Chapter 470: The Goddess's Scheme

The tears in Ariel's eyes receded quickly. In the end, she didn't let them fall. Hearing Ambrose's question, she recited, word for word, the final message Monge Greywater had left behind.

This was something she wouldn't have shared with anyone else, but the strange "resemblance" between the two men had loosened her tongue without her quite meaning it to. Perhaps some part of her hoped this well-read, learned figure might offer some useful insight.

"Master Megaman, do you have any idea what those words might mean?" Ariel asked.

Ambrose nodded. "It seems fairly clear that this hero earned the favor of some particular deity, one too impatient to wait before drawing him into their divine realm, which would explain his abrupt death. As for which deity specifically, I really couldn't say. But this is good news in its own way. As the chosen of the Lord of Storms yourself, Your Highness, you're bound to enter his divine realm eventually as well.

"In the near future, you'll have all the time in eternity to search for this hero. With the Lord of Storms's reputation bolstering you, finding the answer shouldn't be especially difficult. For now, you should simply do what's expected of you. As long as you keep the Lord of Storms satisfied, your wish will resolve itself in time."

Ariel raised her head and let out a quiet sigh. "I did once try seeking the Lord of Storms's guidance on this matter myself. Unfortunately, he never gave me any response at all."

"That simply means the time hasn't come yet, Your Highness. The gods are omniscient and omnipotent. If he hasn't responded, there must be a reason. All the more reason to focus on doing what's right in front of you, and let fate take its time."

These words seemed to give Ariel strength. The light returned to the princess's eyes at last.

"You're right, Master Megaman. As a follower of the Lord of Storms, I should place serving my god above all else. I trust He already has a plan in motion."

Ambrose let out a quiet breath of relief. He'd cleared that particular hurdle, at least.

As long as Ariel didn't let her imagination run too far, their partnership would remain stable.

Meanwhile, tucked away in his corner, Heki Stone wore an expression of profound disdain directed squarely at Ambrose, and added another line to his notebook: "The lich always wears a counterfeit smile, his eyes carrying not a flicker of real warmth. His words are honeyed and pleasant to the ear, yet behind them lies nothing but boundless indifference and cold calculation. His heart lingers for no one save his own interests..."

Ambrose watched Heki Stone scribbling away with furious intensity and couldn't help asking, "What exactly are you writing now? I just had a conversation with the princess. Are you documenting that too? What does this have to do with my great undertaking?"

Heki Stone shook his head with an air of superiority. "This is exactly what you don't understand. Historical material requires detail, and only with sufficient detail can different accounts corroborate one another and establish authenticity. Don't worry about me. You go about your conversation. I'll go about my writing."

Ambrose genuinely wanted to kick the dwarven vampire down the deck. His diviner's instincts told him with total confidence that whatever rough draft Heki Stone was compiling was almost certainly riddled with selective quotations, predetermined conclusions, and outright slander. Unfortunately, he had no proof of any of it.

Still, this was a minor concern for the moment. Whatever Heki Stone was writing concerned "Megaman Tiga," not Ambrose himself.

Worst case, he'd simply switch identities again when the time came.

The Greywater lifted off. Ariel herself, having finally given voice to what had been weighing on her mind, now felt considerably lighter.

Some burdens really weren't that heavy in their own right. What made them unbearable was having no one to share them with.

Ariel felt as though a thousand-pound weight had been lifted from her shoulders. There was noticeably more warmth in her smile.

As they returned from the Sea of Storms to the Ragetide Kingdom, Ariel threw herself back into managing the alchemical factory, while Ambrose worked through the night studying the schematics the githarks had provided in full detail.

Mindflayers were extraordinarily skilled at staying hidden, which made them nearly impossible to track through conventional means, but their concealment depended entirely on their formidable psychic abilities.

And the moment any psychic ability was used, the githarks' "gemstone" would detect it.

Ambrose found himself genuinely impressed by the design of the gemstone, which was capable of detecting even the faintest fluctuations in psychic energy with remarkable sensitivity, and across an impressively long range at that.

A fitting tool, given that the githarks had once been the mindflayers' bitter enemies; they had clearly poured exhaustive effort into devising ways to hunt down their former masters.

The psychic-detection gemstone proved somewhat costly to produce. Ambrose failed twice before finally succeeding, burning through tens of thousands of gold in materials in the process.

The finished gem, roughly fist-sized and transparent, was set into the head of a staff. The moment it detected anyone using a mind-control spell, the crystal would turn red and form an arrow-shaped marking within its depths, pointing toward the source.

The closer the target, the deeper the color became.

The gem's detection range was roughly five kilometers. Flown over a stretch of land aboard an airship, it could sweep an enormous swath of territory in remarkably little time.

But the mindflayers weren't on the material plane at all. They had most likely been exiled to the chaos realm.

Space and time within the chaos realm were both thoroughly disordered, which made Ambrose uncertain about how effective this gemstone would even prove there.

Ambrose had no choice but to transmit the completed staff, along with its full schematics, to the Unholy Kingdom, hoping they could help solve that particular problem on their end.

He waited several days, but instead of good news from the Unholy Kingdom, what arrived was a piece of news that made him frown deeply.

Aige had sent an urgent signal from the Sea of Volcanoes. She was on the verge of ascending to godhood.

The news left Ambrose momentarily stunned. By his own calculations, Aige should have needed at least several decades to convert sufficient faith into the embryonic form of a divine realm, with the realm itself only fully materializing the instant she actually ascended.

It had only been a few days. How could she suddenly be on the verge of godhood already?

Without a moment's hesitation, Ambrose abandoned what he was working on and rushed straight to the Sea of Volcanoes.

By now, the Sea of Volcanoes had fallen largely under the control of the Silent Sea Pirate Company, though the merfolk "criminals" populating it were still few enough in number that the region felt sparsely settled despite its size.

There was an upside to that, however: resources remained plentiful, and these merfolk, freed from any cultural restraint around reproduction, bred remarkably quickly. Give them two generations, and their numbers would grow exponentially.

And that was precisely the heart of the problem. The merfolk's devotion to Aige had only just begun. There was no conceivable way it could already supply the power needed to push her into godhood.

The answer to that question presented itself the moment Ambrose laid eyes on Aige in person.

Her body had changed dramatically. Ugly, irregular patches of shell had fused haphazardly onto the hull, making her not merely unsightly, but bloated and grotesque in shape.

Strange, misshapen coral had begun sprouting from the masts, and even the ship's prow had begun warping into the shape of a lobster's head.

Aige's avatar was straining to maintain its original form, but ugly gill-slits had already begun forming along her neck.

The moment she saw Ambrose, Aige spoke with evident agitation. "Good timing. You can probably already guess what's happened, can't you?"

Ambrose nodded. This was, without question, faith contamination.

There was only one force capable of something like this: the kouto.

A substantial number of kouto had redirected their devotion to Aige. The resulting flood of faith had begun pouring into Aige's body, twisting its form in the process.

Kouto worship was uniquely potent. Even a single kouto's devotion rivaled that of a zealot, but no deity actually wanted them as followers precisely because of this contamination effect.

The kouto mind was simply too disordered. They tended to worship whatever hallucinated image their own fractured minds conjured up, then proceed to reshape the actual deity to match that imagined form.

The reason the kouto goddess wore that unflattering lobster-head was, fundamentally, because a lobster's head happened to align with kouto aesthetics.

And now Aige was beginning to grow a lobster head of her own, clear evidence that a substantial number of kouto were actively channeling their devotion toward her.

"That deranged goddess doesn't hold back, does she? Voluntarily redirecting her own faithful's devotion elsewhere? Isn't she worried about taking a loss herself?"

This was, without a doubt, the kouto goddess's counterattack, and a remarkably precise one at that. The true crisis here wasn't the change in Aige's appearance. It was that the entire sequence of her ascension had been thrown into disarray.

If Aige ascended to godhood right now, her divine realm wouldn't be remotely ready. The instant she became a deity, she would find herself the target of a hunting party.

Lords of Hell, demons of the Abyss, every manner of evil god—they would all be desperate to tear her apart on sight. And given that Aige's identity as an undead inherently put her at odds with countless factions, there was a real chance even the Lord of Dawn himself might get involved.

This was exactly the outcome the kouto goddess wanted to see. She intended to destroy Aige entirely, and use the act as her revenge against Ambrose.

Ambrose asked, "Can't the President's ring convert this surplus faith? Wouldn't that actually speed up the formation of your divine realm?"

Aige answered, with evident frustration, "There's no time. The faith is crashing over me like a tidal wave, and the ring's capacity is nothing more than a narrow drainage channel. It simply cannot process power of this magnitude."

Even an artifact had its limits. The ring was genuinely formidable in its own right, but set against the combined vengeance of an entire race and a god, a single artifact simply wasn't enough to keep up.

What made it worse was that this particular maneuver from the kouto goddess was a scheme that worked precisely because its target understood exactly what was happening and still couldn't stop it. Unless Aige abandoned her ascension entirely and severed herself completely from all incoming faith, there was no way to halt the kouto's "worship" of her.

Faith was simply a fundamental component of how the world's rules worked. To draw on the power of faith was to accept its consequences as well. There was no version of this where you reaped the benefits without any risk of blowback, not even for the Lord of Dawn himself.

Looked at this way, the kouto goddess's gambit seemed almost unbeatable. Couldn't it corrupt virtually any deity at will?

In practice, that wasn't quite true. Other gods commanded vast, established congregations of their own, and the corrupting effect of a handful of kouto worshippers would quickly be diluted and purified by the sheer volume of their existing devotees into nothing more than raw, neutral energy. Some deities, for that matter, simply didn't care at all. What was the harm in a slightly altered appearance, when a god could already reshape their avatar however they liked? Was the true form really so much uglier than a demon's? Free faith, handed over with no strings attached—only a fool would turn that down.

But Aige was in the uniquely awkward position of being unable to refuse the offering and being threatened by a premature ascension.

"Even if the faith were sufficient, it would still mean nothing without Aion's approval. Let's stay calm for a moment. Perhaps Aion simply won't condone what the kouto goddess is attempting here," Ambrose offered, trying to reassure her.

Aige shook her head once more, her voice heavy with resignation. "No. I've already sensed it. Aion will push me into ascension the very instant I lose control. The God of Gods remains entirely impartial. He won't disrupt the kouto goddess's scheme simply to help me. This, too, is a trial Aion has set for me."

"Then this really is a problem..."

Ambrose had never imagined this situation would escalate all the way to one of Aion's own trials.

As everyone knew, the fundamental prerequisite for godhood was Aion's approval. Once that approval was granted, your own thoughts on the matter, well, didn't matter. Even if you were nothing more than a lump of mud, you could become a god of mud.

The God of Alchemy made for a useful example. Ambrose's standardization of alchemical measurements had been the achievement that first drew Aion's attention to his master. But for his master to actually become the true God of Alchemy—to claim the very concept of alchemy itself as his domain—he had had to pass a trial set by Aion specifically.

Ambrose had no idea what the actual content of that trial had been, but he knew with certainty that it couldn't have been simple.

Aige's current situation mirrored exactly that. Aion's trial had already begun. To give up now meant total, irreversible failure. There would never be a second chance.

For most people, survival would matter more than anything else. Giving up wouldn't be such a difficult choice.

But giving up simply wasn't an option for Aige. Her entire reason for apotheosis was for Aion to help restore her maker, the old shipwright, to life, and only Aion could grant that wish. Abandoning this opportunity would be tantamount to suicide for her cause.

"I really did underestimate the gods. This is a genuinely vicious move. Still, it's not entirely unsolvable."

Ambrose said to Aige: "You said the kouto's faith is crashing in like a tidal wave, and a single artifact can't redirect enough of it on its own. So let's simply dig a few more drainage channels. Senior Aige, perhaps you could take on a few divine servants ahead of schedule to help divert some of this incoming faith."

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