Chapter 190

I sucked in a breath. Fortuna, the goddess of luck and fortune?

"You're right to be concerned," Sorsette said. "She already has her claws deep into you and your growth."

I shook my head. "That doesn't make sense, why would the goddess of luck be giving me skills and intertwining luck into all of my abilities if she was working with a group hunting me in particular?"

"It's more than that," Sorsette added. "When I told you that gods have the ability to push and pull things, some have more influence than others. But what has more influence than random chance? How hard would it be for her to influence seemingly disconnected and random things to get the results she wanted? Her influence is far deeper than you think."

Furrowing my brows I leaned in. "What do you mean?"

"You walked out of a ruin where a man accidentally cut too deep and killed himself, leaving you with a heavy bag of gold. You ran into a man who had captured your future lover, a person who wouldn't only positively react to their changes but thrive because of them. Days later you happened to be paired with a pair of twins who were very talented and were bought in part by the... unfortunate incident before that. The moment you walked into Goldenhearth you were led by the hand to a place that was full of people who would benefit from your powers and would happily accept the cost. All the while, you would continue to gain more and more luck and luck-based magic."

My fists clenched as I listened to her words. "Are you saying that everything that's happened has been because of her?"

Sorsette crossed her legs in front of her. "Yes. She's been pushing events all around you and it was because of those threads that I was able to follow them and confirm her connections to the Tamin church."

I closed my eyes as my thoughts raced. I was barely able to get the next words out without losing my nerve, "So many times I had felt lucky. I barely made it out of a scrape, barely survived. And now it's not just that, it's everything? The lovers I've found, the friends I've made, everything?"

There was a long pause before Sorsette finally replied. "Yes. However, I'll remind you again that even she can only push and pull things using her influence. She doesn't have any more control over your free will than Felketh or I do. Everything you've done, all the friends and lovers you've found, all of that has been because you took the opportunities presented to you. Not because she forced anyone onto you."

Another long pause passed as I digested her words. She lifted a cup of tea to her mouth and took a sip before sighing. "Truthfully this isn't how I expected you to react to this at all."

I looked up at her in confusion.

She nodded. "I expected you to be confused by her involvement sure, but not so... violently upset by this information. Do not take this the wrong way but I expected you to be more... thankful that Fortuna has influenced things in this way. It is plain to me that you love your girlfriends and are happy with how things have gone so far. I chose to tell you this information to get out in front of it. Because even if she is manipulating things to your benefit, you cannot trust her."

"He raped me!"

There was a long silence. All of the feelings that I thought I had dealt with had rushed back to the surface. I was pissed off and it turned out I didn't just have him to blame but Fortuna as well. Would I have avoided that fate without her interference? Would Bella have been sold into slavery without her interference? Did he drink just a little too much that night because of her? I was seething but I realized it wasn't Sorsette that my rage was directed at, it was Fortuna. I forced myself to calm down, took in a deep breath, and let the anger fall away like I had done before with my anxiety.

"How much influence does she have over me? Does she get to mess with me more because my Luck is high? What about the Black Cat class? What about the luck spells?"

Sorsette cleared her throat. "When it comes to the system she doesn't have much direct control over anything, and her magic is set up in such a way that not even she can adjust the outcome. Having high Luck actually gives her less control over you, other than the fact that you're more likely to survive in the first place. Having even luck means that she can influence both positive and negative events, having a lot of good luck means she can only boost you when you need it really, anything too negative would go against the grain too much, though she should still have some control in that direction. You're so much less likely to be in a bad situation in the first place, however, that even poor results for you are less likely to be devastating."

I rubbed my face, trying to take all of this in. "So, why would she supposedly help me so much while supporting a church that's actively hunting me?"

"I can't pretend to have the full details of their plan but Fortuna, along with the other hidden gods, are trying to set the stage for a specific version of the prophecy to take place. I'd like to assume things are already diverging quite a bit now that you're no longer a demon but I'm also uncertain how much they know and how much they've anticipated."

"What about Felketh?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No, it's impossible for him to be one of them, directly anyway. I won't deny that the state of affairs are indirectly empowering him but it is not possible for him to be among them. His domain isn't actually demons, it's strife and adversity but demons are his greatest expression of that. He isn't able to give them tools to harm his domain even as a front. Felketh, Charon, Morkinnen, and myself are the only gods that cannot be a hidden supporter of the Tamin church."

"What absolves you and Morkinnen... or Charon for that matter?"

"Charon marked you with his blessing of change. In addition to empowering some of your abilities, it makes it harder for the divine to influence you directly. That automatically makes prophecies about you much less accurate and makes you much more difficult to nudge using their domains. His blessing runs too counter to any of their goals, if he were among them it would destroy their own plan to give that blessing to you. He also very rarely gets involved with anything, the fact he's acting at all is incredibly surprising."

She leaned back in her chair and drummed her fingers along the top of her desk. "Morkinnen... In a similar way that Felketh can't be a member, Morkinnen cannot be a member. When the Tamin church can get away with it, they regularly murder people expressing their love in a way that Morkinnen upholds as part of his domain. He cannot support them directly and I have seen no evidence that he has supported them indirectly."

Sorsette sighed. "As for me, I have no direct proof that I am not part of their group but I hope my actions speak to my character. I would not be telling you any of this if the goal were to keep you on track to fulfill the prophecies in the way that they wish for it." She gestured around us. "Even now I'm shielding this room from divine spying using my own domain so that I can tell you all of this in confidence. Everything I tell you that they cannot observe will make their predictions of you even worse. Especially since you've managed to surprise me with your reactions thus far."

I squinted at the way she worded that. "You just said in the way that they wish for it, that makes it sound like you're trying to fulfill a version of the prophecy too."

For the time since I've sat across from her anger flashed across her face. She rubbed the bridge of her nose before looking back up. "There will be a war of the gods. That part of the prophecy already cannot be changed. It's now just a matter of how and when. Things are already in motion, the riot outside this tower shows that. Things have been building to this for a while, all I'm trying to do is adjust things so that fewer people get hurt and my domain isn't lost."

"What do you mean by lost?" I asked.

"War breeds both innovation and terrible loss, every, single, time. In every conflict while we learn of new ways to kill each other, we also run the risk of losing someone at the forefront of research or a repository of knowledge being burnt to the ground. The sapient races are on the verge of extinction and we're squabbling over followers instead of things that matter. There are already factions that don't like me because of the last war, I'm afraid that if a full-on war that involved mortals were to take place, my libraries would be targeted. There are two ways to kill a god, you can either kill them directly or destroy the current incarnation of their domain. I am one of the most susceptible to this threat and one of the most likely to lose everything in a second war."

I took a sip of water and swallowed. "What do you mean when you say the sapient races are on the verge of extinction?"

She sighed and shook her head. "Just because a few cities have walls does not mean that they are safe from the wilds." She looked me in the eye. "I've seen glimpses of your world, billions of sapient life on the surface of your planet. By comparison we have less than two hundred million people spread out across what comparatively little land we've tamed. To make things worse, we have monsters and demons on our doorstep constantly trying to erode away our defenses while the larger threats are thankfully half a world away. The only reason we've survived this long is by plucking the souls of deceased world travelers from other worlds and integrating what knowledge we can. Sometimes the knowledge is practical, like agriculture, sometimes it's peculiar but useful ideas like the concept of the status system itself."

There was a lot to mull over in that statement but the thing that had me the most immediately curious was the system. "You got the idea of the system from a world traveler? Why did you create it?"

Her expression went flat, likely trying to hide her complex feelings on the topic. "The idea of the system came from a world traveler, yes. It is designed to help people get stronger and more resilient. I took the idea and created a version of it here to help people properly integrate mana into their bodies. Everything in this world is filled with mana, the plants, the animals, the planet itself, the monsters, and even sapient beings. Before the system existed sapient beings used the mana they gained from eating and killing monsters the same way animals did, mostly randomly. It was haphazard and messy, sometimes the mana would be useless, or worse, be actively detrimental based on how it integrated with them, over time it manifested into the evolutionary differences seen between the races. But the status system was created to help individual sapient beings leverage their greatest advantage, knowledge, to their benefit. There were some growing pains with the early versions of the system but it was immediately effective in increasing survivability rates." By the end of her speech, she had shifted to being proud of it.

"And then the first war of the gods happened?" I asked.

She sighed and leaned back in her chair. "Yes. Erimikai, the god of war and destruction got the biggest benefit from the system being created. War is somewhat inevitable to settle large-scale factional disputes. If it was just that he got stronger that would have been fine, but it was discovered that he was pushing different gods' followers to fight with each other. It only really intensified when it started threatening some of the gods' domains that it triggered a full-scale war. After the god of death killed Erimikai unexpectedly, the remaining gods negotiated and created the Divine Accords. I was blamed for triggering it, which I in some part agree with. So, I swore not to create an army to exert my power and disband the one I had at the time by stripping all of my paladins of any divine magic. The most I'm allowed is those who guard my sites and allowing my followers to participate in an unorganized fashion as they see fit. Even the boons I grant must be powered by their own strength, such as the variant of [Zone of Truth] I have granted you." She quirked a smile. "If you wish to learn more about this time period, you're welcome to research it yourself here. We still have more to discuss and we're starting to drift off topic."

"Could Erimikai secretly be part of the Tamin church?" I asked.

Sorsette laughed. "No, that's not possible. Part of the Accords made the domain of war and destruction permanently well... destroyed. During the negotiations the gods agreed that the god of death should permanently 'kill' the domain, in a metaphysical sense. He is the only one of us who would be capable of doing so and I'm not sure if it could even be recreated if he wished it. On a more practical level, the gods would be able to see the domain if it had been somehow recreated and reclaimed. No, Erimikai is still dead. Of that I am sure."

I nodded and took another sip of water. "There is one more thing you mentioned earlier that I'm curious about."

She nodded solemnly. "I thought as much."

"You said that you have survived by plucking the souls of deceased world travelers... Does this... include me?"

"Yes," she replied before sighing. "It does."