready to die with calm dignity. But in truth, even mourning and a calm death were luxuries.

“Right before their eyes, everything they had recorded turned into… unspeakable things.

“This is the Mortal Realm. When the world itself steps into destruction, nothing that is recorded on the ‘world’ can be preserved.”

“Then…” Vanna opened her mouth. After a long time she slowly raised her hand and asked again, “That tower…”

“When the entire building began to collapse, that place was the last safe spot,” the giant said softly. “They ran toward it, just like many, many years before, when the first great fire swept the forest settlements. Back then, they ran down from the trees and rushed toward the safe, open plains. Only this time, the ‘fire’ was going to burn more than the forest…

“In the end only one person reached that place. I do not remember what that person looked like. I do not remember if it was a man, a woman, an old person, or a child.

“That person stopped there and died standing.

“In the last minute before death, that person grew as fast as a rising mountain, as if about to touch the sky. That scene looked as if… the scale had broken, because their ‘science’ told me that a human body could never support a form that large…”

The giant raised his head and looked at the “tower” in the center of the deep pit. Even after such a long, long time, that ancient confusion still seemed to sit in his heart.

Vanna finally knew what it was.

It was the last person in this world.

Her eyes slowly widened. In her shock, she stared hard at the center of the pit.

Even across such a great distance, she could see how enormous the “tower” was. It was taller than the highest tower in Pland and even more grand than the city?state’s great cathedral. How… could it be a person?

Yet little by little, Vanna began to see the chilling details hidden within the tower’s twisted, savage shape. She saw melted, deformed structures that rose like raised arms, and a torso that spiraled and warped. For a moment, she even felt that she saw a horrifying face set into some part of the tower.

But she knew it was an illusion. At such a distance, even if there really were such details on the tower, she could not possibly see them clearly.

Besides, it had twisted so badly that its original shape could no longer be seen at all.

Vanna could not say what she felt at that moment. She only knew that her heart had been shaken, and a flood of questions nearly drowned her thoughts. She stared for a long time at the black “tower”—the last tombstone left by the last person of that destroyed ancient civilization. Then she slowly lifted her head and stared for a long time at the sky, covered by red cracks, where no trace of the Sun could be seen.

After an unknown length of time, perhaps to push aside the heavy feeling in her chest, she suddenly asked: “the Sun… did the Sun disappear at that time too?”

“The Sun?”

Vanna raised her hand and pointed at the sky. “It was not like this before. Where is the Sun that used to shine on this world?”

“Ah, right, the Sun. I almost forgot. It is the Sun…”

The giant muttered softly. His tone carried a feeling Vanna could not understand. Then he lifted his hand and searched inside his ragged robe. After feeling around for a while, he seemed to find something hidden deep within the cloth. He took it out and held it in front of Vanna.

“The Sun is here,” he said gently.

Vanna stared at him, dumbfounded. She stared at the thing he showed her, at the object resting quietly in the giant’s palm, which was only about as big as her own fist…

A glowing sphere.

It shone with bright light and gave off a faint warmth. It seemed to float there, in a dimension parallel to the Mortal Realm.

So… small, and so calm.

“It fell down,” the giant said calmly as he looked at Vanna. “I picked it up.”