Chapter 983

【Wanderer.】

Seeing Uesugi Muneyuki not respond, that voice shouted again.

Uesugi Muneyuki was stunned again, he looked around and there was no one else.

In this body of water, besides him and Sakura, only the huge form of the Old God and the light of the void remained, and Sakura had already faded, so it could only be him: ……You called me?】

【It is you, Wanderer, your soul has not been covered by the Logic Tide. You come from outside the Logic Tide. You are a transmigrator, an existence not soaked by the sea of reason, I do not understand why you drift here.】 That consciousness's voice paused for a moment: 【Precisely because of this you can see me, hear me, other mortals, even above this sea area can only feel a vague soul resonance, unable to understand language.】

Uesugi Muneyuki quickly pondered, understanding the meaning of that sentence: the Logic Tide is that layer of "rational shell" covering this world, and his soul, because he came through transmigration, has not been wrapped by this shell, so he can directly contact the Old God remnants beneath the Logic Tide's cover. The Village Flower Palace originally told him this, so he can freely enter and exit Mahabuo Gods' City, so he can contact the remnants of the Old God even entering the void of the Old God, while others face only closed doors.

But is this really a good thing for him?

He is not sure.

【Great Old Day Sovereign, God of Love and Desire, Mother of Humanity, Colorian, why have you appeared here?】 Uesugi Muneyuki asked. 【Because of your sacrifice, I have thus come.】

Uesugi was astonished: 【I have sacrificed no one! It was not my ritual!】

【It is you.】 Colorian's voice was calm, without explanatory patience, only stating facts like certainty: 【That night, you pleased me with "love". I sensed the resonance in the ancient, submerged deep passage.】

【Your love and obsession for stockings and those three human women are real, pure, and purposeless. No transaction, no ritual, no sacrifice with any calculation, it merely exists, and purely only for bodily pleasure. Thus I felt its signal, those humans mistakenly thought their ritual achieved effect, but letting me descend was you. Always you.】

Uesugi Muneyuki fell silent.

He recalled the sea-view suite on the 12th floor.

The burgundy silk cheongsam and the light pink short cheongsam.

He recalled the black lace suspender stockings and the white semi-transparent pantyhose.

He recalled the golden bell and collar, and 【Sekiro】 he was repeatedly beaten down by Ichiro, then had to fight the three women in a wheel battle. That was just a game anyway.

The intimate games between him and Mai Xuejie, and Sakura, and Asuka.

He is still very young and pure now, sometimes very naive, he just wants to enjoy.

Then because there were cultists on the ship performing rituals, so this became?

He wanted to laugh, but couldn't.

【First not discuss the ritual, so did you create humanity?】 He asked the question lingering in his heart: 【Then why did you leave? Why did you abandon this world?】

Colorian's tentacles slowly moved in the seawater.

【I created humanity, I created man and woman at the first dawn.】 The pool's voice carried a faint trace of nostalgia and joy: 【I bestowed "love" upon you. I long to receive equal "love" from you—like a mother hopes for an embrace from her child, like a gardener hopes to see growth from plants.】

The pool paused for a moment.

Uesugi Muneyuki then waited.

【But humanity's experience of "love" is far less than their experience of "hate". When you gain love, you are dull, hesitant, fearful of loss. When you lose love, you become sharp, frenzied, unable to extricate oneself.】

【A smile can be forgotten by you in an instant, but a betrayal can be remembered by you for thirty years. All your social relations, family, nation, marriage, friendship—essentially are maintained by hate and debt, not love. A father's love for his son contains the debt "you owe me the favor of raising you". A wife's love for her husband contains the contract "you should repay my efforts". The righteousness between friends contains the weight "you owe me a favor".】

Uesugi Muneyuki fell silent.

Colorian spoke correctly, humanity's all social relations and operation's deepest logic is not love, but hate and debt relations.

The world's total debt now reaches 400 trillion dollars, everyone wonders why they owe so much money.

Someone once proposed finding a person to bear this debt, then kill him, and all debts would be zero.

However, if anyone really did that, everyone should realize the existing global order would instantly face utter destruction, human society would regress to near antiquity or even ancient times.

【Excessive love, once faced with loss or unrequited return, will instantly transform into hatred fiercer than hate itself. I have seen too many such transformations. A mother curses her child because the child refuses to live as she wishes. A man destroys the woman he loves because she rejects him. A nation wages war because it fails to receive another nation's "love". Humanity's "love" is the most beautiful thing in the world, and also the most dangerous. The pain it brings far exceeds the joy it brings.】

【Because generating love requires many harsh conditions, but hate needs none, a person can generate extremely intense hatred merely because something looks bad, is displeasing, or even because they do not understand something.】 Uesugi Muneyuki expressed agreement.

He recalled his own relations one by one—Minami, Mai, Sakura, Asuka, Eirina, Mikoto.

Does he love them?

He certainly does. But he also clearly knows how much tangled complexity of interests, exchange, debt, and contract is mixed in those loves. He shelters them, they give him loyalty. He gives them opportunities, they give him companionship. Between him and Mai looms Minami's existence, between him and Minami entwines the pressure of the Uesugi and Watanabe Eiji clans, between him and Asuka hides her past of having no home—each relationship has an invisible line, hanging labels "you owe me" or "I need you".

He has never realized this as clearly as now.

Without pure love, even parents' selfless love for children, the greatest reason is merely because he is their child.

But there is pure hate.

Just as Uesugi Muneyuki still does not know who these cultists are or what they are called, the two sides are locked in a death struggle.

【So you chose to leave.】 Uesugi Muneyuki said calmly.

【I left. I accepted the Logic Tide.】 Colorian's voice remained calm: 【Reason, contract, debt, equivalent exchange—these things, though cold, are at least predictable. They will not suddenly turn into hate like love, nor suddenly turn into destruction like desire. After the Logic Tide covered this world, humanity although lost the channel to directly communicate with Old Gods, but gained stable social structure, calculable moral principles, predictable reciprocal relations. That is more suitable for you than the Old Gods' gaze.】

The pool paused: 【For a thousand years, I have wandered in the void, until you. You have reawakened something I have not felt for a very long time.】

【Your immense love and hate toward this girl as sacrifice, this extremely intense emotional energy penetrated the Logic Tide, drawing my attention.】

【Now I understand.】 Uesugi Muneyuki could feel a vast, time-spanning sadness enveloping him—a being who created humanity, bestowed "love" upon humanity, ultimately chose to leave because humanity's love was too heavy.

Love and hate, debt and contradiction.

Essentially this is the path divergence of Qian Shouzhu and Uchiha Madara.

Uchiha Madara believes Xu Suspended Great Buddha and two others destroying Shikoku can directly use pure strength to end all love-hate grudges and debt chains. But Qian Shouzhu opposed, reasoning that even if all enemies are destroyed, internally only new enemies and new deeper hatred and deeper blood debts will arise, and Uchiha Madara and his lifespan are not infinite, they can plot today, others can plot tomorrow, he believes balance should be achieved through balancing relations and stabilizing debt to realize mutual checks, forming a rational, dynamic balance.

The right and wrong between these two people is now hard to concretely say who is right who wrong, but without doubt falling into Infinite Tsukuyomi leaving only a world filled with "love" and "no-debt" relations would also lose all vitality and hope.

【Are you the "Tian Zhao Da Shen" of Japanese mythology?】 Uesugi Muneyuki asked: 【As for the God of Destruction Ge Golos, is it Susuozhi Nan, right?】

Colorian's tentacles twitched slightly.

【It seems, you have understood much.】 The pool said: 【It is time.】

The pool's pair of tentacles embracing the Kusanagi sword slowly loosened.

The sword slipped from the god's embrace, slowly rotating in the seawater, the blade flowing with golden light, like a sleeping flame awakened. That sword floated upward a distance, hovering before Uesugi Muneyuki.

【Heavenly Clouds. You call it the Kusanagi Sword. The seabed of Wall of Ura has slept for eight hundred and three years.】 Colorian's voice sounded like a bell from the seabed: 【You are a descendant of the Taira clan. The Taira sank into this sea area, you rose from this sea area. This sword—it should return to the Taira bloodline's hands.】 Uesugi Muneyuki gazed at Heavenly Clouds, its blade engraved with ancient patterns, those patterns faintly visible in the green light, like living. One of the Three Sacred Treasures, power to destroy heaven and extinguish earth.

【I do not want it.】 However, Uesugi Muneyuki said.

Colorian did not respond.

The pool's silent posture seemed to indicate for Uesugi Muneyuki to continue speaking.

Uesugi Muneyuki lowered his head, looking at Sakura's peaceful face in his arms, her beautiful eyelashes dotted with tiny beads of water, her lips pale, her body cold.

He lifted her up, bringing her forehead to rest against his chin.

【If obtaining the Sword of Heavenly Clouds means losing her……then I would rather have her back.】Uesugi Muneyuki's face twisted in anguish: 【"She died for my sake. If I hadn't sent her to investigate, she wouldn't have been exposed, wouldn't have been caught, wouldn't have been brought to the deck, wouldn't have jumped into the sea. Her life is mine borrowed, and now I must return it. Please give her back to me!】

【Compared to Sakura's life, the Sword of Heavenly Clouds is not something that can be weighed equally on a scale!】

【You want me to trade Sakura's life for a divine artifact—this exchange never existed from the start!】

【Something equivalent to Sakura……does not exist, it simply does not exist!!!】

Chi Rui An remained silent for a long time.

So long that Uesugi Muneyuki thought Chi Rui An would not answer again.

Then the voice in his consciousness rang out once more, this time carrying a certain moist quality, like a deep-sea warm current: 【The ritual was successful, her soul has already been used for sacrifice and to summon my old remnant. That cannot be reversed. Her life force has become the fuel to open a rift between the mortal world and the void.】

Uesugi Muneyuki's chest felt as if something had fiercely gripped it.

【But one】Chi Rui An's voice rose slightly: 【If you are willing to accept the Sword of Heavenly Clouds, I can return her remaining soul, merging it with the sword spirit of the Sword of Heavenly Clouds. Let her become the vessel of the sword, become the sword sheath. Her body will come alive again, she will still be herself, the Sword of Heavenly Clouds is her, she is the Sword of Heavenly Clouds, she will be by your side, she will remember you, she will speak, she will laugh, she will cause trouble, she will be as before. Only she will no longer fully belong to the human world.】

【Good!】Uesugi Muneyuki's voice was unusually firm at this moment: 【I am willing to accept the Sword of Heavenly Clouds, return her to me!】

【Then let it be so.】Chi Rui An's tentacles unfurled for the last time.

The Sword of Heavenly Clouds slowly floated before Uesugi Muneyuki, tip pointing down, hilt aimed at his right hand.

He reached out with his right hand to grip the sword's hilt, golden light along the blade and hilt spreading up his arm, covering his entire body, then gathering in his chest into a small, warm point of light.

At the same time, Sakura in his arms suddenly moved slightly.

Her eyelashes trembled, a golden-pink light flowed between Sakura and the Sword of Heavenly Clouds, finally forming a point of light that then surged into Uesugi Muneyuki's brow.

The sixth wheel of the chakra, the forehead wheel, also known as the Wheel of Forgiveness, lit up, boundless energy sustaining this place.

A brand-new Wisdom King Dharma Aspect was born in Uesugi Muneyuki's brow.

The Sixth Wisdom King—Peacock Bright King!