novelraw Chapter 9: The God of All Forms
Chapter 9: The God of All Forms
“Your name?”
“...Reina.”
“How old are you?”
Fischer held a rolled-up manuscript and looked at Reina sitting on the sofa. Beside her, Renée was playfully peeling candy and feeding it to her. At first, Reina suspected these humans might be trying to poison her, but after eating one, she couldn’t stop. It seemed such treats were rare where she lived.
Reina’s chewing paused slightly, then her gaze flickered away.
“E-eight years old.”
This was far from her earlier claim of having endless lifespan. She probably realized her impromptu lie wouldn’t fool Fischer.
Fischer had just examined her body and found the crab-like organs fully intact. The crab shell resembling an ornament was firmly connected to her back, but according to her, it was very light and felt weightless underwater.
Having gathered some physical data, Fischer was more interested in understanding what the ocean demi-human settlements were like.
Ocean demi-humans rarely appeared in human sight. When he was in Nary, he occasionally heard fishermen reporting sea monster or mermaid sightings, attracting a swarm of journalists taking trains to the coast, but all the black-and-white photos they brought back only showed calm seas alongside lengthy speculative interviews—no real evidence.This time, finally meeting a real talking ocean demi-human, he had to extract as much information as possible.
Though Fischer had no plans to take her back to Nary—given current technology, not only was reaching the ocean floor settlements impossible, even if they could, it would just repeat the Southern Continent’s situation—this research was merely to satisfy Fischer’s own curiosity, and the records would remain confidential.
Most importantly, Fischer wanted information about the “Child of the Sea.” Among the four apocalypse prophecies, only the Child of the Sea’s description was the vaguest, using the mysterious term “God,” offering no clues at all.
“So you’re only eight years old? No wonder you look so cute...”
Renée peeled another candy and fed it to her, making Reina’s cheeks puff out. Before finishing, she opened her mouth to signal Renée to keep feeding her, her mouth stuffed so full she couldn’t answer Fischer’s question.
Fischer tapped the table with his fingers, glaring coldly at Renée, as if blaming her for interrupting his research, which made Renée look innocently at him.
“Renée...”
“Okay, okay... but Fischer, I really love kids! If it were ours, it would definitely be cuter than this one~”
She emphasized “ours” with a little extra weight, her starry eyes scanning Fischer’s, as if trying to awaken some desire deep inside him.
Could you really refuse such a girl’s simple wish for a cute child?
Fischer glanced at her expectant gaze. At this moment, Renée looked like a devoted wife longing for a child of love after years of marriage, and just that look was enough to overwhelm you with desire, making you want to make a baby with her right then and there.
But all this was just Renée’s trick. Fischer knew this better than anyone, so he averted his gaze with difficulty, suppressing his reproductive desire to focus on knowledge, then looked back at Reina and asked,
“Why did you come here to steal things? Is this close to your home?”
He didn’t directly ask about the demi-human tribe she lived with, fearing the direct question might raise their suspicion and cause her to lie or give vague answers. Yet Reina seemed just like a young demi-human, and this question opened her up like a floodgate, spilling out information nonstop.
“I didn’t steal anything! I just wanted to take a look upstairs! But there was nothing up there. I heard old people in the city say that many creatures who look like us live up there, like humans and sea monsters. I almost got hit by one of your big machines. I wanted to get an explanation, but then I saw a sparkling gem necklace. I just wanted to borrow it to look at it!”
Reina stubbornly denied stealing, insisting it was borrowing to look, though how she would return it remained undecided.
“What about the royal family you mentioned earlier? Are there demi-humans with higher ranks than you?”
If there was a royal family, their social system should be relatively stable, at least forming a structure similar to humans. According to Reina, it was very far from where she lived to the surface. She swam for a long time before barely seeing the sunlight above.
Fischer guessed the demi-human settlement was on the oceanic plain at the bottom of the Southern Ocean, but couldn’t calculate the exact depth. From studying the crab-person’s body structure, her resistance to water pressure exceeded Fischer’s imagination, and she had a rapid pressure-change response mechanism; otherwise, she couldn’t remain unharmed on the surface.
Though her overall appearance was strange, all her biological traits seemed perfectly adapted to reality, as if she were some unspeakable divine creation, making Fischer marvel at nature’s greatness.
“Oh, those guys.” Speaking of the royal family Fischer mentioned, Reina rubbed her head embarrassedly and whispered, “Actually, I’ve never seen them. They live in a very deep trench far from us. My dad said the royal family is very conservative and doesn’t leave that trench easily. And it’s so dark down there I’m too scared to go. Deeper down, normal people get crushed, only the royal family can come and go freely...”
“I see...”
Fischer’s quill wrote the word “royal family” on the paper. For ocean demi-humans, the royal family seemed extremely special. According to Reina’s family, the oceanic royal family was unique, referring exclusively to the species living in the giant trench below.
Fischer squeezed every last piece of knowledge from Reina’s little head, even learning that children in her settlement rode fish and pulled her around. This was thanks to Renée’s excellent candy-feeding technique, which made Reina unconsciously reveal many details.
“You’re not lying, right?”
After recording the information, Fischer looked at Reina’s puffed cheeks. Flustered, she raised her claws and said innocently,
“I swear in the name of the faith of Lhamastia! I’m not lying, or else I’ll... I’ll spit out all these delicious candies I’ve eaten!”
Saying this, seemingly to prove how serious her oath was, she hurriedly swallowed the candies in her mouth!
“Lhamastia... what is that?”
Fischer sharply caught the strange word from her mouth. This word was very odd, because her voice was translated in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style due to the strange translation liquid she had just swallowed, but this word was pronounced clearly without distortion.
“Ah... so you don’t believe in the great Lhamastia.” She tapped her own head with her claw in frustration, apparently trying to figure out how to explain the meaning of Lhamastia to Fischer and the others.
“My dad told me that all our lives are granted by Lhamastia. Every year, we go to worship Her, throwing lots of fish and crafts into the trench. Though I’m not sure if they might hit the royal family’s heads...”
“Wait, you mean the royal family lives together with the god you worship?”
“Yes... Huh? You don’t have a god like Lhamastia? Then why do you worship Her?”
This question stumped Fischer. Though he knew the Mother Goddess was just a human way to explain the world, more like a primitive belief or faith, he hadn’t expected ocean demi-humans to genuinely believe in the real existence of such an entity.
In other words, the god they worship truly existed in this world, right now lying somewhere in a trench in the Southern Ocean?
“Have you seen that god?”
“No. But every time I pray, I can feel Her response, though I don’t understand it...”
Seeing the human deep in thought, unsure how to explain, Reina extended her claws, joined both hands and forearms together, making a gesture she often did—like a human prayer pose, but far stranger.
She closed her eyes, voice solemn and devout, softly chanting,
“Guardian of the ocean, origin of life, God of All Forms Lhamastia, I pray to you, hoping to eat this kind of delicious food every day from now on... Yeah, that’s about it. My dad and I do this every day before eating. Ah, I can’t feel Lhamastia’s voice here anymore. Maybe it’s too far and She can’t hear me. Sometimes at night when other friends bully me, I pray to Her to tell their parents to spank them. I don’t know if She agreed...”
“I see...”
Fischer gazed out at the endless sea, paused for a long moment, then wrote the last note on the manuscript,
God of All Forms.