Tree of Aeons (an Isekai Story)

339. A Long Delayed Conversation

339

Stella found herself returning to the Aivan lands and shared her revelation with her peers. I was happy for her, that she too finally joined the small but growing group of Level 200 domain holders. 

It was a key choice to make, at this point. A role she found exceptionally hard to digest, and like Ebon, she hesitated. “I can’t choose.”

“Then don’t.” Edna said. “Until you are sure. I think, with our immortality, we have that benefit of waiting till we know for sure what our path is.”

And as it so seemed, we were in one of Aiva’s grandest core worlds.

It was a beautiful world with a single golden sun that wasn’t spherical in shape. Instead, it was a five pointed star that glowed with a consistent golden yellow. It was a land with strong winds, but no storms. Gentle rains and evening showers but no floods.

Rainbows and beautiful mountains. Soaring peaks. Humans here had flying machines that were akin to those of birds unlike those on Earth. 

Flying was the norm, and cities here flew too. They were large constructs with gigantic fans, and the cities floated with it. 

“These won’t ever work with our world.”

“But this is not your world.” Aiva spoke, manifesting as a wise monk with a pair of brown harpy wings. He was cloaked, invisible to the regular folk but only visible to us. “I often walk among my people here. They worship me, and they pray to me for allowing them to fly. The lands down below contain all the food and resources, but the sky is where their hearts belong.” 

Humans and harpies. There were winged gryphons. Eagles and hawks. The flying cities were made with an extremely lightweight and strong metal, but coated with a sheen of paint to hold them together. They shouldn’t have been able to fly, but the divine will allowed them to.

Even the monsters of the world were beautiful. Majestic birds, huge drakes, flying serpents, winged lions, and tigers, all with incredible manes and scales. 

“As long as they pray, the divine fans will work, and the city will float. At the heart is the Aivan Battery Altar. Those who wish to make their things fly, must pray to me, refill the battery, and from there they can make their things fly until that battery is drained.”

“You’re gaming the faith system.”

“They never said we couldn’t. Packing ten to twenty worlds into a single core system is also gaming the system. The faith system has a set of rules and principles, and it is up to us to use it to our benefit. It isn’t very much different from what you do.”

“I don’t mean it as a crime.” Lumoof countered. “I am merely amused that it is so.”

“The people here know that to fly, they must believe in me. So faith becomes a default thing, not something they question. Meanwhile, it is only a single, one off expense for me to alter the rules of this world to enable such things to happen.”

“Damn. But doesn’t that mean your people can’t fly elsewhere?”

“Yes. But I can deal with such circumstances separately.” Aiva laughed. “But you are here for something else. Here.”

The same golden ticket. 

“I realized you had it, and then I realized I could make the same. And so I did.”

“Can you not make me something like what Hawa did?”

“I could, but I would have to wait a bit longer than Hawa. My powers are less destructive-focused than the Armored God, and so I need to spend more to achieve the same effect.”

“Is this the bias of the World Faith System?”

“Yes. We are predisposed to certain abilities, and the World Faith System inherits this by giving us preferential effects to certain abilities. Some abilities that cost others faith points, might be something I can do for free or very cheaply. But remember, without this system, I may not have access to those skills and abilities at all. So, this shift was a net positive for many of us.”

“Are you one of the old gods?”

There was a long silence, as the party of three moved through the city. We witnessed powerful warriors, half-birdmen armed in unusual weapons patrolling the streets. They enforced order in the core worlds and all carried a little bit of Aivan divinity. 

Aiva walked with us, as if thinking. 

“I suppose you can say we are. Myself, Gaya, Neira, Wadra and Eras were the later set of the Old Gods, though I generally prefer to style ourselves as part of the New Gods. Hawa, Zafar and Sulya are part of the later New Gods.”

“What happened to the true old gods?”

“We killed them.”

“Oh.”

“In the beginning, there was a great war. A war so horrific that we ripped stars apart, just because we could. In those days, the other gods were no better than demons. No, they were worse because they plotted, schemed, and struck with far more cruelty than the demons. The old gods represented the primal origins of the System. They were Gods of Beasts, Gods of War, Gods of Chaos, and even the original demon’s creators, the God of the Ravenous. They were the early ascended ones, and they represented a time when everyone fought everyone else. Demons were honestly just one of the irritations of the time.”

“It is said that the collective wish by all the living beings to end the great wart caused the [System] to trigger the gradual drifting of worlds and splitting the realm into the clusters you see today. When I emerged as one of the gods, that drift was already in motion. When the war almost ended, the surviving gods came together to create the World Faith System, because we were losing the ability to control the drifting worlds with our narrow skills. Not many of us had the ability to travel between worlds, especially when the distances were increasing.”

That made me pause. “The war was so bad that everyone wished everyone else just lived in their own worlds?”

“Yes. Very much so. It was such a strong feeling amongst the people that even the gods could not overwrite the wills of the worlds to reverse it. The system imposed a need to keep everyone apart, if only to protect everyone from themselves.”

To be honest, I could see the appeal of letting everyone just live in their own corner of the universe and unable to interrupt one another. 

“Then, there were also two of the greatest war gods, Perang and Asura, and they were the ones that helped slay the primal old gods, but they have both died under the World Faith System. I do not know for certain, but I theorize that the gods of war could not help but have a war to fight, and so over time, killed their own believers in their great chaos of war.”

In a way, the World Faith System brought about a world order where the gods had an incentive to care for their followers. “But, wasn’t it created to stop the demons?”

“You can argue that there are really two demons. The original demons, those spawns of the Primal Ravenous. And the current, mutant version which inherited that ravenous desire to assimilate and consume all the worlds. Somewhere in between is your claim that Eras is imprisoned and captured. Or they are descendants of the same demon, but they had acquired additional abilities that gave it its current form, perhaps as a feature of an extremely high leveled demon, likely descended from the first Ravenous God.” 

The prospect that there was a high level demon creating these creatures and spreading them throughout the realms was frightening. What level would such a creature be? If there was something that somehow captured Eras, could we beat it?

It likely wasn’t part of the WFS, because it didn’t have living followers, so it didn’t get the level 250 choice.

Level 300? Or 400? Maybe even Level 500?

“Do you know what we can expect behind that barrier? When we crack it, we’d like to be ready.”

“My intuition believes that you will see the original demons. The remnants of the ravenous creatures. These are the semi-divine monsters, leftovers from that great war, that the demon kings are meant to imitate. They must’ve lost the ability to make more of them. After all, the God of the Ravenous has long died, but if you trace the demons to those worlds, there must be a predecessor somewhere. Something that started the current version of demons.”

“Gaya didn’t say this.” But many more things didn’t make sense to me. As it was, all the information we had so far was second hand information. Gaya’s words, Aiva’s words, and Hawa’s words. 

Who had the correct sequence of events?

Not just that, was there even a single coherent sequence of events? Given the unusual effects of time shenanigans when worlds were moving at different speeds, could certain developments happen in what feels like a matter of moments?

“Gaya is a foul god who does not share information freely. You trust that being’s words at your own peril. Gaya isn’t even honest with their own followers.”

“Is it?”

“But his strength is undeniable. It is a good thing we do not share territories.”

“Don’t you share worlds in the peripheral and far peripheral worlds?”

“They are too far away for us.”

“How did you even spread your religion to those worlds?”

“The worlds were once much, much more compact. Some, maybe most of them, were still within reach of our faith, and in the early days, the cost to send preachers to these then not-so-faraway worlds was not exorbitant. Secondly, back then, the demons were also not so powerful, and also did not attack so many worlds, so we had resources to deal with them and still expand. Three, the [System] spawns these worlds with certain sets of attributes, and so some of these worlds inherit an image of my faith with some random variations.”

Stella, naturally freaked out at this. “There’s a possibility that we are all some kind of [system] generation?”

“Does not make them any less real. I reckon even some of the primal gods are [system] generations.”

“I do feel like this is the equivalent of waking up and discovering it is all a dream.”

“There are dreams all the way down.” Aiva joked. “I met some source-world heroes who said something similar. Now, now, like I said, I may not do what Hawa the Armored can do, but I can do other things. Help me with the peripheral worlds in the distance for ten or fifteen years, and I will craft a powerful artifact that can create a safeworld. A [Realm Egg], if you may. It will allow you to safely expand into the demonic lands, and act as a world that is inherently friendly, instead of the ravaged lands you find close to the heart of the demon world.”

“A realm egg?”

“Have you ever wanted to create a world from scratch? I happen to be better at that than either Hawa or Gaya. It would not be as strong as your current holdings, but it is a standalone world that could bridge the gap. If you find that there is a place where you couldn’t reach, because it is out of range, you can spawn the [Realm Egg] there and it will be like a new world.”

“Say yes, Aeon.” Stella said. “I really want to know what this is like.”

The idea of a created world reminded me of the new smaller world that was now a ‘sibling’ to Treehome. 

But unlike Shrubhome. 

“This means we are delaying our entry into the demon worlds a bit longer.” Edna frowned.

“I don’t see this as a bad thing.” Lumoof countered. “If it’s true that we can get concessions with each of these gods and help them in some way or form, we can go into the demon worlds as  prepared as we can be. We will have more levels. Destroying the demonic barrier, in other words, could very well be the equivalent of us stirring the goblin’s nest. We want to do it when we are ready.”

“Can we just go find Neira or whatever other god and just sum up all the requirements they need. Then we can deal with this in one go.” Stella said. “If each god asks us to help them for ten years, we’d be waiting a full century before we actually get there.”

“A full century isn’t that bad.” Lumoof said.

“You’ve been spending waaaaaaaaay too much time with Aeon.” Stella countered. 

“Fair.” 

“But we agree, anyway.” Lumoof turned to Aiva. “Do you know where the gods are?”

“Like I said when we first met, they are all far away. Our realms of influence do not overlap, and so, we have no direct means of talking to each other. But I believe if you look at parts of the star map where no gods control, then it is likely there is an undiscovered god there.”

“How many gods are there?”

“Ten to maybe fifteen of us left? I do not remember. But when we came together for the creation of the World Faith System, there were about twenty. There are the two fallen gods, the vanished Wadra, the captured Eras, and the dead Zafar. I cannot say I know whether any of the distant gods have vanished.”

“Flawed. Thoroughly flawed system.”

“Only if you think that way.” Aiva countered. “But off you go. Speedy and safe travels, Aeon and friends.”