Sword of Dawnbreaker

Chapter 768 - 767: Birth of the Gods

Magic Guide Technology Research Institute, Basement Level 2, Confidential Meeting Room.

Gawain, dressed in a dark blue coat, entered the room and saw that everyone attending the meeting was already waiting in this heavily guarded and never publicly accessible meeting room.

Wright and Veronica were whispering to each other, Pittman distractedly twirling his moustache, Kamel was floating by the conference table, the arcane brilliance on him calm and blue. Aunt Heidi saw Gawain appear and was the first to stand up and bow: ”Ancestor.”

The others also stopped what they were doing, stood up, and saluted respectfully.

Gawain glanced around the scene, his gaze lingering slightly on an empty seat beside the long table: ”No need to stay invisible at this time.”

Amber’s figure then appeared: ”Habit, just a habit...”

Gawain shook his head, came to the head of the conference table, and as he sat down, he spoke: ”Internal meeting, no need for formalities. Today is mainly to exchange some information, and... I need some advice from the professionals present.”

Veronica raised her head, looked at the people present, already understanding: ”Related to knowledge of the Gods?”

”That’s right,” Gawain nodded and said, ”About the recent anomaly in the Eternal Sleepers’ mental network, Amber should have told you all before the meeting, right?”

”She mentioned it half an hour ago,” Wright replied, ”I had no idea our penetration into the Eternal Sleepers had reached this level.”

”The confidentiality level of this matter has always been very high, and there has been no crossover with the church, so it’s normal that you didn’t know,” Gawain said seriously, ”but now things have changed, and some information has to be made public.”

”In short, based on the intelligence I’ve just received on my side, the Eternal Sleepers’ execution of a secret plan in the mental network is highly likely to have inadvertently touched upon the realm of the gods, and... they might have come into contact with the secret of the birth of gods.”

Gawain got straight to the point, and the conference room instantly fell silent, each person’s breathing seemed to slow by half a beat, even Kamel, who didn’t need to breathe, dimmed for a brief moment, a few seconds later, Pittman twitched the corner of his mouth, breaking the silence: ”I knew there had to be something big going down in an urgent and secret meeting like this, but this... this is a bit too much.”

He spoke while looking down, somewhat ruefully at the several strands of beard he had accidentally plucked, hesitated for a long time, and then carefully reattached them to his chin with a spell.

Gawain didn’t pay attention to Pittman’s muttering, seeing that his bombshell news had successfully energized everyone, he went on to describe in detail his previous experiences in the mental network, in that ”Illusion Town.”

Everyone present was listening intently, even Amber, who usually napped or daydreamed during meetings, was all ears and particularly focused this time.

”...that is the entire process,” after nearly twenty minutes of narration, Gawain exhaled and concluded, ”Based on my speculation, worship of the ’Supreme Narrator’ is likely the main reason for the sandbox going out of control, and what this ’Supreme Narrator Church’ has specifically brewed in the dream realm, and whether this ’thing’ merely exists as a conceptual product within the dream world... will be key issues.”

As soon as he finished speaking, Veronica, sitting in the second seat on the left, broke the silence: ”Are you suspecting... that the act of worship towards the so-called ’Supreme Narrator’ in the mental network’s Sandbox One... really created a god?”

”There’s no evidence yet, but I do suspect,” Gawain nodded, ”The Eternal Sleepers haven’t found the ’path’ through which a god polluted Sandbox One, there’s no evidence or clues to indicate which god, by what method, at what time bypassed all the defenses of Sandbox One to enter the inside—we all know, the Three Great Dark Sects are the most knowledgeable about gods, yet even their top researchers can’t find traces of a god invading the Sandbox System... so we might as well make a bolder assumption: the pollution did not invade from the outside at all...”

...

Mental network, within the Central Temple with top-secret access, the archbishops sat around a round table adorned with various symbolic depictions.

All participating archbishops shed their disguises here, adopting their real appearances from the real world—according to the church’s internal regulations, this meant that the meeting was of very high confidentiality and specification.

Archbishop Yuri, clad in a white robe, stood by the round table and spoke in a solemn tone: ”According to my and Archbishop Selena’s speculation, the pollution... may originate from within Sandbox One, and the so-called ’Divine Erosion’ should all come from the sect that worships the ’Supreme Narrator.’

Opposite Yuri, a shorter, red-haired man with a loud voice and a black robe stood up: ”This situation is utterly incomprehensible. Residents in the dream world began to doubt the reality of their world, then started worshipping a ’Supreme Narrator’ they imagined, and a god was really created? And this god even caused Sandbox One to go out of control? Is this just a reason made up due to the inability to find the real cause?”

Yuri looked somewhat helplessly at the red-haired man opposite—that was Archbishop Magnan, known for his fiery temper and loud voice. However, Yuri also knew that the loud questioning from this voluble gentleman bore no malice nor was directed against anyone personally. It was simply his nature—thoughts occur in his head naturally, and so he spoke them.

However, this gentleman’s voice was really overwhelming, making it difficult for others to adapt, and also, can’t he ’turn down the volume’ a little in such a mental space?

”Archbishop Magnan,” Yuri shook his head slightly, ”Everything I’m saying is indeed mere conjecture, and I realize it’s unbelievable, but don’t forget, we are dealing with ’gods,’ and gods... are inherently unbelievable.”

A cluster of starlight hovered above the ornate round table and conveyed its sound to everyone present: ”Is there any evidence to prove that the ’Supreme Narrator’ worshipped by the sect born in the dream world possesses any divine characteristics?”

”Your Holiness,” Archbishop Yuri immediately bowed his head, ”So far, there is no evidence. The information we have is still too sparse. We can currently only confirm that such a sect does indeed exist within Sandbox One, and its activities correlate with the timeframe of Sandbox One’s loss of control.”

The starlight cluster in mid-air fluctuated in size and brightness: ”Then as long as there is any proof that the ’Supreme Narrator Faith’ within Sandbox One truly gave rise to a god, or something similar to a god, all the answers will become clear.”

Yuri frowned: ”But... if that thing really is a god, how are we supposed to deal with it?”

”We don’t know yet, but isn’t this the answer and secret we’ve been seeking all along?” Pope Megal III’s voice echoed gently in everyone’s mind, ”We’ve been trying to uncover the secrets of the gods, to find out the truth of their birth, and now, we may be infinitely close to this truth...”

...

”The secret of the birth of gods... may be hidden in Sandbox One,” Gawain said in a deep voice, ”If the shadow of divine power really appears behind the ’Supreme Narrator Church’, then the concept of gods... will be completely overturned.”

”It was not the gods who created humans, but humans who created the gods...” Pittman murmured, his hand suddenly shaking, pulling out a few more of his whiskers again.

Holding a platinum scepter, surrounded by a faint Holy Light, Veronica, who had been silent since just now, seemingly in deep thought, suddenly lifted her head: ”This... was actually one of the hypotheses of the defied Plan back then.”

”You’ve speculated in this direction before?” Gawain looked at Veronica in surprise, ”You’ve speculated that gods were actually born in the process of human belief?”

”We didn’t speculate so deeply or directly, but we had guessed that human belief—or the collective thoughts of a large number of mortals—might influence the activities of gods to a certain extent. But this speculation was too astonishing, and it was neither provable nor falsifiable, or rather, the difficulty of proving or disproving it was so high as to be almost impossible to achieve, so until the collapse of the Gondor Empire, this conjecture remained just a conjecture.”

”But now the bold attempts of the Eternal Sleepers are probably about to prove your speculation back then...” Wright said with a sigh, ”It’s truly unimaginable that the gods, whom mortals feared and revered, were essentially creations of mortals?”

”Don’t jump to conclusions because of this, and don’t become blindly arrogant, underestimating the ’gods’,” Veronica said gently, ”The projection of the faith of billions of living beings into a dimension we cannot understand turns into gods. The changes produced in this process have already exceeded our understanding. Perhaps gods are indeed created by the faith of mortals, but we are not yet qualified or powerful enough to call them our ’creations’... Maybe, we should regard them more as a kind of terrifying, out-of-control, yet inevitable ’natural phenomenon’.”

”Natural phenomenon...” Gawain couldn’t help but repeat the term in his mind, feeling thoughtful.

He then nodded: ”Indeed, as Veronica said, it might be some kind of natural phenomenon, and... an inevitable natural phenomenon.”

Faith and religion could almost be considered an inevitable stage of social activity.

Civilization always has its periods of fragility and powerlessness. As mortals emerge from ignorance, facing this mysterious, unknown, and crisis-ridden world, facing the incomprehensible and unpredictable nature, as intelligent beings with awareness, they are inevitably going to develop a sense of awe toward nature and a mindset of fear or worship toward those inexplicable natural phenomena.

And in the process of moving from the unknown to the known, in the attempt to understand everything in the world, mortals would try to explain those things that evoke awe and fear in them.

During a period when knowledge is lacking, power is weak, and civilization is still in its infancy, these explanations will inevitably point to gods, or similar concepts.

In that enclosed Sandbox One, in that man-made world running for hundreds and thousands of years, the inhabitants inside must have also faced such a problem: Where did we come from? Who created this world?

Perhaps some ”prophet” accidentally glimpsed the data flow behind the world, or perhaps some adventurer accidentally arrived at the border of the sandbox. They were inexplicably horrified by the grand and chaotic sea of the mind outside the world and saw the script running behind the world and the command records left by the operators.

So, they had an explanation for their world: it was created by the ”Supreme Narrator.”

Then, ”Supreme Narrator” really came into existence.

”The Eternal Sleepers are a group of outstanding experts in the field of soul engineering, excellent researchers, but unfortunately, they only focused on the technical realm and did not understand how society operates,” Gawain shook his head, his tone inevitably tinged with a bit of lament, ”If they had understood the mechanics of social operation, understood the various stages of civilization development, then even if they couldn’t foresee Sandbox One getting out of control, they would at least anticipate that religious activities appearing in Sandbox One are inevitable, and they would be vigilant and prepared for it.”

For a moment, the meeting room was somewhat silent.

Even though everyone here knew about the defied Plan, even though everyone here participated, more or less, in Gawain’s plans to challenge gods, ”heretical” plans, today’s discussion was still too shocking for everyone.

Everyone was seriously digesting, everyone was repeatedly verifying the various aspects of those hypotheses.

Pittman placed his hand on his chin, carefully repairing his whiskers while saying: ”If the situation is really like this, and a ’god’ was created within Sandbox One... This affair might be impossible to settle. The deer created by the Oblivion Association can still be dealt with using firepower or the sea demons’ army, but a god operating within a dream, how do you deal with that?”

”No need to be so pessimistic,” Gawain said calmly, ”Even if that thing is really a god or ’demi-god’, it has just been born, and it’s trapped within a dream. As long as we can figure out its mechanism, it wouldn’t be difficult to deal with it—and the Eternal Sleepers, for their own survival, will definitely do their utmost to resolve this crisis.”

Pittman looked distressed, unable to stop himself from tugging hard at his own beard: ”Alas... I shouldn’t have listened to Amber in the first place, my later years are not peaceful at all...”

With this sigh falling, the old Druid looked down at the whiskers that he had pulled off, looking even more troubled.

”Why not just give up on it,” Wright, sitting opposite, said with some concern, ”I don’t think it will attach back.”

”...Alas...”