Book 7, Chapter 53: Ancient History (2)

Even gods were not immortal.

This was because, before they discovered divine power, the gods were not actually gods.

Before the gods discovered divine power, the gods and Origin Beasts had been, in some sense, on the same level. The gods, however, had been born in the storms of Origin Energy and better understood how to use Method Power.

The first bit of divine power that the Moon Goddess ever received came from the Divine Eye Ape.

This piqued the Moon Goddess’s interest, and she quickly ran a variety of different experiments to explore what exactly Divine Power was.

She soon discovered that divine power was produced through faith. Without faith, there would be no divine power to speak of.

As such, the Moon Goddess began to search out and persuade other Origin Beasts to worship her.

The Moon Goddess started accumulating divine power at an ever increasing rate, and she grew more and more powerful as she did so. Most importantly, she had stopped aging, and she would not die.

This made the Moon Goddess incredibly happy.

At the time, the Moon Goddess wanted nothing more than to live for as long as she could.

Slowly but surely, however, she began to grow dissatisfied.

Because she had realized that the maximum divine power she could gather through faith was limited. As time passed and her strength increased, the amount of divine power that she needed to sustain her divinity also grew. In other words, the longer she lived, the more divine power was required for her to continue living.

The number of Origin Beasts was limited, so the amount of divine power that they could provide was limited as well.

More importantly, the other gods were beginning to catch onto her secret and had started gathering their own groups of Origin Beast worshippers.

This made the Moon Goddess incredibly anxious.

The gods began to fight with one another over the Origin Beasts, who were pampered and treated like royal pets.

This all came to an end, however, when yet another discovery was made.

No one knew who made this discovery, but news spread very quickly, mostly because it was virtually impossible to conceal — killing Origin Beasts provided even more divine power.

Faith was still the foundation of divine power, but absorbing it through proffered sacrifices was actually the most efficient method to do so.

The amount of divine power that an Origin Beast sacrifice provided was extremely great, and it would last a god for a long time. The properties of Kun territory also meant that new Origin Beasts would be birthed spontaneously every so often.

This cycle was then harnessed by the gods for them to obtain their necessary nourishment.

Thus, the Origin Beasts’ status went from pets to food.

Food for gods.

In order to obtain eternal life, all of the gods, even the Moon Goddess, who supposedly loved to play with her pets, began to hunt these Origin Beasts.

The sudden change in the relationship dynamic wounded the Origin Beasts’ pride greatly. They would not allow themselves to be hunted like dogs, which was why they began to retaliate against the gods.

Even though they didn’t have divine power or Method Power, the blessing of the Origin Energy Sea gave them incredibly large physiques and impeccable control over Origin Energy.

The two sides were soon embroiled in a fierce battle.

This battle was so intense that it caused the very sky to tremble and the earth to quake. Eventually, however, the gods emerged victorious.

A majority of the Origin Beasts were subsequently captured and tamed as livestock that provided the gods with divine power while a small number managed to escape and hide deep under the Origin Energy Sea.

But the gods soon discovered that, over the course of their battle, the realm had sustained a significant amount of damage. The previous center of the Origin Energy Sea had been shifted to another realm, causing the Origin Energy density in the Origin Realm to decrease.

At the beginning, this was a good thing.

The decreasing Origin Energy density significantly calmed the turbulent Origin Energy waves within the Origin Realm, making it much more peaceful.

This peacefulness allowed for even more creatures to spring to life.

New Origin Beasts constantly came into being in Kun territory, but their general strength was declining as a response to the constantly changing Origin Realm.

Even though the gods had gained dominion over the Origin Beasts, they were still dissatisfied.

Their need for divine power was simply too great, and there were far too few Origin Beasts to meet that need. The Origin Beasts’ reproductive rates were also declining, and that wasn’t even mentioning the fact that the Origin Beasts were beginning to weaken and become more and more like modern-day Desolate Beasts due to the natural process of evolution.

The gods fought amongst each other for control of the Origin Beasts a number of times. At this point, the Origin Beasts had essentially become resources that were fought over.

This continued until the second Sky Goddess’ appearance.

This second Sky Goddess was birthed a thousand years after the death of the first Sky Goddess. As a newly birthed goddess, she was significantly weaker than the rest, and she had very few opportunities to garner any Divine Power from Origin Beasts. She could only closely guard the single Origin Light Sabertooth that she possessed.

For a long time, the second Sky Goddess remained extremely obscure.

Until one day, when the barbaric Tyrant God suddenly tried to forcefully claim this Sky Goddess in a moment of hot-bloodedness.

Shockingly, he was defeated.

And he had been so soundly defeated that a single finger strike from the Sky Goddess was enough to claim his life.

It was only then that the other gods realized that the Sky Goddess had somehow obtained an incredible amount of divine power. Her true power was so immense that she was actually one of the most powerful gods in the entire realm.

But she only possessed a single Origin Beast follower, so where had her vast store of divine power come from?

A few of the more curious gods carefully observed her every action and movement until they finally discovered her secret.

The Sky Goddess had created a new lifeform at some point in time.

These lifeforms were extremely weak and tiny, but they did offer one major benefit: they could reproduce on their own, without any help from the environment. And because these lifeforms were very weak and had short life spans, their reproductive abilities were exceptionally high. In just a hundred years, they had already formed a sizable population.

Even though these creatures individually provided much less divine power than an Origin Beast, their numbers more than made up for the deficiency, and they were ultimately the reason why the Sky Goddess’s strength had skyrocketed.

This was the secret behind the Sky Goddess’s sudden increase in strength.

Soon after that, the gods also figured out that Sky Goddess had combined her bloodline with the Origin Light Sabertooth to create these creatures.

When the gods made this discovery, they quickly began their own secret experiments to produce more efficient and more robust races that would supply them with more divine power.

The Sky Goddess eventually became known as the Mother Goddess.

Not long afterwards, the Mystic Armor Beast and the Dream God’s bloodline combined to produce the Mystics; the Immortal Enlightenment and the Nature God’s bloodline combined to produce the Dryads; the Divine Eye Ape and the Moon Goddess’s bloodline combined to produce the Astrals; the Savage Tyrant and the War God’s bloodline combined to produce the Ravagers; the Nightmare Spirit and the Darkness God’s bloodline combined to produce the Dark Astrals; the Illusive Feather and the Sky Goddess’s bloodline combined to produce the Harpies; and the Scaled Flood Dragon and the Sea God’s bloodline combined to produce the Oceanids.

At the peak of activity, hundreds of unique races populated the Origin Realm. Each god had their own race, and some even had multiple.

The Mother Goddess was one such god that had multiple worshipping races — the Harpies were just the most successful race that she had produced.

Success from the gods’ point of view was a direct measure of how much divine power that race provided them with.

The gods were constantly attempting to maximize the divine power from their vassal races.

They very quickly discovered that the amount of divine power that a race could provide was not only linked to the creature’s strength, but also its intelligence.

The higher both attributes were, the more divine power that race could supply.

This was why the Mother Goddess could use a weaker race to replace the Origin Beasts — they were much weaker, but their intelligence was also greater.

It took large amounts of resources to raise powerful creatures, but intelligent creatures required relatively less resources for the same output of divine power.

Thus, Intelligent creatures were the superior choice when it came to the divine-power-to-price ratio.

As such, the gods began to fiercely pump out race after race of intelligent creatures.

During that period of time, a creature’s potential divine power output was basically entirely determined by their intelligence, and thus, a god’s vassal races’ intelligence also became the standard by which the god’s power was measured.

The Mother Goddess, Dream God, and Moon Goddess, who had been quite unassuming in the past, suddenly soared to unprecedented heights with this change in how divine power was acquired.

The Mother Goddess was the first to create a subservient race, the Dream God relied on his unique consciousness powers to increase the intelligence of his creatures, and the Moon Goddess used her bewitching powers to obtain more sacrifices from her creatures. Later on, the Mother Goddess also utilized this method to increase her divine power as well.

This was a golden age for the Origin Realm, and it was also the gods’ most productive period of time.

The Origin Beasts were their livestock and their vassal races were food, both constantly working to extend their lifespan.

Even so, once they reached the top, there was nowhere else to go but down.

The Origin Realm continued to drift away from the center of the Origin Energy Sea. The realm’s Origin Energy continued to thin not because it was flowing out of the realm, but rather because the realm was losing the Origin Energy Sea’s support.

Until one day, the Origin Realm beached itself.

From that point onwards, Origin Energy would only flow out of the realm and never in.

The rapidly declining Origin Energy within the world also began affecting the gods, causing them to fall into a panic.

They wanted to return to the center of the Origin Energy Sea. Having divine power without Origin Energy was like only eating meat and neglecting vegetables. Doing so for an extended amount of time would result in heavy health problems.

But it was too late to try to find a solution now.

The Origin Energy Sea had never been calm, and even the gods would be torn asunder by the violent storms that constantly raged on it — the gods may have become immortal, but that didn’t mean that they were invincible.

Suddenly, an unprecedented idea was put forth.

The Kun territory!

The Kun territory was the only place that was unaffected by the Origin Energy Sea’s violent storms.

If they could transform the Kun territory into a boat and use it to drag the Origin Realm back to the center of the Origin Energy Sea, then everything would return to normal.

This was a good idea in principle. Even though the Kun territory was a bit too weak to tow an entire realm by itself, the gods would be able to support it and help it along.

The Kun territory would protect the gods from the raging winds of the sea while the gods provided the necessary power to mobilize the territory.

The gods’ power was clearly demonstrated by the fact that they actually managed to move the Origin Realm slightly.

Slowly but surely, the Origin Realm inched towards the center of the Origin Energy Sea. Even though this process expended quite a bit of energy, the plan was considered a success.

But no one could have foreseen what happened next.

The Origin Beasts, who had always been somewhat lacking in intelligence, suddenly gained intelligence and the ability to think critically, allowing them to restart their fight against the gods.

The way they rebelled was very simple, yet effective.

They immediately severed the connection between the Kun territory and the Origin Realm. The Kun territory thus became a giant prison that was to be cast away into the violent throes of the Origin Energy Sea for all eternity.

But the gods were also extremely powerful, and they reacted instantly despite the Origin Beasts’ best attempt to surprise them.

Just as the Kun territory was about to be swept away, the gods joined hands to submerge the Kun territory and attach it to the Origin Realm from below, locking the two landmasses together once more.

But because they were now submerged within the depths of the Origin Energy Sea, even the Kun territory could no longer shield them from the seething liquid Origin Energy surrounding them. The gods were forced to erect a barrier to isolate them from their surroundings and protect their hideout from the turbulent Origin Energy. This was the only way for them to cling to survival.

This was the origin of the Barrier of the Gods.

The Barrier of the Gods was a cage confining the gods, but it was also what they relied on to stay alive.