“This feels so amazing!”
Xi Wei was clutching the seven Sapphires in his divine kingdom and rolling about without any dignity. “I’m rich now!”
His self-directed act had proved very successful, with his divine edition of the traditional shadow play coming to great effect. Even if the fishfolk deity he had fabricated never really showed up, it still left every last Player in the Fishmen Village utterly astonished.
Yes, it was ultimately a mirage. Xi Wei had even kept the area of effect for those images within Fishmen Village to save divine power, and only the Players there could witness it.
It was even easier to make the Players believe their HP was dropping… with control over their System completely in his hand, was there anything simpler than just adjusting those values?
And it was precisely with that short performance that Xi Wei tricked the Players of the Sapphires.
What, the show was too short and not enough for you? Nonsense! CG needs divine power too!
Still, there was no telling where the Ocean Goddess had gotten the Sea Sapphires—the gems were clearly not durable and could break if even ordinary Players unleashed their full power, and yet it somehow could act as a crucible to contain enormous divine power like the skull of Rotten Bones.
After all, the Ocean Eye definitely existed beneath the waves, but it was basically a portal connected to undersea tectonic plates and formed naturally.
Unlike Xi Wei who could use a secret power like transmigrating to create the Lifestone portals, the range of the Ocean Goddess’ authority did not correlate to portals at all. In fact, the portal was obviously both a natural phenomenon and magitek, and was instead one of the authorities that Magic Violet, one of the Ocean Goddess’ bitter rivals back in the War and one of the seven Divine Fathers wielded.
Coupled with the obstruction of the World Barrier, the Ocean Goddess had actually built the Ocean Eye over Fishmen Island by force. As such, the pseudo-portal that pierced space to achieve the objective of ‘teleportation’ by using divine power required a lot of divine power.
And the seven Sea Sapphires were the batteries used to power the portal.
To use an inappropriate comparison: if Magic Violet’s authority over portals was an insurmountable wall and entering was to cast teleportation, what Xi Wei did in using his power of transmigration was merely to lower the spiked steel wires over the wall and open the gates over it, while the Ocean Goddess had simply brought barrels of dynamic to blow up Magic Violet’s wall…
From that point alone, one could see why the Ocean Goddess whom even Aslan the Great Lion nicknamed the mad hag was ruthless and unrestrained.
Because the sheer force of the Ocean Goddess’ divine power was very distinct from his own, Xi Wei had difficulty quantifying the divine power inside the Sea Sapphires according to the standards he set previously.
Be that as it may, he realized that the divine power inside wasn’t violent after the briefest of touches.
Even if the Sea Sapphires that acted as containers were destroyed by an external force, the divine power it holds would only leak and fade without any nuclear explosions—naturally, he still couldn’t absorb the Ocean Goddess’ divine powers from it, although he could use it like a battery like before to keep the Ocean Eye open and let some fishmen pass through it. It was certainly possible that Ocean Goddess had assumed that Xi Wei would become her sub-deity even if he passed the trial and that his believers would become hers, she did not bother to let her divine powers to go amok and blow up those powerful believers who managed to find and obtain the Sea Sapphires.
Moreover, the Ocean Eye applies spatial rupturing in teleportation, which meant it had nothing to do with the bodies being sent to the other end. As such, the cost of divine power was constant regardless if it was a fishman slave or a fishman commander being transported.
If 1 point of divine power was the cost to move one fishman, the seven Sea Sapphires had a total of nine hundred and eighty thousand points… a quality and quantity that far surpassed Xi Wei’s own divine power.
Once he remembered that the Ocean Goddess could throw away so much divine power over one slapdash trial, Xi Wei could not help feeling jealous.
Fortunately, however, he was not completely out of ideas—just as it was with Rotten Bones whom he continued to juice with the blender.
By continuously letting some fishfolk pass through and then calling the Players to farm the hell out of the creatures as offering to him, wouldn’t he be quickly converting the Ocean Goddess’ divine power into his divine energy?!
“I’ll let out a hundred fishmen per day, and it would last me nine thousand and eight hundred days with the divine power in the Sea Sapphires and that also means around twenty-only years… no, this world has three hundred and twenty days each year, meaning that this would last up to thirty years!”
If Xi Wei had eyes, his pupils might be dollar-shaped right now. “Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh!”
Thirty years might be the flick of a finger to the gods who lived almost eternally but Xi Wei was convinced that if he could really hang on the edge of the divine realm without dying in thirty years, he might not lose to any other gods by then.
As the old saying goes: Thirty years down the east river, thirty years down the west river[1]—do not bully the ball of light just because it looks weak.
“In thirty years, becoming a divine father from a weakling deity is just a minor goal! I would never believe that the Ocean Goddess could still bully me until then! If she is really is that awesome, I’ll start living on handstands!”
That said, the bright future had yet to come, which was why Xi Wei would earnestly keep himself in his own divine kingdom to farm and strengthen his power.
After all, it was basically useless to have the world progress with leaping bounds of technology. Any divine being who holds physics or chemistry authorities could just have a moment of diarrhea to promptly lay waste to decades of industrial revolution, meaning that the power of the Gods was the most reliable the end.
“That said, the Players are being a little slow—it’s already been two days, so why hadn’t the Fishmen Island been purged? Should I pour everyone a cup of cappuccino and have them stain their levels to work overnight?” Xi Wei mumbled in irrelevance while activating God’s Eye to peek at the mortal realm as usual. “I’ve already set up a version update, hurry up guys.”
[1] Translator’s Note: ‘Thirty Years down the East River, Thirty Years down the West River’: It describes the fluctuating flow of the Yellow River (Huang He) down different branches in different times, and is used as a metaphor for the ever-changing fortunes in life.
