“Uh…why…? Isn’t it because the realm’s designers set it up that way?”
“Not so,” Cardinal said, her mouth upturned with the anticipation that I would have responded that way. “The outside people who created this world merely set down the vessel. The social structure you see here was created entirely by the Underworldians who live here.”
“I see…”
It made sense that we were excluding Eugeo from this conversation. At last, I recalled one of the first things I wanted to clear up with her. She’d demonstrated familiarity with Rath. So did that mean…?
“H-hang on. Can you make contact with the real world? Is there some method of relaying information?” I asked with excitement.
She looked annoyed. “Fool. If I could do that, I wouldn’t have locked myself up in this dusty place for centuries. The only one who can do that…is the pontifex.”
“Oh…I see…”
That made me even more curious about the figure in question, but I set that aside and clung to my one ray of hope. “Then, can you tell what date it is in the real world…or where my physical body is located, or—”
“I’m afraid I can’t access the system domain now. Even my ability to browse the data register is meager. Compared to the Cardinal you knew on the other side, I am a helpless creation,” she said bashfully, making a disappointed face that suited her apparent age. I almost began to feel a bit sorry for her.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “it’s a huge help that you even know about the real world at all. Sorry to have derailed your explanation…you were talking about feudalism.” I gave the topic a bit of thought and guessed, “Does it have something to do with…needing a manager in place to maintain security or distribute goods?”
“But as you know by now, the people of this world do not disobey the law as a fundamental rule. They do not harm others, steal, or monopolize harvests. But if their diligence and fairness were enforced by nature, you would assume they’d form a more effective social development, like communism. Do you think such people, in a world of barely a hundred thousand, really need four emperors and various ranks of nobles numbering over a thousand?”
“A hundred…”
I hadn’t heard the total population of the Underworld yet. Cardinal said “barely,” but I was stunned at the total. This wasn’t artificial-intelligence research, it was a full-scale simulation of an entire civilization.
But as she said, each emperor ruling over twenty-five thousand subjects seemed quite small when compared to the Roman Empire or the Frankish Kingdom. It didn’t seem like a feudalism that arose out of need but one built to mimic the real-life example.
As I pored this over, Cardinal again offered some fundamental truths.
“Earlier I said that there were no gods in this world. But in the age of Creation—four hundred and fifty years ago—there were those who resembled that title. Four ‘gods’…back when Centoria was just a tiny village.”
“Four hundred and fifty? Not three hundred and eighty? I mean, it’s the year—” I started to say, but she shrugged in exasperation.
“What did I tell you? The Church invented the creation myth. The genesis of the current calendar was arbitrarily decided afterward.”
“Uh…Oh. So, four gods, you said? Those were humans…staffers of Rath who built this world, right?”
This time, Cardinal grinned, telling me that I was on the right track. “So you can deduce that much?”
“In this world, the chicken would have come before the egg. Someone had to raise the first artificial fluctlights from babies. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense that all these people are speaking and writing in Japanese.”
“Very wisely argued. You are indeed correct. In the beginning, when I was still a manager without sentience, four outsiders descended upon this land, separated into two farms, and raised eight children each. They taught them how to read and write, to raise crops, to tend to livestock…even the moral arguments of good and evil that anchored the Taboo Index later on.”
“So they really were gods. That’s a lot of responsibility…even a single offhand comment could end up having a huge impact on the outcome of the entire society.”
Cardinal nodded gravely. “Indeed. It was only after I was imprisoned inside this library that I was able to collect these thoughts and come to one conclusion—why does this world feature an unnecessary feudalism? Why does it have such an extreme legal system, and why do some nobles sneak through its cracks for their own profit and pleasure? There could be only one answer.”
She pushed up her round little glasses and intoned, “Given that the Four Progenitors succeeded at their extremely difficult task, it is clear that they possessed the highest intelligence that a human being can have. And given the moral sense of good they instilled in the Underworldians, their good moral character is apparent as well—except that this did not apply to all four of them.”
“…What…?”
“While all four were brilliant, one of them was not possessed of a good heart. And that one was the source of pollution that infected one or two of those first children. I doubt that it was by design…but one’s nature cannot be hidden. That source introduced self-interested desires, like possessiveness and dominance. And that child, or children, became the founder of what developed into the nobles, emperors, and high priests of the Axiom Church that control this world now…”
Not possessed…of a good heart?
So that evilness that dwelt in a certain subsection of nobles originally came from one of the core members of Rath? And the evil was passed down mentally, until it ultimately resulted in people like Raios Antinous and Humbert Zizek today?
I suddenly felt my senses grow distant and cold. In the real world, my unconscious body was connected to an STL in Rath’s headquarters, wherever that was. The thought that right near me was the person responsible for Raios gave me the chills.
Was it someone I knew? I tried to remember the faces of the Rath staffers, but the only ones that appeared immediately were Takeru Higa, the chief researcher, and the mysterious public servant Seijirou Kikuoka, who got me in with Rath. There were other employees at the branch office in Roppongi, of course, but my memory of their names and faces was vague. In my perceived time, that little job for Rath was over two years ago.
The question was, did this just happen to be a person who was greedy and self-interested, or was it someone who infiltrated Rath with sinister designs? Someone stealing secrets, selling them…possibly destroying them?
“Cardinal…do you know the names of these Four Progenitors?” I asked. She shook her head sadly.
“I would need access to the entire system domain to know that.”
“Oh…sorry. I don’t mean to keep asking you the same things.”
It wasn’t like knowing the names was going to help me now. It merely made the need to create contact with the other side that much more crucial. I leaned back against the chair, sipped the sweet-smelling tea, and changed the subject.
“I see…So if a small subset of Underworldians possesses this sense of dominance, then it’s a natural evolution that they would develop into a privileged class. They’re like lions among a herd of gazelles.”
“And like a virus that cannot be deleted. In this world, children do not just inherit physical appearance but mentality as well. Among the lower nobles, where marriage with commoners happens more often, that self-interest seems much weaker…”
Her words put me in mind of Ronie and Tiese, sixth-rank nobles who possessed a very respectable sense of justice and benevolence.
“Meaning…that if the nobles marry among one another, their self-interest is preserved?”
“Quite. The four imperial dynasties and the Church’s high priests are the backbone of this. And standing atop them all is the ultimate ruler of the human empire…the Axiom Church’s pontifex, and now a system administrator. In fact, she has taken that haughty title for her own name: Administrator.”
“
Adminis…trator,” I muttered, repeating the English term. Now that she said it, I recalled Eldrie babbling that name when his forehead starting glowing. So that meant the target of the Integrity Knights’ fealty was the Administrator Pontifex…
That was when I stumbled over another very important bit of information in Cardinal’s statement. “Wait…did you say she? This…pontifex?”
Ever since I became familiar with it, I had just assumed that the leader of the Axiom Church would be an elderly man, but it seemed I was wrong.
Cardinal nodded and scowled like never before. “Exactly. And worst of all…you might say she is my twin sister.”
“Wh-what do you mean?” I asked, unable to parse the logic of that, but the sage in the guise of a young girl did not answer quickly. She looked at her own pale, fragile hand in apparent disgust, and only then opened her mouth to speak.
“I will tell you in order…About three hundred and fifty years ago, the Axiom Church was founded to serve as the supreme controlling structure of society. In other words, about a hundred years after the simulation actually began. At the time, all humans married around age twenty and had an average of five children, so the population was over six hundred in the fifth generation alone, and near a thousand if you counted their parents and grandparents…”
“H-hang on. How do marriage and childbirth even work in this world?” I asked, unable to resist getting answers to questions I’d had for two whole years, and then panicked when the question seemed a bit inappropriate for a girl of around ten—regardless of who she was on the inside.
But Cardinal didn’t bat an eye. She said, “I do not know the breeding habits of real-world human beings, so I cannot say for certain, but I believe that the act itself is largely based on the real thing, given the fundamental structure of the fluctlight. When a man and woman registered as spouses by the system—and they alone—commit the act, there is a certain probability that the woman will become with child. In more direct terms, a new fluctlight prototype is loaded into an empty cube in the Lightcube Cluster, synthesized between his parents’ physical attributes and mental/personality patterns, and then activated as a newborn baby.”
“Ah, I see…And what’s this marriage registration?”
“Just a simple system command, delivered as an oath of marriage dedicated to Stacia. The village elder did it in the early days, but once churches started popping up around the place, the monks and nuns would officiate.”
“Ahhh…Oops, sorry to interrupt again. Please continue,” I prompted. She nodded and went on.
“Several decades after the Four Progenitors logged out, there were a thousand residents, already ruled by a number of lords. Those few who had received the weapon of self-interest grew their territory as far as they could, and when the young people nearby could not manage their own fields anymore, they were put to use as serfs. Some resisted the yoke and chose to leave the center of the map for new frontiers.”
“Okay, so those were the people who ended up starting rural towns like Zakkaria and Rulid.”
“Precisely. The lords in control of the center were antagonistic to one another, of course, so they did not join their houses in marriage for quite a while. Eventually, two lords conspired to wed their families together…and produced a child. She was as cute as an angel and possessed the greatest self-interest of any fluctlight created in the Underworld…They called her Quinella.”
Cardinal stared out into space, her eyes glimmering as though traveling the long-distant past.
The lamps placed between the bookshelves surrounding this little room cast complex shadows on her white cheeks. You could have heard a pin drop in the silence. When she spoke again, her voice was calm but had a note of melancholy.
“In Centoria at the time—which had grown into a full town, not just a village—it was one of the lords, Quinella’s father, who assigned children their callings. By the time she turned ten, she showed great talent for the sword, sacred arts, singing, weaving, and every other activity, so everyone assumed that she could shine at any calling he might give her. But because of that, Quinella’s father decided he didn’t want to send his precious daughter out to work…”
A pitying smile crept over her features. “It was a foolish fixation. In order to keep Quinella close to him, he gave his daughter a calling that had never existed before: training in sacred arts. In a room in the back of their mansion, Quinella used all her wits to analyze the sacred arts—which are really system commands. Before then, the Underworldians knew only the most basic of commands, and none even bothered to question the meaning of the words themselves. They hadn’t needed to, in order to live their lives.”
Thinking back to my time in Rulid Village, the most that Eugeo and the other villagers did was open Stacia Windows to check remaining life.
“But with tremendous patience and observation for a child her age, Quinella continued to analyze the command words—strange, otherworldly terms from a language not their own, like generate and element and object. Finally, she succeeded in creating her own art based on a few basic commands: Thermal Arrow. From the system commands that were merely tools to assist one’s living, she had created an attack spell that would harm the life of its target…Kirito.”
The sound of my name snapped me out of my reverie. I looked back at her.
“Do you know why your sacred arts usage level—your System Access Authority—rose so abruptly before?”
“Yeah. Well, I think so. It was because we beat those monsters…the goblin pack in the cave.”
“Precisely. This world was originally designed for the residents to fight invading enemies from outside and increase in strength. That will become necessary during the ‘stress test stage’…But at any rate, to raise one’s authority level requires defeating an invader or simple repetition of commands. At the mere age of eleven, Quinella discovered how to do that all on her own. She went into the woods near her home and used that Thermal Arrow on the harmless golden flying foxes…”
“Meaning…that the target you can defeat to raise your authority isn’t just limited to invaders like monsters from the Dark Territory…?”
“Aye. In other words, the accumulation of experience points occurs when any moving unit is destroyed, including humans. Of course, humans do not kill humans in this world, and almost no human would kill a harmless animal—but those with a high amount of noble genes are a different story. They hunt for sport and, without realizing it, increase their authority level…and it was eleven-year-old Quinella who did this while knowing her own intentions.”
Cardinal paused there and quietly put the cup to her lips. She pulled it away and cradled it in her hands before continuing.
“When she realized that she could raise her sacred arts usage level by killing animals, she started sneaking into the forest at night to kill without alerting her family or the villagers. As the process in charge of world balance at the time, if I’d been conscious, Quinella’s actions would have terrified me. Without emotion…or perhaps with a kind of joy, she cleaned out all the wild animal units around Centoria in a single night. As the system ordained, the depleted unit numbers were replenished…and then she repeated the act the next night…”
To a VRMMO gamer like me, that was a totally ordinary action. In the SAO days, I did that very thing myself, hunting for days at a time for the sole purpose of increasing my own stats. It was the entire point of an MMO.
But hearing the words from Cardinal made a cold sweat run down my back. A young girl in pajamas, prowling the forest at night and burning any animal she found, without emotion. If anything, that was the image of a nightmare.
As though resonating with my own fear, Cardinal’s hands squeezed the cup tighter.
“Quinella’s authority level rose without end. Her decoding of commands proceeded until she could use arts that the people of the time would have considered miracles, like life regeneration and weather prediction. Her father and the other residents of Centoria called her the ch
ild of God and began to worship her. At age thirteen, her beauty had indeed become divine. Behind her gentle smile, Quinella sensed that the time had come to satisfy her bottomless lust for power. She wanted not the power of land possession like the feudal lords, nor the strength of the warriors and their swords…but a more absolute form of power…using the name of God…”
For a brief moment, Cardinal looked up to the dome of the Great Library, hanging far overhead, or perhaps to the real world beyond even that.
“It was the greatest mistake of those who built this world that they described the mysterious powers of its system commands through the concept of God. In my mind…the existence of God is an irresistible ambrosia to the human mind. It can heal all ills and permit all cruelties. Fortunately, as I do not possess emotions, I cannot hear His voice…”
Her burnt-brown eyes looked down on the teacup, and she tapped its ceramic rim with a finger. More hot liquid began to fill in from the base, until the empty cup was full of fresh tea again.
“You need not be a blind believer when miracles are performed before your eyes and explained as the work of a god. Men injured on the farm, healed in a snap. Storms foretold three days before their arrival. No one doubted Quinella’s word ever again. She told the lords working under her father that they needed a place of worship, to call forth ever greater miracles. Very soon, they had built a marble tower in the middle of the village. It was narrow back then, and only three stories tall…but that was the foundation of this very Central Cathedral and the founding of the Axiom Church’s three hundred and fifty years of history.”
The story of this ancient saint, Quinella, put me in mind of a different person. I’d never known her myself, only through Eugeo’s and Selka’s stories—but the girl Cardinal described sounded a lot like the girl with the talent for sacred arts at a young age, tasked with being an apprentice sister at the church: Alice Zuberg.
But Eugeo claimed that when she was in Rulid, Alice was kind and warm to everyone. And she was Selka’s sister, too. I couldn’t imagine such a person would sneak out at night to lay waste to wild animals.
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