So, I Transmigrated Into The Heavenly Realm

35. A Concert of Problems

35

It was a few days before Dax was able to meet the God of War again.

He had spent that time ferrying his prayers from the Prayer Office to their prospective piles. Now that all the loose papers that had spilled out onto the floor during the two avalanches had been scooped up he was faced with a dense mass of compressed papers that needed to be handled very delicately. You couldn't just grab a handful and pull them out, the paper was too thin and easily torn to be handled thusly.

Dax had tried to induce more paper to fall out of the Prayer Room by walking heavily past it and even jumping up and down on the floorboards directly outside of it but to no avail. He'd even overexerted himself so much with the jumping that he'd had to spend half an hour laying on the floor until he could assure himself that he wasn't going to pass out.

Half of the papers he could see looked like just breathing on them would cause them to disintegrate. 'I should probably be wearing a pair of those white conservation gloves.' Dax thought as he gently teased one out.

Work that had previously taken him days already to complete grinded slowly to a halt. It had for a while filled Dax with a sense of purpose and pride that he was actually being useful but using a dinner knife he'd found in a drawer to lever out the papers one by one whilst bending at a weird angle was frustrating.

Frustrating and painful.

He needed a break.

When Dax had made the trek up the garden path to the front gate this morning to collect his breakfast, watched by all the guards loitering about there he'd overheard them talking about a festival. What sort of festival it was he had no idea but hearing about it reawakened his wish to be anywhere and doing anything other than sorting through papers.

For being in the Heavenly Realm for several weeks at this point, Dax's experience of the city could be boiled down to three rooms in the Healing Halls, the view from a carriage, a portion of his own home and garden and an unknown amount of the Emperor's Palace.

Dax wanted to get out and see what the place was really like.

He'd argued desperately to be able to go to the festival. He had really wanted to go alone and the guards, especially Olris, didn't want him to go at all sighting his health and how busy he must be. In the end two unstoppable forces met two immovable objects and instead of mutual destruction things ended in a compromise.

Dax could go but Olris was going to escort him the entire time he was there.

As much as Dax hated being babysat, it beat being the only person not able to attend the event. Once it was cleared that he could go, the other guards were considerably happier to talk to him about the festival.

Apparently it was held every year in celebration of the Heavenly Emperor's ascension into the Heavenly Realm. Yellow peony flowers covered every street across the entire city, so bright they could damage a mortal's sight. Any space not covered in the heavy blooms was instead festooned in vivid banners bearing his signature shell emblem. High above the buildings rainbow coloured kites filled the sky somehow perfectly not tangling up with one another.

A sky you would see in an animation. Bright blue, a scattering of pure white fluffy clouds and a round bright yellow sun.

Streets that had been empty when he had viewed it from the carriage on the way here were now packed. Stepping outside of the gate had gelt more significant than Dax had imagined it would. Leaving the palace for the first time since arriving, crossing that imaginary wall and not knowing where their feet would take them or who they would meet.