Tokyo Gods Only Want Beautiful Priestesses

Perhaps it's just a joke, and everyone just walks across the sacred bridge for a short while and then comes back.

Or perhaps the palanquin contains only dolls, not real children, or perhaps the palanquin is specially designed to float on water.

Step by step, they drew closer and closer to the end of the sacred bridge. The girl in the palanquin seemed unaware of what awaited her, remaining completely silent.

Kimura could only keep reassuring himself that it was just a doll and that he had just mistaken it for something else.

At the end of the bridge, just before the palanquin was thrown into the lake, Kimura inexplicably glanced down.

There was nothing on the dark lake surface. So, it seems that Suwa-sama and all that stuff is just superstition?

Just as he was thinking this, he made eye contact with something.

It's... a snake.

Chapter 239 Suwa Myojin

"Gurgle..."

The words caught in his throat, unable to escape. The moment his eyes met those of the enormous creature in the lake, Kimura's heart clenched painfully.

“Hey—whoosh!”

As if they hadn't seen anything, the person behind them exerted force, and the palanquin slipped from their grasp, plummeting straight into the water and shattering its reflection.

A feeling of joy welled up within him, though he didn't know what he was so happy about, but at that moment, this feeling arose in Kimura's heart.

Not only him, but also the others behind him, and countless people at the festival, all felt a surge of joy at this moment.

The wooden palanquin sank into the water, and crimson blood gushed out from the depths, turning everything a deep red.

The crimson mouth of the serpent closed, and then rose a white body—a colossal beast, or rather a god, awakened, raising its head and tail from the entire Lake Suwa.

Akakuchi no Kami, Suwa no Okami, Shugiya no Kami, Misaka no Kami... the joy of its awakening was equally shared with everyone at the festival, and no matter how fantastical or terrifying the scene before them was, they were all overwhelmed by this joy.

On this lake surrounded by the city, non-human beings stretched out their bodies, which had not moved for thousands of years, and let out a silent shriek.

"Wow, such a blatant appearance, they'll probably be complaining about it endlessly afterward, right?"

Jingu tapped his forehead. While it was true that he had used a human sacrifice in the other's style to awaken him, he hadn't expected the other to rise from the lake so directly.

In front of hundreds of thousands of people in the entire city, is this direct manifestation meant to be interpreted as a collective hallucination of hundreds of thousands of people?

However, since the other party is an old-fashioned person who overslept, let's just be understanding for now.

After all, the other party is about to offer up its enormous serpentine body as the cornerstone of hell.

After a brief moment of joy, Suwa-no-Okami seemed to notice the strange and out-of-place shrine, and flicked out a scarlet snake's tongue in his direction.

It asked, "Who are you?"

At the tip of the snake's tongue, the tiny divine child spoke indifferently, acting as a messenger of divine pronouncements and an incarnation of God.

Suwa-Okami is a cruel god who demands human sacrifices, who inflicts real curses on those who disrespect him, and who expresses his own emotions.

When it awakens, it demands a living sacrifice every year and transforms the sacrificed person into its own god, conveying commands that the serpent's body cannot convey.

"Ah, this was prepared especially for you, a child not even twelve years old. Is her flesh delicious? Is her blood fresh? What does it taste like?"

The child spirit on the snake's tongue looked puzzled; it didn't know what the shrine meant by those words.

But the next moment, a burning pain spread throughout her body, and she detached herself from the crimson snake tongue, just like a polyp naturally falling off a person's body.

The snake's body fell back into the lake, leaving only the curled-up child of the god held in the god's hands.

"I wonder if you are satisfied with this offering that I specially 'prepared'? Besides the taste, do you have any opinions on the appearance of this body?"

Naturally, the shrine does not actually have a penchant for human sacrifice, especially children.

This is used for living

The children of the gods offered in the festival were merely handcrafted products of the shrine.

Of course, I also added a little something to it.

"What have you done?"

The serpentine body that originally carried him has now lost its senses, and Suwa Myojin's consciousness has been completely bound into the body of this child.

The unprecedented feeling made her somewhat flustered. Even though her own body was already very weak, it was still countless times better than that of this child.

As Suwa Myojin, she still possessed that formidable divine power, but no matter what she did, she could not break free from this body and return to her original serpentine form.

"Don't waste your energy. This is a requisition, and also a reward for waking you up. Keeping your life is enough for you to be grateful to me."

"After all, you should have never woken up."

As a deity with multiple divine attributes, Suwa Myojin possesses a variety of complex divine attributes, including god of war, god of agriculture, god of hunting, god of wind, god of mountains, god of water, god of snakes, and god of rocks.

It is a combination of nature worship and conqueror myths, and it cannot handle the divinity that integrates conqueror and conquered, which leads to so-called logical errors and system crashes.

In the past, human sacrifice could be used to maintain the ability to think and to unite divinity, but in civilized societies where human sacrifice is forbidden, one would lose oneself.

In a sense, she is a more complex version of the Heavenly Bow Assembly. The Heavenly Bow Assembly is a system iteration, while she is a logical error. So-called gods are just such complex and troublesome things.

If you find the right method, you can easily solve these problems without even using a knife or gun.

Jingu raised his head and looked at the Yatsugatake Mountains behind Lake Suwa, mountains whose peaks had been cut off by Konohana Sakuya-hime because they were taller than Mount Fuji.

Suwa Myojin is an ancient indigenous deity, a great god of the Shinano region. Although it was assimilated and conquered during the later unification of Japan, its ancient divinity cannot be faked.

This enormous serpentine body, which has been preserved to this day and lies dormant beneath Lake Suwa, is an excellent material to serve as the foundation stone of hell.

"Your target is my body?"

Using a human body, his gaze, which had been like that of a puppet just moments before, gradually revealed a wise and intelligent quality in his pupils.

"Ah, yes, but we still have to deal with so many ordinary people."

The scene of the serpent god emerging from the water had just been brought back to normal by Suwa Myojin after he was imprisoned. The crowd began to doubt their own eyes.

Suwa Myojin followed the shrine's gaze and looked around, somewhat puzzled.

Isn't it perfectly normal to feel fear or develop fanatical faith upon witnessing the form of God?

However, this is no longer an era in which she can act freely and instill fear and awe in the world.

After thinking for a moment, Jingu waved his hand, causing a grand water curtain to rise from the surface of Lake Suwa. Light and shadow were projected through it, creating a huge water curtain performance.

Of course, it's not that simple to turn the giant snake that so many people just saw into a light and shadow performance.

The splashing water dispersed like smoke, and the shrine snapped its fingers again, adding a hallucinogen favored by primitive religions into the mist.

Then, with just a gentle breath, the mist spread out, enveloping the entire crowd on the shore.

If we can't pretend that we can't see the truth, then it will become that everyone was high on hallucinogens at the Onishima Festival.

In that case, even if they go around saying they saw a giant snake emerge from Lake Suwa, no one will believe them.

If you can't solve the problem, then solve the person who caused it.

After a hasty and perfunctory attempt to cover it up, the shrine abandoned the mess and disappeared with Suwa Myojin.

Chapter 240 Special Interests in the Body

They returned to the front shrine of Suwa Taisha.

Facing the unfamiliar shrine environment after a thousand years, Suwa Myojin touched the walls somewhat awkwardly.

"So that's how it is. I've been asleep for so long?"

It has the innocent appearance of a young child, yet it spits out a bright red snake's tongue.

Using their tongues to sense their environment is also one of the habits of snakes.

However, having arrived in a more familiar environment, Suwa Myojin was able to calm down a little from the chaotic state of just waking up.

If we use a snake as a metaphor, it means recovering from a state of fright to a state of docility.

He no longer tried to muster his divine power to break free from the constraints of this physical body, perhaps because he gradually came to understand the beauty of intellect.

Although they used human bodies as messengers in the past, what came out were still strange and chilling serpent god babblings.

Now, having been completely severed from its original serpentine body and imprisoned within the body of this child, it is gradually beginning to conform to human intelligence.

However, the part belonging to the serpent god is also constantly modifying this body, and the forked tongue that it spits out is a symbol of inhumanity.

"So, who are you? What is the current situation of this country?"

Having painstakingly climbed to the top of the shrine, Suwa Myojin adopted an indifferent expression that belied his childish nature, looked at the shrine, and asked the question that had been lingering in his mind.

I've never seen one before, never seen a divine palace before. It's an ancient and powerful entity on this land. I should have seen it before.

Could it be that in just a short span of a thousand years, another god so powerful that it is powerless to resist has been born?

"Me? Introducing myself is too much trouble. Just consider me a passerby having some fun."

Although they came for a proper purpose, they also staged a festival and took the opportunity to deliberately observe the moral struggle of that ordinary person.

If others knew about it, Jingu's actions would probably be criticized, since it's like arbitrarily launching a moral interrogation of someone.

Unfortunately, humans are indeed unable to do these things, but God has not said that it is impossible.

Having been isolated from the world for too long, Suwa Myojin didn't quite understand what the shrine meant by "rakuko-jin" (entertainment person).

Does "Leziren" refer to a god of joy and happiness? Does this mean that humanity no longer needs to worship other things and only needs to seek pure joy?

As a deity whose essence is nature worship and closely related to hunting, farming, and fishing, Suwa Myojin could not imagine what stage humanity had reached to crave pleasure so much.

"Then why do you demand my physical body?"

"Don't ask so many questions. Now that you've finally woken up, just continue to be a good Suwa Daimyojin. However..."

Jingu lowered his head and pinched the other's fair face.

"If I had known, I would have made an older one according to my aesthetic. At the time, I was only thinking that the God Child should be a child, so I made you a little too small."

"However, my cooking skills are actually quite good."

Unlike Narukami and the others who have ready-made characters, Suwa Myojin's body is a completely original creation by Jingu. She combined some child characters from recent anime to create a cute little girl character according to her own preferences.

Although

It means that I am not interested in empty shells with only a physical body, but as long as an interesting soul is put into it, it will be a completely different story.