Text and Poetry

That day.

Huxter, the priest of the Temple of Eternity, also became a [Prophet] in his sleep.

When he awoke from the dream.

He came to stand before the statue, dazed.

Then he fell to his knees, tears streaming down his face.

"God!"

"Ah, I knew it. You've been watching me all along, haven't you?"

Huxter could no longer contain his excitement.

Only he knew.

How long he had waited for this moment.

Throughout half his life.

Not a moment had passed without this longing.

Longing for divine favor to descend upon him.

Once.

He had believed that the Rot Spirit Flower was a reward bestowed upon him by God, meant to guide him in using the Rot Spirit Insects to better serve the Tribe.

However.

After Ned received the gift of the Rot Spirit Staff.

He finally realized that the glory had never been his.

For a time, Huxter had grieved over this.

But despite being heartbroken, he had harbored no resentment.

Instead, he had faithfully fulfilled his duties as God's priest.

If God had chosen to do this.

Then there had to be a deeper meaning behind it.

As God's priest.

He didn't need to think too much; he only needed to fulfill his duties.

That was why he had openly opposed Richie's decision.

He had repeatedly pleaded with him to make Ned, who had received God's favor, the Tribe's chief.

He had even been willing to relinquish his position as God's priest to Ned.

More than loyalty to the Tribe.

More than the desire for power.

Huxter was more loyal to God, and yearned for God's approval.

And now.

He had finally received everything he had wanted.

Looking at the towering, faceless statue.

At that moment, Huxter had even wanted to rush forward and kiss the statue of God.

But he had also felt apprehensive and hesitant.

As if afraid of defiling the statue.

In the end, the old man merely prostrated himself before it, unable to suppress his cries of excitement.

"Ha ha ha ha!"

"Waaah!"

The priest of God, whom people regarded as an exalted figure, knelt before the statue.

First he cried.

Then he laughed.

Then he laughed and cried at once.

That day, the priest's awful, hoarse, peculiar laughter and sobbing, like the rasping of a broken bellows, echoed throughout the entire temple.

The believers who had come to worship God were stunned at the sight.

They thought the cold, eccentric elder had been so devastated by the Chosen One Richie's departure that he had gone mad.

Before the believers who came to worship at the temple.

Huxter soon regained his usual authority.

To better understand the meaning of the blessings God had bestowed, he summoned the [Prophets] to discuss the magnificent vision they had seen in their dreams.

Every one of them had seen the shadow of a majestic temple cast down from the distant sky.

However.

Only Huxter and one elder recalled another scene from the dream.

It was a magnificent tower wreathed in ethereal radiance.

On its sacred heights, solemn yet mysterious patterns, perfectly square, had been carved.

Each one seemed to follow some strange rule, revealing a mysterious significance.

Led by Huxter.

They discussed it from day until night.

At last.

Huxter murmured:

"I understand now."

"Just like the patterns the ants arranged on the beach to convey divine revelations."

"They're like pictures, but they're not pictures."

"They need no special skill or complicated strokes, yet they can convey endless meaning."

"They can even record and transmit things that pictures cannot convey or preserve."

"God is telling us..."

"We must use those patterns to record the deeds our great Chosen One performed in life, as well as all the history that ought to be remembered."

And so.

Under the guidance of this fervent priest of God.

The concept of [writing] was born:

Once simple patterns of different shapes were assigned meanings, they became written characters.

The mysteries of all things could be expressed through those characters.

Anyone could easily use them to record everything without omission, and convey the profound meanings of the things and emotions in the world.

Inspired by the visions in their dreams.

For the first time, the primitive civilization on this island began trying to create writing through their own ingenuity.

At first.

The Tribe's efforts to create written characters were still limited to fairly simple things.

Using the patterns the ants had once formed on the ground as their foundation, people created more simple, recognizable characters and assigned them meanings.

Sometimes.

When deciding on the exact shape of a character.

The elders and Prophets would even get into heated arguments.

"God should be written like this."

"That's too complicated. It has to be simple yet beautiful, like this, to reflect God's greatness."

"What about this one? A circle inside a triangle."

"Isn't that the character I came up with for the temple in the sky? How did it become one you created?"

In the end, after Boer reluctantly stepped in to mediate.

The elders, who had nearly come to blows, sat back down and continued arranging the shapes of the characters.

And so.

Every concrete and abstract thing acquired its own corresponding character.

The sun, flowers, insects, the sea.

Life, death, God, myths.

Characters representing the things familiar to the Tribe were created, one by one.

Once they had created a certain number of characters.

Everyone in the Tribe began learning to write.

Using twigs dipped in black charcoal from burnt wood, people began arranging characters on the ground, on leaves, or on rough Hemp Paper that took considerable effort to make.

However.

Such fragile materials could never preserve the writing for long.

After being battered by wind and rain.

The lines would fade and fall away.

So at last, people turned their attention back to stone.

Although.

Carving into stone was far more difficult than writing.

It was the best medium for bearing the weight of time and words.

Before long.

The Tribe finally began using writing for the first time.

The artisans worked on stone slabs.

For God.

And for the departed Chosen One.

They began carving characters to record all that had happened.

The elders called these accounts of the great God and the Chosen One's deeds poems.

However.

The first writing recorded on those stone slabs.

Could hardly be considered a complete sentence.

Much less a poem.

At most.

It was a simple jumble of characters and words.

On those limited stone slabs.

The earliest written records went like this:

God and the Chosen One.

The sky and the temple.

Death and the sun.

Stone and carving.

Writing and poetry.

They looked simple and crude.

But people at the time could never have imagined.

That one day in the future.

People of a later age would discover these stone tablets bearing the weight of history.

Through painstaking study, they would gradually restore the writing on these earliest steles, whose sentences were so badly fragmented.

And over the passage of time, it would truly become a poem, passed down through the ages.

Elegy of the Chosen Prologue

That day, God.

Led the great Chosen One back to the sacred land in the sky.

Even in death.

His noble soul.

Still shone upon the Tribe.

Like the sun.

To commemorate that moment.

And to honor the great first Chosen One.

People carved the first meaningful patterns into stone.

Writing and poetry.

Were born.