265 About Beyond SSS-Grade ESPers and Gods
I already posted in P4TRE0N about it, but I have been recently busy with a new project recently, so sorry for the inconsistent releases. It will last one or two weeks more. Please bear with me until then.
Aidka :p
...
Stare.
Look away.
Stare.
Look away.
Stare.
Look away.
Watching Aya staring at him from the corner of her eyes and then looking away as soon as she felt he was about to look at her, Bloed did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
He could understand her behavior, though. After all, she had just kissed him in front of the princess of the elves while thinking she was still inside her dream.
In other words, she had not only revealed her feelings to her crush in almost the worst way possible, but someone completely unrelated had witnessed everything.
Aya was so embarrassed that she wanted to dig a hole and jump inside.
In fact, Aya's current behavior was a bit better than before. When she just realized she did kiss Bloed, she turned so red and flustered that Bloed could swear he saw smoke coming out of her head.
Aya had frozen in shame, opening and closing her mouth repeatedly but unable to complete a single word. In the end, she covered her face with her hands and crouched down with a strange whimper.
Bloed felt incredibly awkward when he found himself faced with that situation.
Fortunately, Aya 'recovered' before long. But even now, she was still unable to look at Bloed directly and her cheeks were dyed in a deep shade red.
The only reason she had the courage to look at him from the corner of her eyes was that she wanted to see Bloed's reaction after the kiss.
As for Bloed, he was currently at a loss.
In the end, he was not a playboy incredibly experienced in courting girls. Moreover, he already had two girlfriends and he had not even considered getting another one.
He had to admit that he found the current Aya incredibly cute, though.
More than once, he was tempted to tease her.
Even so, he suppressed his impulses. He did not want to make the situation even more confusing.
Plus, he was not planning to feed the eyes of the smirking elf princess beside them.
Much less when Elwha was moving her gaze between them as though she found something extremely interesting.
'... At the very least, she stopped looking at me as though I was going to kill her at any minute.'
Sighing tiredly to himself, Bloed decided just to focus on finding the core for now.
As for Aya, he would decide what to do after he was done with this troublesome competition.
"How far are we from the core?" In an attempt to stop thinking about the kiss, Bloed looked at Elwha and asked her about the situation.
Elwha stopped smirking immediately and put on a serious expression.
"… We should be close already. The soul power here is much denser than before, so it means we are closer."
Bloed nodded. Certainly, he could feel that the psychic energy around him, what the inhabitants of this world called soul power, was becoming denser and denser.
It probably was a sign that they were approaching the core of the soul world.
At that moment, Bloed decided to use this opportunity to ask something to Elwha.
Something he was curious about since a while ago.
"Miss Elwha, I understand why the elves want this treasure so badly, after all, creating a new great tree is of utmost importance for your race. But, why is the God of Slaughter interested in it too? He even went to such lengths of sending several demigods and even offending two powerful churches and three countries just for that purple crystal."
Elwha looked at Bloed and hesitated slightly. She could see that not only Bloed but also Aya was curious about the God of Slaughter's motives.
In the end, Elwha sighed and opened her mouth.
"Mr. Bloed, how much you know about gods?"
"Gods?" Bloed furrowed his brows. He did not know much about them.
He knew that godhood was the level after the third level of demigods, Apotheosis, but that was all.
But although Bloed did not know much about gods, he knew about their equivalent in the Human Confederation.
Legendary ESPers. ESPers who had gone beyond SSS-Grade.
Even in the entire Human Confederation, with hundreds of billions of inhabitants, only a handful of people attained that level.
There was not a name for that realm, nor a known method to break beyond SSS-Grade. According to the information in Camilla's spaceship, each Legendary ESPer surpassed SSS-Grade differently.
But there was something that was known about beyond SSS-Grade ESPers.
They were absurdly powerful.
The true trump cards of humanity.
There was not much information about beyond SSS-Grade ESPers even in Camilla's spaceship, however, Bloed remembered reading something about one of these ESPers.
In the war against the Devourers, a beyond SSS-Grade ESPer once infiltrated the Devourers territory alone, destroying five Devourers planets, more than twenty-five fleets of spaceships, and then returning to the Human Confederation alive.
He then died a few days later due to the injuries he received.
But even so, his battle record speaks of the power of that kind of being.
That was truly a power worthy of being considered divine.
Thus, Bloed did not dare to underestimate the power of gods, beings with power equivalent to beyond SSS-Grade ESPers.
After thinking for a moment, Bloed shook his head.
"I don't know much about gods, to be honest. I only know that godhood is the level after demigods."
Elwha nodded. "That is true. However, attaining godhood is not so simple. To become a god, your understanding of a set of laws must gain the recognition of the world. After that, you assimilate your body and soul with the law you that gained the recognition of the world and that law becomes into your godly position. However, all the other laws you have comprehended besides that law are forgotten. In exchange, your proficiency in the law you used to become a god becomes much greater."
Bloed frowned. Laws?
He remembered reading about something like that in a book when he was still a prince, but he did not know much about them.
In fact, there was no information about laws in the spaceship's information.
Was it something like the rules governing the universe?
He looked at Elwha and wanted to ask her about that, but Elwha continued with her explanation before he could.
"The problem is what comes after that," Elwha said with a sigh.
"Problem?"
"Yes." Elwha nodded. "You see, to become a god, you need to assimilate with the laws of the world. But, how can the soul of a mortal endure the greatness of the world's laws? Due to that, after a being becomes a god, he slowly starts to lose his sense of self, until finally becoming nothing more than a part of the laws themselves."
"... In other words, he dies." Bloed furrowed his brows.
"Yes," Elwha said with a serious expression. "Until now, no god has managed to avoid that fate. However, there are ways to delay it. For example, faith."
Realization flashed upon Bloed's mind.
"Do you mean, the reason churches exist is to harvest faith for the gods?"
Elwha nodded. "It is not something bad. Giving faith to a god doesn't affect mortals. Plus, most gods usually reward their most devout followers and support the people that worship them in some ways. That way, it forms a mutually beneficial relationship between gods and believers. But besides faith, there are other ways to delay the assimilation."
"For example, the purple crystal." Bloed completed Elwha's sentence.
"Yes." Elwha did not deny it. "Each Heart of the Forest possesses an enormous amount of pure soul power. Something like that is an incredible tonic for any god. If they get it, they can suppress the side-effects of assimilating with the laws for at least twenty or thirty years."
Bloed nodded in understanding. At the same time, he understood another pair of things.
The reason why elves did not like gods.
And the reason why the elves tried so hard to hide the existence of the purple crystal.
Because if Elwha's explanation was true, once the existence of the purple crystal was made public, very few gods in the continent would be able to resist the temptation of going after it.
If the elves did not handle this situation carefully, it could even turn into the spark that started a giant war that enveloped the continent.
