Siduri left the black pyramid with a mind full of shock and bewilderment.
With every step she took, the vision of that future city, and that man's utterly arrogant "declaration of allegiance," surfaced in her mind beyond her control.
She knew an unprecedented storm was about to take shape over Uruk.
Seiji stood at the temple entrance, watching her petite figure vanish at the far edge of his sight, the curve at the corner of his mouth unchanged.
He knew full well that a king as arrogant to the bone as Gilgamesh could never accept his conditions.
But so what?
The negotiation had only ever been a smokescreen, groundwork laid to justify a falling-out.
What he wanted had never been any "cooperation." What he wanted was a thorough, total overthrow, from the economic base to the superstructure!
And Gilgamesh's inevitable hesitation and deliberation were the perfect moment for him to launch his second wave of assault!
"War has never been only swords and magic." Seiji turned, his gaze sweeping over the four Servants standing in the hall like statues, finally settling on Medea, the great witch of the Age of Gods.
"Medea, in your understanding, what is the economic base of this age?"
"In answer to my Master," Medea said, stepping forward, the light of intelligence flickering in her purple eyes, "the economic core of this age is survival resources and the symbols of divine authority. To be precise, that means basic goods such as grain and minerals, along with precious metals like gold and gemstones that have been imbued with sacred and rare attributes. The temples and the king grasp the greatest wealth by monopolizing the right to perform sacrifices to the gods and the ownership of land, and through that they maintain their rule."
"Too primitive, too fragile."
Seiji shook his head, a sharp glint of the modern financial player in his eyes. "A system built on physical goods and hollow faith is like a tower of sand on an unstable foundation. Find the right pivot point, give it a gentle push, and it collapses completely."
He paced slowly, his voice echoing through the hall. "We're going to establish an entirely new system, a financial system in which I define value, I control circulation, and which can dismantle their rule from its very root."
"And to establish a new system, the first thing required is a brand-new currency, one that cannot be copied and cannot be replaced."
He reached out a hand as if to grasp the intangible future. The system's database churned in his mind at an unprecedented speed, hurling twenty-first-century knowledge of materials science, crystallography, and energetics into a frenzied collision and fusion with the magecraft rules of this Age of Gods world.
Countless schemes were worked through and instantly rejected, until at last one that could be called perfect locked into place in his consciousness.
"Medea, your alchemy can create gemstones, correct?"
"Yes, Master." Medea's answer carried the confidence of the foremost witch of the Age of Gods. "Given enough material and magical power, I can refine any gemstone that exists in nature, whether diamond or sapphire, and the purity can reach the highest grade."
"No, that's nowhere near enough." Seiji cut her off flatly. "What you create is, in the end, only an imitation of nature, mimicking the rules this world already has. What I need is a creation of rules that surpasses nature, flawless and perfect! A brand-new substance whose value I myself will bestow upon it!"
He swept his hand up, and a vast stream of information mixed with refined magical power instantly constructed an extremely complex three-dimensional structural diagram in midair: a constantly rotating crystal atomic model, formed from countless points of light precisely linked together.
The position of every point of light, the length and angle of every link, was precise to an unthinkable degree.
"Look closely, Medea. This is not simple compression and purification of matter, but absolute order down to the atomic level. I want you to use your Age of Gods magecraft to guide every single atom, so that they build a flawless, perfect lattice at the most precise positions. At the same time," his voice took on a note of enticement, "imprint the purest magical power, in the form of runes, like a brand, fixing it into every single node of the lattice!"
Medea stared blankly at the structural diagram before her, one that exceeded everything she had learned in her life. A flash of confusion crossed her beautiful eyes at first, but that confusion was quickly replaced by an intense thirst for knowledge and an irrepressible fervor.
This... what a magnificent conception this was! This was no longer within the bounds of alchemy. This was a creation art only the gods could reach! It was the authority to rewrite the rules directly at the lowest layer of matter!
"I... I will need enormous energy. A vast amount of energy, far beyond my own magical power." Medea's voice trembled slightly with excitement.
"Energy, you'll have all you need."
Seiji smiled. His own "Grail" was a near-limitless source of magical power, enough to sustain any grand plan.
"Then begin. Let us deliver to this ancient, benighted world its first great financial gift, one capable of overturning everything."
Medea drew a deep breath, suppressed the surging in her heart, and walked to the empty center of the great hall. She closed her eyes, and her entire presence merged with the space around her.
A vast hum resounded.
An immense Age of Gods magic circle unfurled outward with her at its center, intricate runes spreading like golden streams across the entire floor in an instant. Seiji's magical power poured into the heart of the circle in an endless stream through an invisible interface, like a great river.
Medea extended a slender hand and gave a light grasp toward the void. The free elements in the hall began to gather, and she screened and stripped them with precision, in the end keeping only the most basic, most stable "carbon" element. The ordinary black powder hovered and spun in her palm like a tiny nebula.
"Rules, be reshaped!"
"Order, be constructed!"
Guided by the "perfect blueprint" Seiji provided, Medea began the most delicate operation of her career. No longer applying pressure and high heat on the macro scale, she extended her magical power and spirit without limit, reaching into a microscopic world no mortal could imagine, and like an invisible hand of god, she began patiently to "weave" atoms!
A thunderous roar went off.
A surge of energy terrifying beyond measure spread out violently from within the black pyramid, like an invisible shockwave.
Inside Uruk, everyone who could sense magical power, whether the priests of the great temple or the magi hidden among the common folk, turned in horror toward the city's edge at the same moment. They felt a source of magical power, pure to the extreme and condensed to a terrifying degree, being born at an unbelievable speed! It felt as though a sun were about to rise from the surface of the earth!
And high in the heavens, in her own resplendent temple, Ishtar, goddess of Venus, who had been idly counting her gemstone collection out of boredom, shot to her feet, oblivious to the several priceless diamonds sliding from her arms.
"This feeling...?!"
Her divinity as "goddess of gemstones and wealth" was frantically sounding an alarm, or rather... letting out an instinctive, intensely covetous wail!
Something... something purer, more beautiful, and richer in magic than all of her collection combined, some "supreme treasure," was about to be born!
She couldn't sit still any longer. She turned at once into a brilliant streak of light, mounted her sky boat "Maanna," and like a golden meteor charged headlong toward the source of that energy surge!
In the very instant she arrived at breakneck speed above the black pyramid.
"Ding."
A clear, melodious sound, light enough to seem to cleanse the soul, drifted up from inside the pyramid below.
Within the temple, Medea slowly opened her palm.
A crystal about the size of an adult's fist, crystalline and transparent through and through, without the slightest trace of impurity, perfect to the point of absurdity, lay quietly in her fair palm.
It was not passively reflecting light. It was actively... breathing light in and out!
The surrounding light was forcibly drawn in by its perfect lattice structure, refracted and amplified through hundreds of millions of perfect facets within, until it gave off a radiance ten thousand times more dazzling than the most brilliant rainbow in the world. More terrifying still, at the very core of that crystal, a miniature rune giving off an eternal golden glow was slowly rotating, pulsing like a heart, locking a vast amount of magical power firmly within in an unthinkably stable form.
This was no longer a gemstone.
This was a "magical star" solidified into physical form by the art of a god!
"This... what the hell is this thing?!"
Ishtar leapt down from her sky boat and appeared at the temple entrance almost as if she'd teleported, her beautiful ruby eyes already fixed on that crystal, unable to tear themselves away.
Her pride as a goddess, her wariness toward the false god, her duty to Uruk... in this moment, all of it was swept utterly clean by that fatal attraction welling up from the depths of her soul!
Seiji descended unhurriedly from his throne, took the perfect crystal from Medea's hand, and tossed it idly at his fingertips, as though toying with a worthless glass marble, his bearing carefree in the extreme.
"Oh? Isn't this the proud sky goddess, Lady Ishtar? What wind blew you here?" he said with feigned surprise.
"This thing here," he said, giving the crystal a shake, its radiance dazzling Ishtar into a dizzy trance, "is just a little trinket for conducting equivalent exchange. I've given it a name. The God Crystal."
"I'm planning to make a few tens of thousands of them to start, to use as the circulating currency of the new era."
Make... make a few tens of thousands to start?!
To use as the circulating currency of the new era?!
These two casually tossed-off remarks of Seiji's, landing in Ishtar's ears, were no less than two world-creation-class thunderbolts. They blasted her proud goddess's body burnt on the outside and raw within, her mind humming, nearly short-circuiting on the spot.
As the goddess who governed Venus, beauty, and abundance, and at the same time the famously "top-tier rich lady" of the entire Mesopotamian mythological pantheon, Ishtar's ability to appraise wealth and gemstones was an absolute instinct carved into her divinity, as natural as breathing.
She needed only a single glance, without even using her divine power to sense it, to judge with one hundred percent certainty that the inner value of that so-called "God Crystal" in Seiji's hand had already far exceeded the bounds of what the word "gemstone" could define!
That maddeningly pure magical reaction! That flawlessly perfect construction of rules! That brilliant radiance that could directly shake a god's soul and leave even a god enchanted!
This thing would be more than sufficient as the core energy furnace of a god-forged weapon! You could even call it extravagant for the purpose!
In her understanding, a "supreme treasure" of this caliber, anywhere in heaven and earth, needed only one to be born to trigger a savage war among the gods, fought to the death! Countless gods would smash each other's heads bloody and split the heavens to seize ownership of it!
But now, this man of unknown origin before her was actually saying...
He wanted to mass-produce it?!
And spend it like ordinary money?!
What kind of concept was this?
It utterly exceeded the limits of her imagination! It was like a mortal king showing off to a neighboring envoy the one and only imperial jade seal in his treasury, the symbol of his royal authority and his nation's fortune. And then another king's envoy walks over and says, with a perfectly bland expression, "Oh, this thing? In our country we use these as bricks to build walls. We're running a little short lately, so we're planning to knock out a few tens of thousands."
This wasn't flaunting wealth! This wasn't flaunting wealth at all!
This was the ultimate insult to her values, her worldview, her view of wealth, and even her entire godhood, an attack from a higher dimension!
"You... you... what did you say?!" Ishtar's voice cracked from sheer shock as she stared hard at Seiji, trying to find the slightest trace of bluffing or joking on that handsome but detestable face.
But there was none. Not the slightest trace.
His face held only a serene calm, as if he were saying something perfectly ordinary, like "Nice weather today, I think I'll go out for a stroll."
"I said," Seiji turned the "God Crystal" deftly at his fingertips, the brilliant light it gave off casting Ishtar's stunning face into shifting light and shadow until she looked half-dazed, "I can have as many of these as I want. As long as there's enough energy, filling your temple with them is only a matter of time."
"After all, as the god of a new era, one has to have a few signature touches. Look at those lofty old gods of Uruk. They grant blessings through hollow, ethereal prayers and conduct exchanges through bloody sacrifices. The efficiency is too low, and the methods are too backward."
"I rather prefer a more direct, fairer way."
He took a step forward, holding the radiant "God Crystal" out before Ishtar, the two of them close enough to nearly feel each other's breath. His smile carried a devil's enticement.
"I'm going to use this to buy away the soul fragments of my people, to buy away their loyalty, to buy away their laughable and cheap faith in the old gods."
"My lady goddess, you be the judge," his voice dropped low, full of magnetism. "Tell me, which is more appealing: those verbal promises that require kneeling and begging and might not even be answered, or this glittering little thing that can be held in your hand, truly raise your power, and change your fate?"
"..."
Ishtar was struck completely speechless. Her mind went blank.
Her divine body even trembled faintly beyond her control from the violent surge of emotion.
Half of it came from the anger and indignation of having the "wealth" authority she took the most pride in utterly crushed by the other side in an unthinkable way.
The other half... came from the depths of her soul, an extreme greed that could not be suppressed at all and nearly burst out of her body!
She wanted it!
She wanted it so badly!
I have to get my hands on it!
The thought grew and spread frantically in her heart like a wildfire across a plain, nearly burning away all her reason!
She even felt an absurd and dangerous urge to act at once, to summon the sky boat Maanna and use every bit of her divine power to snatch this man and the "God Crystal" in his hand away!
But the last shred of reason she had left made her instinctively glance at the Servants behind Seiji, the ones who wore no expression from start to finish, yet whose presence was as terrifying as an abyss.
Especially that black-dressed woman holding the black banner, with the cold eyes (Jeanne Alter). A single exchange of glances was enough for Ishtar to feel a pure hatred and malice that seemed able to freeze her soul, leaving her whole body stiff.
There was also a purple-haired woman wearing a blindfold (Rider). Though she only stood there quietly, she gave Ishtar the hair-raising sense of crisis of being eyed by an ancient demonic beast.
She couldn't win... and even if she could, she would surely pay a heavy price.
This crystal-clear thought was like a basin of ice water, snapping Ishtar back to her senses in an instant.
But after the calm came a deeper humiliation and frustration.
She, the dignified goddess of Venus, mistress of the heavens, the most beloved daughter of Anu, king of the gods, was actually feeling the cowardice of "not daring to act" toward some "false god" of unknown origin?
"You... what on earth are you trying to do?!" Ishtar gritted her teeth and forced the words out through them, using it to cover her own guilty unease.
[Read 20+ chapters ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]