Mila
Even more important than the strength of gods to Aalam, however, at least judging by what Mila could sense him muttering under his breath, was how the various types of energy they’d been using since the integration were linked.
According to the Divine Compendium, mana was the base magical energy of the universe, while psyforce was mana converted through the consciousness of souls and qi was mana converted through some kind of metaphysical effect of life Mila couldn’t wrap her head around. Primal energy was then mana in a more permanent form, and nascent energy was primal energy transformed to more easily integrate with souls.
These were the main types of energy used by cultivators and monsters, and their influence on matter is what created magical materials.
Even the form of energy which was gained from Territory, natural energy, was just another form of mana.
Law energy and faith energy, however, were different. Law energy was still being studied even after trillions of years, seemingly a transformed form of mana, but there was something else mixed in which greatly increased the energy’s quality which, according to the Divine Compendium, even the gods didn’t understand. Faith energy, on the other hand, while also not purely a form of mana, was far simpler.
Faith energy was natural energy filtered through the souls and bodies of the living, what a mix of psyforce and qi would be to mana, but each wisp of faith energy carried the unique soul signature of the believer who generated it, and this gave faith energy a form of intent not found in any other type of energy, an ever so slight amount of consciousness which created effects which were fundamentally different than most other types of energy.
All contract magic, from the bonds Mila’s power set was designed to manipulate to the soul shackles which were ever so useful, was created primarily using faith energy generated by those who’d made the contract. And the old inefficient type of skills which had gone out of style trillions of years ago, involving speaking words out loud to help guide magical effects, worked by generating faith energy to guide mana, something which became pointless after Alashan improved the universe’s study of runes.
Unlike other forms of energy, the slight amount of consciousness in faith energy also made it much, much better at bypassing the natural defenses of souls, so things like curses and blessings were primarily based on faith energy as well, as were truthsense skills.
Karmic merit and sin were then more permanent forms of faith energy, the intent in each a bit more crystalized and unchangeable, so they could be used to set the foundation of several types of runic arrays, such as the skills Mila specialized in.
Mila’s entire power set, without her or Nana Xara having known, was primarily based around faith energy. So, more than the other types of energy, she was interested in its uses. And the use she was most interested in was divination, as her lack of knowledge on the subject had made her too scared to leave Earth for decades.
Thankfully, the Divine Compendium had more than enough on the subject to alleviate her worries.
Mila remembered once having a conversation about predestination with Aalam before the integration, and she’d been surprised to learn he actually believed every action a person was going to make was already set from long before they were born, even though at the time he hadn’t been at all religious. And she hadn’t liked his explanation, as to her it made logical sense.
In Aalam’s mind, if everything about a contained system was known, everything about the future of that system could be predicted.
Take as an example a box, with nothing inside but a moving ball, no air, nothing. And assume there were no external forces acting on the ball, no gravity, no electromagnetism, nothing. If you could measure the speed and direction of the ball at one point in time, you could predict the ball’s location and speed at any point in the future.
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Now the real world was nowhere near this simple of a system, each grain of sand on a beach containing more atoms than a god could verbally count even if they started at the beginning of the universe. And, due to some science mumbo jumbo Mila had never fully put in the effort to understand, getting perfectly accurate measurements of anything in the universe was fundamentally impossible, thus making perfect predictions impossible as well. But the idea still stood.
If, somehow, someone could perfectly measure everything in the universe, they could perfectly predict everything.
And this is where magic came in, especially faith energy.
With magic, it was much, much easier to get accurate measurements of a contained system when creatures with souls weren’t involved than with traditional science. Take a planet’s weather for example. With Earth’s technology, it was difficult to predict more than a couple hours in advance, but, with magic, getting accurate enough measurements to predict the weather on a planet for several decades was well within the capabilities of an A rank, yet alone a god.
Souls, however, made these types of measurements difficult, as souls tended to block external energy from entering into the area they controlled, but faith energy could bypass this problem.
So, with faith energy used to get accurate and precise measurements of beings with souls and normal techniques used to get accurate and precise measurements of everything else, predicting the future with a scary amount of accuracy was possible, but the amount of faith energy required was something pretty much only a god, the System, or an A rank who specialized in faith energy could make use of, thus why knowledge of divination was not at all common in the universe.
With this explanation of how divination worked, however, there were some very obvious weaknesses Mila could exploit.
First, Mila wasn’t the only one who could mess up a god’s divination.
According to the Divine Compendium, shadow line uniquenesses worked by greatly increasing a cultivator or monster’s affinity to the karmic aspect of faith energy, giving them greater control over karma-based skills and providing resistance to those types of skills when used by others, requiring a certain level of energy in the skill to correctly connect to their souls. This meant karmic bonds created by those without enough power wouldn’t bind as securely to those with shadow line uniquenesses; curse, blessing, and truthsense skills without enough power would have no effect; and divination skills would get very inaccurate results.
Altogether, Mila’s Shadow Princess uniqueness was more versatile than she’d realized, providing a boost to her charm skills as well, and she’d just never noticed as she hadn’t had anyone else to compare herself to.
Resistance to faith energy based skills, however, wasn’t unique to those with shadow line uniquenesses. Just having a high enough Luck stat would do the same, a Luck stat of 5,971,968, which was achievable at B rank, high enough to resist divination by the System as well as most gods.
Second, anything introduced to a closed off area after a divination was made would completely ruin the divination’s results.
Earth before the integration was, at least for the purposes of divination, closed off, so only Mila’s presence could mess up the divination’s results. But this wasn’t the case for planets with working teleportation platforms, i.e. pretty much any planet Mila would go to in order to try and gain Territory or advance the United Federation of Planets’ businesses.
Unless a god performed divination when Mila was already on the planet and was then actively monitoring the planet closely enough to notice the changes she caused from the prediction, Mila was fully safe going anywhere in the universe, especially to planets with a lot of inter-cluster teleportation or any planet with more than one god.
This then raised an interesting question, however. If divination was nowhere near as powerful as Mila and Nana Xara had thought, why had all the divine forces banded together to kill Nana Xara’s husband? What were they so afraid of? Had Javier Garcia potentially been right all those years ago when he’d assumed an ability which gods would hunt them down to eradicate could actually threaten the gods’ lives?
“Aalam,” Mila sent, still trying to work through all the various implications herself, “given the new information we have, do you think the reason we thought the gods would want to kill everyone on Earth is wrong?”
“Hmm. Yeah. Definitely.” Aalam sounded slightly distracted, various new theories of how the universe worked likely rapidly forming in his minds after reading through the information in the Divine Compendium.
“What do you think the true reason is?”
“Because if you, or someone else, manages to advance a shadow line uniqueness to the highest grade, you’d be able to control any faith energy in the universe, giving you the power to turn the faith energy of any god against them, killing or at least crippling them for life.” Aalam’s words were matter of fact, like what he’d said wasn’t some huge shocking revelation, and, if anything, he sounded disappointed. “It’s too bad I’ll never be able to awaken to a shadow line uniqueness. It sounds quite practical.”