46. Origin

  “Thank you for the tea, Mai Mai,” I said once I was served. I was the first she served, but we all sat at the table, which was large enough for all of us and many more. She went around and served the women first, and then the men, and then she took a seat next to me and took my hand.

  “It is often easy to forget how humble you are, that you do not see yourself the way that others have come to see you,” she said, squeezing my hand reassuringly. “We all thought that you knew about the prayers. And the shrines, and the temples that are propping up everywhere. The people, they love you. And they believe in you.”

  “And they love us too,” Di Sana said, smiling. “I am the mother of a god. You should hear the tales that they tell about me! Did you know they think that I slept with a god to conceive you, then passed you off as your father’s child right in front of him? That is one tale of how you left home, that you were kicked out by my husband and began your journey from there.”

  I frowned. “I do not like that tale. Father was a good man, I was proud of him. When the merchant told us lies and overcharged us for his ‘light stone,’ he stood by me and acted to protect me, though he beggared himself to do it. I will not have the people telling falsehoods about him.”

  “Then what would you have the people know about my first husband?” my mother asked quietly.

  I sighed and looked at the ceiling. “Nothing but the truth, but no more than you are willing to share about him,” I admitted. “I was proud of him because I thought he was a fine man for the world that crafted him, but in the end I did not know him and I do not know how he would wish his memory to be honored. So as his widow, you should decide.”

  “Thank you,” My mother said, and she stood to leave. “I shall go and begin sharing the stories about your mortal father to those who will listen.”

  And she left the room.

  “That won’t stop it,” I said. I shook my head. “They’ll think that my true father is one of those pervert gods who gets women pregnant and then abandons them to their fates. Like that guy with the lightning.”

  “You wield lightning,” Di Ram said. “And earth and fire and it seems like the world itself bows to your will.”

  I shook my head. “I know secrets of cultivation that are normally not known until the very end of the mythril path, and also secrets that are not known until the beginning of the celestial. But I am in the body of a platinum ranked cultivator. I am no god.”

  “Have you considered the fact that godhood might be the path upon which you walk?” Di Phon questioned.

  “Before tonight I had not,” I said. I laughed. “Do you know what my golden core revelation was? What pushed me to ascend past silver?”

  The room was silent as they waited for me to continue.

  “That I was too weak to do the thing that I allowed myself to be born to do. Too selfish. So I decided that one world would be enough. I would save one world, and try to make it safe,” I laughed bitterly. “And now they think I’m a god.”

  “Some of them think that we are gods too,” Di Ram said. “They say that I am the mortal incarnation of the god of leadership and honor and justice. That my first wife is the god of scribes and merchants.”

  “People will believe anything,” I said, but I felt no venom in the words. “Religion can be a terrible thing. War and cruelty unimaginable can be done in the name of gods.”

  “If you say so,” Di Phon said. “For the last ten thousand years or so we have been stuck with a simple distant figure of Lord Loshi. We have paid a handsome price for his protection, I think, but when it truly came due he abandoned us. And you stepped into the position as our divine protector.”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t like that.”

  Abruptly Toorah cleared his throat, and I looked at him in surprise, as I had forgotten he was in the room with us.

  “Perhaps it would be best to know the story they are telling about your birth, your life, and the battle you did in the heavens on the night with no stars,” he suggested.

  “I know better than anyone what happened that night,” I argued.

  “But let me tell you what the people who you saved that night believe,” he said.

  I sighed, and nodded for him to proceed.

  He cleared his throat, and began to speak.

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  “A very very long time ago, the Lord of the Realm arranged the heavens and the earth to his liking, and he put the people on Atla to tend the fields and send him his harvest. He always took as much as he took, and in exchange he promised to protect the people of Atla from any threats of the heavens. He promised that as long as he got his harvest he would leave them to their earthly matters.

  “For a very long time, this arrangement was the law of the realm. But then, the god of wisdom cast his seed into the world, and that seed took soil in the womb of a beautiful maiden named Po Sana. It was to be Po Sana’s second child, and nobody knew that it was not of her husband, not even she, for she had always been loyal and faithful to her husband and how was she to know that she had caught a divine spark?

  “And so she gave birth, and the little godling that she gave birth to was born with all the secrets of the gods in his head. But although he had the secrets of the gods, he had the body of a mortal. So he realized that if he wanted to go and find out who his true father was, he would have to cultivate.

  “He knew of matters of the heavens, but not the earth, so he asked a merchant what the greatest sect in the land was, and he was taken to the Six Mountain Sect. There he was recognized by Di Phon as a god, and put under the protection of his son, Di Ram. But there were demons hiding in the sect, and one of them, Ko Ren, tried to steal the divinity from the little godling.

  “The godling was quick and turned into a little bug and fled, and that is why we call in him Little Bug! He fled all the way south to the jungles of Ker’tath, and there he found a divine beast. The Tunrida! And he revealed himself to the beautiful Tunrida and said ‘oh great one, will you not protect me until I come of age?’ And the Tunrida saw that he was a god in the body of a mortal and agreed.

  “So it was that Little Bug was cultivating upon the mountain with his three followers, his oldest friend Hien Ro and the girl who would become Ro’s wife, when he drew the attention of the cultivators of that land, and they came to him to ask him how they might serve him, recognizing his greatness.

  “He said ‘I wish to prove myself to be a mighty warrior that I might confront Ko Ren and put the world to right before everything is corrupted.’ So the sects of the southern continent gathered all of their juniors in one place and had them fight Little Bug, but even when they fought all together, they could not defeat this little godling.

  “He sighed and said ‘that wasn’t challenging enough. I will take with me ten disciples and make them as strong as I am, and then I will have a challenge that will turn me into a true warrior.’ So he gathered ten disciples, and yes I am certain you know their names! The Peach Blossoms they are called. He gathered them, and he raised them up until they were almost as strong as he was.

  “But he wasn’t satisfied when he had accomplished this task, for he was still not ready to face the evil that was Ko Ren. So he sent the disciples to the battlefield in his place while he made a pilgrimage all over the world, traveling everywhere that there is to go all at once with divine magic! But he did not find what he was seeking.

  “Because what he was seeking was not on earth.

  “While he was making this journey, the great Di Phon was in the heavens pleading with the Lord of the Realm to intercede and slay the demon Ko Ren, but the Lord would not hear him or move his icy heart.

  “The evil Ko Ren had corrupted the Six Mountain Sect and turned it into a wicked thing, which is now called the sovereign summit sect because the Six Mountain Sect was always a symbol of piece and unity and should not be confused with the Corruption that Ko Ren brought when Di Phon went to the heavens to plead with the lord.

  “Ko Ren brought the might of the Sovereign Summit and the corpse of every man, woman, and child who had ever died to the south to try to find Little Bug and slay him, but Di Ram, who had married Little Bug’s mortal mother and loved her very much, led the mortal forces in battle. The peach blossoms arrived just in time to save the port of hope, and they held it for long enough for Little Bug to find what he was looking for.

  “He found it just in time, for the lord of the realm’s attention was finally turned upon the world of Atla and he saw the corruption that was there and he cast it out of his realm and into the darkness.

  “But Little Bug knew this would happen, for he was a god. And he had found what he needed. He had found a weapon that the evil Ko Ren could not combat. And he took that weapon to the siege of Resh Fali and he turned back the darkness and he made the earth shine and he brought back the stars and the sun and the blue of the sky and the black of the firmament all at once.

  “And then he said after the battle ‘I am sorry, but I accidentally made a baby with the goddess who gave me this power, and so I must go take care of it for a while. For you see, the weapon that I found while I was searching the world was Love, but now that I have found it I am ever so busy!’ And so he left, but he was not really gone because the baby was Atla, the spirit of the world, who is a boy. And it was Aetla, the spirit of the world, who is a girl. So he left a piece of him behind to take care of Atla and Aetla, and he went off into the heavens to court their mother, the beautiful Mai Mai, who became his second wife. His first wife was, of course, Matla. And now he is back and Atla, Aetla, and Matla are back as well, and the gods walk among us.

  “And things are much better when the stuffy old lord of the realm ruled anyway, so everyone is very happy with Little Bug, who is also called the Worldfather.”

  I listened to the children’s story without interruption as Toorah told it, then I asked solemnly “Are they truly telling that story?”

  “More or less,” Toorah said. He shrugged. “It’s pretty similar to what my mom told my baby sister when she was five. The others filled in some of the details that were bugging me because they didn’t sound right. Atla himself told me to add in the parts about Aetla because he decided that it makes things easier for him if people think of ‘The Twins’ as two people instead of him flip-flopping. How close to the truth was it?”

  I sighed. “I’ve worshiped gods with a far more pathetic origin story than that in my previous lives. If that is what they are teaching the children, and that is what the children believe, then I despair that I will ever get this mantle that is settling around my neck like a noose off again.”

  The room was silent as they allowed me to contemplate my situation.

  “Stop being so stupid, Father,” Aetla said, manifesting as her girl-self. “If you want them to think differently then just tell them.”

  “It’s not that simple,” I said. I sighed. “I need to do the same thing you did, Aetla. I need to hire a priest.”

  Tonilla nodded solemnly. “I have a list of candidates who are very eager to interview for that position, Worldfather,” she said.

  “Call me Little Bug. It reminds me who I am.”

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