Alice in the Land of Steam

Chapter 317: Will God Descend at This Moment?

Time goes back to ten minutes ago, in the suburbs of Nimcher, in the Ever Summer Palace, in the greenhouse garden of Ladais, the Spring Spirit believers are still praying, eager to receive the grace of the Great Venerable Tifu with their piety. But can it really be considered a prayer? At least in the eyes of outsiders, perhaps it is just a group of lunatics venting their innermost desires. Those despicable thoughts that cannot be expressed in words on weekdays, once named in the name of faith, are also covered with the cloak of justice and solemnity.

But it doesn't matter, because faith is such a thing, and gods are such existences. They are born to respond to the prayers of believers, and no matter how sinful the words or how blasphemous the thoughts are, they will eventually be purified in their kingdom of God and become an eternal mark.

This is--

“The meaning of God’s existence.”

A sound slightly deeper than the sound of a fountain gushed out, as if it were a soliloquy.

Rochelle stood on the highest stone step with her arms folded across her chest. She looked up through the broken dome and saw the lifeless sky. It was dark everywhere, with no light to penetrate, as if the day had suddenly turned into night. The howling wind drove the rushing clouds, causing the lead-gray clouds to stir up waves like rolling tides. The turbid waves surged, forming an overwhelming force. In the dark cracks where the waves disappeared, red lightning with fire all over it could be vaguely seen, as well as a huge ice land that gradually revealed its corner. The gray-white frost foreshadowed the arrival of the next blizzard.

At this time, if you look towards the city of Nimsher from the distant horizon, you will doubt that this area has fallen into eternal night. The clouds are like heavy iron blocks, heavily covering the sky of the city. Each cloud is so low that it can touch the spire of the tallest building in the city, and gradually spreads to other buildings, as if with boundless accumulated anger, it wants to crush them all and turn them into collapsed ruins.

At this moment, the sky and the earth met for the first time in ten thousand years. The vortex in the sky kept pressing down, as if it was about to fall into the abyss in the mouth of the giant beast; the giant beast hidden underground kept rising up, as if it was about to jump into the turbulent and terrifying vortex. The sky and the earth were merging together, and from a distance it looked like the palms of a giant were merging, and every life between the palms, that is, every citizen and every tourist in Nimsher at this moment, was a tiny ant, destined to be crushed to pieces at the moment when the sky and the earth closed and order collapsed.

This disaster was not man-made, but more like the wrath of the gods. The city must have been in chaos at this time. No one could keep a normal state of mind if they could sense that the impending disaster would bring them overwhelming terror. Therefore, fear, suspicion, confusion, anger... everything is imaginable. The people of the united church would inevitably devote most of their energy to maintaining order. The bishops of the cathedrals, the tribunes and representatives of the believers in the parishes, the disaster alarms of the Natural Disaster Detection Bureau, the emergency treatment system of the grass garden... all these invisibly bought enough time for the ceremony of inviting the gods.

The prayers from the greenhouse garden gradually faded.

If we claim to be the protectors of civilization and order, and the definers of religion and faith, then we will inevitably bear the negative effects they bring.

The magic crystals inlaid on the four walls of the pool, the wall frames of the garden, and the gaps between the flowers and leaves are like many asteroids orbiting the stars in the vast universe, releasing bright and soft blue halos one after another, and gathering together to form a vast and blurred ocean like dust and sand, which permeates every water line in the greenhouse. Every tiny grain of star sand in the ocean contains magnificent magic power, shaping a tangible body for the invisible faith.

Moreover, believers of various religions who were unwilling to obey the "Religious Decree" would secretly start a rebellion and stir up trouble. They might not know what the impending disaster portended, but instinctively felt that they could gain benefits from it, so they followed the guidance of their desires and nature and helped Rochelle delay the pace of the religious group's unification.

It was not because the believers' emotions had reached their peak, but because after the fermentation of fanatical faith and greedy prayers, this ceremony of inviting the gods was gradually reaching its climax. Rochelle looked down and saw that the golden holy stone floating above the fountain pool was releasing a dazzling light. It swallowed up too many beliefs and was like a small sun, illuminating every dark corner in the garden greenhouse.

In the universe where the sun rotates and the stars surge, the believers' prayers gradually weakened, and finally returned to a strange nothingness. But their expressions became more fanatical, and the dreamlike piety in their eyes even made people think that they really saw their own gods and were bathing in such great grace that they lost their perception of the outside world and did not realize that their bodies were gradually disintegrating and turning into shining stars, slowly floating across the dome, drilling out of the hole, passing through the ivy, tendrils and weeds growing in the cracks, and drifting towards the storm clouds that were as dark as the night.

Those intermittent stars of light were connected together by some strange principle, forming a gurgling blue river of light. At this moment, more than a hundred Spring Spirit believers in the greenhouse garden, with the help of the god-inviting ceremony, turned their existence into illusory spiritual bodies of faith. Therefore, more than a hundred brilliant rivers of light rose from the human world and converged to the center of the vortex, like building a dreamy, sacred and solemn tower, reaching the spiritual realm where the gods lived.

At this moment, no matter where you are in the city, you can see this extremely bright and holy tower. The more than one hundred blue light bands on its surface are all people's expectations of some unknown natural phenomenon. Tourists who are crowded and pushing on the streets, eager to escape from the blizzard, see it; police and staff of the Natural Disaster Detection Bureau who are trying to maintain traffic order and evacuate people see it; night watchmen and arbitrators of the Scales of Order who are riding on steam chariots and desperately chasing in the direction of the Eternal Summer Palace see it; finally, local citizens who walked out of their houses to avoid the natural disaster and looked up in confusion, whether they were in the city or the suburbs, whether they were old or young, also saw it at this moment, and felt a particularly familiar atmosphere from the tower that reached the sky.

At this moment, if they are willing to shift their gaze a little, they will see the rivers and waterways that can be seen everywhere in the streets and alleys, the fountain pools that are gradually freezing due to the low temperature in the squares and parks, and even the drainage pipes installed under the fence grids... suddenly they all begin to boil restlessly, bubbling, as if the water in a pot has been boiled, and the hotter and more invisible energy at over one hundred degrees Celsius slowly leaves the water body and floats towards the vortex in the sky.

That is spirituality.

The three rivers that once washed and nurtured the land of Nimsher, their many tributaries, underground rivers, springs, dry wells, ditches, pipes... the water in them all inherited the vitality from the mother, and was also the so-called spirituality that the believers of the Holy Spring Monastery had been tirelessly pursuing in this city. Now, all these spiritualities are gathering together, as if they are being called by a great will and are returning to their roots.

In the suburbs, in the clogged and stagnant waters and the dirty and smelly rivers filled with garbage, all kinds of non-human creatures showed their traces like fish that surfaced to breathe fresh air on rainy days: ugly fishmen, rotten monsters that looked like rotten mud balls, corroded ghosts that looked like human skin... These aliens and monsters used to be afraid of being strangled by the night watchmen, hiding in the darkest and filthy corners of the city, not daring to show up easily. But at this moment, they seemed to have forgotten that fear, raised their heads from the dirty and smelly water, and stared blankly at the dark sky above their heads. If there were any brave humans who noticed the movement here and looked down, they would definitely be able to capture another deeper fear from the depths of their confused eyes.

This fear is different from the fear of the Night Watchmen. The latter is the fear of losing life, while the former is... the fear of losing oneself.

"What... is that..." an alien covered in water plants and algae asked in a clumsy and difficult human language, which was actually the local dialect of Nimsher City.

The fish-man wise man holding a cane shook his head, a trace of pain flashed across his turbid and deep eyes, and he answered with a hoarse and sharp voice like a broken bellows: "The god of this city, and."

"A demon created by humans."

……

In such a gloomy and depressing atmosphere, the blizzard finally arrived.

More than one hundred rivers of light flowed, converging into dark blue towers that connected to the sky. Lead-gray clouds slowly rotated like a heavy vortex. In the dark abyss deeper than the night, the shadow of a huge monster floated vaguely.

The spirit god of the spring, the great master Tifu.

He came down in His holy city, Nimsher.

　Give me some meow
　　
　
(End of this chapter)