"Tell me about the spirits," Shin said. "Not the history that gets recited at ceremonies—the real one. What they actually were, where they came from, and why they're gone."
The king laced his fingers together and looked at the flowers surrounding his wife's bier, as though orienting himself against something familiar before he began.
"It starts further back than most people bother to track," he said. "Before any of the current kingdoms existed. Before the guilds, before the magic academies, before any of it." He paused. "Have you ever heard anyone mention the Creator God?"
Shin said nothing, which the king took as a prompt to continue.
"This world wasn't formed by accident. Something built it—something the old texts call the Creator God. Nobody alive has any idea what it actually was. Whether it was a single being or something else entirely, whether it still exists somewhere—none of that is known. What is known is that when it built this world, it populated it with six races."
He held up a hand and counted them off quietly.
"Humans. Gods. Dragons. Spirits. Demons. And monsters."
Shin absorbed that without comment. He'd been in this world long enough to know about humans, dragons, and spirits in a surface-level way. Gods were more abstract. Demons and monsters—he hadn't seen much evidence of either, at least not under those names.
"Humans were the last and the weakest," the king continued. "In the Creator God's original design, we were barely a step above animals—no innate magic, no particular strength, no longevity. The other five races all had something we didn't. We had nothing except numbers and the ability to work together."
He let out a short breath that wasn't quite a laugh.
"The Creator God apparently didn't think much would come of us. Interesting experiment, perhaps. Nothing more."
Shin could already see where this was going, but he kept quiet and let the man tell it at his own pace.
"What the Creator God didn't account for was human adaptability. Not just intelligence—every race has some version of intelligence. What made humans different was the speed at which they learned and the completeness with which they applied it. Give a human a hundred years and an enemy they can study, and they will find a way."
He said it without pride. Just as an observation, the way someone states a law of nature.
"The Demon race was the first to find that out. Powerful individually, organized in their own way, and completely unprepared for what humans were willing to do to win. By the time the conflict ended, the Demon race as a sovereign power was finished. The survivors were absorbed—their techniques were studied, their bloodlines were folded in, their magic became human magic." A beat. "The monster race followed more slowly. More of a gradual process than a war, but the outcome was the same. What had been a competing species became—domesticated, more or less. Companions. Tools, in some cases. Pets, in others."
Shin thought about Dragon Slayer magic. About the way humans in this world had developed techniques specifically engineered to fight beings that should have been categorically beyond them.
'The same pattern. Over and over. Find the thing that should be impossible to beat, and build the exact weapon needed to beat it.'
"The Creator God noticed," the king said. "How could it not? It had created something that was eliminating its own other creations. From what the oldest texts suggest, there was a period where it considered intervening—resetting the balance somehow. But it didn't. Whether because it was curious or because something prevented it, nobody knows."
He shifted in his chair.
"After the demons and monsters, the dynamic between the remaining races changed. Humans weren't the bottom of the hierarchy anymore. That made the gods nervous. It made the dragons territorial. And it brought the spirits—who had always been the most isolated of the six, living in their own realm, largely uninvolved—into contact with human civilization for the first time."
He glanced at Lucy.
"The Spirit King came to us not because he admired humans," he said carefully. "He came because his people were already in trouble. Something was happening in the spirit realm—something that was killing them slowly, that none of their own power could address. Bringing his people here, into the human world, was an act of desperation."
He paused on that word.
"He didn't tell us that at the time, of course. He presented it as a partnership—spirits would offer protection, humans would offer coexistence. And that's what it became, at least on the surface. The arrangement was genuine, even if the full truth wasn't shared."
"But whatever was killing them in their own realm—" He looked at the woman on the bier. "It followed them here. More slowly. But it followed."
The room was very quiet.
Shin turned something over in his mind. A slow collapse of spirit power across an entire people. Eleven years ago it had accelerated—or at least become impossible to ignore. The Spirit King had vanished around the same time.
"The Spirit King didn't abandon you," Shin said.
The king looked at him.
"He disappeared because he went back," Shin continued. "Whatever was destroying his people, he went to face it himself. That's the only reason a being like that vanishes without a word—not because he stopped caring, but because he decided the fight had to happen somewhere else."
The king was very still.
"I don't know that," Shin said. "I want to be clear—I'm reading between the lines. But the shape of it fits."
"Yes," the king said, after a long moment. "I've thought the same thing. For years." He pressed his hands flat against his knees. "I just never said it out loud."
Lucy was watching her father with an expression Shin hadn't seen on her before—not the bright, easy warmth she usually carried, but something older and quieter underneath it.
"Then what happened to the spirits here," she said. "If he went to fight it—why did they still die?"
The king looked at her gently.
"Because whatever he went to fight was stronger than he was."
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