28 – Envy
With the question of how to proceed with my cultural invasion of other lands resolved, I could turn my attention to Arcantor and its development.
I was fully aware that my approach to Arcantor was completely different from what the other gods used to conquer their kingdoms.
While I was conquering Arcantor peacefully by simply offering them the benefits of using the Internet and showing them how it could change their lives for the better, the other gods might have used different methods, much more aggressive methods, such as demonstrations of power, catastrophes, and the like.
This was even recommended by the school teachers themselves, as mortals would be afraid of the gods at first, but over time that fear would turn to awe and then respect, turning them into loyal followers.
Especially in a test like this, it was much easier to make the mortals fear you by having powerful lightning strike the city, thus winning over the hundreds of thousands of people, even if it didn't immediately turn them into believers, because winning them over so quickly would make it much easier to influence them to go to war for you.
After all, mortals had only two choices: fight for you against another kingdom, or battle against a god who could use his divine power to kill hundreds of thousands of people with ease.
All this from a mortal's point of view, because I knew that it wasn't as easy for us to destroy a country's capital as they thought.
But my method also produced results.
Even though the speed I used to win over the believers in Arcantor wasn't that fast, I completely skipped the fear part and started with awe, which the mortals could quickly turn into respect for me.
When I looked at my system screen, I knew I was on the right track.
=========================
| Character Status
=========================
| Name: Adrian Innovashine
| Titles: God of Creativity, God of the Internet
| Level: Embryonic deity rank 3
| Number of believers: 6,282 -> 10,110
| Average usage per user: 5 hours
|------------------------
| Divine power: 8,828 / 40,000 -> 60,485 / 40,000
=========================
In the past 2 days, I've gained another 51k Divine Power points and almost 4,000 new believers!
With my Divine Power, I was able to increase my rank again and become a rank 4 embryonic deity, which would possibly increase my affinity with my Divine Power to 15%!
Considering that we were already on the evening of the 9th day of the Trial and had reached the 10th day, which was still only 5 days in the divine world, the other gods might just be accumulating Divine Power to increase their rank before starting the battles.
Therefore, it would be safer for me to use those 40,000 Divine Power points to increase my rank and only keep 20,000 as a guarantee in case I needed it for an attack or to use some other kind of power.
Seeing that the faithful were already going to sleep, I also heard Robert's prayer before I left the mortal world.
Thank you, God of the Internet, for the gift of the Internet, for the knowledge you give us, for the ability to communicate over long distances, and for the entertainment and fun your games give us... I see every day how happy people become when they learn to read so that they can use the Internet. With the blessing the Lord has given me, this has meant that the people in the class are learning much faster than normal! Even government magicians have come to me to offer me a better place to teach even more people, all because of you, God of the Internet, thank you so much for all the good you are doing for us...amen. Robert finished his prayer and went to bed.
Thinking about his prayer, I couldn't help but smile.
It was strange to see mortals from the perspective of a god, especially since the divine world was so similar to the mortal world I lived in before I came to this world...
I think the only difference between the divine world and my previous world is that the gods are extremely dependent on divine power for everything, to the point that electricity and steam power are used very little, probably because no god wants to be dependent on another god, like a steam god, to live.
This made the divine world seem like a 1920s version of my old world, with some modern things present, but many things that did not even exist.
Even though the place was different from the world of my previous life, it just seemed like a different time, not that these people were all-powerful gods.
But seeing how mortals treated us, and the great power we had to influence their lives, gave me a sense of responsibility that would make Uncle Ben proud.
Seeing Robert's gratitude, the happiness of the poor commoners who gathered at home to play a simple game of cards together, or even the only literate person in the family reading one of the novels I had painstakingly copied, making the children's eyes shine with dreams and hopes that one day in the future they would be as cool as those protagonists in the stories...
All this was so unbelievable that I didn't know how to act, except to do my best to help these people.
I needed the divine power that they had generated in me, and nothing was more fair than to give them back something just as valuable and interesting, right?
After observing the mortal world for a few more minutes and seeing what the mortals around the capital of Arcantor were up to, I returned my consciousness to my body in the divine world, ready to rise in rank again.
- 3rd POV -
In the teachers' lounge, several teachers were observing, recording, and taking notes on the progress of the students in their assigned realms.
Just as Adrian had imagined, more than 90% of the students had used the strategy of fear to conquer the realms they were in and had mortals praying for them at least once a week.
An amount that wasn't too low for them to receive little Divine Power, nor too high to make mortals resent them and give them less Divine Power.
Just as a farmer knows the right amount of milk to milk from a cow, the Gods had already discovered a very good number to demand from mortals at each stage of development.
As a result, many students had begun to rise in rank after receiving prayers from mortals during the week.
Since this was still in its infancy, the number of mortals praying to each god wasn't as high as it would be a few weeks later, but it was already enough to give these young gods a few dozen Divine Power Points to increase their rank.
There were even three students who were Rank 3 Embryonic Gods.
Observing Zack Gale and Lucy Wavecrest was very easy, and their progress was completely in line with expectations, making the teacher's job very easy.
But monitoring Adrian Innovashine was much more complicated.
The teacher responsible for monitoring his progress was at a complete loss.
Adrian's number of believers was much smaller than all the other students, but somehow he managed to develop a way to get believers to pray to him willingly several times a day!
This made the teacher not only curious, but also envious, because he was also a god, the God of Rain.
As the God of Rain, a God who received many prayers from believers on various worlds praying that their crops would receive enough rain to grow healthy, Professor Nereus was someone who could climb the ranks relatively easily.
With such a practical deity, it was easy for him to collect prayers for hundreds of years.
But that didn't mean that he didn't want to receive more divine power from the faithful to climb the ranks even faster, because the higher he climbed the more powerful he would become, and the faster he could climb the ranks in the army!
The problem was that Nereus not only couldn't understand what Adrian was doing to conquer mortals, he couldn't copy it!
Since Nereus was limited to the Rain God, he couldn't do anything with his divine power that wasn't rain-related, so it was impossible to create an Internet... and that frustrated him a lot!
Thinking of Adrian, whom he had always considered to be a practically useless disciple, since despite having a full god who could theoretically do anything, the cost of doing anything was ten times higher than any other god, Nereus never really felt envious of him.
But now that he saw the potential of Adrian's divinity and how he used it to the fullest, his view of the young god was constantly changing.
So much so that he knew he had to make a very important report to his superiors to get them to pay even more attention to Adrian.
Even more so when he realized that Adrian, with just over ten thousand believers, had even managed to rise in rank again in such a short time, becoming a rank 4 Embryonic Divinity and rising to first place in the student rankings!
With a serious expression, Nereus dedicated himself even more to writing the report for his superiors, especially since he knew how much Headmistress Aubrie Spearstrike appreciated him.
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