Chapter 34: The Gods’ “Anchors”

Chapter 34: The Gods’ “Anchors”

Knowing that any diary page carefully selected by the Queen of Mysteries was bound to contain highly important information, the Fool, Klein, focused his mind and, with an air of casual indifference, turned his gaze toward the yellow-brown parchment in his hands.

“September 11th. Ever since becoming an angel, I have felt as though my personality were splitting apart. In my heart, within my spirit, and in the depths of my mind, there has always been a voice urging me, influencing me, creating a coldness, bloodlust, cruelty, and madness that are difficult to control.

“This does not come from the outside world, nor is it the influence of a deity upon those of Their own pathway. I can clearly sense that it originates from genes, from the collective subconscious inherited by humanity generation after generation, from the Beyonder characteristic itself—not from residual mental imprints left upon it.

“It gives me an intense desire to hunt and kill. I want to devour every living being around me that possesses Beyonder characteristics. This forces me to spend the overwhelming majority of my energy resisting it. Even though I am already acting and digesting the potion, there has been no improvement.

“No wonder Mr. Door said that rationality is temporary, while madness is eternal.”

“September 28th. I have not written in my diary for a long time. Over the past half month or so, it felt as if I were watching myself be replaced by a stranger bit by bit, becoming cold and terrifying one inch at a time. Even my daughter Bernadette could only awaken in me a tiny amount of fatherly love—very, very little.

“Just as I was about to go mad, I seemed to hear countless praises. They came from my subjects; from all those who benefited through my reforms; from those believers who regarded me as the Son of Steam. They were praising me, singing of me, erecting statues of me, writing stories about me, and creating poems for me.

“Their voices were like a ship’s anchor, helping me ‘locate’ myself.

“I began to gain the ability to resist that craving, to fight against the cry that came from the depths of my heart. Little by little, I walked out of it, and once more possessed the normal emotions of a father, a husband, and a man.

“If this kind of change already exists at Sequence 2 alone, then at Sequence 0, at the level of a true god, how terrifying must the madness that must be resisted become?

“Perhaps They, too, require ‘positioning’ to resist the intense tendency toward loss of control hidden within Beyonder characteristics and the depths of the collective subconscious.

“I think I somewhat understand why They establish Churches, why They spread faith, why They have chapters written for the Saints of Their own forces and leave legends behind for the corresponding angels…

“But why do They have no human forms, only symbolic representations?

“I cannot understand it.

“I’ll ask Mr. Door next time. He knows a great deal in the domain of gods. If He had not been exiled, perhaps there would have been one more deity.”

“September 29th. Rereading yesterday’s diary, I remembered the rituals corresponding to my Sequence 4, Sequence 3, and Sequence 2. All of them clearly carried a mad and cruel meaning, the kind only a villain in a novel would conduct.

“The Sequence pathways may very well be roads destined for madness and despair.

“And yet they are also the only roads by which humanity can obtain extraordinary power.

“How laughable. How ironic.

“We struggle to save ourselves only so that we may destroy ourselves more completely?”

The content of the first diary page left Klein heavy and depressed. Roselle, who had written those words, was no longer an ordinary person. He had already become an angel, joined the Twilight Hermit Order, seen the second Blasphemy Slate, and understood far more about the mysterious world and Beyonder characteristics than Klein currently did. Yet he was even more pessimistic than Klein…