The next morning.
We changed into our school uniforms and waited in our Pablohetra lodgings. Mom and dad had been assigned the role of recordkeepers and given a magic camera, tripod, and image recorder created by Arcana. They were currently snapping photo after photo of me. Ottolulu had stopped by earlier to tell us to be ready in an hour’s time, and since then, nearly an hour had passed.
“Calm down,” I said to Sasha, who was pacing restlessly by the door. “The Gui Ambarret person who visited you is sure to be from the Magic Bullet World affiliated with Pablohetra.”
“My mother is alive?” Misha murmured.
“If she wasn’t, he wouldn’t have made you pick out a birthday present for her.”
“But how?” Sasha asked. Elenesia was meant to have perished after creating her successor, the Goddess of Creation, Militia.
“I don’t know. But since Gui didn’t disclose whether she was actually alive or not, there may be difficult circumstances surrounding the matter.”
“Was he worried we’d try and take her back?” Sasha wondered.
“Who knows?” I said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know the first thing about the Magic Bullet World, or about Pablohetra itself.”
“Right...”
We didn’t have any clues to go off of. Both Misha and Sasha knew they had no choice but to wait for now. But I couldn’t fault them for worrying about their mother either.
Just then, we heard a knock.
“It’s me, Ottolulu.”
“Come in,” I said. The door opened, revealing the Arbitration Goddess Ottolulu.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Then please follow me.”
Ottolulu led us down the corridors of the palace, eventually stopping in an area enclosed by pillars. In the center of the area a fixed magic circle had been arranged.
“Stand here,” she said, then waited for us to all get on the circle. “To Shallows Hall One.”
We teleported, our vision filling with white light. We then arrived in front of a large double door.
“This is Pablohetra’s Shallow-Level Auditorium Number One. Most lectures are held here. Come inside.”
She opened the door. Inside was a wide room, with a round teacher’s podium set in the middle surrounded by desks and chairs arranged in neat, concentric circles. A number of uniformed students were already seated. Most schools were seated together, but there were a few groups of students wearing different uniforms.
Ottolulu walked forwards and pointed at a section of the room. “Militia’s World has been assigned seats there.”
“If this is the shallow-level auditorium, does that mean there’s a deep-level auditorium?” I asked. None of us moved to take a seat just yet.
“And there is also a middle-level auditorium. The miniature worlds of the Sacred Silverwater Sea exist at different depths. Levels one to ten are the shallows, eleven to twenty are the middle levels, and twenty-one onwards are the depths.”
Come to think of it, Baltzarond’s subordinates had also called Militia’s World a world on the first level.
“How are those levels decided?” I asked.
Ottolulu floated up into the air and drifted over to the podium, then sent magic into the round, spherelike blackboard that had been set up behind the podium.
“A miniature world’s level is decided by the strength of the world’s order. The level indicates how large the world’s influence is on the Sacred Silverwater Sea overall. Magic power flows from the shallows towards the depths, with order also exerting its power from the shallows to the depths.”
The spherical blackboard was some kind of magic instrument. It responded to her magic by turning transparent, revealing six silver bubbles within. Five of them represented shallow-level worlds, with one representing a deep-level world.
“Let’s assume the shallow-level worlds have a magic value of ten, and their order of weight is also ten. The same goes for the deep-level world.”
Ottolulu’s rules were written into the blackboard as “Shallows: Magic 10, Weight 10” and “Depths: Magic 10, Weight 10.”
“In accordance with the order of the Sacred Silverwater Sea, magic flows towards the depths, and order exerts its power in the depths. When one unit of magic moves from the shallows, one unit of order exerts itself.”
One unit for magic and order was subtracted from the shallow-level worlds. The text changed to “Shallows: Magic 9, Weight 9.”
“The magic and order are applied to the deep-level world, turning into power.”
One unit of magic and weight was removed from each of the five shallow-level worlds, adding a total of five units of magic and weight to the deep-level world. The text by the deep-level world read “Magic 15, Weight 15.”
“In reality this is not so simple, but this is the general rule of the Sacred Silverwater Sea. Miniature worlds that possess more magic and have more order are heavier, sinking further into the abyss. This is what is considered depth.”
I see. The Seventh Elenesia World was more powerful than Militia’s World by as many shallow-level worlds that had working magic and orders. Naturally, that power affected the people living in these worlds too.
“There are many issues that make it inefficient to measure the magic power and order of a miniature world directly, so firedew is used as the unit of measurement instead. The more firedew a world has, the deeper the level in which it’s located.”
The location she was talking about wasn’t a physical location, but the strength of the world’s order.
“So frankly speaking, the depths are stealing firedew from the shallows?” I asked.
“You may think of it that way if you wish,” Ottolulu replied, “but firedew does not belong to anyone. It is the universal order of the Sacred Silverwater Sea. It is natural for firedew to cross the seas and travel through silverfoam.”
Equis had been stealing firedew. They had claimed they were consuming the firedew, but Ottolulu’s reply revealed the truth to that answer. If we looked at Militia’s World alone, the firedew seemed like it had been consumed. But Equis hadn’t known about the outer worlds at that time, and so the firedew they thought they had consumed had actually crossed to another miniature world.
“Say, does that mean...” Sasha mumbled beside me.
“Our mother’s firedew left the world,” Misha said, quietly answering her question.
We had believed that their mother, the Goddess of Creation Elenesia, had perished. But in reality, her source had become firedew and crossed worlds, resulting in her birth as the Goddess of Creation in the Magic Bullet World.
“There’s still time until today’s lecture commences. I will explain a bit more about the order of the Sacred Silverwater Sea to the group from Militia’s World. Please have a seat,” Ottolulu said.
I pulled back a nearby chair and sat down. The others did the same.
“You asked me if the deep-level worlds were stealing firedew from the shallow-level worlds. But the movement of firedew does not occur naturally. This is because the chief god of the world who maintains that order should be preventing the firedew from leaking out of their world.”
She drew a clear bubble on the spherical blackboard. The words “ephemeral world” appeared beside it.
“The movement of firedew mostly occurs in ephemeral worlds, which is what we call the countless number of dark, fleeting bubbles that float near the surface of the Sacred Silverwater Sea. It’s believed that all worlds began as ephemeral worlds, even the deep-level worlds in the abyss of the sea.”
She added the words “unevolved” next.
“Ephemeral worlds are unevolved miniature worlds. The term also refers to worlds in the Sacred Silverwater Sea that haven’t been born yet at all. This is because ephemeral worlds have no chief god or ruler. Without a chief god, the miniature world is unable to fully control its order; without a ruler, the residents of the miniature world will fight amongst themselves for eternity. The result is as you can imagine.”
The ephemeral bubble popped, vanishing from the blackboard.
“When left alone, these bubbles burst and disappear. That is why we call them ephemeral,” Ottolulu said. She drew more bubbles over the blackboard, marking them as ephemeral worlds. “However, not all ephemeral bubbles vanish. The worlds lucky enough to survive will eventually undergo an internal transformation.”
She wrote the words “birth of a purist.”
“Gods and order exist in ephemeral worlds as well. The will of a world exists within them both as seeds, leading the world in a particular direction. The seeds cannot be visibly perceived, and do not have consciousness of their own. The gods obey this ambiguous will and lead the world to its correct order. In almost all cases this fails, but in some ephemeral worlds blessed by the Sacred Silverwater Seas, purists are born.”
In the case of our world, the seeds of the will of the world were Equis’s cogs.
“A purist is an evolved life-form possessing magic and strength, abilities that exceed even the gods’, and the power to lead the world in a better direction. As more purists are born, the miniature world undergoes further change, that being the birth of a chief god,” Ottolulu explained in a matter-of-fact tone. “The existence of a purist strengthens the firedew of the world they inhabit, making order more powerful. Eventually, one of the seeds left in the gods will sprout, turning that god into the chief god, also known as the will of the world.”
That was a little different to what had happened with us. Graham’s experiment had involved gathering the seeds and testing whether they would gain a mind of their own when combined together—resulting in Equis, the god that was a collective of cogs. Ottolulu called them seeds of the will of the world, but the fact they had formed a consciousness when gathered together made it more natural to call them fragments. But she wouldn’t know that unless something similar had already happened in another ephemeral world.
“The birth of a chief god changes a miniature world dramatically. Once born, the chief god selects a ruler worthy of governing the miniature world. All the candidates for that position are purists.”
“So the ruler is a purist who conforms strictly to the position?” I asked.
“To the position, and to the evolved world. The chief god can distinguish who is most fitting for the order of their world.”
That meant the holo boy Vade had been a candidate for the ruler position. In our world, I had stopped all destruction, which in turn had stopped new life from being born—including purists. Equis had had to use his power to create purists by force.
“The chief god selects a purist to become king of the world. Once the ruler is born, the ephemeral world evolves into a silver bubble.”
It was now pretty clear that having our world reincarnate to rebalance order had accidentally resulted in the evolution of our world into a silver bubble.