[Crystallization is the corruption of the supernatural. Machinery is the End of Crystallization.]
At last, the title of Act Five had taken shape, and Your Excellency the Fool didn't seem to object.
Fu Qian had wondered if this might be like the Abyss Notebook, where anything too outrageous simply couldn't be written down.
Unfortunately, an artistic occasion like this didn't seem suited to testing that theory. In the end, he still wrote down the chapter's theme exactly as he had distilled it, even taking care to keep the lettering neat.
And the content itself unquestionably qualified as a true doomsday text.
Perhaps it couldn't be equated completely with reality, but this round of Etched Wisdom had a distinctly clear theme: crystallization was a curse upon everything supernatural, ultimately creating a semblance of truth that was nothing but a lie.
The storm Your Excellency the Fool had sacrificed himself to withstand during the Long Night had, in the end, ravaged the entire world nineteen years ago.
It had proved even more fragile than the already fragile barrier. A thousand years of peace for mortals had been nothing more than the last dried leaf.
By then, the world had fallen completely, and everything was sustained by "lies."
Even the gods, high above, were intoxicated by them. Only a few "mad" wills still retained any awareness of the truth.
Of course, from a mortal's perspective, there was still one small consolation: one of those few had come from among the common people and had yet to ascend to godhood.
Would Nepheli, who had burned herself out atop the lighthouse, have witnessed the same scene in the end?
Whether she had or not, it seemed she had missed out on the greatest spectacle.
If she had arrived just a little later, perhaps she might