The True Forms of the Nine Pillar Gods

At the end of the Twenty-First Ring's Endless Corridor stood a round hall as sacred and magnificent as the Great Chapel.

After entering, the first thing Iver saw was this—

The wooden floor was bright red, while the ceiling was dark red. It looked as though they were inside the heart of some enormous monster.

Thousands of white candles of varying heights burned throughout the room, filling it with faint incense imbued with a sacred aura.

The statues of the Nine Pillar Gods were arranged in order in a fan shape, embedded in their respective square shrines. They looked like enormous paintings, except that the paintings were recessed into the walls. The sacred images of the Nine Pillar Gods within them maintained different poses, each appearing inside a frame of a different color.

Different offerings were placed in the two corners of every "frame." They were mostly different flowers, different gems, and candles of different colors, arranged in varying quantities and sequences.

From left to right, the Nine Pillar Gods were arranged according to the Sacred Number.

Everyone knew that the Nine Pillar Gods had different incarnations. However, the Theocracy had its own unique definition of the "official forms" of the Nine Pillar Gods.

Although the churches of other nations also had religious paintings, they did not have complete statues, nor did they permit drawings of any kind without authorization. This was the "right of permission" and "right of speech" controlled by the Theocracy. Only temples that exclusively worshiped a particular Pillar God possessed sacred images.

Normally, only here could one see sacred images of all nine Pillar Gods at the highest level.

—Constant Self, on the far left, looked like a plump young girl.

She knelt on the ground, facing a lake, her hands crossed against her chest or