Several days later.
The War God Mountain.
Lorne sat in the back courtyard of Hestia's residence, took out a golden apple, and swallowed it down in a few bites.
The flesh dissolved the moment it touched his mouth, forming a thread of golden liquid that flowed from his stomach and surged through every limb and bone, slowly soaking into every inch of his skeleton, every muscle, and every drop of blood.
Gradually, a layer of golden radiance spread over his body from the inside out.
"HMM!"
At the same time, a golden halo lit up behind him as countless lush grapevines grew wildly in the mind-image world built by the halo, gradually extending their branches to fill the tenth empty space and transforming into a fruit tree with flourishing foliage.
Fist-sized fruits with fiery red skin and trumpet-shaped openings at the top hung densely across every branch.
As the tree and its fruit stopped growing, Lorne slowly opened his eyes, spread his palm forward, and several green branches automatically drooped from behind him, delivering one fiery red fruit from among the branches into his hand.
"Crack!"
With a light break, the fiery red skin split open with a crisp sound, revealing seeds as crystal clear as agate inside.
A pomegranate.
A fruit of particularly special significance in Greek culture.
In the god realm, the pomegranate tree was one of the most beloved plants of Hera, goddess of marriage and fertility and queen of heaven.
Her image typically showed her holding a sceptre in one hand and a pomegranate symbolising fertility in the other.
For Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Beauty and also the Goddess of Flowers and Mother of Plants, the pomegranate was equally one of her sacred objects and symbols, and the plants people offered to her included the pomegranate tree.
On the other side, legend held that it was born from the blood of Adonis, who presided over the annual death and rebirth of plants.
And the Underworld King Hades tempted Persephone into eating six pomegranate seeds, binding her to spend six months of every year in the Underworld.
So many people believed it held mysterious magical power, strong enough to even influence the fate of gods.
Lorne broke off a few pomegranate seeds and put them in his mouth.
A wonderful sweet and clean sensation bloomed across his taste buds, followed by a thread of coolness spreading through his body.
In a trance, his blood energy grew more vigorous, his eyes grew clearer, and his thinking seemed to sharpen.
At the same time, his perception of the [world] seemed to undergo a subtle change he could not quite put into words.
As though everything around him became much more intimate towards him.
Lorne ate a few more pomegranate seeds, closed his eyes and sensed for a moment, then opened them and shook his head with resignation.
The effect on him was too slight.
The sensation was not clear enough.
He thought for a moment, picked up a Gorgon bronze emblem besides him, and traced several lines of Hermes script onto it.
Not long after, a careful knocking sound came from outside the room.
Lorne casually lifted the magical restriction on the door and welcomed the visitors into the back courtyard.
"Lord Dionysus. I brought the people you wanted."
Phaedra, the fourth daughter of King Minos whom he had not seen for a long while, cradled the thyrsus in her arms with eyes that kept sneaking glances at the god she served, her whole face tense and nervous.
Before was before. Now was now.
Strictly speaking, a god and a human were no longer the same kind of life.
As the leader of the Bacchae, years of spreading the faith and offering prayers already engraved her reverence for this God of hers deep into her bones.
Coming face to face with her idol naturally made nervousness unavoidable.
"What is there to be afraid of? I do not eat people."
Lorne laughed and joked as he pulled over a stool, invited this somewhat stiff niece of his to sit down, then looked at the small visitors she brought along.
They were a group of children, most wearing rough outer garments with eyes full of innocence and curiosity.
Obviously these were children born at the bottom rungs of society, without the bloodlines and talents gifted by gods.
"The pomegranates at home ripened, and there seems to be more than we can finish. Come, try them and see how they taste."
Lorne smiled with half-truth and half-pretence as he pushed a few pomegranates he took down from the branches earlier and placed on a plate towards the children and personally demonstrated by eating a few seeds first to dispel their wariness.
Seeing such fragrant and beautiful fruit placed before them, the children turned back to get Phaedra's permission, and then joyfully grabbed the pomegranates from the plate and happily broke them open to share.
The sweet and sour taste bloomed across their taste buds as the children looked towards the kind person who treated them with faces full of satisfaction and gratitude.
Lorne responded with a smile, like a warm and friendly older brother, chatting with the children as they ate and occasionally asking about their family situations, academic abilities, physical conditions and so on.
The innocent children chattered away with their answers.
Lorne listened patiently and spoke up every now and then, sometimes offering useful suggestions, sometimes praising their good sense, sometimes patting their shoulders and saying encouraging words.
After this casual conversation, Phaedra, who was watching from the side, noticed something with surprise.
These previously not-very-confident commoner children were performing exceptionally well today, speaking articulately and thinking in clear order.
Once the pomegranates were finished and he spoke with each child one more time, Lorne, who had already upgraded from friend of Cretan women to king of Minoan children, picked up a branch, crouched on the ground, and sketched out one after another of mysterious symbols before speaking with a grin.
"Come. Let your brother play a little game with you. Whoever memorises these characters first and draws them out in the air with their hand gets an extra basket of fresh fruit and vegetables from me."
Hearing this, the children immediately pressed together with enthusiasm before the open space with the characters written on it, stretched out their little hands, and concentrated intently on tracing the symbols on the ground.
"Hermes script? How could they possibly..."
"Shh. Let us try first."
Phaedra, besides him, just started to speak when Lorne stopped her with a quiet word.
Without the bloodline of a god, one could not wield ether, much less gather magical power and weave Hermes' script through the air.
Phaedra looked at the lorne besides her with puzzlement and a hint of doubt in her heart.
'Can this really work...'
A moment later, the Bacchae stared with wide, astonished eyes at a scene that shattered her common sense.
"Light! It is glowing!"
"Mine too!"
A boy and a girl pointed at a line of Hermes script hovering before each of them, condensed and unscattering as it faintly emitted a glow, and couldn't help cheering with excitement.
"Outstanding!"
Lorne gave a thumbs-up with genuine admiration, then, under the envious gazes of the crowd of children, helped himself to two baskets of fruit and vegetables from Hestia's vegetable garden and gave them to these two children who performed excellently as gifts.
The small gathering ended in joyful noise and officially drew to a close.
Lorne rose to his feet and sent each of the reluctant-to-leave children out the door one by one, then pulled the leader Phaedra aside and gave her quiet instructions.
"Have Teacher Horse give these little ones a health check later.
If you come across anyone with magical aptitude, have him take them into the Athens Academy."
Phaedra gave a slight nod and noted down this instruction.
However, recalling the scene in the courtyard just now, this Cretan princess with God's blood flowing in her veins felt somewhat bewildered.
"Are they not commoners? Why can they also use magic?"
"Don't you find it too shallow to distinguish people by bloodline?"
Lorne gently countered and recited the doctrine he composed for the Dionysian religion with meaningful depth.
"The world was built upon the ashes of the Titans. Life too. The blessing of the gods was long ago gifted equally to all people of this world..."
Hearing her God's teaching, Phaedra felt deep shame.
The Lord God loved all people equally.
Nobles did not monopolise this honour.
Commoners could equally receive this grace.
Setting aside family background, what difference was there between her and those children?
Phaedra reflected deeply on her own shallowness and prejudice, then made a solemn promise to the God she served.
"Your teaching. I will engrave it in my heart!"
"Mm. I believe you. Do your best."
Lorne gave a gentle nod and an encouraging smile, then watched the Bacchae, full of determination, set out on her path of spreading the faith.
He closed the door and came to the courtyard where he looked at the pomegranate in his hand in quiet contemplation.
Universal doctrine wove the foundation of human divinity.
Wine poured in the name of God's blood irrigated the soil of human divinity.
And finally, the seeds in his hand fell, took root and sprouted in human beings, grew step by step into towering trees, and would eventually bear the forbidden fruit.
'The [Forbidden Fruit]?'
Lorne smiled and looked at the pomegranate in his hand with a sense of dawning understanding.
The first book of the Bible, Genesis, described how despite God warning Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, a serpent in the garden persuaded Eve to take a bite.
"So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate."
From that point on, humanity bore original sin.
But humanity also broke free of the restrictions of the gods, left the cradle, and stepped towards true freedom.
And the [Forbidden Fruit] that triggered this transformation had no single unified concept in the strict sense.
It was simply a broad term for some kind of fruit.
Some believed it to be a fig. Some believed it to be grapes.
Some believed it to be a citron.
Others believed it to be an apple.
In Hebrew culture, many also maintained that the pomegranate was the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden.
The most important painter of the Florentine school during the Renaissance, Botticelli, once created a famous painting called Madonna of the Pomegranate.
The Virgin Mary held the infant Jesus in her arms, and the saviour of humanity gripped a plump and full pomegranate tightly in his hand, its skin broken open at a small point to reveal crystal-clear, glistening seeds inside.
That pomegranate was perhaps a symbol of the suffering and redemption of the Son of Man.
And the [Forbidden Fruit] that grew behind Lorne also had complex origins.
Hera's nursing and the golden apple's god-power created the sinful soil for the birth of the tenth incarnation.
The apple seed fell, the grapevine came to graft, and finally the pomegranate fruit formed.
All in all, it could be called thoroughly heretical and unconstrained in its mixing.
And at the same time it was precisely a metaphor for the stolen indulgence between him and Hera, adding a subtle footnote to that forbidden affair.
'So the effect of the [Forbidden Fruit] was to activate humanity's latent divinity?'
It should be the earthly God's authority contained in the golden apple that injected new vitality into these humans named "ashes of the Titans", thereby igniting that divinity at the root of their being.
After all, the humans of this generation were "born from throwing the bones of Mother Earth" and were themselves a partial manifestation of earthly God's authority.
Nourished by the [Forbidden Fruit], it was naturally easier to cultivate the sinful flowers that ran counter to the supremacy of God's authority.
Pity that this boiling-the-frog-slowly project could not solve the trouble he faced right now.
Lorne looked at the pomegranate in his hand and let out a quiet sigh.
'The tenth Incarnation now...'
(End of Chapter)