Chapter 1703 - 1259: We Are the Gods of Four Pillars

The cigarette butt sizzled and smoked in his palm. Just now Siflin had used all her strength and still couldn’t leave a mark on Ash’s soul body, yet Death Mad casually burned him until his lips pressed tight and his body trembled.

"Does it hurt?"

"No!"

"Then let’s keep burning for another five minutes."

"Hey, hey—" Ash yanked his hand back and rubbed it, saying in exasperation, "Isn’t that enough already?"

"So Meiwa and that Vampire together are only worth five minutes to you?" Death Mad tossed away the cigarette butt and sneered. "As expected, to you they’re just toys to while away your loneliness in your spare time, huh?"

Ash’s body went rigid. After struggling for a moment, he offered up both hands like a condemned man: "Both hands, another five minutes!"

"Only five more minutes?"

"Then... ten minutes?"

Death Mad flicked a finger against Ash’s forehead, tapped a cigarette out of the pack, and said coldly, "What do you take me for, a Priest who redeems the masses? If you want atonement, go find Sonia later and accept her punishment properly. I just purely don’t like the sight of you and want to torture you, that’s all."

Ash hurried to light her cigarette; the tobacco strands crackled audibly. He’d always suspected the cigarettes Death Mad smoked were some kind of treasure-tool, otherwise there was no way to explain why a cigarette could burn through a soul body and roast the soul. Every time Ash tried to use various Healing Miracles to ease the pain, the more he resisted the deeper and sharper the pain became, until in the end he could only obediently accept the punishment.

"Every single strand of tobacco is Weaving from the souls of ten thousand living beings. One cigarette has eight hundred strands, totaling eight million souls. With every drag, hundreds of thousands of souls are scattered into nothing."

"What!?" Ash froze. He’d just taken a few puffs of Death Mad’s cigarette earlier.

"But I’m not that pervert Youmo who eats souls." Death Mad said lazily, "Soul products have zero appeal to me."

Ash let out a breath of relief. "So it’s fake?"

Death Mad shot him a sidelong glance, the corner of her mouth curling in a playful arc. She took a deep drag, blew a smoke ring right at his face, and showed a prankster’s smile. "Take a guess."

Then why bring it up if you’re not going to explain it!

He didn’t know if it was his imagination, but Ash seemed to hear the wails of souls from within the burning tobacco. He hurriedly shoved the thought out of his mind and lowered his head, looking at the Gods of Four Pillars’ remains quietly lying on the ground.

A full-coverage helmet with four sharp horns, crude to the point of grotesque; a simple yet eerie mask painted with a black-and-white opera face; a very small, fragile glass skull; and a bizarre human face stitched together from the facial skin of dozens of different races, genders, and ages.

He didn’t need any tests to confirm that these were the Gods of Four Pillars’ bones, maybe even their true bodies. He had thought the Gods of Four Pillars’ true forms would definitely be some extremely Evil, radioactive horror-source of contamination, yet in reality they were unexpectedly "clean." Like how a single High Explosive Gun Bullet can blast a person’s upper body into a bloody, Chaotic pulp of flesh, while the anti-materiel sniper rifle that fired it is exquisitely crafted... The Gods of Four Pillars’ remains gave Ash the same feeling as an anti-materiel sniper rifle: a tool full of the aesthetic of order.

They were the embodiment of Concepts, fundamentally impossible to describe with moral notions of good and Evil fabricated by sapient beings. Violence, the pursuit of knowledge, Life, indulgence in desire—Concepts that ought to exist only as words, yet from the Gods of Four Pillars’ remains Ash could clearly see the operating mechanisms of these Concepts, as if—

"Don’t they feel a lot like Technique Spirits?" Death Mad said. "Or maybe it’d be more accurate to call them Divine Beings?"

Ash was stunned. "The Gods of Four Pillars are Divine Beings?"

Death Mad shot back, "Then do you think the golden fish and the White Bull count as Divine Beings?"

Ash thought for a moment, then shook his head slowly. "They should be... a kind of phenomenon?"

"The difference between the Gods of Four Pillars and the fish and bull is that they’re phenomena with self-awareness. They’re not Divine Beings, because Divine Beings are the embodiment of rules. In other words, once a Divine Being appears, it means the corresponding ’rule’ has also solidified. It’s said that before the Flame Divine Being was born, fire could actually freeze... But a phenomenon isn’t a rule. Rules can give rise to phenomena, but phenomena don’t necessarily all have rules. Like the fish and the bull, like the Gods of Four Pillars—there are no concrete rules that can explain their authorities."

Death Mad paused, then shook her head at herself. "No, that’s not quite right. In fact, there are plenty of rules that can explain their authorities—such as Blood Magic and souls in relation to the tyrant, Prophecy and truth in relation to the traitor, suffering, weakness and Necromancy in relation to the Merciful Father, Mind Control in relation to the Prince... Some Magic Factions were developed by mages themselves, but some Factions were born under the Gods of Four Pillars’ guidance. In that terrifying era when the Gods of Four Pillars descended upon the land, because they were too close to the Gods, mages would instinctively probe their phenomena and create their rules, thereby in turn suppressing their authorities."

"You can think of the Gods of Four Pillars and mage civilization as locked in a perpetual tug-of-war. The Gods want to drag mage civilization into the Abyss of desire and seize the Void Realm from the bottom up—have you forgotten? Mages are the Void Realm’s sense of touch. Control all the mages and you control the Void Realm." Death Mad saw confusion flash in Ash’s eyes and immediately added this explanation.

"Throughout history there have indeed been many eras when the Gods of Four Pillars had the upper hand, but once mages become the Gods’ sense of touch, they will delve into their phenomena and create their rules. Once the rules are created, the Gods of Four Pillars lose that portion of their authority, and mage civilization pulls the rope back, seizing the advantage again."

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