Tim's POV
That feeling of praying has been annoying for months.
It started during the walking with forty-eight thousand people behind me, A pressure, is the best word for it.
Not pain, not urgency, not anything that demanded immediate attention. Just a persistent quality in the background of my awareness, like a sound at the edge of hearing.
I had ignored it because I was not a religious man, I had knew the Gods are just players, I had spent years inside a religious institution, had learned its theology and its magic and its internal politics, and had treated all of it as a system to understand and work with rather than a truth to believe. The Water God's church had given me skills and cover and access. It had not given me true faith.
But the feeling had gotten louder on the road home. Two months of walking through the Dragon Kingdom's countryside with a hundred thousand people following me, the feeling escalating from background noise to something that was occupying real mental real-estate, and on the morning of my twenty-third birthday it became something that my ongoing attempts to ignore it were not successfully managing.
My head was producing something that I could only describe as screaming, which was internal and non-verbal but was achieving the functional effect of screaming in terms of demanding response.
As I stopped walking.
The hundred thousand people behind me stopped walking as well.
I asked the nearest person if they had an idol I could borrow, to pray to.
The response was immediate and generous and produced a problem of abundance, the column behind me, had a significant representation of people who carried devotional objects, and a request from me, had everyone who had an idol, showed them to me as they wanted theirs to be the one selected. A dozen were extended toward me simultaneously, each offered with the hopeful expression of someone who would like their particular deity to be the one considered appropriate for this moment.
I looked at them.
The idol of Alah Alaf, the life god, was in the third hand extended to me, a carved figure in pale stone, simply made, the craftsmanship modest but the care of the making visible in the specifics. I took it because it was the nicest looking. Not for theological reasons. Not out of preference or faith or any factor more sophisticated than aesthetic response to an object.
I went to my knees.
I had prayed before, technically, the church had required the forms of prayer and I had performed them with the competent emptiness of someone executing a required routine. This was different. The feeling in my head was demanding something that the forms alone wouldn't satisfy, and I was going to give it whatever it was asking for because I wanted the screaming to stop.
I prayed.
The light started from inside me, That was the first thing that was wrong, or not wrong, but unexpected, starting at the centre and moving outward through every system of my body simultaneously.
White, Pure white, My body was the source of it. My body was becoming something else, the transformation proceeding with the unhurried certainty of a process that had been waiting for permission and had now received it.
I looked down at myself.
A robe. Long, pale, covering me completely. The specific garment of the divine iconography I had been looking at in churches for years, the form that the life god Alah Alaf [level 80] was depicted wearing in every representation I had ever seen.
I looked at my hands.
They were pale hands, But the light was coming through the skin.
Around me, the hundred thousand people were on their knees. The movement had been spontaneous and total, as a wave, the people in the front going to their knees first and the information travelling back.
They were praying.
To me.
As I was too busy to notice.
*Is this a permanent transformation or a temporary state?*
The question was the most immediately useful one I could ask myself, If this was a one-time ability, a single activation of something I would not have access to again, then the correct response was to use it as completely and immediately as possible. If it was a permanent or repeatable change, then nothing will be lost.
The feeling of the power available to me was unlike anything I had encountered in twenty-three years of this life, This was something operating at a different scale entirely, the scale of the tier ten spells I could feel waiting in my awareness, the circle forming above me before I had consciously decided to cast it.
If this is a one-time ability, than I'm going to explout it.
I raised my arms.
---
The spell circle was enormous.
Tier ten holy magic, *Summon Angel*, the circle forming in the air above me, as the people nearest me stepping back not from instruction but from the instinctive response to being very close to something very large that was actively manifesting.
Five minutes.
The casting time of tier ten magic was not the instantaneous execution of lower-tier spells. The circle held its formation while the magic built to the threshold required, and I held the focus of it with the specific attention of someone running a process that required continuous input rather than initial instruction and release. The hundred thousand people around me were in their knees. The road was silent except for the sound of the spell working.
The Seraph Empyrean arrived.
Words were inadequate for scale. The tier seven angels I had been working with for years were large, larger than buildings, larger than the orphanage. The Seraph Empyrean made the tier seven angels look small, in the way that adults made children look small, its presence reorganising the ambient air and light of the entire surrounding area.
Wings. Multiple pairs. The specific configuration of the highest angelic rank, not the two wings of the common depictions but the multiple-pair arrangement that indicated something above the standard angel classification.
It looked at me.
I raised my arms and began the second casting, with a smile on my face.
---
Thousand Leagues Astrologer's POV [level 32], In a secert underground base.
I was watching Tim in horror.
My ability provided continuous observation of a target regardless of distance, the seven hundred leagues in my title being an approximate indicator of my range rather than a hard limit, and I had been monitoring Tim for years.
Tim stopping on the road was normal, Tim asking for an idol was unusual. Tim going to his knees was the first thing that activated the part of my awareness that flagged me that something was wrong, Tim never prays, in the years I watch him, he never prayed once.
Then the light started.
I have seen magical transformations before, I have seen tier magic at every tier in the world. I have seen combat between individuals operating at the very top of what human beings could produce in this world. I have seen the aftermath of the frost dragon's death and the Black Scripture's operation and the Grand Arena match.
I had not seen a human being become the physical form of a god.
The robe. The light from inside the body. The hundred thousand people going to their knees in the simultaneous wave of it. And then the spell circle forming above Tim and the specific geometry of it, the tier relationship to spell circle size was something every magical practitioner understood as a reference scale, and the circle forming above Tim was not fitting into the reference scale at any tier I had personal knowledge of.
I ran.
My heels on the stone of the underground facility were loud and I did not care about being loud. The meeting room door opened under my palm, as I slamed it open, and the Supreme Executive Council turned to look at me, as their meeting was interrupted.
I told them what I had seen.
The transformation. The unknown God-tier magic, The angels, YES plural, because the second casting had begun by the time I ran, the second enormous spell circle forming alongside the first completed summoning.
The room turned into a shouting match in the time it took me to finish the summary.
The water cardinal said maybe the god-kin blood inside awaken, and unlocked the divine form.
The earth cardinal said something worse, that maybe it was a talent, not blood, a capability that wasn't inherited but intrinsic, that could access any god's ability rather than one specific line.
The air cardinal asked why Tim hadn't used it against us during the cathedral operation, which was the question I had also been asking myself and which produced a cascade of competing theories that added to the volume.
The Pontifex Maximus raised his hand.
The room quieted.
He told me to keep watching, To Record Everything. To bring him complete information before anyone drew additional conclusions.
I nodded and walked back to my room with the specific composure of someone holding themselves together through professional discipline while worried about the next time Tim finds them.
I was the Thousand Leagues Astrologer. I had seen many things across many years of this work.
I had never written a report that began with *the subject has become a god.*
I sat at my desk, arranged my materials, and began writing.
---
Tsaindorcus Vaision's POV [level 100] [Platinum Dragon Lord]
I was asleep.
I had been asleep for three days, which was short for a dragon and felt shorter still when I felt the first tier ten spell in years, as it woke me.
I did not rise immediately. I was old and very large and rising immediately from sleep required more activation energy than it had when I was young, and I had learned across centuries that the first response to unexpected information was to assess rather than act.
I felt the tier ten spell with the specific sensory capability that my nature provided, not seeing it, not hearing it.
Players.
The thought arrived with the weight of the fear I had been managing for a very long time, the fear of the day Yggdrasil players arrived in this world, with their levels and their items and their incomprehensible capabilities, the day that my preparations would either be sufficient or would not be and the world would learn which.
I checked the timeline in my memory with the care of someone who had been maintaining the calculation for years.
Seven years too early.
The discrepancy was large enough to be significant. I relaxed fractionally, the way one relaxed when a threat had not arrived on schedule but the evidence of something unusual was still present. Either my timeline was wrong, impossible, the calculation had been prefect, or maybe it was a bad dream that made my sences go haywire....?
I settled back toward my sleep.
The second tier ten spell arrived.
I was Fully Awake Now.
Two tier ten spells in sequence, the same location, the same source. Not residual discharge. Not an artifact activation. Active casting, which required something capable of active tier ten casting, which required either a player or something that had no business existing in this world by my previous assessments.
I activated the puppet.
The Platinum Dragon armor [level 80] had been waiting in its designated location with the patience of an object, and I inhabited it with the attention of someone engaging the instrument they maintained for exactly this category of event. The armored form rose and oriented and I began moving it toward the source of what I had felt.
My mind was already running through the catalogue of things that should not be capable of tier ten casting in this world at this time and was finding the list much shorter than I wanted.
Whatever was out there, it had done this twice in the last ten minutes.
That meant it was probably going to do it again.
I moved faster before I was too late.
---
Tim
[level 97]
The god of life Alah Alaf
[level 80]