Chapter 829

【 CHANGES IN STRENGTH 】

Leaving aside Old John, who, through his conversations with his old friend, had gained a deeper understanding and gradually developed a profound curiosity about everything related to Maple Moon Free State and the Church of Life…

Meanwhile, after the ten players who had visited Dragon Island returned, the impact of what they had gained from their journey also began to spread throughout the Elven Forest.

This was especially true when the other players saw the several dragons that the group had brought back along with them, as well as the piles upon piles of dragon scales and various precious materials they had obtained, either through trading with the dragons or by accepting their gifts.

It was enough to make everyone else green with envy.

Just as the players had opened the door to a new world for the dragons of Dragon Island, the expedition to Dragon Island had opened the door to an entirely new world for the other players.

For a time, quite a number of players who possessed flying magical beasts added a trip to Dragon Island to their plans. The maps of the route to Dragon Island drawn by the ten players caused an even greater sensation. In particular, Li Mu’s detailed route guide post on the official forum was almost flooded with replies.

Of course, being excited was one thing, but in truth, only a small number of people were actually able to turn their ideas into action. Although dragon scales were extremely valuable, the journey itself was also sufficiently long and arduous. So unless a player had a dragon companion, crossing the sea to reach their destination was still quite difficult.

In addition, after the players who had visited Dragon Island returned, many guilds also began preparing for another activity: fishing in the northwestern seas…

This was especially true for guilds whose strongholds were located near the coast, as well as those that had established their bases near the northwestern forest following the discovery of Crystal City and Frozen Valley.

《Elven Kingdom》was incredibly realistic, and “food” was an eternal topic here. And with the number of players continuing to grow, the price of meat in the Elven Forest had risen significantly. At a time like this, the discovery of a rich fishing ground had undoubtedly opened the door to another new world for the players.

However, for the players, the recent appearance of these areas involved more than just one door…

Following the return of the ten players who went on a diplomatic mission on Dragon Island, another interesting phenomenon also began appearing throughout the mainland Continent…

Well, perhaps calling it “interesting” was not quite appropriate. To some of the factions in the Seigües World, it was more like a nightmare.

That is, several noble houses that possessed mines discovered that, overnight, all of their mineral deposits had simply disappeared.

No one knew what had happened…

But according to rumors, some people had seen dazzling light erupt from inside the mines, shooting straight into the sky like a divine miracle before it disappeared.

Afterward, the weirder part was that those who witnessed it could no longer remember anything else.

Some claimed that this was punishment from the gods against the decaying nobility. After all, in the World of Seigües, especially among the human kingdoms, the vast majority of mineral mines were controlled by nobles.

Others claimed that dragons were responsible. Whenever something happened to a mineral vein, many people claimed to have seen traces of dragons moving around the area shortly before or afterward.

There were also those who believed that the elves were behind it, taking revenge on the human nobles who had once taken pride in enslaving elves and had even competed with one another over it.

In short, there were all kinds of theories…

As mineral deposits, especially gold ores and mana stones, continued to disappear, the prices of gold and mana stones throughout the various human nations were even affected, and various related industries suffered as well, especially the magical artifact, alchemy, and potion industries.

By sheer coincidence, however, this allowed the Elves to make a considerable profit from selling mana stones.

As these mineral deposits continued to disappear, naturally the nobles were thrown into a state of panic.

Evé, however, knew exactly what was happening.

Recently, her Divine Kingdom had been receiving huge chunks of mineral deposits as offerings every few days to the extent that the elemental fairies were practically sick of purifying gold and mana stones by now.

Yes, the players were responsible, and the mastermind behind it all was none other than Demacia.

After making a huge profit from offering a gold mine in Luke City last time, he had gotten a taste of the benefits. So immediately after returning, he once again used food and gemstones as bait to lure an unscrupulous red dragon into joining him, and together they began causing trouble at various mines throughout the Holy Maniya Empire…

Offering a single mineral deposit could earn them hundreds of millions of contribution points. After all, they were not offering their own mines. It was practically free contribution points falling from the sky.

A business with enormous returns and virtually no cost was addictive.

After Demacia set the precedent, the other players were stunned by his outrageous operation. At the same time, they could not help but curse inwardly:

Holy crap!

You can play the game like this?

And so… even more players eventually joined in.

Who would miss out on something this good, practically a game-breaking bug? They had to take advantage of this while the devs had not yet patched it!

Besides, the mineral deposits being offered did not belong to them anyway…

And so… the human nobles in the empire who actually had mines were the ones who suffered to most.

The imperial central authorities were horrified to discover that reports of mineral veins disappearing were arriving from various regions almost every day.

However, this situation did not last very long.

After reaching the limits of their patience, the exasperated nobles had no choice but to dispatch more guards to patrol the mines day and night in order to protect the mineral deposits. Some even went so far as to hire Gold-rank experts at exorbitant prices.

Only then were they finally able to stop the inexplicable disappearance of the mineral veins…

The players, still unsatisfied, could only express their regret.

Although they wanted to continue causing trouble, if they could no longer succeed without making a sound, it would affect their newly introduced ‘Fame’ Rating.

And if their Fame was reduced, it would affect their personal reputation evaluations, which would in turn affect a whole series of other things.

Of course, if that had been the only problem, some players would probably still have chosen to take the risk after weighing the pros and cons.

What truly made the players give up completely was Evé’s eventual decision to stop accepting this kind of offering.

There was no helping it.

In just one month, mountains of gold and mana stones had nearly formed behind the supreme temple in her Divine Kingdom. Although both resources were extremely useful for rewarding players, the players had already offered far too much.

Combined with the massive expenditure of contribution points, this directly caused the total amount of contribution points in circulation to surge once again.

So in the end… after giving it some thought, Evé decided to intervene.

Of course, the disappearance of the mineral veins was merely a minor episode. Against the backdrop of the Seigüe’s rapidly increasing mana reserves and the strange phenomena appearing everywhere, this bizarre phenomenon, which would once have been enough to shock the entire continent, could now only be regarded as drunken chatter in a tavern…

The ones who truly felt the pain were some of the empire’s nobles.

As for Evé, she had already witnessed the players pull off one outrageous stunt after another, so she was no longer surprised by such things.

Compared with turning holy statues into bombs, offering entire mineral veins was actually relatively harmless.

Nevertheless, the players’ behavior still needed to be restrained.

Although Evé had gradually relaxed her control over the players as their numbers increased and the game system became more sophisticated, there were still times when she had to maintain a proper balance.

Take this whole mineral deposits fiasco this time, for example. If she simply ignored this situation and allowed the players to keep exploiting this loophole, they would probably offer up every mine in the world.

That would not be beneficial to the development of the World of Seigües, nor was it something Evé wanted to see.

Speaking of which, since she had already decided to bring this “Origin Realm” under her control, Evé naturally had to consider how to manage it properly.

Incidentally, after communicating with Urinos, Evé had also vaguely figured out why the World of Seigües was called the Origin Realm.

That is, to the wider Universe, Seigües was the earliest realm and the world where the Ancient Gods were born. Furthermore, it was very likely connected to the Origin Laws of the previous universe.

As the starting point of the mythological power of the Seigües Universe and the birthplace of civilization, it was only natural for the World of Seigües to be called the Origin Realm…

In any case, the Elven Forest continued to develop at its usual rapid pace.

The various player-owned major cities grew increasingly prosperous, while all kinds of new things emerged one after another and were then spread throughout the world through the players.

Of course, the players’ strength also steadily increased with the passage of time. Relying on faith and the passive “War Sacrifice” skill, Evé’s divine power continued to accumulate as well…

This was not a state of steady, linear growth. Instead, as the players’ strength increased further and the number of believers expanded rapidly, the growth began to accelerate.

Evé made a rough estimate. If things continued at this rate, then by the time the planetary barrier surrounding the Seigües World was completely lifted, her divine power might very well exceed 700,000.

Although this was still a considerable distance from the one-million mark required to reach Greater Divine Power, it was already an extremely terrifying rate of growth.

Even so, Evé was still not satisfied.

She wanted to reach the peak of Higher Divine Power as quickly as possible.

Honestly, if other True Gods, especially those possessing Higher Divine Power, learned of her thoughts, they would probably curse her outright.

Less than seven years had passed since she had risen from Weaker Divine Power to Higher Divine Power.

This… even for a True God who had awakened from dormancy, such a rate of growth was utterly insane!

Not to mention that Evé also had the players, a veritable BUG!

It was worth mentioning that compared with several months ago, the players’ overall strength had already risen another level.

This was especially true over the past two months. The number of Gold-rank players had exploded, surpassing five hundred, while among the more than three million players across the entire server, the number of Silver-rank players had also exceeded 1.5 million.

In other words… one out of every two players had reached at least the Silver rank.

This level of power was already quite terrifying. One had to remember that, according to Evé’s memories, at the height of the previous World Tree’s power, it had possessed only an Oak Guardian army of 100,000 Silver-rank experts.

Of course, the previous World Tree had never been an existence that enjoyed warfare to begin with, so it was perfectly normal for its elven army to be relatively weak.

As for Evé… honestly, if it were not for the blue sphere BUG inside her which allowed her to summon someone’s consciousness from Earth, it would have been impossible for her to create such a terrifying force in such a short period of time.

Needless to say, if the players were replaced with Oak Guardians or ordinary elves, merely meeting the enormous demand for souls would have been enough to give her a headache.

It had to be acknowledged that Evé’s achievements today owed an immense debt to the blue sphere continuously rotating within her divine soul, which she had already determined was the Origin Key that had allowed the King of Gods, Neo, to achieve Greater Divine Power.

No, it was not just the blue sphere.

The green sphere that had once been touched by Evé’s soul and fused with her true body, granting her the power of [Absorption], was equally important.

Evé had already determined that this Origin Key should be the Key to the “New Universe,” the fourth cosmic cycle.

And the reason her divine power could increase so rapidly was precisely because of the skill [Absorption].

The green sphere had granted her the ability to absorb power, while the blue sphere had provided her with an endless supply of labor to generate that power. The two combined were what had created the miracle of Evé’s rapid rise in strength.

It could be said that without these two spheres, even if Evé had become the World Tree, she would never have been able to reach her current height.

At the same time, however, Evé had developed a new doubt.

[Absorption] was an innate ability of the World Tree, so why was it now connected to the Origin Key that possessed the ability of [Devour]?

Was it because the previous World Tree had obtained the Key and fused it into itself, thereby gaining an innate ability? Or was it that… [Devour] was merely an enhancement of the World Tree’s ability, while the World Tree itself had always possessed a power similar to absorption to some extent?

Evé could not quite figure it out.

From what she could sense, the green sphere had already completely fused with her true body.

Not only that, the blue sphere had also made a home within her divine soul. If Evé’s perception was correct, then once she ascended to Greater Divine Power, this sphere would very likely fuse with her as well…

From this perspective, Evé could not help but think of another possibility.

If Neo attaining Greater Divine Power truly depended on this blue sphere… then perhaps he really had already fallen at this point.

Of course, it was also possible that he had found a replacement for the blue sphere and had completely left the Seigües Universe.

In any case, there was still a long road ahead before she could become a Greater Divine Power, and she was destined to contend with the Eternal Lord.

Although Evé’s strength was already formidable, she knew that it was still not enough.

The Eternal Lord’s faith spread across countless realms, and the divine power Etriōu accumulated over a thousand years was undoubtedly immense. Moreover, as a god of faith, as long as his network of faith remained, the Eternal Lord could never truly perish.

Defeating him would be no easier than completely killing a Higher Divine Power Abyssal Myrh.

One had to remember that even after defeating Samael, Evé had been unable to kill this Demon Lord and could only seal him away.

However, it was possible to seal a Demon Lord whose true body had entered the battlefield. For a True God of Faith, on the other hand, unless their Divine Kingdom was destroyed, they could almost never send their true body into battle.

Moreover, the battle with Samael had taken place in the Seigües World, which was Evé’s home territory. Samael himself was also hot-tempered, reckless, and overconfident.

Otherwise… Evé would not have been able to defeat him.

In the battle against the Abyssal Myths, Evé might have appeared to be slaughtering them effortlessly, but the home-field advantage accounted for most of that. In addition, Evé’s combination of divine artifacts was particularly suited to hunting down fleeing enemies.

If the battle had taken place under different circumstances, such as in Hell or within a sunken world within the Abyss from the very beginning, the outcome might have been completely different.

Within the Abyss, Demon Lords could unleash one hundred percent of their strength. But here in Seigües, not only could they fail to unleash their full strength, they would also be suppressed by the world’s seal.

In other words, the Samael that Evé had defeated was a doubly weakened version of a Higher Divine Power, not a true Higher Divine Power at full strength.

Leviathan was the same.

So if she wanted to defeat the Eternal Lord, she still needed to become stronger.

It was worth mentioning that the accumulation of divine power was a gradual process. Even with Evé’s cheat-like advantages, she could not simply jump to one million divine power overnight.

It required time.

And during this period, the most important thing Evé needed to do was determine the Eternal Lord’s progress toward Greater Divine and… figure out how to ensure that he would not ascend faster than she did.

This was extremely important to Evé now.

And to figure this out, she first had to understand exactly the method by which the Eternal Lord would ascend in the first place.

Of course, she also needed to understand her own path to ascension.

Fusing with the Core Origin of a world was merely the foundation.

But what came after that?

What should she do next?

All of this required answers.

Just as Evé was pondering these questions, her heart suddenly stirred.

She looked toward Mirovia.

There, a familiar yet unfamiliar divine power was slowly rising.

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