Chapter 837: No Game No Life Six Thousand Years Later, The Return of the God of Doubt
After establishing the temple, Ren didn't just sit back and relax. He still had one crucial matter left to address—a lingering thought that had struck him when that Almighty Power had attacked Shuvi not too long ago.
According to the original timeline, six millennia from now, souls bearing striking similarities to Shuvi, Riku, and Corone were destined to appear. They would be similar, yet fundamentally different. Shiro, Stephanie Dola, and the rest of that colorful cast were supposed to take the stage.
However, his very existence threw a massive wrench into the gears of fate. By simply standing in this world, his unique presence anchored all future events, forcing the timeline to branch out directly from his feet. The future was now dictated entirely by his location and actions.
Consequently, that specific timeline six thousand years in the future would cease to exist. After all, Shuvi had never interacted with Riku, Tet the God of Play hadn't been born, and the ten absolute pledges that would shape the new world remained unwritten. Naturally, Shiro and the others wouldn't be born either.
But now that the thought had crossed his mind, simply abandoning Shiro, Stephanie, and the rest was completely out of the question. Every single one of those girls was either adorably cute or stunningly beautiful. As a pragmatic man who knew exactly what he wanted, he had absolutely no reason not to pull them all into his embrace.
Besides, weaving a specialized timeline six thousand years into the future wasn't exactly a difficult task for someone wielding his level of authority. His only real concern was ensuring the absolute authenticity of Shiro, Stephanie, and the others. He didn't want mere fabricated replicas or hollow clones; he wanted the true girls.
And honestly? Even that wasn't too difficult for him to pull off.
"First things first. There's someone else I can scoop up right now," Ren murmured, a faint smirk playing on his lips.
He wasn't in any rush to forge a new worldline just yet. Instead, he casually raised his hand, his fingers slicing through the empty air as he reached deep into the very fabric of the world itself, pulling something out.
"What exactly are you doing now?" Luo Hao asked, her sharp eyes narrowing in curiosity.
From the Cult Master's perspective, Ren had simply thrust his hand into the empty void and dragged out a shimmering, illusory ribbon of pure energy—something so deeply abstract that even her formidable martial senses couldn't fully grasp or manipulate it.
"This right here is a Divine Essence," Ren explained, his gaze fixed on the glowing ribbon wrapped around his fingers.
The Divine Essence was a fundamental building block of this reality, inextricably linked to the Old Deus—the supreme beings who sat at the absolute pinnacle of the Exceed, the sixteen sentient races. The Old Deus were not mere biological entities; they were living embodiments of concepts. Each god represented a singular, absolute ideal, born from and sustained by the collective emotions, desires, and beliefs of the world's inhabitants.
Take Tet, for instance. The God of Play, who was originally destined to claim the Star Cup, was born entirely from Riku Dola's imagination, manifesting the pure concept of games. Then there was Artosh, the God of War—who had recently been subjected to Jibril's rather aggressive brand of 'filial piety'—born from the world's overwhelming, blood-soaked desire for conflict and slaughter.
If an Old Deus lost the faith and conceptual anchor that sustained them, and suffered a catastrophic blow on top of that, they could actually be killed. The sheer, overwhelming might of an Old Deus stemmed directly from the concept embedded within their Divine Essence. Their overall strength fluctuated based on how closely their defining concept mirrored the current reality of the world.
Artosh was the perfect example. During the Great War, he ascended to become the strongest of the Old Deus by gorging himself on the endless bloodshed, hatred, and violence that saturated the planet. His Divine Essence was intrinsically tied to war itself. Even if his raw power was somehow reduced to a mere thirty-three percent of its absolute peak, Artosh's might during an era of active warfare would still eclipse almost any other Old Deus.
While the Old Deus were undeniably the strongest race on a complete scale, their raw magical capacity was technically only the second largest in existence—surpassed only by the planet itself. After all, the Spirit Corridor that wrapped around the globe was the true, infinite source of all magic.
However, the Old Deus possessed the terrifying ability to create entirely new species from scratch. The innate strength of these created beings was directly proportional to the power of the god who forged them. Throughout the Great War, various Old Deus engineered their own bespoke races to act as their weapons, all in a desperate bid to seize the sole divine position, which later defined the hierarchy of the Exceed.
Yet, not every race was born from divine hands. Humanity, for instance, had simply evolved naturally, crawling their way up from the dirt without any magical or divine intervention. Because the power levels of the Old Deus varied wildly, the strength of their respective creations naturally followed suit. The sheer disparity in combat power between the Flügel, the Ex Machina, and the Werebeasts was glaring proof of that fact.
also, the strength of an individual creation could fluctuate heavily depending on the exact era of their birth. Jibril, having been forged by the God of War during the absolute zenith of his power, possessed a terrifying level of comprehension and combat intuition that the rest of the Flügel completely lacked. Meanwhile, Azriel, who currently ruled over the entire Flügel race, boasted a peak combat power that remained utterly unrivaled among her winged kin.
But the Old Deus possessed one more defining trait: eternal life. As the absolute apex of the upper races, they were ageless, immortal, and fundamentally indestructible. They would only truly disappear if they suffered a devastating conceptual blow, lost all their worshippers, or had their Divine Essence completely inactivated.
The shimmering Divine Essence Ren had just plucked from the void belonged to one such 'dead' Old Deus.
His eyes gleamed with a calculating light as he channeled his own overwhelming power into the ethereal ribbon, forcibly jumpstarting the dormant core.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The Divine Essence slipped from his fingers, floating upward like a feather caught in an updraft. Right before their eyes, the abstract ribbon of energy began to twist, fold, and rapidly reshape itself into a distinct, humanoid silhouette.
"It's... a person," Luo Hao murmured, genuine surprise flickering across her elegant features. The mysterious energy ribbon she couldn't comprehend just moments ago had miraculously condensed into the form of a young girl, suspended gracefully in mid-air.
However, calling her 'human' felt like a gross understatement.
The young girl floated effortlessly in the void, seated upon a massive, person-sized inkwell. She rested her cheek lazily against one hand, her posture exuding an aura of ancient, detached apathy. She was draped in elegant, flowing garments reminiscent of traditional East Asian attire, and her free hand loosely gripped a long, well-worn calligraphy brush. Behind her back, countless parchment scrolls unfurled and fluttered like a pair of ethereal wings or a veil of thin gauze.
Slowly, she raised her head, her cold, iron-colored eyes locking onto Ren with an unblinking stare.
[Question: Why have I awakened?] she asked.
Her voice was crystal-clear, chiming with the pristine, melodic quality of water droplets colliding against polished glass.
Her tone perfectly matched her true identity. She was the Old Deus who had created the Ex Machina. In an incredibly distant, ancient era, she had already been 'inactivated'—her Divine Essence completely stripped away and rendered dormant. She had been gone for so long that even her own creations, the Ex Machina, had completely forgotten her name.
Because she couldn't comprehend what a 'god'truly was, nor understand the reason for her own birth, she had been consumed by an agonizing loneliness. With no one around to answer her endless questions, the girl had indifferently sought out a'speaking partner.'
To that end, she had forged five small machines. Four of these machines were designed for specific functions: observation, analysis, argumentation, and correspondence. The fifth machine was created solely to command and coordinate the other four.
Thrust into a primordial world utterly devoid of higher intelligence, these machines were forced to make their own self-judgments, desperately attempting to 'create intelligence' from scratch. However, what she truly longed for wasn't just a basic artificial mind. She craved a true respondent—a speaking partner capable of answering the infinite, gnawing questions that plagued her existence.
The machines, of course, possessed a form of intelligence. But they fundamentally lacked the one thing the girl possessed: a soul. Her insatiable thirst for knowledge was the very foundation of her Divine Essence. Her core concept was the embodiment of doubt and hope, magnified to an absolute extreme.
Whether it was crippling doubt or burning desire. Whether it was cold rejection or desperate hope. Every single one of these conflicting emotions fed into her, exponentially increasing her power. Assuming the core coordinates of her Divine Essence existed on a constantly fluctuating dimension of 13 + iR, she possessed a truly complex, staggeringly complex intellect.
The massive inkwell she sat upon wasn't just a prop; it was her true form, the physical manifestation of her Divine Essence as perceived by the lower races.
This girl was Holou, the God of Doubt. She was an entity who had existed long before the world had even fully taken shape—an Old Deus hailing from an unimaginably distant, primordial era.
She was, at her core, just a lonely girl. Because she couldn't understand the concept of a god, nor fathom the reason for her own existence, she had fallen into a spiral of absolute self-negation. In the end, that crushing doubt led her to pierce through her own Divine Essence.
But her core hadn't truly disappeared. It had merely fragmented and separated, slipping into a deep state of pseudo-inactivation.
And now, she had been dragged back into the waking world. Her return was entirely Ren's doing.
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