Chapter 443: Better to Rely on Yourself Than the Gods

"...to spare the ocean races further bloodshed, we cordially invite the Mistress of the Silent Sea to participate in this contest. The victor shall hold claim to the Sea of Volcanoes, witnessed by the assembled deities..."

Ambrose read through the invitation, skipping the preamble. The truly significant part was this: the three deities were offering to provide Aige with enough divinity to complete her ascension.

Aige looked puzzled. "Isn't this actually good for me? I could save decades."

"You know what happened with Valarun," Ambrose said. "After Thanos helped him become a deity, how long did he maintain control over Valarun? If not for luck, the god of liches would still be serving as Thanos's slave. Divinity as a gift comes with strings attached—and that's before we even consider what kind of deities we're dealing with here."

The kouto goddess needed no elaboration: insanity was literally her divine domain. If Aige absorbed power from her, she might well become unhinged herself. The shagin goddess Sekkora was no better, with domains over brutality and cruelty. And then there was the ixiray deity Demogorgon.

A demon prince, cooperating with two minor ocean goddesses? No one would believe that.

Ambrose's working assumption was that Demogorgon intended to consume both goddesses as well. The Demon Prince would never expend his power on something as trivial as a stretch of sea for its own sake. This wasn't even a matter of self-interest, it was simply how demons operated.

So Ambrose had strong doubts about the sincerity of the invitation. The problem was, it had been delivered by two legendary envoys.

One each had been sent from the shagin and the ixiray, and the contents were identical.

As a general rule, a patron deity had absolute authority over their chosen. Choralan could, with a single thought, sterilize every elf alive; that was the nature of a racial deity's power. No race would dare invoke a deity's name falsely, which gave the invitation's contents a certain credibility.

That left Ambrose more than a little flummoxed.

Still, that wasn't the main problem. He looked at Aige and said plainly, "I'm concerned about their motives. Whether or not this invitation is genuine, we should decline."

Aige frowned. "Even if it's real?"

"We're winning by grinding them down. Why would we agree to play their game on their terms? How many kouto and shagin die is entirely irrelevant to us. Everyone is fighting for survival. If they can't handle that price, they shouldn't be competing."

"You're not worried about the anger of three deities?"

Having grown up in this world, Aige felt the weight of that question instinctively. Even though she was on the verge of divinity herself, deities occupied a dimension of power that mortals could not contend with. Mortals worshiped; mortals prayed.

Ambrose's relationship with the divine was considerably different. He had outmaneuvered several goddesses, and a few more wouldn't fundamentally change the problem.

Right now, Ambrose held the absolute advantage. Once the undead reached critical mass, they could steamroll the entire sea. Whether the opposition was a coalition or not didn't matter.

In that position, why abandon that advantage to agree to a fair fight?

Ambrose's most inflexible principle was not to accept losing propositions.

Aige trusted Ambrose, but she couldn't suppress one particular worry.

The moment she claimed this sea and crossed into godhood, she would immediately acquire three divine enemies. Would she have time to form her divine realm, or find new shelter, before they came for her?

She needed to ascend, and she needed the attention of Aion himself. Only then would she have any chance of restoring her father.

But if she were to be hunted from the moment she ascended...

The relationship between the two of them had grown to the point where Aige hid nothing from Ambrose. She told him about her concerns directly.

Ambrose didn't offer any sweeping reassurance. The God of Alchemy had a good relationship with him, but that was a personal friendship, not a political alliance. Asking the God of Alchemy to actively shelter Aige and make enemies of three deities would be overstepping badly. It was like asking someone to donate their entire fortune. No relationship survived that kind of demand; he would quickly turn friends into enemies.

The God of Alchemy was Ambrose's most significant backer. He wasn't going to burn that for anyone.

But he wasn't without options, either. He slid the ring from his finger and extended it to Aige. "This should be able to help you."

"That ring looks familiar," Aige said, startled. "You actually stole the Dragon Graveyard's ring?"

"Steal is a strong word. I borrowed a treasure from the Dragon Graveyard for a rescue. Gareth knew about it and agreed."

Ambrose had explained the whole story to the Dullahan long since. Gareth's response had been that a ring in exchange for his and his wife's lives, plus his father-in-law's life, was a bargain.

It was an entirely fair, reasonable, and transparent assessment, and absolutely not another scheme to fleece his father-in-law.

The dragons were now under Gareth's rule. After the betrayal, Sephris had retreated into heartbroken dormancy in the Dragon Graveyard, handing all affairs over to Gareth.

That was why Ambrose could produce the artifact without the slightest need for concealment.

Aige understood what "agreed" meant in this context. The dragons had been picked clean.

"What does it do?" she asked.

"It can begin condensing divine power for you in advance. The power it generates may not perfectly match your eventual divine domain, but it should let you start building your divine realm before you've formally ascended."

The ring the President had left behind was exceptional, and could almost bypass the boundary between the mortal and the divine. Ambrose could use it to condense extremely potent, "active" dark energy, like the power that would belong to a god of death.

That energy couldn't be absorbed into his own body. A mortal form couldn't contain it.

The dragons had used it differently, channeling the energy to reshape their environment and smooth the process of becoming bone dragons. They had never tried to absorb the energy themselves.

Ambrose had used it to produce undead, and had never considered feeding it into himself or his soul either.

Fundamentally, this was power that mortals had no business trying to ingest. It could be wielded, but not consumed.

Aige's situation was precisely what the ring was suited for. This power could help her lay the groundwork for her divine realm in advance of her apotheosis.

A divine realm was, at its core, a higher-order plane like Ambrose's extradimensional space, existing nowhere and everywhere, and accessible from any location.

Close the door, and no one could find her.

The divine realm was primarily for concealment, and only secondarily a destination for followers after death.

A mage's extradimensional pocket was a small independent plane. When expanded, it could become a stable personal plane. Further development granted temporal control, much like Ambrose's own extradimensional space. Beyond that, in the final stage, with perfect internal self-sufficiency and the ability to freely generate matter and environments, was a true divine realm.

Ordinarily, a deity needed to achieve godhood first, gain access to divine power, and then spend time gradually constructing that space.

It wasn't instantaneous. The process took time, and during that time, the newly-ascended deity was effectively exposed, a target for every other divine predator in the vicinity. That was exactly what Aige feared: she might die several times over during that window.

But if Ambrose lent her the ring capable of generating divinity, she could potentially complete that construction before she formally became a deity.

Never mind whether the divine realm produced this way would be perfectly suited to her nature: imperfections could be corrected later. As long as she could survive that initial window of vulnerability, Aige would have infinite possibilities ahead of her.

When Aige understood what Ambrose was offering, she was completely stunned. "The President just gave something like this away? Who on earth is he?"

Ambrose was just as curious, but he shrugged. "If he doesn't want to tell us, there's no point guessing."

He had tried to raise the question privately with the President after receiving the ring, and had received absolutely no response. It was as if the man were asleep and had missed the message entirely.

"That said, he's almost certainly a deity. We can be confident of that. It's just not clear which one. To interfere so openly in mortal affairs at this scale... whoever the Guild President is, his standing is not ordinary."

From everything Ambrose had read, deities came in vastly different tiers, and the distinctions weren't purely a matter of divine power.

Seniority played a role too. Shara, the Dark Goddess, had been born from the chaos of creation itself. Her seniority was staggering, surpassing even the Goddess of Magic's. Even in her current diminished state, Aion appeared to grant her certain special considerations. Otherwise, she would have lost more than her current share of divine domains.

If the President was a deity of similar seniority, it was entirely plausible for him to have access to unusual permissions.

After all, Aion was powerful. But he had never promised anyone that he would be fair. This was, ultimately, his world. You either accepted the terms or you left.

"Regardless," Ambrose said to Aige, "use the ring for now. If you can build your divine realm before you formally ascend, then the moment you cross that threshold, you'll have somewhere to go. Better to rely on yourself than to wait for the gods."

Aige nodded, then picked up the invitation and tore it in half.

Better to rely on herself indeed. Instead of hoping for a deity's charity, she would become strong enough not to need it.

Aige declined the invitation formally in her own name. The envoys merely left behind a token threat and departed.

Immediately afterward, Ambrose's territories were attacked in rapid succession. Both the shagin and the ixiray came at them with a recklessness that suggested they had stopped counting their own losses.

But Ambrose was ready. However fast the shagin and kouto could replenish their numbers, they couldn't win an attrition war against mass-produced undead. And in terms of high-end power, who in this sea could match Aige?

After several costly engagements, they seemed to lose their appetite for war.

As Ambrose had said, the reason he could claim this sea was overwhelming force. There was no trick to it.

Everything was moving in the right direction, and yet Ambrose had a persistent sense that something was off.

That vision he had once seen, that wedding... Whose wedding had it been? And what did it have to do with this sea?

Then Aiolos appeared before him again.

It wasn't the feverish, illogical version of him from their last encounter. If anything, compared to his earlier swagger, he looked battered. One of his arms was gone.

At his side was a strange half-human, half-lobster girl.

The first words out of Aiolos's mouth when they came face to face were: "Old friend, I was wrong before. Will you grant me one request?"

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