After returning with a lot of materials from my little wander, the one I was forcing to become a saintess stupidly tried to absorb the mana using her cultivation technique in Sophie’s Realm. Fortunately, Alex hit her over the head before she could actually do so. He said that the mana in this realm is of the highest quality, and the quantity isn’t lacking either. If someone tried to absorb it, she would just die. After all, as a normal human, she needed a protective barrier to keep the mana from killing her. Taking that into her body would have been no different than taking poison.

I sighed and said, “You’re so stupid,” and then decided to explain. “As a god, I can see why everyone in the cultivation world is so dumb. It’s because they don’t understand what they’re supposed to do to cultivate. I don't cultivators, but the fact that you’re doing it wrong is annoying."

I explained, "You’ve been absorbing energy from the environment and trying to expand your capacity to hold more of it. However, every time you run out of energy, you just replenish it from the environment. Cultivation resources make this process easier, but I had to remove the impurities from your body using a combination of divine magic, purification magic, and healing magic. Well, it doesn’t really matter how I did it. I even had to use my flames to literally burn away the impurities you were holding onto."

I continued, "You’ve damaged your own energy by relying too much on external sources. That’s why I hate cultivators—they depend on energy from outside themselves. What you're supposed to do is absorb energy from the environment and use it to refine and strengthen your internal energy. You’re not supposed to store it in your body. That’s why the energy levels in this world are so low," I added. "They’re even lower than Earth’s because people like you keep draining the energy. The false gods set up layers on the ley lines to absorb energy from them, but now, everywhere else on this planet has become a terrible place to cultivate because it’s been depleted."

"Anyway," I said, "I just gave you the answer to proper cultivation. Absorb the surrounding energy and use it to refine your internal energy. You’re never supposed to store it in your body. It was extremely annoying to repair your container, which you forcibly expanded with various cultivation resources. After expelling all the toxins from your body, I had to restore the container back to its normal size. The amount of energy you possess is extremely low—unsurprisingly. You should have way more energy than a normal human, I added with a smirk. But that’s beside the point. The real issue is that your current energy is low because of the side effects of cultivation, and not even I can fully remove them. Most gods couldn’t do what I did to get you back to this state, so resetting your container way easy even for agod.

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I sighed again. "What you’re going to do now is absorb the energy from the surrounding environment and use it to refine your own energy. If you don’t do that, the barrier will wear off, and you’ll die. I don’t want to have wasted my time, so if you die, you’ll be punished after death."

After that, I went to see the aides to start on the construction of various buildings. We were planning to build are here within this Sophie's Realm anyway.

However, I noticed something: a soul had just entered the realm. It floated over to me, and I was surprised. I knew whose soul this was—it belonged to one of my believers. I instantly inspected the soul’s memories, as this is a divine ability that any god can use, though it’s limited to the souls of one’s believers, and only after they’ve died. It seems Lady Death had given me this soul. Lady Death manages souls in the in the Marvel universes, but since this one was a fanatical believer of mine during her lifetime, it made sense that her soul would be delivered to me after she died.

Because of the multiverse timeline, though, the soul showed up much earlier than it should have from my point of view. Only a few years had passed since I left that universe, but this person didn’t die of any unnatural causes—she died of old age. I remembered her after reviewing the memories. She was that fanatic I saw in the church, and she became a majin, if I’m not mistaken, a decade after I left my fountain was destroyed.

Ironically, that was the downfall of humanity. The humans wanted to destroy the mutants, but the sages were also being persecuted, like the majin. Mutants were often referred to as majin due to their distinguishable non-human characteristics. However, majin didn’t lose their sense of self—they were still themselves. “Monsters” like majin was a broad label, though. Some monsters could be unintelligent creatures, operating solely on instinct without any real intelligence, but majin were always sentient.

The goblins in Tempest were considered majin, even though they were technically goblins, which were monsters. The reason was simple: they were fully sapient. Their strength also surpassed that of a typical monster, though on the weaker side compared to some. "Monster" is a really diverse term, and humans are obsessed with categorizing things. However, the wide variety of differences between creatures made it difficult to put them into neat little groups.

I began using one of my abilities as the progenitor of my race. Progenitors have several powerful abilities bordering on godly, although not all progenitors are gods. Some, like Dracula, the progenitor of vampires, aren’t technically gods but can still rival gods in power. One of my abilities is to create more of my race. I created an egg, about the size of a human head, and it took about an hour. I focused and placed the soul inside.