CHAPTER 63: A MAKESHIFT OPERATION

"Just as I thought, the whole world’s basically a makeshift operation. When you’re backed into a corner like this, you’ll do anything," Ren couldn’t help muttering under his breath.

Building a church isn’t exactly child’s play—it usually takes hundreds or even thousands of seasoned theologians working together, communicating with the divine, pouring in massive amounts of funding, and going through years and years of work before you can actually pull it off.

But the Church of Technology’s establishment was way too... simple and straightforward. No headquarters, no churches, no organizational structure, and honestly, no doctrine, no holy symbols, no divine statues, no symbolic objects. They haven’t even confirmed the God of Technology’s official name yet. The only thing they’ve nailed down is their missionary territory: wherever they conquer, they preach. Don’t listen? Won’t convert? Drag them out and chop their heads off...

The crazy thing is, this mess actually took root in the Teylir Emirates. In just three days, dozens of tribes have converted. Give them something to eat, and they’ll be more devout than anyone else!

There’s even grassroots spreading happening between regular folks now, which is just ridiculous. Ren has no clue what they’re actually spreading, but they’re definitely recruiting people and getting genuine believers to follow along.

"Did you see this coming all along?" Betty couldn’t help but look at Ren. He’d mentioned it several times before, always saying it wasn’t time yet or that he didn’t want to set it up. Now suddenly it’s self-organizing successfully and growing fast, which made her a bit suspicious.

"How would I know? I don’t have prophecy... I don’t have the power of prophecy yet, anyway." Ren shook his head helplessly. "But it’s a good thing in the end, right? The Teylir Emirates worship the God of War completely. If we swallow them up, the God of War will definitely take a huge hit, even if it’s just part of them!"

A deity’s power isn’t set in stone. As faith increases and they develop their divine authority, there’s massive room for improvement. They might even discover new authorities. He suspected that once the Magic Net reached a certain level of coverage, he might actually awaken prophetic abilities based on all the information flowing through it.

"What goes around comes around—it’s a good thing. He gets weaker, you get stronger, that’s two points less of a gap." The Goddess of Magic’s voice drifted from the tower. "So? Have you figured out the cleric system yet? You need to grant power to your clerics."

"Magic Conductors—that’s the power I’m giving them. They can totally form guardian units. Plus, every believer will gain wisdom under the light of the Enlightening Fire. Isn’t that enough?!" Ren laughed.

"I want the truth."

"That is the truth. In the mortal realm, most ordinary people are actually starving. Because they’re severely malnourished, these people’s brains don’t develop properly. If they want to learn anything, it’s harder than forging steel with bare hands. But with my Enlightening Fire boosting them, they can learn just like normal people. This will become the Church of Technology’s greatest asset for growth. Of course, it’s also because I keep feeling like my divine authority isn’t quite complete. If I force together a cleric system now, there might be some gaps."

When Ren first got transported here, he thought the nobles’ belief that freemen and slaves weren’t smart and were naturally inferior was just naked discrimination. But as time went on, he realized it wasn’t discrimination—and because it wasn’t discrimination, it was even more tragic.

Regular people, even the children of freemen, would most likely be malnourished, leading to incomplete brain development and affecting their intelligence, never able to cross class barriers.

The divine authority of [Enlightener]—under the light of the Enlightening Fire, all life would gain knowledge and wisdom. For pretty much everyone, this was an incredible blessing, especially in an era when magic-tech industry was about to begin!

Using this advantage well would give them unmatched "competitiveness" that no other church could compare to. And honestly, are Magic Conductors really all there is?

When various models of war machines and mechs show up, the Church of Technology will become a peak power in the world even without divine magic!

He still remembered that when the King of Creation developed to a certain point, he could grant intelligence to machines. When machine souls descended...

"Your divine authority has gaps?" The Goddess of Magic instantly appeared in front of Ren, looking extremely serious.

"I don’t know if it’s just my imagination, but I keep feeling like Data Craftsman can’t cover all network environments. But we made the Magic Net ourselves—how could this kind of situation happen?" Ren helplessly spread his hands. "The others don’t have any obvious issues, I just feel like they’re still pretty weak and need long-term training, strengthening, and development."

"When did you start thinking this way?"

"When I was building the virtual divine realm." Ren thought about it.

He didn’t have enough faith power and divine power to support building a real divine realm, so he planned to use Data Craftsman to build a virtual divine realm in the network to complete his final connection with his believers. As for "customer service," that was even simpler—just generate a few virtual holy spirits in the virtual divine realm to solve that problem.

After thinking for a moment, the Goddess of Magic finally spoke: "Maybe there’s more than just the Magic Net as a network in this world, or maybe the virtual data that Data Craftsman refers to isn’t just networks, but other things too, which is why you can’t fully use the ’Data Craftsman’ authority."

"There are other networks? Or other things that can be called data?" Ren frowned slightly. "So how can I get full control of the Data Craftsman authority?"

"You should be able to sense that those powers aren’t under your control. Try to find them, understand them, corrupt them. Once all the rules recognized as ’data’ are corrupted and controlled by you, the authority will naturally return completely..."

Obviously, this was incredibly important. The Goddess of Magic kept explaining in detail to Ren, and soon Ren understood why she was taking this so seriously. The reason was simple... if Ren never discovered the other "fragments" and another deity used those fragments to strike back, it could very well cause Ren to lose the Data Craftsman authority!

This was the amazing authority that let Ren travel between virtual and real worlds, going anywhere network coverage reached. They had to be careful!

Ren spent half the day trying to sense it but still got no signal. With no other choice, he called out to the book: "Book, you need to help me keep an eye on the web too, see if anyone’s discussing related stuff!"

In the blink of an eye, another two days passed.

The beastmen of the Teylir Emirates underwent another massive change.

The originally fierce beastmen had long been scared out of their wits by the continuous bombing, with no thoughts of resistance left. Panic and hunger gradually took over these beastmen’s minds!

The cold wind was bitter.

After another round of bombing, Lucina was surprised to discover that the group of beastmen troops in the distance were all just sitting there, with not a single person trying to run away or even get up. They didn’t even try to dodge, and even when magic bombs fell right beside them, they seemed to have no reaction at all.

Their eyes held nothing but numbness, completely lifeless.

The explosions and roar of the magic bombs, the scorching heat that once terrified them, couldn’t make them move at all now. They just quietly picked at their last bit of dried food, putting it in their mouths and slowly chewing, doing nothing else beyond that, like a bunch of walking corpses...