Witch, Fireball and Steam Evil God

Chapter 365 Divine Factor

"...divine factor."

Ignoring the splitting headache she felt when she exited the "dream," Zhuang Xiao spoke the moment she opened her eyes, her intuition telling her that this was extremely important information.

"Finally, there's been progress. Thank you for your hard work, Colonel Zhuang Xiao."

Merlin had been repeatedly reading the book "City of Truth" in his hands while Zhuang Xiao entered the dream. This parchment book, which revealed the fate of the City of Truth, was based on information he had obtained from Zhuang Xiao and Chen Qi. He judged that the City of Truth in the dream was currently in a honeymoon period of relations between the Democratic Parliament and the Empire.

The two sides are frequently exchanging information about their two worlds through dreams.

"Boom boom boom, boom boom boom."

The knocking came unexpectedly.

"Please come in"

Sitting near the office door, Zhuang Xiao vaguely saw a familiar figure. As members of the same batch of "pioneers," she and Song Xian had almost no further communication after returning to the shelter. After the chip's influence was removed, their original identities in the shelter had no overlap, and they did not belong to the same department.

Song Xian seemed to have a lot of work to do as well, and she almost never saw Song Xian in the public areas of the shelter.

After entering, he and Merlin didn't exchange many words. Merlin wrote a few words on a piece of paper and handed it to Song Xian. The latter calmly put the paper into the inside pocket of his clothes, and then piled a stack of documents on Merlin's desk as if nothing had happened, making it look like a normal handover between different departments.

As Song Xian left, the office door closed again, and the room returned to silence. Merlin then said, "Let him investigate the matter of the divine factor. You can get a good night's sleep now... Would you like to have lunch with me?"

"This book is also his..."

Zhuang Xiao suddenly understood something.

Merlin remained silent, which at that moment was tantamount to acquiescence.

“I tried to see Winter, but she didn’t seem to remember anything about the guild, and she also forgot about the existence of the Sanctuary.”

“This is not surprising; it aligns with Song Xian’s view.”

"he?"

“He felt that although Winter looked exactly like the ‘Goddess’, he felt that they were two different people. He also heard some interesting rumors when he was in the Empire. Ethan seemed to think that the Goddess was the ‘future Winter’.”

Of course, from a scientific point of view, this touches on the paradox of spacetime. Many books in Vault have put forward the famous grandfather paradox. The mainstream view is that even if someone really has the ability to travel through spacetime, they can never make their two selves in different worlds meet.

The ability to time, seemingly mysterious and omnipotent, also has many limitations.

The establishment of the shelter, the destruction of the City of Truth, and the starship mentioned in the parchment being sent to the "other world"—in terms of action, the Democratic Council has far surpassed the "Pioneering Plan." They genuinely believed that the starship could traverse the distance between star systems and reach another star system with a highly advanced civilization.

With Zhuang Xiao bringing back the concept of "divine factors," Merlin suddenly felt that perhaps the issue of the order of time was the key to everything.

Seeing that Merlin had fallen silent again, Zhuang Xiao asked, "What are you thinking?"

"I don't believe Winter is human."

Merlin spoke his mind, then suddenly realized that his words might be ambiguous, so he explained, "At least she is different from us; she is not a pure-blooded human."

Their long life in the "other world" was enough for them to become aware of this.

No matter what power the guild leaders acquire or how many planes they rule, they can never become true "gods." In fact, the more they understand power and the closer they get to that supreme being, the more they understand the insurmountable gap between the two. They will always only have the right to use those abilities.

To use a gaming term, after completing the main quest to find the goddess, each of them only received one opportunity for advancement in their cultivation, which made them far surpass the saints, perhaps the limit that humans can reach.

Going a step further, it is the existence that determines the path and the rules.

The goddess who shares power with them, and the ancient gods whose true whereabouts remain unknown to this day, all belong to that level.

“You are the only one among us who has truly dealt with the Old Gods, so you should understand the difference better than any of us… And Winter, she possessed a talent that none of us had from the very beginning.”

However, all of this is beyond their current understanding.

In the minds of the shelter residents, they live in a world without mysticism or supernatural events. They believe only in the power of science, and even the concept of "superpowered individuals" has never appeared in their lives. Therefore, even members of the shelter committee need security personnel to protect them, and those people are always equipped with the best equipment.

But now, Merlin feels he has discovered something amiss in this world.

"If you go into the Democratic Parliament, you might see a familiar figure there."

"……how do you know?"

That's what the book says.

Merlin waved the parchment in his hand, “The believer of the God of Truth who wrote this book has met every member of the Democratic Council.”

According to scientific theory, the original members of the Democratic Parliament would never have survived to this day.

........................

Meanwhile, on the other side.

Ethan's investigation also ran into difficulties.

After getting up, he once again followed Winter to visit Professor Carl, who was a portly man who eagerly shared his insights from rereading "The City of Truth."

Mrs. Vince breathed a sigh of relief. After exclaiming, "Thank goodness you've finally arrived," she affectionately pulled Winter into the living room for a chat. She was very interested in the life in the "dream."

But it absolutely does not include politics, conspiracy theories, or beliefs.

She was satisfied with her husband most of the time, and their married life was mostly happy. However, as a believer in the God of Truth, Karl inevitably fell into a state of madness at times.

Carl has been obsessed ever since Ethan left.

Moreover, this bout of madness lasted exceptionally long. He first locked himself in his study for an entire day, and then, in a neurotic manner, dragged her to discuss the conspiracy of the Democratic Parliament. In reality, however, she had absolutely no interest in the "ideal state" that the believers of the God of Truth longed for.

Being dragged into a conversation for hours about topics she had absolutely no interest in was sheer torture for Mrs. Vince.

“Ethan, the perspective you offered last time inspired me. I’m trying to interpret the actions of the Democratic Parliament from the perspective of the evil side.”

Professor Karl was dressed casually in striped pajamas, which were full of wrinkles. "I found that they showed great interest in various faiths and doctrines. They even invited philosophers to spread the faith of the God of Truth to their chosen apprentices, but unsurprisingly, it ended in failure."

Ethan somewhat understood Mrs. Vince's pain. Once Professor Carl started talking, he was like a wild horse, unstoppable. Even if you didn't answer him, he could keep the conversation going by asking and answering his own questions.

Since arriving in the study, Professor Karl has been rambling on to himself for almost an hour.

Ethan, a polite young man, didn't want to spoil Professor Carl's fun, so when the other paused, he followed up the conversation by asking, "So, you think the Democratic Parliament actually wants the power of researching the Dao to be used for their own purposes?"

"Regarding this, the philosophers proposed two possibilities."

This question was exactly what Professor Karl wanted to hear, and he eagerly said, "Firstly, the power of the upright gods and intermediate gods cannot cross the 'dream' to affect the people in the City of Truth; secondly, the people of the Empire are physically different from the inhabitants there, and they are not naturally able to bear the blessing of the Daoist faith."

"Therefore, based on the second theory, the Democratic Parliament put forward a proposal: could they use some means, taking the residents of the Empire as a model, and through something called 'genetic technology,' transform the residents there into people with the same physique as the residents of the Empire?"

When the term "genetic technology" was mentioned, Professor Carl frowned because there was no detailed annotation on the term in "City of Truth." He could only conclude that it was a technology that a democratic parliament had long possessed. "It might sound somewhat similar to the human experiments promoted by the Vatican. You should know about the choir, right? Those children are selected from a young age and subjected to the transformation of 'the Word of God'."

At this point, he couldn't help but sigh, "One of my students had planned to follow up on and report on this matter, but a month later, his body was found in the suburbs of the capital."

"Please grief."

"He died in pursuit of the truth, and he died without regret."

Because of his students, Karl abhorred any behavior that might involve human experimentation, and this only made sense after he viewed the Democratic Parliament as the evil party.

This is the kind of tactic that evil forces would use.

Just like the Vatican, those children are merely expendable resources in the Pope's eyes to welcome the arrival of saints.

"The Democratic Parliament made a request to the philosophers, hoping they could provide them with a perfect sample to advance the experiment."

This could become a technology that goes down in history.

"He agreed?"

“They agreed, and the sage promised them that he would do his best to find a perfect sample.” Professor Karl paused for a moment, “but there are no records of this afterward.”

He had no way of knowing whether the philosophers had found the perfect model that met the requirements of a democratic parliament.

"My God, after thinking about it carefully from your perspective, I realized that the Democratic Parliament is absolutely rotten to the core! Of course, this is just one possibility, but I don't have any substantial evidence to prove these speculations."

Professor Carl believed that they were destined to find no evidence.

They had never been to the City of Truth in person; what they were doing was an interesting thought experiment. It was a pity he had left the Society of Truth, otherwise it would have been excellent teaching material.

Look at everything with a dialectical perspective.

They respect the philosophers who wrote "The City of Truth," but that doesn't mean all of their views are correct.

This is also why Ethan appreciates the believers of the God of Truth and is willing to communicate with them.

They are fundamentally different from the followers of the Goddess of Life. They won't glare at you when you question the scriptures, nor will they directly label you a follower of an evil god and burn you alive.

He will calmly sit down and think carefully about whether what you said makes sense.

Of course, if you make overly anti-intellectual remarks, you may be labeled an "idiot" by the followers of the God of Truth, thus receiving some harsh and sarcastic ridicule.

In modern terms, most followers of the God of Truth suffer from aversion to stupidity, and Ivy is no exception. According to Ethan's observation, the only difference is that Ivy has good manners and is too lazy to scold people after labeling them as "idiots".

This is easy to verify.

If you are working with the new cabinet and her, and one day you suddenly find yourself demoted several ranks and transferred to the lowest level position, or without warning you are transferred from the capital to a border city, then you have most likely been marked by Ivy.

In the first few months after the new cabinet was formed, all those who had entered the cabinet through family connections were purged by Ivy.

However, Ethan's reasons for coming here might be too advanced even for enlightened believers in the God of Truth.

These days he has been thinking about the God of Truth.

A white ball of light.

This is how the believers of the God of Truth describe Him, and it makes Ethan increasingly feel that there is something strange mixed in with the ranks of the upright and middle gods.

None of the old gods he knew knew where this large white orb of light came from, which shows that, from the perspective of faith and belief, the God of Truth is neither legitimate nor upright.

New problems arise.

Ethan knew that the "leaders of the path" were all at too high a level; they wouldn't pay attention to such trivial matters. And the God of Truth was never the first person they wanted to hate or eliminate. If you had to describe it, His existence was like a "glowing passerby" that the Old Gods casually crushed in the process of destroying the world.

Perhaps only the upright and intermediate gods who worked with the God of Truth know His origins, but the bad news is that the last intermediate god, the goddess of the hunt, Cynthia, decided to stay in the past for hundreds of years. She went to see Mekka-delin one last time, and there are no more records of her after that.

Therefore, Ethan had no choice but to try another approach: to sound out the senior believers of the God of Truth. If that didn't work, he would have to ask Winter if she could use her main account to help him.

After all, he has only just begun his research on the construction of "contaminated zones," so it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that he's a newbie seeking guidance.

"Professor Karl, there's actually another matter I'd like to ask you about."

"You said."

"Among the knowledge left by the God of Truth, is there a way to see Him?"

Ethan explained, “I know that similar rituals are practiced in both the Church of Life and the Nesseril Sanctuary.”

When a knight of the Nesseril Sanctuary obtains the Holy Sword, he has completed his audience with the Knight Lord.

"Meet in person?"

“You mentioned before that you briefly saw the God of Truth when the Vatican was persecuting you.”

"Theoretically, it's possible, but..."

Carl looked Ethan up and down. "Are you willing to become a follower of the God of Truth?"

(End of this chapter)