Chapter 499: Those Who Do Not Believe Have No Right to Live in the God Realm!

"Ding... your chief priest Herder has sacrificed the goddess Nuoyu to you, triggering a multiplier bonus. Congratulations — you have obtained a seven-star goddess, the Butterfly Sword Saint [Nuoyu]."

"Ding... your chief priest Herder has sacrificed the goddess Yunmi to you, triggering a ten-thousand-fold bonus. Congratulations — you have obtained a seven-star goddess, the Cloud Sword Immortal [Yunmi]."

"Ding... your chief priest Herder has sacrificed the goddess Ophelia to you, triggering a ten-thousand-fold bonus. Congratulations — you have obtained a seven-star goddess, the Seeker [Ophelia]."

"Ding... your chief priest Herder has sacrificed the goddess Alice to you, triggering a ten-thousand-fold bonus. Congratulations — you have obtained a seven-star goddess, the Elemental Master [Alice]."

Liu Che wasn’t especially surprised by Alice’s arrival, nor by that of the two queens. Only Nuoyu and Yunmi caught him off guard. He made a mental note to ask Herder later how this wandering merchant of a girl had even come to the gods’ attention — for now, there was a whole world to bring home.

Liu Che extended a hand — twenty-nine fingers now — and tapped lightly at the space before him. Light bloomed across the God Realm’s sky, wrapping the entire planet at once and drawing it toward the God Realm. The stronger he grew, the more refined his command of divine power became; the power of space moved now like an outstretched hand, drawing the whole world gently toward the gods.

Across the Arad continent, the residents — still caught up in their prayers, not yet fully roused — felt an overwhelming surge of power flooding into their bodies. Sword Saint Xilan broke straight through his current stage on the spot.

"My god... is this the God Realm?"

Hundreds of vast stars hung across the dome of the sky. Sun and moon crossed the heavens together. A single breath here felt like swallowing a elixir of the highest order — his strength leapt forward by whole stages in an instant.

Suan Aska gazed out over the sweep of the God Realm and murmured to herself, "So the decision was right after all. We’ve come to the God Realm. We are the people of the true god now..."

Meanwhile, in the lands of the night elves — from the moment Queen Maya departed on that shaft of divine light, power had rained down from the heavens, and the night elves began to change. Their lavender skin lightened first, growing fairer; then the old curse buried in their blood was purged entirely; power of every kind surged through their bodies all at once. At the same moment, deep within the night elf kingdom, an enormous, verdant tree rose up out of the earth — the Tree of Life, ruined by disaster since ancient times, restored to life at last under the touch of divine power.

In the snowy reaches of the Snow Region, Casillas looked out over a land where the breath of spring had returned and couldn’t help but smile.

"Look at that — this is the gift of the gods. You Bantu people won’t have to suffer like this ever again."

"That’s right — thank you, God. When I’m grown, I’ll enter the selection for godhood myself, and I’ll do everything I can to become a goddess..." A rabbit-eared girl, endearing and full of longing, spoke the words like a wish. Her name was Min Tai, a humble young girl of the Bantu tribe.

Elsewhere, Ophelia looked out at the radiant God Realm and turned to the friends beside her. "From here, it’s up to you. I need to go and serve the gods now."

"Farewell, Goddess Ophelia..." Isadora and the others knocked their heads to the ground together.

The fiery-haired girl, hair still cropped short, smiled down at them. "You’d best be ready too, little Isadora."

Isadora flushed red and didn’t dare answer. A moment later the light descended, and the red-haired girl departed with it, rising into the sky.

Within the Delos Empire, things unfolded rather differently. The people here were proud, stubborn, and — especially among those raised within the royal family’s own domain — steeped in that arrogance to the fullest. And so, when they arrived in the God Realm, the believers of the faith found their bodies growing stronger, saturated with power under the divine energy’s nourishment — while the rest, the ones who had refused to convert, began dying, one after another, right where they stood. Something like poison working through their veins.

It could be explained simply enough: when a body cannot adapt to power of a higher order, that power becomes the most vicious poison there is. And because divine power now filled the very air itself, those who refused it were, quite literally, drowning in poison.

A judge within the Delos Empire watched the princes and the common people alike die where they stood, and said, without a trace of feeling, "Our chief priest’s words were not wrong in the slightest. Heh."

"My lord — what should be done with the bodies?"

"Burn them all."

"Understood."

And with that, the Arad continent had fully returned to the God Realm.

Meanwhile, deep within the Tower of Death, a group of practitioners who had spent countless years cultivating there under borrowed divine power found themselves baffled — why had the power of the death god suddenly vanished into nothing?

They had relied on that power for generation after generation of training. Now Dreyfus had simply disappeared, and the Tower of Death itself had begun to collapse around them.

Sword Saint Soderros and Liang Yue stood frozen. Once the tower crumbled away, an entirely new world lay revealed beyond it.

"No — this energy in the air, it’s eating away at our strength."

"This power... it’s far too strong!"

"No—"

The blonde princess Taylor and the others around her wailed in despair. But before another moment passed, a beam of divine light wrapped around them all — sparing them, just barely, from certain death.

Soderros eyed the group with open suspicion. Then he heard a voice: "Welcome to the Eternal Faith. Now that the Arad continent has been folded into the God Realm, will you join the faith?"

One man, fists glowing faintly, scowled at the question. "I won’t join any god’s faith. I—"

Before he could finish, he was cast out of the beam of light. He died the instant divine power touched him, his soul flung straight down into the underworld.

The gathered faithful turned their eyes back to Soderros and asked again: "Will you join the faith of the gods?"

"I..."

Soderros, sword master though he was, felt something close to dread twist through him. He had no wish to join any faith — in his eyes, so-called gods were nothing more than very powerful people, and he flattered himself that he could kill a few of them if it came to that.

"We won’t force you. But understand — if you refuse, the gods will grant you no protection at all..."

With that, the man reached out to pull Soderros from the beam of light entirely. It was enough to scare the old sword master half to death.

He roared at once: "No — I’m willing! I’m willing to join the faith!"

By then, one of his arms had already slipped a hair’s breadth beyond the edge of the light. Liang Yue and the others no longer cared about pride at a moment like this — saving their own lives came first. It was only afterward, once they understood the full weight of the Eternal God’s power, that they found themselves sighing at how they’d acted in that moment. A man could die in the space of a single second here.

Naturally, all of this had been arranged by Herder from the start. The Arad world needed capable enforcers, and the gods needed fighters of their own — otherwise, once Dreyfus, god of death, had been captured and dragged down to the underworld, this entire group would have simply perished along with him.

Back on Huttonmar’s side, Herder herself was greeted by a figure she knew very well.

Celia, the ancient elf. Only now, the girl’s face had flushed a deep crimson, and she no longer carried herself with quite the same purity as before.

"Sister — come with me..."

———

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