He pulled the Armor from his Godhead and turned it over. The distinction was worth thinking about. Most artifacts, including the Wings of Scarlet Ruin he'd taken from Dantean, were static. No matter how much Divine Crystals he fed into them, their rank wouldn't budge.
Improving them required an expert artifact smith and massive quantities of God Level metal for reforging. It was a complicated, expensive, uncertain process.
The Scepter of Sovereignty and the Armor of Sovereignty were different. They had come from the GM as rewards and were classified as growth artifacts, upgradeable purely through Divine Crystals. No smith required and no materials beyond the Divine Crystals themselves.
A Lower True God Tier Growth Artifact could theoretically become a Supreme God Tier Artifact given enough resources. That was the gap between them and everything else he carried.
Currently: the Scepter was a top-level High God Tier Artifact, while the Armor was an intermediate-level High God Tier Artifact, two levels behind. He had roughly 3.7 million Divine Crystals. Upgrading the Scepter to a Supreme God Tier Artifact would require ten million, which was out of his reach for now.
But the Armor could be brought up first. He used 500,000 Divine Crystals to push it to a high-level High God Tier Artifact. Its defensive strength more than doubled. He used another 800,000 to push it to the top-level, matching the Scepter.
[Armor of Sovereignty]
[Top-level High God Tier Artifact]
[Defense: 1,000,000 points.]
[Upgrade requirement: 10,000,000 Divine Crystals.]
[Next level: Low-level Supreme God Tier Artifact.]
Now, even a peak High God attacking with their full strength wouldn't break through his defense. Combined with his own Supreme God Tier Divine Power, his actual defense became considerably more absurd.
Now, he had just more than 1.95 Million Divine Crystals remaining. Not enough for either artifact to reach Supreme God Tier. Not even close. The math was simple: ten million crystals per artifact, roughly two million in reserve. He needed around eighteen million more to upgrade both.
(T/N: I know the math isn't 'mathing' here as he has 3.7 million, spent 1.3 million and now has 1.95 million, but this author has been pretty accurate with numbers, so I'm guessing some of it is spent on other things like recovery of God Tier Angels. He'll either give account of this amount later or we consider this to be a healing cost for God Tier troops.)
As for the question of where to get these eighteen million Divine Crystals? The hundreds of thousands of artifacts sitting in his storage were the answer. Most were damaged, all from the demons, all carrying the Divine Law of Abyss that would put off any buyer who couldn't handle that energy.
But what if he purged the law before sale—which he could do cleanly, since the purged law would simply feed back into his own origin of the Abyss Law—buyers could instill their own Divine Law afterward.
The artifacts would be fully usable and selling all of them could net tens of millions of Divine Crystals, possibly more. Easily enough to upgrade both of his artifacts with room to spare.
He'd been thinking about it as a large-scale auction, an organized event, open to Castle Lords and Rangers flush from the contest, plus any native empire buyers he could reach out to. The more bidders, the better the prices. For now, he needed to find buyers loaded in cash, but lacking Divine Artifacts.
He remembered that the Ice Queen Eira had promised to reach out to her contacts in the local empires about purchasing Divine Remains from his earlier hauls. There was no word about that yet and he'd learned not to rely on a single channel.
He took out the jade card the Elunara had given him, a direct line that worked across dimensions, and reached out. She took a moment to respond. When she did, her voice carried the focused distance of someone mid-preparation.
She said, "I'm about to try ascending to the peak of the Supreme God Tier."
Svetlana had given her something at their last meeting—a blessing or an insight, enough to make Elunara confident she could break through in one attempt. When she emerged, she'd be the most powerful peak Supreme Goddess on the Endless Continent.
'Do I tell her?' Haru pondered, 'Nah, she's an ally. I shouldn't tell her that Celestia is chasing the same milestone and that she would emerge as a pseudo God Queen and not your average peak Supreme Goddess. The poor girl might lose her sanity.'
"I'll be brief," he said. "I returned from Arboriel with hundreds of thousands of artifacts. Does Your Holiness have any interest?"
She replied after a pause, "Is this a gift between allies?"
"No."
After another pause, this time shorter, she replied, "I can't afford them."
The Pantheons of Faith were really too poor. Their only source of Divine Crystals was either from their own bases or through constant accumulation of 'faith'. That's why only the Titan Pantheon and the Dragon Pantheon were the only rich Pantheons of Faith. Everyone else barely scraped by.
"I'm looking for buyers," Haru said. "Does Your Holiness know anyone who needs artifacts?"
Elunara raised an eyebrow, he could almost hear it in the brief silence, "What does the Nature Pantheon receive for making introductions?"
"We're allies."
A pause that lasted exactly long enough to communicate what she thought of that answer occurred. He had just declined to give a few Artifacts as gifts and was now invoking their alliance to ask for a favor. The irony was not lost on her.
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