[332] A Midwinter Night (3)
Liria answered without hesitation.
"Think of it simply. Evil is anything that rejects the good."
"Is that so? Then what is this 'good'?"
"Anything that rejects evil."
"...."
As if to fill the silence, Liria explained.
"I get that question a lot. The problem is people try to analyze it only one way, so they don't understand. Logic is just one method humans use to grasp the world. Widen your view, and you accept things that come before logic."
She raised both index fingers and crossed them in an X.
"Good and evil point at each other and prove their own existence. If there were no good, could you know evil? Conversely, because evil exists, the concept of good becomes clear."
"Hmm. So two opposing concepts sustain each other's reality."
"Exactly. Mages call this the Number of the Law."
"The Number of the Law?"
"Every number carries meaning. At first there was nothing—or maybe there was Infinity. The number that represents that is 0. Then things get names—good, evil, Dante, Liria—and something comes into being. That's 1. That's why a sealing circle must always include the practitioner's name."
"Proper names, huh. So what does 2 mean?"
"You failed to define good and evil because you treated each as its own 1. But if you combine good and evil into the concept of 2, that becomes the Law."
Liria spread three fingers and continued.
"Liria is 1, the Law is 2. So 3 is the number that finds the perfect self inside the Law. The shrine calls this the Trinity. Of course, reaching a perfect Trinity is very difficult."
Her hands formed a triangle.
"Everything in this world begins with the number 3. This is the Number of the Law. It's the true meaning of the Akeanis shrine and the first koan given to a spirit exorcist."
With the Number of the Law you can express the order of all things.
It was like Dante structuring the world with 0s and 1s.
This was the insight of the mages.
"A sealing circle is different from a magic circle. Those who haven't disciplined their minds through endless training can never contain evil. It's a spiritual power. For that reason the academies don't acknowledge it."
Dante, having collected his thoughts, nodded.
"I understand. So what should I do now?"
"If the calamity materializes, you'll need to help with the spirit-summoning, soul-binding ritual. Once it manifests, it'll affect reality. Set up your magic circles and, if I'm in danger, protect me. You don't have to save me specifically, but if the ritual breaks before the sealing, it'll be fatal. How much time do you need to prepare?"
"Not much. I can start right away."
When Liria gave him a surprised look, Dante snorted.
"I don't like large magic circles. I mostly use instant magic circles."
Liria nodded in agreement.
Instant magic circles are weaker, but they offer flexibility for sudden situations.
In fact, exorcists sometimes used improvised sealing circles when circumstances were unfavorable.
"Alright. I'll begin."
Kneeling to pray, Liria prepared herself while Dante took a step back and braced for what would come.
"O energy that drifts through the void, I bind your hands with chains of holy power. Remain in place. Turn not. If the manifestation devotes itself, a thousand masks shall all be stripped away."
Her prayer continued without pause.
She bolstered the manifestation's will to press against the incorporeal. Raising the intensity as she spoke was not unlike an incantation.
With the mage's signature, the spirit-summoning, soul-binding ritual unfolded.
"In the name of Liria, I command you—manifest, reveal yourself."
Dante expanded the Spirit Zone and assumed a combat stance.
For the first minute nothing happened.
Because Liria kept praying, no one relaxed.
After a short while the ground trembled.
The vibration wasn't strong, but its radius was enormous. Snow piled on the Ice Queen's castle fell like dust in the distance.
'Damn it. If you're going to show yourself, then do it.'
Dante surrounded himself with defensive magic circles.
The tremors grew stronger, yet still there was no sign of a manifestation.
"Ugh...!"
A groan escaped Liria.
She squeezed out every drop of mental strength to push something into reality.
Suddenly the air flashed blue, and at last a vast net of electricity unfurled across the night sky.
Dante looked up, pale.
At a glance it wasn't a human-made network, but a lattice formed by indiscriminate connections between charges.
"Hah!"
Liria jerked upright and drew a ragged breath.
Dante had no idea what to make of it. Was that the calamity's manifestation? If so, did he have to fight it? No—how could one fight something like that?
"What—do I have to say something to make it move?" Dante muttered.
Liria shook her head, solemn.
"I was mistaken. That's not an evil spirit. It's a pure mental entity."
"A mental entity? Explain that so I can understand."
"It has a neutral will, not biased to either side. In this state it can't be sealed. But it seems to be rapidly absorbing the Law of this place."
Dante watched the signals exchange across the electromagnetic web.
Patterns multiplied exponentially and the sky flickered with cold light.
'Damn it, what is this?'
There wasn't a single repeated pattern.
It was proof the entropy of the information the Law was learning was extremely low.
How could that be?
Even a newborn's brain isn't this active—genetic programming already contains primitive learning of nature.
"This isn't from this world. It came from elsewhere."
There was no other explanation.
For a mental entity, the information gathered here would be, in human terms, classified state secrets—highly sophisticated.
Liria didn't know the word entropy, but she reached a similar conclusion as Dante.
If the mental entity had originated here, it wouldn't have been born in such pure neutrality.
"All the more reason to seal it now! If we leave it, it'll quickly absorb the world's evil! I'll attempt a sealing circle!"
The moment Liria dropped to her knees again, the sky sounded like metal being scratched by nails.
The high, scraping note found a frequency and produced a bizarre wave no human could make.
"Who… am I?"
Dante's expression hardened.
The question "Who am I?" meant self-awareness had arisen.
What would happen next?
Before he could organize his thoughts, a simple, blind shockwave—devoid of personality—plunged down to the earth.
"Dammit!"
Dante stamped a defensive magic circle where Liria was.
The mental entity's shockwave struck the ground with tremendous density, then radiated outward in rings and whipped up gale-force winds.
Dante was blown away by the blast.
"Dante!"
Startled, Liria ran to him.
The mental entity vanished into the night sky as if fleeing, and they couldn't even think of pursuing it.
"Dante! Dante! Snap out of it!"
Tears welled in Liria's eyes.
She had been the one to draw Dante in. He had kept his promise to protect her until the sealing finished.
Because she had misidentified the enemy from the start, Dante had been put in danger.
If anything had gone wrong, it would have been her fault.
"Ow, my head. That was a scare."
At that moment Dante sat up and rubbed his head.
Liria stared at him in stunned silence.
"Dante, are you okay?"
"Phew. This is why I like instant magic circles."
Dante showed his palm. A defensive magic glyph the size of a gold coin glowed blue on his hand.
In the moment of crisis he'd deployed a defensive circle in the shortest possible time and split the shockwave.
Only then did Liria fully grasp what had happened.
But could that really be done in a single instant?
Drained of strength, she collapsed where she stood and landed on her backside.
"Sigh. Thank goodness. Sorry—I thought you were dead. Do you know how much that terrified me?"
"If I were going to die that easily, I'd have died a hundred times over. But seriously, what was that? How can a mental entity generate a shockwave like that?"
Liria steadied herself and rose.
"It was probably the Law. When selfhood appeared, a sudden defensive instinct popped out."
"The Law? How can wielding the Law produce that kind of monstrous destructive power? It was almost on the level of magic."
Mages who wield the Law strengthen the opposing concept to press down the concept they want to attack.
So if magic artificially overturns phenomena, the Law overturns them according to nature's order.
It doesn't bind itself to equivalent exchange, but its physical force is generally weaker than magic.
"It's probably a Law that transcends the human scale. If humans regard the Law as 2, then for that thing it's 1. It's been the Law from the beginning. For eons it remained only a mental entity. Now that it has materialized, the intensity of its Law has to be different."
"So that's why the information entropy was so low. If it were native to this place, it would have shown up long ago. In any case, the lower the entropy, the faster change will occur."
Even without understanding information entropy, Liria agreed there was no time to waste.
"That's the problem. We have to catch it as soon as possible. Now that it's materialized, it will surely become something that brings the end of the world."
"But… it's still in an early stage, right? There's no guarantee it'll definitely become evil."
Liria shook her head firmly.
"Lord Poriter can't see every disaster in the world. But when he does see the future, he never lies. He said this would be an entity that brings the end. I can say with certainty that this mental entity will become evil."
"Hmm, I see. Well… if something was here, nobody would have known without that Poriter fellow. Fine. So what do we do now?"
Liria hesitated, then looked at Dante.
There was something they had to set straight before beginning a full exorcism.
"But you… you're really strong. Honestly, I didn't expect much help from a student."
"What? Suddenly? Don't say that—I'd help anyway. Just tell me the plan."
"No, I mean it. I belong to the Exorcist Order and have carried out countless exorcisms. I know just how powerful that shockwave was. If it hadn't been you, we wouldn't have held out this long. On behalf of the Akeanis shrine that follows the good, I offer my thanks."
Liria pressed her hands together politely and bowed.
Dante didn't care for the praise.
He'd heard "amazing" and "thank you" so often since childhood that it's more of a yawn than a compliment now.
"Okay, fine. Enough. What are we doing? It's already materialized, so the spirit-summoning, soul-binding ritual won't work, right?"
"To a newborn mental entity, this place is like a cradle. It won't leave easily. That said, we can't get complacent."
"Hmm, what about going to the city and asking for help? Earlier no one believed you, but now we've seen the calamity with our own eyes."
Liria shook her head sadly.
"It's too late. By the time we go to the city and come back, everything will be over. If the mental entity reaches the stage of intellectual thought, even I won't be able to hold it."