Wandering Knight

"Wang Yu, this space is losing its material properties."

"And Roland's journal mentions something about Mr. Samuel."

They spoke almost in unison—two discoveries voiced at once, each surprising the other.

"Is that so? I suppose it makes sense," Avia said after a pause. "This space no longer holds the power to sustain a physical domain within the Void, nor to shelter the beings of the material world inside it. That means the ‘living fortress' that fled earlier must have been the keystone maintaining the realm."

The journal could wait. Wang Yu first turned his focus outward. With the Chariot's power, he could tell that the material structure that allowed this place to exist within the void was rapidly fading. It was being absorbed, its boundaries swallowed by streaks of deep violet, the air itself fracturing into translucent patterns as the void's texture bled through.

"Let's stabilize the space first," Avia urged. "Otherwise, everything of value in this room, the books and the notes, will be twisted by the chaos of the Void. The texts will warp into gibberish before long."

She kept her eyes on the walls, now faintly pulsing with distortion. "Use the Chariot's domain to shield this study, the way you protect yourself."

"No problem."

At Wang Yu's command, his spectral door manifested once more, enclosing the study in its field. The violet corrosion halted instantly and froze at the edge of the door's radiance. The room was safe—at least for now. Only then did Wang Yu open the leather-bound journal resting on the desk.

Meanwhile, Avia's gaze drifted back to the direction where the living fortress had fled. "So that fortress was what anchored this pocket of matter inside the Void," she murmured. "Then... what makes such a thing possible? What allows matter to persist here?"

She tilted her head, whispering the word that came to her. "Life...?"

Her mind replayed what Wang Yu had said earlier about how the fortress could not be touched by the Chariot's power.

"When something from the material world falls into the Void, it's usually assimilated almost instantly. Dead matter doesn't resist. But what about living things?

"A living being still counts as matter, at least for a short while after falling. If it can resist assimilation... could it sustain its form longer?"

A faint, uncertain hypothesis took shape in her thoughts. She glanced toward Wang Yu, lips curling in a smile.

Regardless, Wang Yu would be a terrible test subject. When it came to the void, he always seemed to work by entirely different principles.

"I have pondered this question for many years," Roland's handwriting began. "In my own research—and that of my companions, the wizards who study the void—we have always held that its essence tends toward chaos and entropy.

"To be consumed by the void's madness and distortion unto death seems to be the inevitable fate of every wizard. Yet in exchange, at every stage of power, we gain faster growth and greater breadth of ability than any other path.

"But there is a kind of being I have never been able to fully understand. They are unique. They do not follow this law. Even though their divine realms and their very selves exist within the void, they embody order to a terrifying degree. They can even lend strength to mortals of the material world, shielding them from the void's corruption: the gods."

The journal, Wang Yu realized, wasn't a diary so much as a record of Roland's private meditations, notes written in the margins of his life's work.

He nodded faintly. Much of it mirrored his own thoughts, though the two men had reached their conclusions from different paths. Wang Yu's insight had come through his unusual connection with the Lady of the Night; Roland's, no doubt, through the vast scope of his intellect and study.

"I have faced voidborn abominations that called themselves evil gods," the next entry read. "They too bear the name, but in truth they are nothing of the sort—merely creatures of immense power.

"In this, I agree with Yggdrasil's distinction. There are two kinds of gods: those called gods because they are mighty, and those made gods because mortals believe them so. True divinities belong to the latter class."

Wang Yu arched an eyebrow. Trust Roland to neatly categorize the void's evil gods. That was something even he himself had struggled to define.

And Yggdrasil... if memory served, that name belonged to a philosopher or writer from Roland's age, someone often quoted in alchemical texts.

He turned the page. Roland continued to expound on the unique behavior of deities in relation to the void. As a wizard, he was naturally curious about such behavior.

"I once caught a glimpse of the God of Light, as worshiped by the Church of Light," Roland wrote. "What I saw was a sphere of radiant brilliance, suspended within the Void. No wizard could approach it. Its emanations did not kill, but they scattered our energies, dissolving the fabric of our power.

"This god is one of the mightiest, and perhaps the most worshiped of all. After all, it was said that He once descended into the depths of the Void itself, slaughtering countless voidborn horrors that sought to extend their grasp into the material realm.

"This brings me to a final thought: the bond between faith and divinity. What truly ties mortal belief to the gods? Curiously, in our own age, the followers of the Church of Light are fewer than during the time of the Bound Sanctum...

"Yet," Roland continued, "according to the observations of both my fellow magicians and our friends within the Church, the God of Light has only grown more potent. Whether in sheer size within the void, in the might of the divine arts His followers can wield, or in the frequency with which miracles manifest, all of it is trending upward."

Wang Yu's thoughts were stirred by what Roland had recorded. The man's reflections reached down to the very bedrock of their world: fundamental, yet profoundly abstruse, just as if he were pondering the origin of mana itself.

The so-called Bound Sanctum referred to a particular age in the Church of Light's history, one whose deeds fit perfectly with the cynical depictions Wang Yu had once read in Earth's old novels.

Divine authority overshadowing royal power; atrocities justified as divine will; minds molded and shackled through doctrine; inquisitions, purges, the founding of the Holy Gospel Theocracy, a nation born from the Church's descent into fanaticism.

Not all of its members were zealots, but as a whole the era had been a grotesque caricature of Wang Yu's biases about organized faith. And yet the end of that era could already be glimpsed in the Church that now stood before him.

Paladins, grand knights of enlightenment, had risen up and cut down their leaders from top to bottom. The Church of Light was razed and rebuilt almost entirely. From that time onward, the canon itself enshrined new precepts: the Church would not meddle in worldly kingdoms, and its justice would be tempered by restraint. Thus was born the very institution Wang Yu had encountered in this age.

"This incident," Roland wrote, "has been recorded and analyzed by countless scholars as a parable of unmatched instructive value. The Church that overthrew itself, an empire none could rival, has since enjoyed immense prestige across the continent.

But my concern lies elsewhere. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

"What caught my attention was the attitude of the God of Light throughout the ordeal. From beginning to end, He never once manifested a miracle, never issued a single oracle. This was confirmed by my friend within the Church: the god remained utterly silent.

"How strange," the note continued. "Among all deities, the God of Light is famed for frequent miracles and divine decrees. Yet in this event, an upheaval that shook His own faith to its core, He showed no outward sign of power at all.

"I pondered this for a long time, as did the magicians who study the void beside me. My friend from the Church I dared not trouble further; even for someone so broad-minded, our speculation would verge on blasphemy.

"Perhaps," Roland mused, "it is because no matter what kind of believer one is, even those who exploit faith in the God of Light for selfish ends, they all believe in the same god. To Him, all of them are His followers, regardless of their divergence.

"And after that, despite the decline in their numbers, the God of Light seemed only to grow stronger. The link between belief and divinity—or between mortal intellect and the gods—what is it truly? That is what I long to understand.

"That faith determines a god's strength. That much I am certain. I have seen many minor deities fade into slumber as their followers' devotion waned. But what is faith? To most, perhaps that question matters little. Yet to me, it gnaws at the heart.

"For if I can comprehend the essence of faith, perhaps I will finally grasp how the gods maintain such impossible order and stability within the void, a domain whose very nature is chaos. And then, perhaps, I might look upon what lies at the deepest end of the void itself. Hah... my insatiable curiosity may yet be my undoing."

Here, Wang Yu could almost sense Roland's exhilaration. His research into gods and the void had clearly entered a new phase. Judging by the timeline, by then, the Abyssal War was just about ti begin.

"Abyssal creatures... another anomaly that defies the void's chaotic nature. What are they, truly?"

Just one terse line, but it marked the moment when Roland had begun considering the intersection of the void, divinity, and the Abyss carefully.

"Forgive me, Samuel," the final entry read. "My thirst to uncover what faith brings is too strong. As a Flamewarden, you are irreplaceable. Forgive the messages I have sown in the outside world, my friend."

Wang Yu's eyes lingered on that last sentence. The divinity of knowledge that had begun to cling to Samuel's being—so that had been Roland's doing.