Chapter 199: Infinite Iteration Box Master—Rast
The cult leader had imagined his own end countless times.
Perhaps it would happen during a ritual, discovered by that noble councilman named Talis who coveted the Supreme Lord’s relic. A fierce battle would break out against the pack of police lackeys under Talis' command, ending with his own exhaustion and death.
Or perhaps, after successfully completing a blood sacrifice ritual, he would gloriously offer himself as the vessel for the Supreme Lord’s descent into the world...
But regardless of the ending, he would undoubtedly die on the path of fulfilling the Supreme Lord’s will—a death in pursuit of the Supreme Lord’s glorious return to the world.
Yet, what kind of ludicrous situation was this now?
“You’re telling me that I, the leader, am actually a fraud... a thief and conman who stole the Supreme Lord’s relic and used the Lord’s name to deceive people for personal gain?”
The cult leader felt he was nearly laughing from anger.
He pointed toward Rast, who was being surrounded and honored by numerous cultists not far away: “And that guy, someone I dragged in from some godforsaken corner, locked in the dungeon to serve as blood sacrifice fodder, is the Supreme Lord’s true Chosen One?”
“That kind of trash is worthy of receiving the Supreme Lord’s divine revelation?”
“Insolence! You, a conman who stole the Supreme Lord’s relic and flaunts the Lord’s name to deceive others—how dare you speak to the Chosen One like that!”
The cultist named Aize rudely interrupted the cult leader’s words, raising the safety-unlocked shotgun in his hand. The other cultists, their expressions turning hostile, also reached beneath their robes to grip the handles of their weapons.
Clearly, if the cult leader dared to further disrespect the Chosen One, they were ready to offer a demonstration of their “truth” by blowing his brains out.
“If it weren’t for the Chosen One worrying that the Supreme Lord’s relic might get damaged in a gunfight and thus unwilling to resort to force unless absolutely necessary, you’d already be riddled with bullets! You wouldn’t be standing here unharmed!”
“Calm down.”
Rast stepped forward from the crowd and patted the shoulder of the cultist named Aize.
“The Lord loves all people and does not wish to see His faithful followers, misled by a liar’s words, turn to blades and slaughter one another.”
“Moreover, truth is never afraid of debate—it only becomes clearer through discussion.”
He walked to the boundary where the two factions of cultists were clearly divided, his gaze falling upon the cult leader who stood tensely, gripping his weapon alongside several personal guards.
Though he had leveraged the intelligence advantage accumulated over three centuries of reincarnation to talk his way into winning over many cultists, convincing them he was the Supreme Lord’s Chosen One...
The cult leader was still, after all, a genuine figurehead of a cult. There would always be diehard loyalists.
If given enough time, Rast had ways to break even the most stubborn followers... but now, with the time limit of the "Deep Blue Port Speedrun Challenge" activity down to less than 24 hours, time was short. He couldn’t afford to waste any of it on slowly turning their allegiance.
So this time, Rast was planning to finish the run using a more straightforward and brutal approach.
An idea that had once remained a mere hypothetical in the actual Historical Echoes, but which he was now putting into action.
“According to your own words, you and I are both Chosen of the Supreme Lord, correct?”
Rast looked down at the cult leader before him, his gaze filled with pity.
“Of course, I was once just an ordinary fisherman who made a living by the sea—”
“Had I not stumbled upon the Supreme Lord’s relic during a fishing trip and received His divine revelation, becoming one of His Chosen, how could I possibly have become who I am today?”
“In all the divine revelations I received, there was never a trace of someone like you!”
The cult leader stared at Rast, feeling entirely ill at ease.
He was clearly the legitimate Chosen of the Supreme Lord, yet the black-haired youth before him looked at him with the same sorrowful expression as the priests in confessionals, listening to sinners pour out their guilt.
“From the very beginning, you never received the Lord’s revelation. How could you possibly know of my existence?”
Rast smiled lightly. “But that’s something we can discuss later.”
“Since you also claim to be the Supreme Lord’s Chosen, let me ask you a question—”
“What, in your eyes, is the Supreme Lord?”
Hearing Rast’s words, the cult leader was briefly stunned, but then his expression turned solemn.
As the head of the cult, this was precisely his area of expertise: “The Supreme Lord is the incarnation of twilight, the very symbol of the silver moon that graces the night sky.”
“All lands bathed in moonlight are sanctified realms of the Supreme Lord.”
“Only those who faithfully believe in the Supreme Lord shall, upon death, enter the eternal and peaceful Kingdom of the Silver Moon.”
...
Nightworld, Modern Metropolis of the Sixth Era.
Bang!
Dean Silver slammed the half-finished can hard on the table.
“You tell me, why is that cult leader such a bastard!”
She glared at the computer screen displaying the live stream in real time and couldn’t help but exhale sharply.
“Goddamned ‘Incarnation of the Moon,’ huh? According to that old fool’s nonsense, does that mean my ‘Moon’ Sequence has also become the lackey of that what-the-hell Evil God?”
“How come I didn’t know I had such a superior officer above me?”
“Little Rast, go, finish him off!”
Her fluffy big tail bristled with anger, and her formerly lazy and idle posture vanished. For the first time, she earnestly started cheering Rast on.
On the livestream.
The cult leader had just finished his lengthy propaganda speech.
He glanced behind him at those diehard followers whose faces were now filled with fanaticism after his incitement, then looked at the slightly shaken cultists behind Rast, and couldn’t help but show a smug expression.
However, faced with the cult leader’s elaborate rhetoric, Rast merely smiled faintly.
“That’s it?”
“I originally thought that someone who became a cult leader, even if just a fraud who climbed up by lying and trickery, would at least possess some degree of insight.”
“Turns out I gave you too much credit.”
The pity in his eyes vanished, replaced by a faint fury. “Perhaps, in your eyes, what you just said was praise for the Supreme Lord.”
“But in reality, it was nothing short of slander—a blasphemy against the Supreme Lord’s majesty.”
Rast began to speak slowly: “The silver moon in the night sky may seem bright, but in truth, it is nothing more than a gigantic stone lump composed of rock and gravel. Its size is merely one-fourth that of our planet.”
“What’s more, no matter how large the moon may be, it cannot emit light on its own—it only appears luminous because the brilliance of the sun shines upon its surface and reflects.”
“If the sun did not exist, then the so-called moon would be nothing more than a dark and massive rock.”
“So, are you trying to say your Lord is actually the master of the sun, the Incarnation of the Blazing Sun?” the cult leader interrupted.
“No, not at all.”
Rast shook his head. “Whether moon or sun, they are simply celestial bodies within a single star system.”
“They may seem dazzling, radiant beyond measure, but their influence is limited to just one star system. Beyond that, in the vast cosmos, they are nothing but the most mundane of existences.”
“The sun we know, the solar system it belongs to, is located merely within a spiral arm of a larger galaxy called the Milky Way. This galaxy alone contains billions of stars similar to the sun.”
“And galaxies like the Milky Way, each harboring billions of such suns, must number over thirty—only then can they form our local galaxy group.”
“This local galaxy group, in turn, is but a small part of the Virgo Supercluster, which consists of over fifty different galaxy clusters and groups.”
“I...”
The cult leader opened his mouth but said nothing.
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Yet Rast continued: “Beyond our supercluster lies an even larger one called Laniakea Supercluster. It contains nearly five hundred superclusters and galaxy groups akin to the Virgo Supercluster.”
“And the Laniakea Supercluster is merely a part of the observable universe. Beyond the observable universe lies the infinitely vast cosmic deep space—light from those regions has yet to reach our planet and thus remains unobservable.”
“Therefore, we can know nothing of any galaxies outside the observable universe.”
“You...” The cult leader opened his mouth again. “So you’re saying your Supreme Lord created not just the observable universe, but the unobservable universe as well?”
“Absurd!”
Rast’s expression turned from pity back to fury. “The Supreme Lord is not some shortsighted being who would care about the rise and fall of things no different from ants!”
“All that I have described—galaxies, superclusters, even the entire observable universe—is merely one cycle within a single world.”
“Even if the entire universe we dwell in were to be annihilated, it would not matter to the Supreme Lord, for it is but a minor world.”
“Such a minor world is also called a Small Chiliocosm.”
“Only when three thousand Small Chiliocosms are combined does one form a Middle Chiliocosm, and only when three thousand Middle Chiliocosms are combined does one form a Great Chiliocosm.”
“A Great Chiliocosm?”
The cult leader stared blankly at the black-haired youth before him.
His mind was racing, trying to comprehend the other party’s logic and find flaws in his words to strike back.
After all, this was a debate over their respective Supreme Lords. As the leader of the Holy Cult, he could not afford to lose.
However, the cult leader soon realized that even just following Rast’s pace of narration and attempting to grasp his thinking and logic was enough to slow his own mental processes significantly.
This endlessly stacked and nested structure—if he had never tried to understand it from the start, it would’ve been fine. It would’ve just been listening to some incomprehensible nonsense.
But once he attempted to understand, each upward level of nesting and layering exponentially slowed his cognitive processing. Before long, he realized he could no longer keep up with this heretic’s train of thought.
In plain terms—his CPU had overheated.
“Do you know the Mitro River?”
Suddenly, Rast’s voice rang in the cult leader’s ears.
“Mitro River.”
The word felt like a lifeline, and the cult leader immediately grasped it.
Unlike “galaxies,” “superclusters,” “galaxy clusters,” “observable universe,” Small Chiliocosm, Middle Chiliocosm, Great Chiliocosm... all abstract terms that would crash his brain just by thinking about them—
The Mitro River was something the cult leader could understand.
“Of course I do. The Mitro River is the widest river across the entire Western Continent, nearly spanning all of human civilization until it reaches the sea.”
One could say that human civilization on the Western Continent grew along the banks of the Mitro River, and its estuary was near Deep Blue Port.
As a former fisherman, the cult leader knew this all too well.
And through this familiar, down-to-earth term, the cult leader finally escaped the swirling vortex of stacked galaxies and superclusters, regaining a small part of himself.
“Good.”
Rast nodded. “Then do you know how many grains of sand lie at the bottom of the entire Mitro River?”
How many grains of sand lie at the bottom of the Mitro River?
The cult leader was stunned again.
He had never once thought about this. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? No, surely far more than that—tens of millions? Hundreds of millions?
“The number of Great Chiliocosms I just spoke of is as numerous as the grains of sand in the Mitro River.”
“And the ‘Boundless Domain’ containing as many Great Chiliocosms as grains of sand in the Mitro River—that is what was created by the Supreme Lord.”
Rast’s voice became reverent once again. “He is the Creator of All, the Omniscient and Almighty God above gods, the origin of all greatness.”
“He is the One, and also the All, the Beginning and the End.”
“He surpasses the starry skies in majesty, outlasts the Blazing Sun in time. He is both the fleeting moment and the eternal infinity.”
“He is the origin and the end of all things. All beings of the world shall one day return to His embrace.”
His gaze was clear. “Our walk through the world is like walking through His kingdom.”
“The Supreme Lord I believe in is a being of such towering greatness.”
“Someone like you, who has never been bathed in the Supreme Lord’s radiance—no matter how hard you try to imagine—”
“Even if you strain every last thought to craft words of grand flattery, you would not even come close to capturing a ten-thousandth of His true majesty.”
“You have never believed in the Supreme Lord, so you see Him like a frog at the bottom of a well gazing at the moon.”
“But if you did believe in the Supreme Lord, then you would see Him like a mayfly beholding the blue sky.”
Rast looked down upon the dazed and broken cult leader, his expression solemn and majestic.
“Someone as shallow as you—how dare you claim to be the Supreme Lord’s Chosen One!”