After she left, Haru made his way to the Angel Reincarnation Pools. The day's recruitment window was still open as midnight was the cutoff, and it wasn't close to that yet. With five pools, all at Level 9, all full of energy, he checked his reserves first.
Power Stones: 20 Billion+
Magic Crystals: 10 Million+
Divine Crystals: 3.7 Million+
The Divine Crystal count stood out. Before the Arboriel campaign, he'd been down to roughly 200,000. Tenebris alone had yielded over three million in one sweep. It was the definition of instant wealth, by any measure.
Still, it wasn't enough to upgrade the Scepter and Armor to Supreme God Tier Artifacts. Each required ten million Divine Crystals minimum. He had enough to start but not to finish, which meant that the artifact gap in his loadout remained. He noted it and moved on.
'Let's recruit the Angels first.'
He declined the Holy Spirit option and selected adult Angels. The first pool's gestation timer read just under thirty-three days. He fed it 389 Divine Crystals and watched the timer drop to zero.
Brilliant light erupted from the pool, filling that corner like a second sunrise. Melodic chanting rose from nowhere in particular, and small palm-sized angels danced in the white radiance.
This scene, which he'd once found remarkable, now he walked past it without breaking stride. A thousand light spheres lifted into the sky above the first pool. He moved to the second. Then the third, fourth, fifth.
He spent nearly two thousand Divine Crystals total across all five pools. When he was done, five thousand light spheres hung above the Imperial Capital like a field of captured stars.
Then they broke open. Based on the Level 9 pool probability, roughly 70% of any given birth produced Multi-Winged or Special Angels. Everything above Four-Winged reaching Lower True God Tier at minimum.
Out of the five thousand, there were seven hundred and thirty-nine Divine Auras. He felt each one register as it emerged. Although there were no Sixteen-Winged Angels, there were a lot of God Tier Angels. Detailed stats are as follows:
Fourteen-Winged Angels: Seven
Twelve-Winged Angels: Dozens
Ten-Winged Angels: Hundred plus
For context: after the entire Demon Slayer Tournament, the strongest Castle Lords in the Castle Faction had peaked at Intermediate God Tier. The rulers of Aelith Kingdom and Nightreign Kingdom were the standouts.
One of them trained by the Elven Goddess Elunara herself, the other famous since the earliest days of this era. Still, both of them were only Intermediate Gods while Haru alone had thirty-nine High God Tier subordinates and three Supreme Gods.
…
Lysandra, Eveline, and Nova were still inside their evolution spheres when he checked on them. The golden light showed no signs of fading yet.
He left them to it and crossed to an open stretch of ground at the edge of the city square, pulling the Angel Reincarnation Pool blueprint from his storage ring. It was the one that had finally dropped after he'd spent long enough suspecting it never would.
He used it and the sixth Angel Reincarnation Pool rose from the ground, fully formed, its energy already cycling. Starting tomorrow: he would be able to recruit another thousand adult Angels per day from this pool.
He looked at it for a moment, then he thought about what Nova becoming an Eighteen-Winged Angel would mean, and what her becoming a Supreme Goddess after that would mean. It would be an ever-growing stack of God Level Pools producing thousands of God Tier Angels every day!
'Not yet.' He thought, 'But soon.'
…
The new pool was Level One by default so two Angels a day, with low probability for anything that had over two wings. For anyone else this would have been a meaningful limitation, but for Haru it was a fifteen-minute problem.
He fed 110 million Power Stones and just over a million Magic Crystals to it, and the pool climbed from Level One to Level Nine. The energy it had accumulated since being built was barely enough to sustain first-level output, so when he started the recruitment cycle it produced exactly two Angels. The recruitment time was exactly one hour and forty-seven minutes, the shortest he'd ever seen. He put one divine power crystal in and cleared the timer.
Two Four-Winged Angels stepped out of the light, 1.7 meters tall, peak Demigods, snow-white wings folded behind them.
"Praise you, Lord Almighty. May the Holy Light always be with you."
He nodded and sent them off. They'd need evolution blueprints to go further and the Arboriel campaign had produced plenty of those. Two-Winged and Four-Winged Angels throughout the empire had a path forward now, even if it would take some time.
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