Ch.131Social Interactions and Cults (6)

Though he couldn’t read all of the parasite’s confused thoughts, Ortes could roughly grasp the logical progression from the few fragments he managed to decipher from the whirlwind of words.

The parasite was suspecting that Carisia and Ortes might have been created much later than itself.

‘Just a moment ago you were treating me like some ancient monster. How flexible your thinking is.’

But it wasn’t incomprehensible. Ordinary human bodies typically had expiration dates. With the exception of transcendent mages attempting ascension or cyber-wizards who prolonged their lives by replacing their flesh with machinery.

‘Did it read the flow of time from Carisia’s body? Since it considers me a mental entity like itself, my young physical age wouldn’t seem strange, but Carisia is different.’

It wasn’t wrong thinking. The only grand mistake was its assumption that its creator was also the creator of Carisia and Ortes.

“Are you thinking something like, ‘Why is the Creator, who has been silent until now, suddenly revealing their will again’?”

Ortes intended to use this misunderstanding to provoke the parasite.

“It must be because the time has come. The time for the Creator to appear personally and dispose of failures like you.”

From what he had seen and experienced in this world, the more outrageous the bluff, the better the effect when it worked.

In truth, Ortes didn’t even need to do this.

The parasite had already been greatly shocked by the declaration “I am younger than you.”

‘So it wasn’t a much older entity than me…?’

The parasite knew better than anyone how many difficulties there were in obtaining such a powerful body. Even if one had been operating since mythic times, once things went wrong, it was the fate of parasites to be confined by the Order for centuries without seeing light or being able to move.

Because of this, the parasite had considered Ortes to be a patient entity who, after very careful and secretive activities, had found a particularly compatible body. Also an ambitious one who, not satisfied with the current highly compatible body, was waiting for the perfect time to obtain Carisia as the perfect sacrifice.

However, Ortes had declared the exact opposite of the parasite’s expectations—that he was a being from a much later era.

The highly compatible body Ortes possessed and the perfect sacrifice that the parasite itself couldn’t reach despite searching for ages. Both must have been gifts bestowed by the Creator.

Envy and inferiority burned within it. But somehow it could understand. The Creator was as great as they were fearsome.

It wondered why such blessed conditions, denied to itself, had been given to such a young greenhorn, but it would be blasphemous to carelessly guess at the Creator’s grand plan.

It didn’t think Ortes had received such gifts because he was superior.

What truly troubled the parasite was the true intention of the Creator implied by Ortes’s existence.

The Creator desires the purging of parasites living in this era.

‘Why?’ The question fills it. Why had the Creator, who had tacitly permitted the activities of its kind for countless ages, decided to intervene?

What had disappointed the Creator?

Ortes held his sword and observed the information in the surrounding space. The provocation had worked on the parasite better than expected. The movement of the parasite’s other terminals approaching had stopped. Evidence that the mental shock was greater than anticipated.

However, Ortes wasn’t entirely pleased with the parasite’s stunned silence.

His suspicions about the identity of the ‘Creator’ were becoming increasingly firm.

‘No. It might just be my prejudice. I can make a final judgment after extracting more information from it.’

“Do you have plans for after metamorphosis?”

A truly strange question. The mental parasite responded to Ortes with layers of compressed hostility and silence.

Ortes nodded leisurely and continued speaking with apparent composure—or at least pretending to.

“I suppose not. You probably think like this: Just as a worm becomes a butterfly, or a child becomes an adult, metamorphosis is natural. You’ve likely never given much thought to what comes after.”

That’s why you’re the loser.

“What?”

“Isn’t it strange? The Creator gave you the instinct for metamorphosis. But didn’t reveal what to do afterward? Let’s think again. What did your predecessors do after metamorphosis?”

The parasite recalled ancient times. In the mythic era, those who completed metamorphosis by dwelling in sacred objects would play at being gods. Just as it was doing now.

Though it had never socialized with them individually, it was easy to guess that several cults branded as heretical and eradicated by the Divine Order were dwellings of its kind.

‘As expected.’

Ortes’s reasoning continued.

Since ancient times, parasites must have secretly infiltrated the Order. Gradually corrupting originally normal religious orders into heretical cults.

The parasite that appeared in Algoth City had bleached away the identity of one religious order and played the role of a nameless god.

Its predecessors wouldn’t have stopped at this stage. Just as the parasite in Algoth City tried to achieve metamorphosis by obtaining a magical core, they would have attempted metamorphosis using the sacred objects of the Order as cores.

“Our illustrious ones. You know the fate of those who posed as gods and metamorphosed into false gods. War with the Divine Order, and ultimately defeat. Finally, death.”

“Don’t you understand that this is the Creator’s will?”

Why did these false gods, who shed their pupal stage to become adults, no longer exist in this world?

Ortes’s experience and intuition quickly derived an answer.

Thinking about it, it was strange. From the time the Demon King disappeared after being betrayed by his disciples until now, throughout that long period.

Why had the Divine Order never regained superiority in its war against the Ten Towers?

Even though the Ten Towers had certainly experienced periods of confusion due to successive succession wars despite their diminished power. Nevertheless, the Divine Order had never once recovered the power that had been suppressed by the Demon King.

‘The reason the Divine Order couldn’t recover its capacity must have been the false gods.’

False gods appearing at critical points of recovery, causing internal strife. The Divine Order would have repeatedly cut itself down while eradicating these false gods.

False gods. Time bombs planted to prevent the consolidation of divine forces and perpetuate the superiority of magic.

A question sprouted in the parasite’s mind. If opposing the Divine Order was a mission ordained by the Creator, like metamorphosis, then metamorphosis was needed now more than ever to strike against the Divine Order, which had become more threatening than ever—

“The efforts of those who metamorphosed before were admirable, but hasn’t the order to annihilate the Order failed?”

“So you’ve withdrawn my mission because of that?”

Because others failed? The unspoken sentence blazed in the parasite’s thoughts. Ortes detected that strong sense of frustration.

“Not just you. It’s a failure disposition for the entire species. The Creator is deeply disappointed in all of you for ultimately failing to break the Order.”

‘The Creator isn’t some squad leader who gets disappointed every time, and they wouldn’t try to abolish a semi-permanent sabotage mechanism that had been working well just because it failed once.’

Ortes thought about the whereabouts of the vanished false gods. Not all false gods would have been eradicated.

Even the mental parasite that appeared in Algoth City had survived until this period without metamorphosing.

What happened to the false gods who weren’t used to undermine the Divine Order’s power?

And precisely this question.

It was the starting point of the most dangerous inference that Ortes’s intuition warned against. False gods appearing periodically to induce internal strife in the Divine Order. When the Divine Order was sufficiently weakened, what decision would the false gods make when they no longer needed to wage war?

Ortes knew there were blank spaces in the setting of the original novel.

***

The means by which the Demon King was resurrected.

The foggy setting that allowed the protagonist to be resurrected in 2077. Something that ‘coincidentally’ resurrected the Demon King.

The mental parasite judged that if it used a substance with transcendent magical storage capacity like the magical core of the Tower of True Magic as its nucleus, it could attempt metamorphosis, and if it had a body with overwhelming magical talent like Carisia’s, it could metamorphose more perfectly.

Even without perfect metamorphosis, it clearly possessed power strong enough to warrant eradication attempts by the Divine Order.

If metamorphosis were more perfect, the natural consequence would be even greater strength. Beings with human form but magical power beyond the individual level.

…I know such beings. The Tower Masters wielding the authority of the Ten Realms.

Judging from the fact that even the declining Divine Order could eliminate them, the individual power of false gods would not match that of Tower Masters, specifically those connected to the Ten Realms. However, sometimes quantity can substitute for quality.

Like Adusiam did in Pluto’s temple, the Demon King had the ability to design magic that would continue to function after his physical death.

The thing before my eyes is agonizing over whether it has truly been abandoned because it didn’t receive a “post-metamorphosis mission,” but the reality is probably different.

A new mission would be injected after completing metamorphosis. In other words, metamorphosis was a certificate of authentication. A design requiring proof of completed metamorphosis to access the post-metamorphosis mission.

If the parasite’s creator was the Demon King.

He would have inscribed conditional orders predicated on the situation where ‘he himself had disappeared.’

The surviving false gods would have become burnt offerings.

Spare bodies for the Demon King. If there were false gods who had completed perfect metamorphosis, he would have dwelled in them, or he could have fashioned a new body by taking multiple imperfectly metamorphosed false gods as sacrifices.

I recalled the 2074 years from the time the Demon King disappeared until now.

The Demon King.

How many gods has he devoured?