Beast Gacha System: All Mine
Chapter 445: Facts as Threats
"Whenever the window is open, I feel like I am hanging upside down in an upside-down lake. Above the other side of the lake, so like, if you get inside it and get to the other side of it, you will be able to see them. That is the window I am talking about."
...what?
Cecilia’s brain short-circuited. This... description of divine perception that defied every law of physics was truly... fascinating.
An upside-down lake? She couldn’t tell if it was metaphor or literal truth.
"The lake is wet, but you can breathe in it. But when you go to the other side, you will not feel wet at all. It is like that reversed video of Scarlett Johansson in the pool." Lilyca shrugged, as though this comparison made perfect sense.
Cecilia tilted her head. She truly had no idea who Scarlett Johansson was but was filing the reference away for later. "Oh..."
"When they speak, it’s always crystal clear. It is like when you hear things with those noise-canceling earphones... hmm, for me, at least. And actually—" Lilyca’s small brow furrowed. "—sometimes it is weirder than usual."
"How weird?" Cecilia leaned forward.
"It’s like you mix up your senses. It is weird. How to explain it?" Lilyca paused, her silver-white eyes brightening as the right words found her. "Oh, right! It is like an image you can hear. There is no sound coming from it, but you can hear it. Like the memes?"
"Oh, and like a sound you can taste? Like your brain connects the sound of the waves with this fishy taste and smell?"
"Hmm." Cecilia nodded slowly, her mind racing.
"Or when you hear certain noises and you see colors bursting in your eyes! Also, when you touch something dusty, you immediately feel that cringe inside your ear? The gods sometimes speak through my sense of touch too. It is sooo strange!"
No, wait. Wait, wait, wait. Cecilia’s brain almost formed a theory.
Synesthesia? The mixing of senses, hearing colors, tasting sounds, feeling textures in response to divine communication?
But the gods had once warned her not to theorize too much lest her brain explode...
Ah—
How would she know whether she was strong enough to handle it or not yet?
"Lesser Goddess, I think I can feel, or, you know, communicate with you the same way. You are divine too, after all," Lilyca said suddenly.
"Huh? Me?" Cecilia blinked, startled out of her spiraling thoughts.
Lilyca nodded. "Mm-hm." She reached out and touched Cecilia’s hand, her fingers warm against Cecilia’s skin. She smiled. "Your touch tastes soooo sweet! I think I feel a similar sweetness when I touch the fur of a cat that has been laying in a sunbeam inside a church."
She paused, her head tilting as though she were comparing flavors. "But cats also sound savory. While you sound like a veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery mild honey diluted in warm tea."
The young girl giggled and Cecilia found herself chuckling along despite the overwhelming strangeness of the conversation.
This girl could actually taste the touch of cat fur marinating in holy energy. She could hear flavors and see sounds and feel the gods pressing against her senses from the other side of an upside-down lake.
Was it sensitivity, then? To be a Saintess was to have such strong senses that they overlapped with each other, blurring the boundaries between sight and sound and taste and touch until the divine became perceptible?
If the gods were more than three-dimensional beings, if they existed in dimensions humans couldn’t perceive, in frequencies humans couldn’t hear, then perhaps these abstract, overlapping senses were the only tools that could detect them.
To say that the gods were beyond human comprehension could simply mean that humans were not equipped with the right tools to perceive them. Or at least... hadn’t awakened those tools yet.
"Can I ask you more things, Saintess?" Cecilia leaned forward.
"Yup, anything." Lilyca nodded, cheerfully willing to tell her anything. She had never been told that some questions were too big to answer, after all.
Cecilia hummed, choosing her words carefully. "So... about this divine, purifying power you can unleash. Can you describe it the same way you described talking with the gods? Like, how you channel them, and where you get the power from, and how you distribute it?"
"Oh! It is actually not that complicated!" Lilyca’s face brightened, and Cecilia immediately felt a pang of doubt. In her experience, whenever someone began an explanation with it’s actually not that complicated, the thing that followed was, invariably, extremely complicated.
"So, you just pray sooooooooo hard for it to come out. Like, for me, I wake up at three in the morning to pray every day, and then I go back to sleep, and then I wake up an hour later to pray again, and that is when it feels like—" She made a small, explosive gesture with her hands. "—boom. Your prayers are granted."
Oh, wait, it is actually simpl—
"I tell the gods they need to give me power or people are gonna die."
...
...
...
Cecilia’s thoughts screeched to a halt.
The garden was very quiet. Somewhere in the distance, a bird sang a single, uncertain note and then fell silent, as though it too had heard what the young Saintess had just said.
Cecilia stared at Lilyca. Lilyca smiled back at her guilelessly, as though she hadn’t just casually admitted to... threatening the divine on a regular basis.
This girl was straight up shaking down the gods for power! Waking up at three in the morning not to supplicate, not to worship, not to humbly request, but to inform the guardians of the worlds that if they didn’t cough up the goods, people were gonna die, and it would be their fault.
"You..." Cecilia’s voice emerged slightly strangled. "You threaten the gods?"
"Threaten?" Lilyca tilted her head, her expression genuinely puzzled. "No, I just tell them the truth. If they don’t give me power, people will die. That is not a threat. That is a fact."
Was this normal? Did all Saintesses do this? Had this world’s version of the previous Saintess, the one who had died when Ruby was two, spent her mornings holding the divine hostage with the cold, hard facts of human mortality?
Or was Lilyca Celeste simply... built different?