21st Century Necromancer-Chapter 896 - 890: The World and the Deities (3000-word )
Chapter 896 -890: The World and the Deities (3000-word chapter)
In front of Inari Taisha, amidst a canopy of lush green trees, countless vermilion Torii gates are arranged in perfect order. They wind along the mountain path, forming what seems to be a tunnel of Torii, or a long corridor, resembling the body of a great dragon.
To the ordinary eye, this might simply appear as a stunning spectacle, a landscape formed by the Torii gates donated by followers of the Inari God over countless generations.
But to Chen Yu, this represents the faith and reverence of countless believers toward the deities. It is a chain—a chain binding the divine to the mortal realm, a fixed anchor point.
When the world’s rules were still incomplete, countless gaps would appear within it. At such a time, the world would instinctively give birth to powerful life forms to fill these gaps. These powerful entities were the primordial deities—the Ancient Gods.
Though the Ancient Gods were pure and powerful, they were ultimately products born to patch the gaps in the world’s rules. Bereft of reason, they merely acted through instinct and primal, beastlike nature.
Thus, the New Gods came into being as a replacement for the Ancient Gods. Either exalted by the worship of living beings to ascend and chosen by the world to become deities, or born from the bodies of the Ancient Gods, inheriting their legacy, the New Gods replaced the Ancient Ones to become the divine.
In short, the New Gods supplanted the Ancient Gods. Possessing wisdom and reason, they not only filled the gaps in the world’s rules but also progressively perfected these rules, patching up the flaws and making the world more complete.
However, in this process, as the world’s rules grew increasingly complete, deities would be assimilated by those very rules, gradually becoming embodiments of the principles they represented. Wisdom and reason would be overtaken by the order represented by the rules, and in time, the deities would lose their sense of self, becoming part of the world’s framework.
Simultaneously, the power of these deities would grow ever stronger as they merged with the rules, eventually exceeding what the world could accommodate and being expelled from it.
Yet these entities, cast out by the world, remain closely linked to the world’s rules and therefore cannot drift far. However, blocked by these same rules, they cannot re-enter the world. Ultimately, they transform into a defensive system on the world’s periphery, safeguarding its stability.
The only way to keep a deity within the world and prevent their expulsion is to build an anchor—a chain forged from the faith of living beings—to bind the deity to the world.
The more powerful the deity, the more followers they require, and the greater the power of faith needed to anchor them. When the faith of followers wanes and can no longer tether the deity, they are cast out by the world, no longer existing within it.
Earth is currently in this phase. As global science advances and human civilization reaches new heights, belief in deities continues to decline, and the gods are gradually being expelled from this world. The mystical elements of the world are steadily fading away.
The Age of Dharma Decline has arrived. This is not due to a reduction in the concentration of Magic Power but rather the world’s rules refining themselves, leaving no room for mysticism.
Because the rules representing Magic Power still exist, Magic Power continues to exist in this world. However, its manifestation has quietly transformed as the world’s rules evolve.
For instance, in the past, rainfall was brought about by deities who governed the rules, which is why mortals prayed to the gods for rain, for favorable weather, for bountiful harvests.
But as the rules of the world became perfected, mortals with proper scientific education came to understand that rainfall is a natural phenomenon, brought about by nature rather than deities—a conclusion made possible by modern scientific research.
Perhaps, in the eyes of many who revere science, the world has always been this way—rainfall was always a natural phenomenon rather than a gift from some god.
But was it truly always this way?
What if the reality is that the world was once governed by deities, and what we now perceive as natural laws and science emerged only after the world’s rules became perfected?
The deities who once governed wind and rain were expelled from the world by its rules. The evolution of these self-perfecting rules led to the atmospheric circulation system we recognize today—what became common knowledge to us. The truth of gods ruling the world was relegated to myth, something only children might believe.
This is the so-called Age of Dharma Decline—the Twilight of the Gods in myth and legend.
Some deities tried to resist, opposing the world’s self-perfection in an attempt to prolong the era of mysticism and remain in the world for a longer period.
One such deity was God, whose faith began to rise and spread after the old deities of Europa’s civilization faded away. Once the Church was established, the other deities of this world gradually perished. They were either destroyed or expelled from this world.
God, in an effort to form an anchor through faith and to continuously absorb said faith to grow stronger, went to great lengths to use the Church to hinder the progress of science and civilization, aiming to keep humanity clinging to an ignorant belief in deities. This gave rise to a millennium of the Dark Middle Ages. freewёbnoνel.com
Ultimately, however, the bold explorers and truth-seekers of human history were neither defeated by the divine conspiracy nor intimidated by a millennium of the Church’s dominance over the world. They raised the sword of defiance against the sky, pulling the gods down from their shrines and guiding the world toward science—the inevitable trajectory it was meant to follow.
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“Why are you telling me this, Your Highness Miketsu?” In a room within Inari Taisha, Chen Yu and his entourage of nine sat in the company of a Shrine Maiden. Yet apart from Chen Yu and his wife, the others had collapsed to the floor, unconscious from drinking tampered tea. Faced with this situation, Chen Yu questioned the Shrine Maiden—the incarnation of the Inari God who had just revealed the truth of the world to him.
In response to Chen Yu’s question, the Shrine Maiden, the Inari God’s incarnation, replied calmly, “I simply wish to tell you the truth of this world, Chen Yu. Even if you were to become a deity and transcend the need for the chains of faith, it would also mean that you have no anchor through which to bind yourself to this world.
The moment you ascend to godhood will also be the moment this world rejects you. And for you, who will have no followers, this rejection will come more swiftly and directly than for other deities. You will not become part of the world’s outer shell like the others.”
The Inari God’s words plunged Chen Yu into silence. Although much of what Inari revealed was knowledge reserved only for those who attained godhood or had grown powerful enough to be expelled by the world, even the Multiverse Universal Necromancy Spell Compendium did not mention what happens after one becomes a deity. Yet Chen Yu knew it to be true.
The absence of such knowledge in the Multiverse Universal Necromancy Spell Compendium was only because he had not yet achieved Divine Enthronement. Such knowledge remained inaccessible to mortals and could only be comprehended by the divine.
However, the rule that deities cannot freely tread the mortal realm was a universal law across the worlds of the Multiverse.
Chen Yu had once believed this to be a method by which the deities preserved their own mystique. Yet through Inari’s explanation, he realized this was, in fact, the world’s self-protection mechanism.
Overly powerful deities who exceed the limit of what the world can sustain would only destabilize and compromise the world itself, hindering the perfection of its rules.
With this understanding, Chen Yu felt no hesitation. If this was the price to pay for achieving divinity, he would gladly accept it, rather than abandon his aspirations due to the world’s rejection.
Quietly, he asked Inari, “If I were to ascend to godhood, how long would it take before the world expels me?”
“Currently, weaker deities can still remain in the world. Intermediate Gods, as long as they have sufficient followers, can anchor themselves using faith. But powerful deities already exceed the world’s limits,” Inari calmly explained through the Shrine Maiden. “Using myself as an example, I became a powerful deity only a few hundred years ago, following the spread of my faith. The world’s rejection of me has been intensifying. Now, it has reached its limit. If I cannot continue advancing, within a century, I will be forcibly expelled.”
“As for you, Lord Chen Yu, if you aim to ascend as an Intermediate God, the time from when you achieve that state until the world rejects you will range between three to five centuries. If you anchor yourself with sufficient faith and suppress the growth of your power, you might be able to extend this timeframe further.”
“Three to five centuries? That’s longer than I anticipated,” Chen Yu remarked after hearing Inari’s explanation. Rather than disappointment, his voice carried a tone of relief.
Though three to five centuries might be a fleeting moment for a deity, it was an eternity for mortals. Such a span was enough for Chen Yu to accomplish the goals he wished to achieve, to ascend without reservation, and to step into the Multiverse.
Collecting his thoughts, he smiled reassuringly at Jounouchi Hiromi, who stood by his side, worried for him. He then turned back to Inari and said, “We’ll discuss all this later. For now, let’s proceed with our plan.”
“Indeed. Without godhood, all efforts are in vain,” Inari’s Shrine Maiden incarnation nodded, her gaze shifting to the unconscious Minami and Inomata Naoki lying on the floor. She raised her hand and sent forth two streams of Divine Power, which entered the heads of the two individuals.
“My Divine Arts will let them experience three lifetimes in their dreams, leaving no memories behind. But will this really produce the desired results?” Inari voiced her doubts about Chen Yu’s plan. “If no memories remain, how can love persist?”
In response to Inari’s question, Chen Yu smiled and said, “Even if memories fade, love will endure.”
