But... some deities have come up with new ideas. For instance, why bother going out to battle when you can grow faster by drawing nourishment from your own blood?

This is a simple truth. In the vast and boundless Star Realm, finding a place to call one's own is quite challenging, even for deities.

After all, without the protection of divine glory, ordinary deities must face the many difficulties coming from the Endless Star Realm on their own, and they must confront the challenges of wind and rain by themselves.

Each deity excels in different Domains, and who can guarantee that the Domain they excel in will be able to handle the crises within the Endless Star Realm?

Therefore, some deities have conceived some underhanded and unpresentable methods.

It's simple. For deities, dealing with all sorts of potential crises in the Star Realm can be resolved by significantly increasing the number of core combat forces within their divine kingdoms.

For those core combat professionals, such as those believers in them, they will directly transform into the beings of the divine kingdom after death, and even begin to fight for the deities before dying.

Under normal circumstances, the fact that these elite professionals can grow is more of a borrowing of the divine will of glory rather than the power of the deities.

But most of the time, the wise races won't specifically thank the divine will of glory, but instead turn their longing eyes toward the deities who offer them faith and blessings.

Once, twice, thrice...

One year, two years, three years...

Over long periods, those who should have been living on the continent, fighting for the future of the Divine Glory Continent, unknowingly gathered under the banners of deities.

The number of deities grew stronger, the amount of resources plundered increased, and instead of giving back to the world, they increasingly became parasitic growths on the world.

After all, now for them, those deities dreaming of sailing into the depths of the Endless Star Realm are just fools. Seeking growth on their own could never compare to extracting nutrients from the Divine Glory Continent faster.

Of course, they would not directly expose their intentions, and some would not even realize they've deviated.

After all, equally attached to the Divine Glory Continent are many righteous deities who continue to fight for the future of the Divine Glory Continent and the world.

These deities account for the vast majority of the number of deities.

More often than not, they are what people conventionally understand as righteous deities.

Yes, it is not defined by humans, but by the world, acknowledging them as legitimate deities beneficial to the development of the world.

And as for those who have completely turned into blood-sucking parasites?

Isn't it only to be expected? That's how the Evil Gods, shunned by everyone, are born.

Deities defined by the world, posing a threat to the world's ecosystem, in most cases, are basically what normal people consider "Evil Gods."

The two are not contradictory.

Because if the Evil Gods can influence the world itself, it's hard to say they won't affect the lives residing on the Divine Glory Continent as well.

If it were just this, it actually wouldn't pose much of a threat to the world, because the number of righteous deities has always surpassed that of the Evil Gods. For the world will, Evil Gods shouldn't become a fatal threat.

But... faith is toxic!

At the moment Kael became the lord of lies and murder, he was able to inherit this divine authority, directly capturing the majority of followers who were originally under the Prince of Lies, Shirek.

After all, devotees purely believing in the deities themselves are always in the minority. Most devotees are fanatics drawn to the power of the deities.

They don't care who the deity they believe in is. Whoever can provide them enough benefits will be the deity they revere.

Thus, in such circumstances, the ceaseless murmurings, filled with earthly greed, continuously poured into the deities through prayers.

Such occurrences, once or twice can be overlooked, but what about ten times, dozens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of times... numberless and infinite murmurings, full of earthly desire, echoing by your ear?

Think about it. If such voices, even while you sleep, continuously flow into the voices of believers, and over hundreds or thousands of years, these whisperings have, in a sense, become akin to the mental corruption Kael saw in a Human Federation myth known as "Cthulhu Mythos."

Three people can turn talk into a tiger, let alone these thousands upon thousands.

Once or twice, once or twice, by the time you come back to your senses, even those deities with powerful Divine Power cannot guarantee they will not go astray amidst these whisperings, committing fatal errors, whose cruel impacts, originated from grand excess, will certainly destabilize the foundations of deities.

Someone once said, the human imagination is slightly larger than the entire universe.

But human greed, the filth erupting from it, no matter how many universes there are, cannot contain it.

Because ah, the world can be large, yet such desires will be larger than the world itself.