Chapter 128: Roots Beneath the Earth

As the leaders of nations convened by telephone, and Tokyo was transformed into a red earth beneath Ito Mio’s crimson blood tide—

Elsewhere, in a bay dozens of nautical miles from Yokosuka Naval Port, Ito Mio’s body hovered above the Rambri. The psychokinesis she had inherited from Mizuhara Manami enabled her to grasp the world around her with far greater clarity. Across these waters, every movement within dozens of nautical miles appeared to her with the minute precision of dust upon her skin.

The “tentacles” of her psychokinesis extended outward. In that instant, Ito Mio seemed to exist simultaneously here and within Tokyo. The sea of blood spreading from the National Diet Building and the body standing in midair at this very place were both firmly connected by a single central trunk.

“I…”

“…am everything…”

Ito Mio opened her arms.

For a moment, the entire world seemed to bow beneath her feet.

If the total measure of her power before merging with Mizuhara Manami had been one hundred, then after the fusion—after breaking through the limits of life and soul—it had instantly surged beyond five hundred.

And when her other self, using her identity as prime minister, absorbed into herself the entire National Diet Building, all of Tokyo beyond it, and more than ten million people—

Her power then multiplied nearly a hundredfold on that foundation.

She was now a hundred times stronger than her former self.

By the “evolutionary levels” devised by Xigu, she had already reached the height of Level One Hundred Sixty.

On the Earth of the present day, apart from Xigu himself and his divine-tree avatar, Ito Mio was unquestionably the third-strongest being in the world.

…Of course, compared with the first two, there remained an essential gulf between them.

Even so, having risen to such a height, Ito Mio had already drawn infinitely close to the image of a god in the minds of ordinary people.

The aftereffects of the four nuclear warheads launched by the missiles had not yet completely dissipated.

Intense nuclear radiation had transformed the waters around the Rambri into a wasteland.

Yet that powerful radiation and the electromagnetic pulse seemed to have no effect whatsoever on Ito Mio. An ordinary person would contract leukemia and other radiation sickness after lingering here for only a few seconds; after a minute, their body would begin to deform; after ten minutes, great patches of flesh would rot away across their entire body.

And yet—

Psychokinesis covered her from head to toe, dense as a net and sealed tight as a shield, completely cutting her off from the radiation.

More than that… as her psychokinesis circulated, she could faintly glimpse the trajectories of the radiation and electromagnetic waves.

Heat, sting, vibration, transition, transfer, diffusion…

The world she sensed around her became a vast tableau, unfolding within Ito Mio’s mind.

Her power sank into the ocean. Everything it perceived transformed into a clear and vivid reality before her eyes.

—Oxygen molecules in the seawater drifted slowly through the spaces between droplets. As they moved, fish darted past. The oxygen entered their bodies through their gills, circulated through their blood cells, and the carbon dioxide they exhaled dissolved into the water…

—Far below the fish, in the deeper reaches of the sea, beneath rock and soil accumulated over tens of millions of years, the magma within the crust silently stored its searing energy. It was like a colossal dragon lurking beneath the earth, its crimson eyes calmly surveying everything beyond itself…

—Her psychokinesis continued downward, and her perception descended with it. Beneath the conglomerate and magma lay enormous cavities composed of hard minerals and glittering crystals. As her power arrived, the traces it stirred struck against those hollow spaces, producing distant, resonant sounds like the voice of an independent world… Within those cavities of ore and crystal, everything seemed frozen in place…

The spread of her psychokinesis was nearing its limit. She could continue, but the farther down she went, the closer she approached the Earth’s core—and beyond that lay an increasingly monotonous world of blazing heat.

Just as Ito Mio was about to withdraw her psychokinesis, a strange sensation suddenly seized her.

It was the pulse of life.

Something nearby was moving.

—But her psychokinesis had already descended more than ten thousand meters beneath the seafloor. How could life possibly exist in such a hell?

The instant bewilderment surfaced, another familiar sensation surged through Ito Mio’s heart.

She continued directing her psychokinesis along the mineral veins within the strata.

And then—

She “saw” it.

Roots. Countless roots plunging tens of thousands of meters into the earth.

Even with her psychokinesis nearing its limit, she still could not reach their ends.

They were like swords driven into the depths, casually piercing through impossibly hard veins of ore and solid rock. They feared neither water nor fire, neither magma nor the crushing weight of the earth. Everything beneath the ground seemed merely to be nourishment for them.

Those roots formed a vast net beneath the land. Their position lay thousands, even tens of thousands of meters below the regions where humans lived and moved.

Yet the world above seemed like a frail kingdom countless times lower in stature than they were. If those roots moved even slightly, the result would be a catastrophe capable of destroying nations and sinking continents.

Even Ito Mio…

Even she…

Even if she gathered all the power she possessed now into a single point, it might still be inferior to the strength contained within the smallest of those roots.

She trembled.

A shudder of genuine terror rose from the depths of her heart.

The instant she “saw” them, Ito Mio understood the reason.

She understood where they truly came from.

The arrogance of having just regarded herself as a god vanished without a trace.

All that remained in her heart was fear—an instinctive terror rooted in life itself.

“…Is this…”

“…your true form?”

Ever since gaining the ability known as Flesh Resonance, these past several months since leaving the Plain Imperial Bookstore marked the first time Ito Mio had quietly addressed that distant existence.

A voice, half amused and half smiling, sounded within her mind.

“…This is only a part of me. For you to ‘see’ this place without my actively assisting you… Your growth truly is astonishingly fast.”

“Even so, I am still far from you, Lady Suyen, the Venerable God of Names.”

Ito Mio spoke silently within her heart.

“I have fused with the lives of more than ten million people in Tokyo, and with Mizuhara Manami’s existence as well, before reaching this point… I can feel that I am already close to colliding with a new limit. But even if I break through that limit again, and even if I assimilate all of humanity into my world, at most I would only become several hundred times stronger…”

“…Even I at that point would still be unable to rival the strength of the ‘you’ I see before me. And I am nowhere near that level now.”

“Discouraged?”

The being’s voice held a note of interest.

“Discouraged?”

Ito Mio tilted her head, then suddenly laughed.

“How could I be?”

Though reverence still lingered within her heart, her bearing was proud and resolute.

“…The power of a god is so immense, dazzling like the sun. But I do not wish to become the sun. All I wish to become is light itself—the kind of light that allows everyone to join it, the kind that can reach every person, without distinction between beauty and ugliness, existing eternally.

“…So long as there is a road ahead, I will keep walking.”

The conversation ended there.

Her psychokinesis withdrew.

“…”

Ito Mio slowly extended one hand.

Then she pressed it downward once more.

Like Moses parting the sea, a hollow suddenly appeared beneath the cruiser below her, along with the waters beneath its hull.

A hollow more than a hundred meters in diameter.

—Then the hollow transformed into a whirlpool, burying the entire Rambri beneath the seawater.

The whirlpool gradually filled in. The sea surged inward, and the waters returned to calm as though nothing had ever happened.

In the next instant, her body vanished.

At the same time, from the place where she had stood in midair, tens of thousands of nearly invisible red lines shot forth. Traveling at more than several dozen times the speed of sound, they streaked toward Yokosuka Naval Port.