Mila
“So,” Mila sent to Aalam after spending several hours looking through everything herself, “here is the problem.”
Then she explained everything she’d already come up with.
“It’s not an issue of fairness. Everyone has already received far, far more than they would’ve had we not carried them to victory. But there are only 26 members of the army who I’ve felt haven’t given their all, and I don’t want to break the deal I’ve made with the other 170, as it would set a bad precedent.”
“Understood.” Aalam was quiet for about half a minute, obviously thinking. Then, having already looked over all the same information she had before she’d brought up the issue, he proceeded to do his normal Aalam thing and quickly solved her problem. “Most of the resources being offered to the commanders of the force are alchemic ingredients, while for the soldiers they’re complete products, the System seeming to think I wouldn’t waste my time on them.
“I’ve just sent you over three lists. The first is a list of resources you should use your army points to buy. The second is a list of resources which you should be able to purchase from the System or easily find available in one of the universe’s markets. Finally, the third is the list of soldiers whose rewards are better than what I could make with the resources we have easy access to.”
Mila looked at the third list first and wasn’t surprised to find it only had 13 names on it, all of whom were in the top 30 when it came to individual contributions among the soldiers. The second list would take her about six months to prepare, but would only cost about a year’s worth of profits from the United Federation of Planets’ external businesses, the Primordial Humans having taken away all of Aalam’s Territory but none of the business entities she’d deliberately set up in completely different galaxy clusters. Finally, the first list would cost her 573,152,614,070 army points, nowhere close to the amount of army points she would gain from their soldiers.
Altogether, Mila would be able to buy the complete Divine Compendium, allow Aalam to choose his second individual reward, and purchase two doses of Four Elements Soul Cleansing Pollen from the Army Points Store and still have 483,811,930,930 army points left over. Taking her second Uniqueness Awakening Boon, that was then 309,865,765,810 army points to invest into making the United Federation of Planets stronger and preparing for Diana’s rebirth.
“Aalam, I love you.”
There was silence on the other end, but Aalam was within range of her sensory domain so she could see him blushing and feel his emotions through their bond, which just made her smile more.
Giving him an out as it would still be a couple months before they could advance to D rank, Mila then got back to business, using most of her minds to tell Irena, Nitya, and all their soldiers but the 13 to choose the army points option from their individual rewards and send them to her. Meanwhile, with her remaining mind, she bought the first two volumes of the Divine Compendium. Then, along with Aalam and Nana Xara—who seemed very excited—she started to read, eventually buying the third volume when she’d gained enough points from the army.
And she learned so much.
First, there were three types of gods: those that used accumulated faith energy to naturally push themselves into divinity, those who used their Laws to transform their souls, and those who accumulated such solid foundations that their souls naturally ascended. Of the 204 living gods in their universe, roughly half achieved ascension through faith while the other half advanced through the use of Laws, including the five most powerful gods, the Divine Child, the Lady of Laws, and the three human ancestors, all of whom had long ago advanced yet again, becoming elder gods, the second rank of divinity.
There had once been a god who’d advanced using the third method, soul ascension, an extremely powerful Chaos Dragon, but he’d been killed soon after, so there was little data on this method.
What was known was that those who ascended through Laws could accumulate faith energy just like those who ascended using faith, and use it just as easily, while those who ascended using faith could use their faith energy to help increase their attunement to the universe, allowing them to advance their Laws to the same level as those who ascended using Laws and thus enabling them to transform their souls. According to the Divine Compendium, there wasn’t much difference in which method a cultivator or monster used to become a god, but those who ascended using Laws were generally more naturally talented, so they were stronger on average.
Second, Mila learned how accumulations from F to A rank affected the chances of divine ascension. F to C rank set the foundation for energy, and any flaws in the resulting cores of power and energy channels would make ascension impossible unless they were somehow fixed. B rank was then all about strengthening the soul, the closer a B rank’s oaths were to a cultivator’s truth the stronger they would make the intrinsic nature of their soul, making everything from using energy to studying Laws easier, explaining why the general advice on oaths was to not look for power but for fit. And, finally, A rank was all about the transformation of Laws.
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Up through B rank, Laws were mostly supplementary. Sure, they made a huge difference, but, in the case of two cultivators following the same path where one had 50% higher stats and the other had Laws of a grade higher along with a higher level cultivation technique to match, the cultivator with higher stats would almost always easily win. At A rank, however, this would reverse.
A ranks would transform their Laws into a special type of metaphysical Law energy which represented their path, and then start the process of merging the power of said Law energy into all of their skills, increasing their power by a very, very large amount. As a result, the grade of skills would start to matter more than at previous ranks, higher grade skills able to contain more of the power from an A rank’s Law energy, and this explained something Mila had always been confused about.
Racial abilities which increased the grade of skills had always seemed a bit underwhelming to Mila, not having as great an effect as other abilities of the same grade, but the nature of A rank now explained why Nana Xara had always held them in such high regard.
And Mila also now understood why the nature of A rank was rarely shared with younger cultivators.
Law energy was generally more powerful when more Laws were mixed in, but training in too many Laws was one of the best ways to get stuck in a cultivation bottleneck, so, knowing about the increase in power possible at A rank from training in a few more Laws, overconfident youngsters would be much more likely to take on more than they could handle, eventually getting stuck and never reaching A rank to see that power manifest.
Finally, Mila learned the powers and abilities which came along with divinity, as well as the true nature of the Luck, Attunement, and Aura stats.
Luck worked differently than Mila had always assumed. It wasn’t a measure of the universe’s favor, or some kind of confluence of good fortune. Instead it was a measure of a soul’s resistance to their universe’s control.
It wasn’t like the universe had a consciousness or any active goals, but it provided physical limitations and a natural tendency toward entropy which made a being growing ever more powerful difficult. As a result, the higher a cultivator’s Luck stat, i.e. the more resistance they had toward the universe’s natural tendencies, the more likely they were to awaken to powerful racial abilities, have epiphanies in their skills or Laws, and resist being stained by karmic merit and sin.
The original term for the stat had actually been Resistance, but ascending to divinity required a minimum value of 5,971,968, so the System had been designed to heavily favor those with more of it, causing the perceived nature of the stat to slowly change among those of the population who didn’t understand its true nature, i.e. everyone but the gods and those directly under them, so its name had eventually been changed.
Gods were beings who had escaped the universe’s control, and this by itself had a whole host of effects. They were ageless, the normal rules about souls of certain ranks only being able to live until a certain age no longer applying to them. The effects of high Luck were magnified, allowing them to gain epiphanies much more easily and their resistance to karmic merit and sin reaching an extremely high degree. And they gained all the effects of a sublime soul variant race, their souls becoming nearly stainless, their auras becoming unnoticeable in their natural state, and their affinities with all Laws rising.
Just with this, gods were more powerful than mortals. But then there was faith energy and the effects of transforming their souls through the power of their Laws.
Faith energy was extremely similar to the energy produced by Territory, the two seeming to be different versions of the same power, and their effects were almost exactly the same. For believers, they would automatically gain a benefit related to the path and strength of their source of belief, pretty much the same as the benefits from living in a lord’s Territory. And, for the source of faith, they would get much faster resource regeneration based on the number and strength of their believers, pretty much the same as the effect a lord would receive from the size and rank of the pieces of his Territory. More important, however, the source of faith would also gain a boost to their stats based on the number and strength of their believers, equivalent to a lord who had a high grade royal line uniqueness. And this increase in stats, this multiplier of strength, put every god on the same level as Aalam in terms of strength multiplication.
Also, just like Aalam could empower his servants with his lord line skill at pretty much no cost to him, gods could use faith energy to directly empower their subordinates, resulting in divine classes. And the higher the god’s Attunement stat, the more faith energy they could store in their souls and the better they could use their faith energy for other purposes, such as karmic divination and merging faith energy into their skills to strengthen them further.
Mila had always thought of the Attunement stat as a connection to Laws, but that wasn’t quite right. The Attunement stat represented a cultivator’s ability to attune themselves with a universe.
It wasn’t the opposite of Luck, as a higher Attunement didn’t represent the universe having more control over a cultivator, and it didn’t have to do with the compatibility of a soul with a universe, as the stat would affect a cultivator’s ability to connect to other universes as well. Instead, increasing the stat was more like gaining a better and better set of tools for viewing that which could normally not be seen, basically Perception for the metaphysical. And, as a result of the stat allowing a cultivator to have a greater grasp of metaphysical energy, Laws included, the soul of someone with higher Attunement naturally became better and better at holding and using these types of energy as well, faith energy just happening to be the easiest of these metaphysical energies to store and use.
This then left the Aura stat and the abilities gained by gods after transforming their souls through their Laws.
The Aura stat represented the power and size of a cultivator’s aura, the field of control which emanated out from a cultivator’s soul. And, after transforming their souls through the power of the Law energy they gained as A ranks, the aura of gods became infused with that same energy. It became much easier for the gods to use Law energy to empower skills and, with the synergistic effects of their auras and their Law energy, the Aura stat suddenly started providing an enhancement to all of the god’s base stats, kind of like how Aalam’s Minor Soul Lord Battle Armor empowered his physical stats using the power of his soul.