What Kaori found in the book next was something she could barely believe was allowable. There was a section on various types of minerals and metals that would increase and in some cases even double the number of worship points garnered from any given settlement if used in worship ritual items.
She decided that despite the expense, she would at the very least, look through all of these items and see if any fit into her idea. The idea of being able to double her worship points from all or even some areas really appealed to her. It was like getting a production boost in the early stages of a game. Anything she could do to up her production of currency would be a boon.
As she read through the chapter, she found that there were various different metals or minerals, mostly crystals, needed for different types of deity. She even had one of them already purchased, the floating metal. That one would make the worship of an air or ethereal aligned god double.
The best boost could be found from what was dubbed starmetal. From the description, it was basically meteoric iron that would gain a certain celestial glow as it fell from the heavens and she would have to literally launch it at the planet from space. She thought that condition was strange but discovered that a lot of the crystals would require a god of that alignment to do certain things to encourage their growth. The thing that set starmetal apart was it didn’t have any alignment and would boost the worship of any god.
Kaori bought this and summoned one of the asteroids in orbit. She then went up and sent the huge rock plunging towards one of the uninhabited hexagonal continents that she would then retrieve it from. What awaited her was a truly magnificent sight. The meteorite had been reduced in size to a mere fraction of its original size and was glowing red hot. Even on the verge of being molten, the object was beautiful to look at. The lump sitting in the bottom of the crater had a swirling, rainbow-colored iridescence to it that was reminiscent of the aurora borealis.
Kaori forced the lump of metal to rapidly cool off and reached into the crater to pick the metallic stone out of the bottom. The chunk was only about the size of a volleyball with an irregular flattened round shape. With it cooled down, the glow of the iridescent pattern was a tad dimmer but not by too much. Kaori looked at it from all angles but concluded that it was just a surface effect but quite nice.
When she entered the door of her hut, she was greeted by the others and they all gathered around to stare in wonder at the object she held in her hand. Proud of her new acquisition, Kaori sat the lump on the table in the midst of a chorus of oos and aahs. She then set to work on the item she would be making from this.
She made the lump of beautiful stone form into a regular rectangular bar. She then had it divide into five regular cubes of equal proportions. Then she went to form them into crucifixes before stopping herself at the realization that the cross bore no meaning to her own worship. She considered for a bit what she would want the symbol of her or her pantheon to be but in the end she came up blank.
Finally, she decided to just form them into small, palm-sized balls with a hexagonal pattern spaced across the surface that would represent the planet. The inhabitants wouldn’t know what the planet looked like but that didn’t matter. Finally, she remembered that they were about to change the planet and almost made the balls smooth. No point in changing it, she decided, they could simply become relics of the previous world or something.
With the objects formed, Kaori asked Yaju to take one to each village and give the shaman one. She also wanted him to tell each of the elven villages that a time of great change was coming and that everything they knew was about to change and they should prepare themselves to start their villages over. They would be paused while the changes were happening but they didn’t need all the details and off he went.
Kaori then buried herself in a mountain of paperwork to find the right personnel. There were of course, far more souls available than what she really needed but that didn’t mean she was going to leave them there. She simply needed to give them each the prospect of employment and they would get a free pass out of limbo. What she needed was to figure out who she wanted to give deity positions right away. Well, after her group here, that is. Looking around, she noted that Yaju and Einoro, who had gone to deliver the worship talismans, were back. But for now back to the grind, she thought to herself.
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Kaori had perused the book several times over and found that there wasn’t a lot in the book that she didn’t feel a need to know but right now there was one chapter that was of immediate interest to her. She reached to the side and as expected, her book suddenly appeared in her grasp. She then opened the book and it went right to the part she was looking for. She was momentarily distracted by thoughts of being able to put the same spell to use in every book.
She went back to her chapter, the help chapter. This chapter, like the book itself had a small introductory section that detailed certain knowledge deemed useful for new deities. Since that was her current predicament, she didn’t mind the slightly condescending tone of the author. A small subsection detailed how a god could promote those below them but noted that all lower ranking deities had to have permission to do so. She wondered for a moment if that meant her before recalling that she had signed a contract that stated something similar.
With a look of worry, Kaori held out her hand and to her profound relief, she was holding a copy of the very contract she had signed. It took her reading through the thick sheaf of documentation for what seemed like hours before she found what she was looking for. Though stated a little ambiguously, probably to give her superior a loophole if she screwed up, she found she had been granted blanket permission to grant anyone she chose a rank of godhood almost right up to her own but still separated by a small gap in authority. She was left a little astonished that so much trust was given to someone as new as herself.
Kaori suspected that the proviso about not to the same level of authority was probably there to keep gods from shirking their duties onto somebody else. Despite any misgivings she might have had about the way the contract read, she had her answer. All she needed to do now was recognize her little group as deities. She suddenly found it odd how she could feel a sense of attachment to a group that literally included the demons that tortured her during her life. One look at the various strange figures busily working on tasks she hadn’t even assigned them told her all she needed to know. If nothing else, they were HER demons.
Kaori went back to her book and reread the part that covered promotion. The only real requirement was that the one being promoted be in the presence of the deity offering the promotion to them and that they accept. Kaori knew there wouldn’t be any problem with this group not accepting. She had to admit to herself that the idea of an angel wanting to be one of the evil gods was a bit strange to her but she wasn’t going to try forcing them to be what they were not interested in being.
Suddenly it occurred to her that she didn’t have to make it a permanent assignment. The evil gods who were more suited to be good and the good that were more cut out for evil could just be swapped. Still, she didn’t want them to just flip back and forth from one day to the next. Now how to encourage them to take the chosen path seriously?
She supposed to herself that there was always the promise of promotion, demotion, and being fired. Thinking about it from a rational point of view, other pantheons might also use the threat of being destroyed outright but she knew that she couldn’t bring herself to do that to anybody, no matter how bad they were. Japan was a nation of laws and honor and if someone was too terrible then she would just have to come up with a way to reform them.
What would make her go that far? She pondered the question for several moments not really coming up with anything. Suddenly, she had an epiphany. If there was anything that would make her consider the alternatives to destroying a soul it would have to be another destroying a soul. She really didn’t want that to happen in the first place though, so she flipped through the book looking for a way to ban anything from being able to destroy souls.
What she found shocked and appalled her. There were innumerable methods of destroying souls listed in the book. Some were there so that others creatures could take the place of the soul, some were there as a way to harvest power or magic, and still others were there as simply a means to be evil and cruel. It was in the powers section listing ways for evil deities to demonstrate their craft and gain more power as a result that she got her answer. It stated that the deity in overall charge of the planet could still stop this power’s function if they forbid the destruction of souls. It was really that simple. She could just forbid the destruction of souls.