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Last Embryo Volume 6 Prologue Part 4

When Asterios focused his hearing, he could even make out the happy laughter of the children from within the crowd, who were overjoyed that the grown-ups did not order them to go to beds already, letting them stay up late instead. On top of that, plays and performances were constantly being performed in the lakeside plaza, and the townspeople were enjoying them all with glasses of wine in hands along with some tasty-looking treats. Asterios was so surprised that for a brief moment he forgot about being cautious not to be seen by anyone and poked his head outside through the door of the house in which he woke up in, causing him to be noticed by a woman who looked like she might have been a priestess. And when she saw him, her eyes immediately became so widely opened that they threatened to pop out of her eye sockets as she rushed to his side while saying excitedly:

「Ahhhh! ! ! ! ! Our lord! Our king! Have you finally woken up?!」

「L-Lord? King? Y-You mean me. . . . . . . ? Wait, that is not what is important right now! Where am I, exactly? What is this place and what is currently going on in here. . .! ! ! !」

「Why this is the Knossos Palace on the Lost Continent of Atlantis, the lace that became like a second home for the people of Crete. And as for what we are doing, I hope you will forgive us not informing you about this earlier, but we have prepared a small feast and a few other attractions as part of the celebrations of your return, my lord, King Asterios.」
Then the priestess literally broke down in tears of happiness, and while on her knees she took Asterios’s hand and closed inside of her own two hands. He was still incredibly confused and stunned speechless by everything that was going on around him right now, and that gesture of hers, along with her words only added to his confusion, because there was no way he would ever mistake what she just did for anything else in the world, because he has seen it many times in the distant past, back when he was alive and before he became The Minotaur. That was a gesture made by those who were swearing their allegiance to the king of Crete. . . and while we are on that subject already, what was that about her claiming that they are the people of Crete in the first place anyway?

Sensing his confusion, the priestess smiled and wiped the tears away from the corners of her eyes.

「Your confusion is understandable, my lord, but I need you to understand that we are not trying to deceive you. We are all the genuine descendants of the island country of Crete that your father, King Minos, ruled over.」

「Y-You are. . . b-but that is impossible. . . . . .! ! ! ! !」

Asterios screamed, truly unable to comprehend what the priestess before him was saying and accept it as facts. He grabbed the priestess by the shoulders and shook her pretty violently.

「Do not dare lie to me! According to the literature and folklore of the modern era Outer World, I have become the worst possible calamity that struck the island of Crete! And historically, the Minoan civilization as I knew it. . . it has been completely destroyed by a catastrophic volcanic eruption and then the remains were ravaged by war that happened decades after my death! Or are you going to tell me that the official documents and historical sources were all wrong about it?! ! ! !」

That is right. The Island of Crete, home of the Minoan civilization that Asterios was a part of was struck by two separate catastrophies after Asterios’ death. One of them was a volcanic eruption that was said to be large enough to engulf and level the entirety of Crete. When the eruption occurred, the damage it has caused were so severe that the shape of the island, which could have been said to be similar in size to the Japanese island of Shikoku, has completely changed.

According to the historical sources that described that catastrophe, it was a disaster unlike any other that The Minoan Civilization has seen before, the one where the smoke and ash that were spewing out of the volcano covered the entire sky and blocked even the rays of the sun from shining through it, which caused a wave of chilling cold to sweep across the entire island and beyond its borders, killing everything and everyone who was unlucky enough to end up in its path.

「. . . . Yes, that is exactly what I want to tell you, King Asterios. When the catastrophe came down upon us, we the people of Crete were convinced that they days of the prosperity of our country have come to an end and that death was going to take us all to the underworld on that fateful day, because we knew that this would be the price for having our country build in the middle of the Aegean Sea, at the border of different cultures and civilizations.」

There are two overlapping tectonic plates in the Aegean Sea, The African Plate and The Eurasian Plate, and the Island of Crete is a special land born on the border of the continent to continent boundary that separated the two of them, but it is also known under two different names: The Aorta of the Stars, or The Giant Cauldron of the Stars.

The areas that are exposed to such natural blessings and threats tend to always produce pretty advanced civilizations, but at the same time, they are always at the risk of being exposed to the breath of the stars.

And Crete was not an exception to that rule by any means.

That is why The Minoan civilization and the people who constituted it, knowing full well what was the origin of their country and what that origin entailed, had no choice but to accept that in exchange for being a maritime nation that existed at the crossroads of the Greek and Egyptian cultures the future that was going to await their civilization would most likely be the one of ruin.

「. . . . . But then we realized that the Gods have never truly abandoned us. That is why when the moment of the ultimate ruination of our civilization was finally upon us, the Gods have presented us with an option to move us onto The Lost Continent of Atlantis, and we knew that it was either that or an unavoidable extinction for us. The day of our ultimate ruination served as our convergence point, and as for the summoning method, the one that was used on us was the one of removing us from the historical point of view.」

The convergence point due to the occurrence of a 「Paradigm Shift」does not have to be necessarily tied to only one fact or event. Just like with Oda Nobunaga, who was previously discussed by Indra, the individuals or nations who have been documented by history to have died but have at least one theory of their probable survival tied to them, they can be summoned to Little Garden through an emergency summoning means of removing them straight from that particular point in their history. . . or at least that is how it is supposed to be, because there is still a number of mysteries and unknown variables surrounding that particular system.

「At that point, the people of our civilization have been essentially divided into three categories of possibilities: those who died on The Island of Crete during the day of ultimate ruination and have been dragged into the underworld, those who died in the war that would come over Crete in the future and those of us who have been summoned to The Lost Continent of Atlantis, each group with their own theories behind them.」

「Is. . . . Is that so?」

Asterios was still confused thanks to how quickly the things have been progressing, but the more he listened to what the priestess had to say, the more he was regaining his usual composure.