The most crucial aspect of a scheme was to convince the target or targets to believe that it wasn’t one.
Having lived for as long as they had, the Seven Gods’ wealth of knowledge was vast, so unless one could take advantage of an informational difference, the only way for them to fall for a scheme was to convince them that the information they knew was correct, forcing them to draw a subjective conclusion.
Case in point, other than Negary who Mequik had informed of this information, the others shouldn’t have realized that anything was wrong. Everything so far had progressed sensibly and appropriately, everything that could be predicted had also gone as predicted.
For that reason, after Mequik left the scene, everyone else, including Eternal Heat, focused their attention on Lisa. Red Tears was now feeling a bit helpless since, unlike Eulogy of the Ocean Depths, she had to also control Lisa’s body. For better or worse, Lisa was still an Evil God; even if Red Tears had taken the initiative to control her with the power of Irregularity, some resistance couldn’t be avoided.
Under Lisa’s empty eye sockets, the red tears were already beginning to come alive. Despite being just a phenomenon, Red Tears was already beginning to be converted into an aquatic creature.
On the other hand, while Eulogy of the Ocean Depths appeared a bit dispirited, their soul structure was still relatively solid, no irregularities had manifested just yet.
At this moment, The Unreachable Gate decided to retreat. His conducting a transaction with Eternal Heat was true, but Eternal Heat’s flames burning towards his limit was also true. If he didn’t retreat now, there was a real possibility of Eternal Heat actually witnessing his Pathway.
The Unreachable Gate could accept many things, but the one thing he couldn’t accept would be someone else reaching his Pathway; for Eternal Heat, seeing The Unreachable Gate’s Pathway meant that he wouldn’t be too far away from actually reaching it. The Unreachable Gate wouldn’t take this risk, as he valued patience over all else.
Eternal Heat slowly approached Lisa, gradually radiating intense temperature into his surroundings. Eternal Heat didn’t need a Life Pathway to make up for any shortcomings right now, but a Divine Artifact was still a Divine Artifact. These things did not drop in value regardless of which world they were in, and even if he didn’t need it, he could still give it to someone else, or turn it into a weapon or tool.
Lisa’s bleeding eyes slowly returned to normal as Red Tears began to leave her body. Although she was a sentient phenomenon, and only a portion of her actual self was present here, almost everyone who had manifested a Pathway had this same characteristic. For that reason, almost every Pathway Entity had researched one way or another to attack through a connection.
Even if another portion of yourself was in another world, as long as the world’s barrier wasn’t too thick, their attacks would still be able to reach you.
If you didn’t have such a measure, you would find yourself unable to actually kill any enemies.
Of course, with every measure to attack through a connection, there was a corresponding measure to stop such attacks, although comparatively, offense was usually simpler than defense.
And so, entities of their level usually ran away before any actual damage was done; and if they couldn’t run, they would quickly give up on the clone, or even the portion of their body that was attacked.
The bloody tears that Lisa had shed quickly manifested into form and created an elongated-looking fish. Since Red Tears had retreated, a portion of her body was transformed into an aquatic life form and became Eulogy of the Ocean Depths’ spoils of war.
However, after the other Righteous Gods had all retreated, the only Gods that remained would be Eternal Heat and Eulogy of the Ocean Depths. Comparing between the two, Eulogy of the Ocean Depths would definitely not be able to win against Eternal Heat, as his strength had been confirmed time and time again.
And so, Eternal Heat would be the final victor and obtain the Divine Artifact, while Eulogy of the Ocean Depths would obtain a type of fish converted from Red Tears to further complete their Pathway, a minor gain.
However, not too many people were willing to see this happen. Eternal Heat was already so powerful that if he also obtained victory this time, he would only have a greater advantage during the upcoming God’s Offering Day when they harvested the fruits of this world.
And so, when Eternal Heat approached Lisa, the bloody tears that were being converted into a fish abruptly disappeared, an invisible fluctuation shot into Eternal Heat’s body.
Eulogy of the Ocean Depths had given up on their spoils of war, returning it to Red Tears, and Red Tears had also coordinated to immediately attack Eternal Heat. Quite obviously, while the two of them were stuck in the tug of war, they were also negotiating.
Eulogy of the Ocean Depths had promised to provide Red Tears with some Life-related knowledge. While this wasn’t quite as fast as directly consuming a corresponding Pathway, since she would need to comprehend and draw the Principles from this knowledge, it was still much better than gaining nothing at all and even losing a portion of her body in the process. Not to mention, Red Tears also hoped to weaken Eternal Heat if possible.
None of the Seven Gods hoped that any of them would be especially more powerful than the others, and Eternal Heat was already showing hints of being able to achieve this.
Eternal Heat frowned, the aura around his body grew even more intense, exuding a hint of absolute heat that burnt Red Tears’ attack almost completely away.
However, Negary noticed an issue with this interaction, it was as if Eternal Heat was trying to hide something, otherwise, he wouldn’t have needed to shroud himself in flames to burn away everything that tried to enter or exit his body. Doing this meant that he wanted to ensure that Red Tears wouldn’t be able to obtain any information regarding Eternal Heat from their exchange.
While Red Tears attacked Eternal Heat, Eulogy of the Ocean Depths took advantage of that time gap to approach Lisa and opened their ugly fish head to chomp down on Lisa’s belly.
In the ocean, the most common means of feeding was devouring whole, a bigger fish would devour a smaller one whole, and smaller fishes would devour plankton whole.
Because of this, other than distorting other existences into aquatic life forms, Eulogy of the Ocean Depths also utilized the Principles of Life in their Pathway through devouring another entity, swallowing them into their stomach. After digestion, the devoured entity’s everything naturally became theirs.
The Principles of Life began to radiate from the Divine Artifact. If a normal person somehow managed to be here right now, their lifespan would increase by at least 10 years just by standing in this aura of Life, if they managed to swallow the Divine Artifact, they would become undying and unageing.
As Eulogy of the Ocean Depths had exposed it, the Divine Artifact that they had been competing over was finally revealed to everyone, which was a piece of tree root that was carved full of runes.
As soon as they saw this piece of tree root, Eulogy of the Ocean Depths didn’t appear to be delighted by their harvest at all and instead showed signs of fear. Without any extraneous actions, this clone abruptly lost all signs of life, they had resolutely discarded the entire clone, but they were still one step too late.
Initially, the piece of tree root was only as long as an arm, but when it was exposed to the air, the runes began to glow and sprouted numerous other roots, a portion of the roots pierced through Eulogy of the Ocean Depths’ body and continued further into the void of space, another portion pierced through Lisa’s body and followed their existing connection to also pierce Red Tears’ body.
The remaining roots were also extending towards Eternal Heat and Negary.
Fortunately, he and Negary were a bit further away, so they had enough time to react and move away.
「 Life Bearer had actually turned it into a single-use tool! 」
Eternal Heat appeared in the outskirts of Lohr. Some pieces of root were still stuck to his body and continued to grow, despite the flames around his body constantly burning away at them, they resiliently sprouted again and again. However, he was smiling and even told Negary:
「 Red Tears and Eulogy of the Ocean Depths are definitely in a terrible state right now, they might even fall into slumber 」
