On an island deep in the Fog Sea, Bernadette led Odys into a ruin that extended far underground.
Soon after entering, Odys spotted an English word on a wall. It meant "danger"!
Bernadette understood from his expression. "You recognize these words?"
She had tried to decipher them before, but the passage was too short. It also clearly belonged to a different language family from Ancient Feysac, so she had failed.
Of course Odys remembered English. Cloze tests, listening exercises, reading comprehension—they had tormented him for years.
He could hardly tell her that, though. "I saw some of this writing in documents the Lord of Mysteries gave me."
Bernadette found that reasonable. "Can you translate it?"
"Yes." Odys read as he translated. "Danger! This place is extremely dangerous!
"All humans who come here must leave at once, or you will become monsters without reason!
"We made a terrible mistake. We awakened an existence that should never have been awakened. We finally understand: it wasn't the Son of God who was resurrected, but God himself! This island's name is all too fitting!
"But it's too late... Too late..."
The ruin fell silent for several seconds. Bernadette made the logical guess. "They awakened some evil god?"
Ordinarily, that would be the obvious conclusion.
The problem was that the warning was in English. That changed everything.
Odys came up with two possibilities. First, after the Original Creator awakened, a group of survivors who retained their reason—survivors from Europe or America—had come to this island. They had built this enormous underground complex to study the supernatural.
Then they had accidentally awakened something. Everyone here had died, leaving this ruin behind.
But had there really been rational survivors with enough productive capacity to build an underground complex this large?
His second possibility was that people had