Little Garden — Headquarters of the Heavenly Army.
As the nominal supreme commander of the Heavenly Army, Indra was currently sprawled across his throne in a manner entirely unbecoming of a god.
Before him lay no nectar of the heavens, no divine ambrosia. Instead, there were several towering stacks of documents — piled so high they were in genuine danger of burying him alive.
"Ahh... I really want to quit."\
Indra pressed his fingers against his throbbing temples and let out a groan that could only have come from the depths of a salaryman's suffering.
"I want to go down to the lower tiers and have a drink with those cute girls. I wonder how Black Rabbit is doing these days."\
"Honestly, that old hag Shiroyasha had the right idea — suppressing her own Spirit Origin and messing around down in the lower districts. That's a thousand times better than sitting up here signing off on these wretched reports!"\
The three-digit God-King who commanded all the gods and Buddhas of Heaven — terror of the cosmos, sovereign of the divine order — had eyes at this moment as hollow and lifeless as a dead fish.
On paper, he was Indra, the august guardian of Little Garden's order, the Heavenly Emperor who had received the divine mandate from the Yellow Emperor himself.
In practice, he felt like a high-ranking corporate drone trapped in an office he could never escape.
"Your Eminence, please mind your language. That is the fourth time today you have mentioned quitting."\
From beside the throne, one of the "Twelve Dharma Guardians" — Uesugi Kenshin — set a fresh urgent report at the very top of the pile with an utterly expressionless face.
"Additionally, this is the latest letter of protest received from the Greek pantheon. It is the tenth one. I recommend you read it first."\
"Protest, protest, protest — what else can those uncivilized breeding machines do besides send protests?"\
Indra rolled his eyes and yanked a report off the pile.
But the moment he read what was written on it, the languid, couldn't-care-less expression on his face went very, very still.
It was a compiled summary of the "Upper Tier Spirit Incident."\
To ordinary eyes, they were a group of chubby, almost adorably round little sprites — nameless spirits with no recorded Spirit Origin, no entry in any Gift registry, beings whose very existence could not be properly recognized by Little Garden's own systems.
But to those at the apex of Little Garden — those who operated in the high-digit tiers — these small things were walking, waddling nightmares.
"Another five-digit divine official had their Spirit Origin stripped away while trying to capture one of them?"\
Indra stared at the report and felt his head begin to pound.
He'd actually seen these sprites before. Their markings looked familiar — he'd run into a few during one of his rare excursions outside, though nothing hostile had come of it. One of the purple ones had even bounced cheerfully at him in greeting, and left him a small green leaf as a souvenir. The leaf, it turned out, could completely mask the aura of one's Spirit Origin from detection.
Which had been extremely convenient for Indra's occasional habit of sneaking out in disguise to slack off.
So why, he thought, couldn't everyone just leave the little things alone?
Now look at this mess — people going out of their way to poke a hornet's nest, and now it was the Heavenly Army left to clean up the aftermath.
But still... those little creatures...
"Stripping away Spirit Origins. Ignoring all supernatural barriers. A kind of unreasonable, lawless power like that — it almost feels like..."\
Indra murmured under his breath, and in the back of his mind, a secret surfaced. One spoken of only among gods and Buddhas of the four-digit tier and above.
The Land of Return.
It was Little Garden's greatest taboo. Legend held that before Little Garden was even founded, the gods and Buddhas of all the heavens had engaged in fierce, endless debate — split between two opposing philosophies: "Return" and "Arrival."\
The latter faction had pooled the collective inspiration and Gifts of the gods, building a paradise for divine beings on the plane of the Third Observer — what was now the magnificent, teeming world of Little Garden.
But the former... the "Return" faction... Indra had only ever heard rumors. Not many gods had supported it, and those who did were among the most ancient of existences, long since withdrawn from the world.
Though divine themselves, they had sought to utterly vanish. To let their power grow still and unseen, and return all things to an origin so primordial it could not be traced.
It was obvious why so few had taken that path. What was the point of possessing divine power only to give it up entirely?
In the end, the two factions had not gone to war. They had simply parted ways. Some high-ranking deities had even split their own existence in two — one half for each path.
Indra himself had once been fortunate enough to sense the aura of the "Returned" body of a two-digit deity — a being counted among the most ancient who had ever existed.
And the aura of those round little sprites was identical to it. Indistinguishable.
"...Let's not think about that. The more I think, the worse the headache gets."\
"Honestly... the 'Divine Fall' phenomenon has been getting more and more frequent lately. Something big is coming, I can feel it..."\
Indra set down the sprite report with a sigh and turned to the next file.
This one documented the strange occurrences that had been circulating even before the sprites first appeared in Little Garden.
Spirit Origins that had once been stable and orderly were undergoing "falls" without any warning whatsoever.
These falls were not a drop in tier. They were a fundamental change in the nature of the Spirit Origin itself — turning aggressive, exclusionary, stripping away the divine instinct to protect humanity, and becoming more savage and violent than even the most brutal Demon Lord.
Indra had taken to calling the deities who experienced this "Defiant Gods."\
They had once been stars in the firmament — beings meant to uphold myth and guard the history of humanity. But in one pivotal moment, they "rebelled," thrashing against the underlying logic of Little Garden itself, trying to tear free.
The Divine Fall had originally been documented mostly among five-digit and six-digit entities. Until recently.
Recently, a well-known three-digit existence — one who had touched the realm of omnipotence — had undergone a Divine Fall. And in the process of falling, had completely vanished. Not even the Heavenly Army's observation network could track where they had gone.
"Sprites connected to the Land of Return... and a Divine Fall that keeps getting worse..."\
"Is it really going to be time for another cycle of elemental chaos? But this era isn't even halfway through yet..."\
Indra let out a bitter laugh.
"Urgent report!"\
Just as Indra was sinking into his thoughts, a messenger burst through the doors of the divine hall, face drenched in sweat.
"Your Eminence, this is terrible! A major bloodshed incident has occurred in the lower tiers!"\
Indra didn't even lift his eyelids. He replied in a thoroughly bored drawl:
"When is there not a bloodshed incident in the lower tiers? Which little Demon Lord went and robbed his neighbor's New Year's money this time? Or did some Moon Rabbit get tricked into a compromising outfit again?"\
"No — no, Your Eminence, it's Perseus! Of the Greek pantheon!"\
The messenger's voice was trembling:
"The Perseus community — a six-digit community affiliated with the Greek pantheon — has been completely annihilated at their own base of operations. Their leader, Luaos, is dead!"\
"Furthermore... the Gorgon's Head — the artifact in their possession, the one containing the sealed will of the Stellar Spirit Alger — has gone missing!"\
"...What?"\
Indra shot bolt upright, his entire posture snapping to attention. Death was an exceptionally rare word in the context of Little Garden — it was one of the unspoken rules that kept the peace in this world.
Even the Gift Games of Demon Lords did not casually hand out actual death as a penalty.
"Say that again. Luaos is dead?"\
Luaos had been nothing but a waste of space riding on his ancestors' coattails — but he had still been the Greek pantheon's public face in the lower tiers. More critically than that — Alger.
The one who had given half of Little Garden a collective migraine. One of the three legendary Problem Children of old. Gone? Without anyone noticing? Without a trace?
"The Greek pantheon is in an uproar as we speak!"\
The messenger threw up his hands helplessly:
"Lady Athena is on her way here now. They are demanding that the Heavenly Army provide an immediate explanation. If no culprit is found, they intend to have the community called 'No Name' — suspected of being involved in a conflict with Perseus — completely erased!"\
"Erased? No Name?"\
Indra felt his skull begin to throb. That was where his precious Moon Rabbit daughter lived. Shiroyasha was there to keep an eye on things, sure, but if the Greek pantheon set their sights on the place, that was going to be a genuine headache.
"Those idiots... have we identified the real culprit yet?"\
"No... whoever it was left absolutely no trace of a Spirit Origin behind. The investigation is still ongoing..."\
"Then go investigate! What are you doing standing here?"\
Indra nearly laughed from sheer exasperation. He hadn't embezzled anything, hadn't cut any corners — so when had the Heavenly Army's efficiency dropped this low?
If he'd known it would come to this, he would have stashed his Spirit Origin in some Buddhist temple years ago and gone down to the lower tiers to slack off in peace. He wanted nothing to do with messes like this.
Perhaps the universe heard him — because at that precise moment, the great doors of the divine hall let out a thunderous boom.
Not from brute force. This was something more brazen entirely: an uninhibited spatial displacement, cool and casual as walking through an open window.
"Hey there, Good-for-Nothing Heaven. You look like you've got quite the headache going on~"\
A teasing, unmistakably familiar voice rang out through the hall.
Indra looked up. His pupils contracted sharply.
There, strolling in with her folding fan dangling lazily from one hand, white hair catching the light and golden eyes gleaming with amusement, was Shiroyasha — the former White Night King herself — looking utterly at home.
Walking behind her was a man who hadn't had time to change out of his farmer's attire, and at his side, a golden-haired girl.
No Spirit Origin. He couldn't sense one at all — just like those sprites. Again, not a single trace of a Spirit Origin.
No, wait. The girl — something about her felt... off...
"Shiroyasha? What are you doing here? Aren't you playing local tyrant down in the lower tiers — since when do you have free time to come up here?"\
Indra swallowed, and with the careful calm of a man who had not long ago been pushed into personally intervening to stabilize Little Garden's hierarchy by a certain incident, forced himself to maintain composure.
"Who said I have free time. I came up because my shoulders were getting sore from carrying everything, and I thought I'd dump some of this on you."\
"Anyway, introductions first —"\
"This is Lord Suke, from the Land of Return. Yes, that Land of Return — exactly the one you're thinking of."\
"And this lady here... this is Miss Abigail, a shrine maiden in service to the 'One Who Unites All Things.'" Shiroyasha turned slightly to the side, introducing them with the same casual air she might use for a neighbor she'd run into at the market:
"They're here looking for those sprites. I told them you had leads on the sprites' whereabouts, so I brought them along to see for themselves."\
"So. Are you going to take out what you have and show them, Your Eminence?"\
"..."\
____
👻🔥P- Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Re:Zero: Wrath Route Yandere Emilia Watches the Projection
Help us hit our targets:
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 free chapter for all