Age of Adepts

Divine virtue was excellent stuff as well!

To some extent, you could say divine virtue was the unique trait possessed by true gods.

For the gods, divine virtue was related to a god’s personality, beliefs, principles, alignment, and many other mysterious factors. Mortals could obtain supernatural powers by absorbing divine virtue, including increased lifespan and boosted resistances. Moreover, equipment enhanced with divine virtue would also gain corresponding characteristics.

The point being that both divine virtue and divine authority were top-class resources that every adept lusted after.

[Beep. Divine virtue analysis has been completed!

[Divine virtue belongs to Horr, Sixth Grade God of the Hunt, mid-ranked god of the Orc Pantheon. Estimated number of divine authority fragments is twenty-four. Domains within his divinity include: Hunt, Slaughter, Sacrifice, Marksman, Beast, Tracking, Trap-making, Detection.

[Characteristics of target divine virtue are: Bleed, Trueshot, Tracking Mark, Focused Strike, Execute.

[Host can absorb the divine virtue and use it to increase the body’s base attributes or enhance certain traits. However, said divine virtue leans more toward the domains of Slaughter and Tracking and can only be used to enhance Agility and spiritual senses. The thirty-eight points of divine virtue are estimated to be able to provide the Host with a six-point increase in Agility and a thirty percent increase in spiritual detection radius.

[If the divine virtue is used to nourish the starbeast bloodline, it is estimated to increase progress on the bloodline’s analysis by twenty-six percent.

[If the divine virtue is used to nourish Host’s life force, it is estimated to increase lifespan by 380 years.

[If the divine virtue is used on a mortal creature, one point of divine virtue will provide them with a random divine trait within the corresponding domain. If more than five points of divine virtue are used on a single creature, said creature would ascend into a holy beast.

[……

[……]

Greem looked at the list of options that the Chip provided. He could feel his heart pound. Divine virtue was truly excellent material. It could bring about tremendous improvement to his powers.

However, Greem couldn’t help but get slightly upset at the thought that all this divine virtue could only be used to improve his Agility. Of the four main attributes of Strength, Physique, Agility, and Spirit, Agility was the most useless to him.

He was a damned glass-cannon backline mage. He was a one-man artillery that didn’t need phantasmic movements or ridiculous speed. All he needed was explosions, explosions, and even more explosions.

That was why Greem’s Agility was still at 18 points, even now. Even if he pushed that attribute to twenty-four points with the divine virtue, it seemed like perhaps, probably…it was most likely not going to have any practical benefit to him in combat as he was right now.

Of course, while Agility wasn’t important to Greem, it was exceedingly crucial for Mary. Of course, Mary had now reached peak Fourth Grade. She was standing at the threshold of transcendence, and her Agility had already reached the 49-point limit. It couldn’t be raised further even if she wanted to.

That was why this stuff was still useless for Mary at the moment.

As for using divine virtue to improve his lifespan? There couldn’t be a more wasteful thought!

Greem’s lifespan now numbered 12,000 years. He had barely spent one-twentieth of his life at the moment. Extending it for another 300 years under such circumstances was pointless.

Use the divine virtue to create a holy beast?

If Greem was a powerful god with plenty of divine virtue to spare, creating one or two divine pets to accompany him might be a decent idea. However, Greem was an adept, and the only chance he had to obtain divine virtue was on the battlefield.

As such, he did not have the qualification nor the power to be so wasteful and extravagant!

By process of elimination, the best way to use the divine virtue was to nourish his starbeast bloodline or to forge powerful magical equipment. At the moment, the only two powerful artifacts in Greem’s hands had been stolen from other people. He did not have an actual relic of his own.

That was somewhat unacceptable for a proud adept like himself.

However, Greem didn’t specialize in creating magical equipment. He would have to take his time to explore the idea if he wanted to create a tailored high-grade artifact for himself.

Now that he had made up his mind, Greem hesitated no longer. He reached his hand into the ball of divine virtue and silently absorbed it.

Absorbing divine virtue wasn’t such a simple matter. First, you had to exterminate the soul consciousness that the god had left within it. Otherwise, recklessly absorbing a god’s divine virtue would only turn you into a host for the soul consciousness.

If the god were to activate their powers, Greem would become their soul puppet.

Of course, Greem would never make such a mistake!

He used his principle fire to exterminate all traces of Horr’s soul consciousness.

The level of principle fire was equal to things like divine power and the soul of a god. As such, using his principle fire was enough to wipe out any undesired elements from the divine virtue.

“Damned adept! I have committed your soul aura to memory now…you will become my prey one day! I—”

As the Undying Flames burned, wisps of black smoke rose from the divine virtue and formed into Horr’s ugly face.

He roared, he shouted, and he cursed, but there was no stopping Greem from steadily exterminating this wisp of Horr’s soul consciousness.

Hehehe! A Sixth Grade mid-ranked god with a twenty-four-point divine authority level. He had lost three divine authority fragments with the loss of this clone. His divine authority level had fallen to twenty-one points.

Twenty-one points wasn’t exactly a lot, but it wasn’t a little either. It allowed him to remain as a mid-ranked god. However, if anything more were to happen and he lost one or two more fragments of divine authority, then his grade would be at risk.

Should his total divine authority level fall below twenty points, he would no longer be able to remain as a mid-ranked god. Even his god kingdom would suffer as a result and shrink by half. Even if he could retrieve the lost divine authority fragments after the fact and become a Sixth Grade once again, the collapsed half of his god kingdom would require a large amount of divine power to recover.

Such a thing would be an absolute disaster for any god!

Whether he should send down another clone became a new question for Horr, the God of the Hunt.

It was one of the difficulties faced by the gods that was not as often spoken about.

Summoning a clone would allow them to create a replacement that could travel anywhere; it was incredibly convenient. However, if something were to happen to the clone and the divine authority fragments could not escape back to them, they would lose actual power.

The power of the gods rested in the amount of divine authority they controlled.

According to the World of Gods’ principles, the amount of time, effort, and diligence required to forge divine authority fragments through the faith power of their believers was horrifying.

Under ordinary circumstances, a god with a hundred thousand followers would require a thousand years to have a chance of extracting a single divine authority fragment from within the faith system. Moreover, this was the best possible scenario when there weren’t other gods fighting for the same divinity.

Should there be other gods involved in their divinity domains, then the conversion rate of divine authority fragments would be decided by the amount of control they had over specific divinity domains. The more gods involved in this competitive process, the slower the rate at which divine power could be converted into divine authority.

That was why the World of Gods was no utopia of peace, even when the adepts weren’t invading!

Almost every pantheon and god would have some degree of overlap in their divinity domains. As long as it didn’t involve their main divinities, there would be room for compromise. Should there be a conflict in two gods’ main divinities, then there would be no mercy to be spoken of.

Whoever had the harder fist would live and go on to inherit everything that once belonged to the defeated!

The other god would be exterminated and have their soul destroyed. Their god kingdom would fall into ruin, and their surviving believers would either be taken in by the other god or die along with their old god.

For instance, there couldn’t be two gods of death in the same planar world. Should two gods possess the identical divinity of death, then they would fight to the bitter end, even without encouragement from the planar consciousness.

Due to the gods’ constant infighting, the adept faction could slip in between the cracks and find an opportunity to profit from the gods.

Divine authority and divine virtue. These were the most valuable treasures that the adepts could get their hands on!

Divine virtue could improve their powers or be used to create high-grade equipment in combination with divine authority. Meanwhile, divine authority was a faith principle converter. They could convert the faith power of believers into pure divine power.

However, Greem was an adept, not a god; he could not make direct use of this power. Still, this didn’t mean that Greem couldn’t use the divine authority fragments to improve his own might.

After all, he did have a treasure in his possession that could make use of divine authority fragments.

The Orb of the Fire God!

The Orb of the Fire God was a piece of Fifth Grade divine equipment forged with fire divine authority by a Fire God in the first place. Using the divine authority fragment obtained from the Fire God’s clone to improve the quality of the orb was not a bad idea.

Should the power of the Orb of the Fire God improve, so would Greem’s own powers. He would be able to draw on even more fire energy.

As for these two fragments obtained from the God of the Hunt? They were probably best used as sacrifices.

If they were sacrificed to the Fire Elementium Plane, it would increase the level of Greem’s currently mastered fire principles. That was obviously more direct and essential than the improvement of equipment.

Of course, sacrificing the fragments to the World of Adepts’ planar consciousness was a decent idea too. Unfortunately, the World of Adepts couldn’t provide him with the fire principles he needed; the Fire Elementium Plane was a better choice.

The more he thought about it, the more impatient Greem became.

He couldn’t be bothered with recovering in his room anymore. He hastily rushed to Boulder Fortress’ teleportation array and returned to the Fire Elementium Plane. This time, he even used the origin connection between souls to give an order to the light clone he had left in the World of Adepts.