Tsaindorcus Vaision's POV [Armor] [level 80]
The flight to the source took longer than I wanted.
I had been moving the puppet at maximum speed, which was not the speed I could achieve in my true form but was sufficient for most situations that required urgent response.
The world below passed in a blur, the landscape readable but not detailed, the geography providing orientation rather than information.
What I found when I arrived was not what I had prepared myself for finding.
I had prepared for a New player. For the specific combination of power and foreignness that players produced when they arrived in this world, the signature I had been studying and cataloguing and preparing countermeasures for across decades of careful work.
The Yggdrasil items, the incomprehensible level structures, the casual deployment of magic that this world's practitioners spent lifetimes approaching and never reaching.
What I found was the life god Alah Alaf, standing on a road in the Dragon Kingdom's hinterlands, surrounded by a hundred thousand kneeling humans, summoning angels.
Not a depiction of Alah Alaf. Not a person wearing the aesthetic of Alah Alaf. But The actual human, the actual divine presence, the soul light coming from inside the body was real.
But Alah Alaf was dead.
I had known this with the certainty of someone who had been alive when it happened, the Six Great Gods had all died. Not all of them in the same event, not simultaneously, Alah Alaf, the life god, had died of old age hundreds of years ago, who had lived as a human lived and therefore died as a human died. The death had been documented. The absence had been felt.
So how was Alah Alaf standing on a road summoning tier ten angels?
I descended.
The armor landed in front of the figure with the controlled impact of a practiced deployment. I was aware of the hundred thousand people around us as a factor that required management, I was not going to do anything violent in front of a hundred thousand witnesses regardless of what the situation required, because that kind of information will spread in ways I could not control.
"Greeting, my name is Riku Aganeia, may I know your name?"
I gave my false name. Riku Aganeia.
The figure looked at me. The divine form was still present but fading, I could see the transition beginning, the light receding, the robe disappering, the time the response came, the figure was a differet human. Young. Male.
"The name's Tim, and what do YOU want"
Tim.
The name arrived with the connection to information I already heard.
Rigrit had mentioned this name, had described a young man whose power approached hers, whose existence she had found interesting enough to track, The fight over her ring.
I deployed soul sense.
The soul I was looking at was massive.
Nearly as large as mine.
I am Tsaindorcus Vaision. I have been accumulating for centuries. The soul I have built represents centuries of deliberate development in the specific disciplines I have chosen, the work of a very long life applied with great intelligence and purpose.
This human was perhaps twenty years old and his soul was nearly as large as mine.
The question of whether I should kill him now presented itself with the clarity that serious threats always presented, and I held it with the equanimity I had developed across centuries of making decisions about serious threats.
Could I kill him? Possibly. The puppet armor had capabilities that this human might not be prepared for...
Should I kill him?
The twenty tier ten angels circling above him suggested he had resources available that exceeded what I was currently deploying.
He had not done anything threatening.
The question of whether he was more valuable as an ally or more dangerous as a threat, The Players will show in Seven years, better to leave him for now.
I filed everything. Made the decision to gather more information before making permanent decisions and Flew away.
---
Tim's POV [level 97]
Tsaindorcus Vaision had come to me, given me a false name I already knew was false, looked at me for five minutes with the specific attention of someone running an evaluation, and left.
I watched the armor disappear into the distance and thought about what it meant that the Platinum Dragon Lord had felt tier ten magic, come to investigate, found me, assessed me, and left without taking action.
He had decided something. What he had decided, I couldn't confirm. But the decision had been *leave* rather than *act,* , is he bring his True form here....?
---
The god transformation had lasted exactly one hour from activation to return. I was standing on a road in my regular form with twenty tier ten Seraph Empyreans circling above the column, the people around me still in various stages of prayer and reverence and the specific wide-eyed quality of having watched something happen that they were going to be telling stories about for the rest of their lives.
I told them to get up, as it's time to move.
We had a week of walking remaining.
---
The voice returned the next morning with the same compulsive quality that had driven me to pray in the first place.
Once per day, For One hour, the form of whatever god I prayed to, with access to that god's capabilities and knowledge.
The implications were significant enough that I was spending the walking hours thinking about them systematically.
The air god's idol was the choice the next morning, Kikotenshin Nekonyan, a name I had encountered in the church's theological texts and whose depiction I had studied without expecting it to become personally relevant.
The transformation produced a different form entirely from Alah Alaf's robed figure: a male humanoid with blue hair and white armor with gold adornments that I looked at and recognised immediately.
The paladin armor I had taken from Zesshi. The armor I had assumed was a player item or a high-tier New World creation.
It had been made for the air god.
Or rather, it was the air god's armor.
The golem knowledge that arrived with the air god transformation was immediate and comprehensive, the complete theoretical and practical framework for creating constructs, from the simplest earth-bound models to things considerably more complex. I pulled my book out, writing as fast as the transformation's enhanced processing allowed, transcribing everything before the return to normal form could take it.
The rain that came was inconvenient, a simple Tier six weather control removed the rain, which was the most powerful weather manipulation magic I had ever used and people prayed harder, what a nice sunny day.
Third day: earth god. The form provided structural and geological knowledge that I would need weeks to fully process from the notes I took during the hour. The earth god's capabilities included terrain manipulation at scales that made the dwarf fortress construction look modest.
Fourth day: water god. The Water God's church had spent fifteen years teaching me the theology and magic of this divine figure, and the transformation confirmed some of what they had taught and revised considerably more. The water god's actual magical focus was not the healing-emphasis that the church had built its identity around but deadly world-ending water spells.
Fifth day: fire god. Combat-oriented in ways the others had not been. The fire god's knowledge was the most immediately applicable to the situations I spent most of my operational time in, and I took notes with the specific appreciation of someone who had been developing magical combat capability for years and was receiving a significant update.
Sixth day: death god.
Nothing.
I tried twice, making sure the failure was real rather than procedural. The idol, the prayer, the genuine attempt at the same internal state that had produced the five successful transformations. Nothing arrived. The pressure in my head that preceded the daily activation was present, but the transformation was not.
The death god Surshana was undead.
Maybe I am alive and I can't undead, or maybe I could only transform to human gods....?
Five out of six. I filed this as useful boundary information and continued walking.
---
A day later....
E-Rantel appeared on the horizon after a week exactly, the familiar silhouette of the walls and towers that had been the background of my entire life in this world.
I thought about what to do with them on the final approach.
The hundred thousand people following me, what do with them...?
They had started calling me things.
Avatar of the gods.
Child of the gods.
The Chosen of the Gods.
I was going to have to figure out what to do with the religious movement that appeared to be forming around me, which was not a problem I had planned for.
---
The Pontifex Maximus's POV [level 33]
The papers were in front of me and the cardinals were around the table and the room had been maintaining their composure through a long series of difficult intelligence reports and had reached the current report and found it beyond what composure could be maintained through.
The Thousand Leagues Astrologer's reporting was thorough. She was the best I had, in this role specifically, and her documentation of what she had observed across the week of Tim's return journey was complete.
Day one: transformation to the form of Alah Alaf, the life god. Tier ten summon angel, cast twice, producing entities the Astrologer described as significantly larger than the tier seven angels the Theocracy's own equipment could produce.
Day two: transformation to the form of Kikotenshin Nekonyan, the air god. Tier six weather control demonstrated. Extended note-taking during the transformation period suggesting the subject was recording knowledge acquired in the divine form.
Day three: transformation to the form of the earth god.
Day four: transformation to the form of the water god.
Day five: transformation to the form of the fire god.
Day six: attempted transformation to the form of the death god Sursana. No transformation observed.
Five gods. One failed attempt.
The pattern was legible once the reports were assembled in sequence. I looked at it with the attention I applied to intelligence that required genuine analysis.
God-kin blood was the first hypothesis, the theory that human bloodlines occasionally carried divine heritage from the historical period when gods and humans had breed more directly than they did now, producing rare individuals whose bloodlines contained traces of divine capability that could, under the right conditions, be activated.
We had been pursuing this theory for Tim for years. The danger level scans, the reports from the orphanage, the cathedral operation, the lost children who had all developed hero rank under his care, every data point had been fed into the god-kin hypothesis as the most likely explanation for a human being who had achieved what Tim had achieved.
The pattern of the transformations resolved the hypothesis into something more specific than god-kin in the general sense.
Five gods. Not one. Not two. Five simultaneous divine bloodlines present in a single human being, each one sufficient to produce the transformation, each one apparently activated in sequence as Tim discovered the capability and tested its range.
The probability calculation for five separate divine bloodlines converging in a single person was the kind of probability that existed on paper rather than in practice, the kind of number that appeared in theoretical discussions of genetic impossibility of 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance.
Tim had achieved it anyway.
The failure on the death god provided the confirmation that made the pattern coherent: Sursana was undead, had no biological lineage, could not have contributed a human bloodline. The five gods who had chosen to exist in mortal forms, who had lived and aged and died within the human experience, had left the biological traces that their divine natures had passed to their descendants across centuries of dilution and recombination.
Tim had all five. Somehow.
I looked at the cardinals in worry.
We had been too late for take in Tim.
The cathedral operation had been our last genuine opportunity, and the shadow clone had defeated it before we understood what we were working against.
Every subsequent opportunity had closed as Tim's capability exceeded the resources we were willing to commit to the problem, and the capability had been exceeding our commitment so consistently that the pattern had become its own message.
The most gifted god-kin in human history. Not in this generation. Not in recorded history. But In all of human history.
And he hated us.
The cardinals were looking at the papers and looking at each other and the shame in the room was form the consistently wrong decisions across two decades.
I folded my hands on the table.
The meeting continued, as we moved on to other matters.
---
Tim [level 97]