Chapter 23
In which the trip back is a flashback montage, and Lord of the Rings is a lie
TAMASHII
We got a brand new mast, better than before, and the wind was in our favor. The trip from Kushiyama westward had taken weeks due to crappy navigation and even crappier wind, but now everything seemed to go right. As I sat on the deck Portia and I talked about our past and how it was funny how everything had worked out. I thought about how all the times with friends and just hanging out could have led to this adventure. What would I do after this? Like, when I was older?
I had always been an outcast, and going on adventures was one way that I felt like I belonged. My friends and family had always been with me, but one day, my family would get older. Maybe I could be a professional adventure for after that happened? It made me wonder what sort of history led up to Ambrosia being born, which in turn led to her own adventure as Oracle of Tao.
RENA
After Winter fell, we were adrift. Alicia was gone, and none of us had holy powers. Belial's remaining demons hunted down humans who remembered Jesus or had thaumaturgy of their own, and our racial abilities were mostly elemental effects. It took me a very long time to learn how to get rid of demons, about the time needed for my ninth tail to grow, to be precise.
So we hid. We hid as Belial talked the last humans of the Ancient Earth into using sorcery as a weapon of war. We hid as the Middle Earth emerged after crossing the arctic rim to a new layer (the original Earth before the New Earth had a tendency to expand outward like a tree, with rings from previous times. The Ancient Earth became lifeless except for a few bacteria, but life quickly developed much to the consternation of demonkind. In fact, the line from The Matrix where Smith calls humans a virus? Well, that idea came from Malthus. But it came from Belial first. While humanity had millions of years to develop in the Ancient Earth, the Middle Earth developed humans, elves, dwarves, the Ainur (who became wizards and balrogs), the Ents, and the lesser known Drúedain within only a few thousand years. But we saw firsthand while watching them in secret, that these were a people who did not know God. They lived in happiness, yes. And Jesus's grace was upon them when they died. But none of the teachings of the past were known to them. All it took was a magic ring forged of great power, and they all were enslaved.
Oh yes, many of you have read the Lord of the Rings. But the outcome of that story is a happy lie. In actuality, Frodo died of poison from a certain sword. Elrond was not able to heal him. Fighting broke out over who was to take the ring, and without Frodo to volunteer, the fellowship never formed. In that reality, Sauron won, and Belial won. But there was something he didn't count on. Us.
After watching the free people of the land enslaved and then destroyed, I was ready to give up. "Evil is too powerful," I said. But then I heard a voice as though from a distance but steadily getting closer, "Nonsense. Darkness borrows the power of light, it is actually quite weak." I looked at the source of the voice, and gasped, "Jesus! You're here! I thought you had gone." He shook his head, "Do not be afraid, for evil is not infallible. I am an eternal being. I cannot die, and I am always with you even when you cannot see me. But in a form without a human body, I can only be seen clearly by humans who know me. All others see me as behind a veil. A curtain. You remember, right?" Oh yes, I remembered. The temple in Israel had a heavy curtain that was to represent human separation from God. He explained, "That curtain was to remain open. But while humans can still access my grace, none of them know of me. They only know of wars and power. You can try to save them, of course. But their salvation is in the Afterlife, not this dying world. Belial believes that this world matters, and this is why he seeks to kill my people, and hopes to erase my message. But behold, in the blink of an eye, it is new again." Out of thin air, he produced the great religious texts of Buddhism, Shintoism, Judaism, Taoism, and the teachings of Jesus, along with thousands of writings in medicine, science, and philosophy. He handed us a First Silver box to carry them in. "Share these teachings of mine," Jesus said, "The world that is about to appear, the modern Earth will need them. Decided the place and time to share each piece of knowledge. And split us so that Belial cannot track you.
And we did. We showed the Egyptians how to build pyramids, keeping secret the fact that they were actually flying battleships until they were ready. Historians called them tombs, of all things. We showed certain groups how to make aqueducts, various types of medicine, and even gunpowder. We copied snippets of religious writings a little at a time, guiding history in the way we wanted it. Soon, we had a number of religions and powerful civilizations, the exact climate for a Jesus event.
"But what do we do now?" I asked. Now that I knew Jesus was there, I could often see him and talk to him. "I want you to pose as me," Jesus explained. I blinked, "Why can't you return and die for everyone again?" Jesus sighed, "Well, I certainly could incarnate, or possess a body, or something like that. But the purpose of my death and resurrection was a single sacrifice for all sins. You are to explain my teachings. The world has salvation, and had it long before any of them remember. But they do not know that they have salvation. They believe their salvation comes from following laws."
I knew what teaching them about Jesus meant. But I loved Jesus with all my heart, and I was okay with dying, even if that meant never seeing Alicia again. There were a few differences this time around. Like, I still wasn't able to purify demons, so they possessed my enemies, and there was a great amount of resistance to Christianity as they called it (completely missing the point that it was not about worshiping Jesus but about understanding the concepts of grace and forgiveness), inventing reasons why I couldn't be the Messiah. They were right, of course, I wasn't the Messiah. I was an impostor. Nonetheless, I was able to enter Jerusalem by the Eastern Gate, so I suppose Jesus helped make that happen.
It was good news for me that Jesus raised me from the dead. I didn't want to sit in the ground forever after having done his work for him. But many things about history were different this time, and I suspected Belial's hand at work.
The Romans, unlike the Atlanteans, did not readily embrace Christ but conspired with the Jews to spread a lie that his followers had taken his body. Right, these followers who were (as far as the Jews and Romans knew) regular humans, made it past armed guards, pushed away a large boulder, and then they hauled away a body without anyone noticing it.
There were also many heresies of Jesus's teachings. The Judaizers, the people who tried to convince everyone that Jesus taught to follow laws, to be good and this would get you into heaven. There were also the Catholics, the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Muslims. Each of these had something insincere about their teachings. The Mormons and Muslims were cults where the leader had said God had talked to them personally, and spent a lot of their time trying to set up a worldly kingdom instead of accepting that the kingdom of God was already here; these two also taught polygamy as they accepted women as less than men, and both had violent armies to enforce their teachings. Jehovah's Witnesses taught instead of the gospel, the notion of the Second Coming. Like the Judaizers before them, they did not understand that Jesus's resurrection was the Second Coming, and that he came to forgive sins not to judge those who had broken the law. They also thought Jesus was an angel rather than God, and that only 144 thousand people will be saved. In other words, they are believers in Revelation, not the Gospel. As for the Catholics, they taught that Mary is the Mother of God (a gross heresy), that bread and wine literally become Jesus's flesh and blood (that's a magic trick, not theology), and for quite awhile they had the same sort of marketplace going on as the Pharisees, this time to sell indulgences. They taught man-made law, not God's truth.
Suspecting tricks from Belial, I operated in secret, teaching a few trusted people at a time how to develop spiritual awareness. Some of these became thaumaturgy experts, others helped teach people a better way to live by acting as mentors. Eventually though, they helped me find out who Alicia was. Only there was a problem. The child they found had memories of Alicia's past life, and the same powers from before. But this was a boy named Emett. Alicia had been a close friend, but I didn't know how to deal with this. And so, I worked on Emett, changing forms as had been my power as a foxgirl, attempting to get him to notice me. When his awareness reached the point where Emett understood who I was, and remembered she was Alicia, I finally made a meeting possible. I trained Alicia to be the Oracle of Tao, but I was out of my depth. Belial had planted five Statues of Darkness at key points in order to corrupt the Earth to darkness. We managed to stop that plan, but then Alicia made a strange decision to sacrifice herself for demons. I blame myself for being to soft on her, I guess. After that, Belial was sealed away, and then something strange happened. Because I was horribly depressed after Alicia kinda went and blew herself up, Jesus made a deal. Jesus needed a body again, and I wanted to forget the physical world and be with Alicia. So that's where I am now. Jesus took my body, and I'm a spirit. I got to be with Alicia after all, but I have no idea what happened next.
GOD
After that, there was a bit of an evil cloud of darkness (like in the Japanese NES game Final Fantasy III), and so I split split the Earth into a New Earth and the Realm of Void.
It was a new Earth, all right, but of course human beings continued to make imperfect decisions. Jesus, in Rena's body, appeared to humans in many forms and guided humanity along a better path. Humans developed various powers, though now that demons were in an actual town, magic rather than thaumaturgy was more common. Unlike before though, there wasn't a strong push towards sorcery. Other disciplines like geomancy, enchantment, and alchemy became common.
And unlike before, humanity wasn't plagued with constant wars. They had one war called the Great Phoenix War (if I remember correctly, it was started when the Prime Minister of Kushiyama was teased by a child in Phoenix, and he retaliated by killing the entire family while the kid was made to watch; that kid later became the king of Phoenix), which was so long, bloody, and chaotic that a group formed after this to make certain no more wars existed. They concluded after a great deal of philosophy and debate, that the reason for wars between countries is that leaders craved land or power. They concluded that the primary reason for civil wars was that although leaders craved land or power, common people desired to be left alone. They couldn't control people's desires, but they could limit government. And so, they mostly did away with income tax and property tax, and set up a system known as the Anti-Government Council.
They weren't perfect (they polluted Eden and confined Jesus to the town limits of Kushiyama), but they managed to keep the world free from drama for thousands of years. Eventually though, Belial was going to convince the sorcerer Yazim Jianne that if he was freed, the guy's wife Sarai would be able to be raised. This was despite resurrection spells being common. Did I mention he was a mad scientist? This world already had a Savior. What it needed right now was a Hero. And so, I searched for a woman who would bear my child. A found a woman named Manna Leaven. I won't get into any sex scenes, but I think we're up to just before the start of the book Oracle of Tao. She carried out my will, and now she's a mess, and it's entirely her fault. What? It couldn't be my fault!
