Prologue

It had been two weeks since the churches' eradication of the heretic group known as the Defiers. They claimed to oppose the three gods and wanted to stop their persecution of illegal classes, but nobody believed them. Since illegal classes were granted by the invisible yet omnipotent existence known commonly as the Unseen, those who possessed those classes were obviously evil doers in the minds of the masses. After all, the unseen helps people fulfill their potential based on their soul. 

The church had received word from the gods, that a large rift would open close to their headquarters on a desolate and remote land, and that their leader, the famed shadow lich, would be occupied elsewhere at the time.

The war between the heretic group that protected those who possessed illegal classes and the church had been ongoing for hundreds of years. The shadow lich was considered a legend to many since he had been around for millennia.

As the story went, long ago, a young boy awakened a dark mage class after turning fifteen, he was the son of a poor farmer in the borderland of the human territory and wasn’t caught and stripped of the class like most others, but survived in the wild lands of the east for years in rift folk infested areas as he leveled up and grew in power.

Nobody knew this boy had survived after disappearing years earlier. Others also ran after awakening illegal classes, but most were caught by the church or died in rift folk territories. But the necromancer emerged from the east with the power to command the dead and a small army by his side.

Necromancy was one of the most hated illegal classes, yet its various options for specialisation were extremely varied. Throughout history, some focused on zombies, others on skeletons, or ghosts. The young Marcus Grey however, discovered an interesting combination of necromancy and shadow magic.

But the world he lived in was not kind to those with outlawed classes. His parents had been publicly executed as an example to those that protect outlaws, and many others are killed or stripped of their class each year for getting classes deemed heresy.

The church had banned many classes relating to mind magic, dimension mages, and dark magic. Their reasons sounded logical on the surface, but the truth is far more sinister. All those classes could threaten the three gods of Elderon. The unseen had come to this world at the same time as the rifts and it allowed the people of the various nations of Elderon to fight back.

Three people took full advantage of the unseen and rose to unprecedented heights of power until the unseen recognized them as ascending to godhood. Their greed for power was never ending and the defense of their positions was ruthless. No other mortal would even be allowed to strive for the power they possess, and they formed a religious organisation that acted as their hands on Elderon.

Using the faith of their followers to grow stronger, they played with the people of Elderon through their clerics and paladins like a game of chess on a planetary scale. Erasing all knowledge of their origins and past mortality, the three gods proclaimed themselves absolute divine beings and the rulers of humanity.

The rifts allowed them to rise in power, and those same rifts were suppressed by the gods to prevent others from following on their path. This was a selfish desire but had positive benefits to the ordinary people of Elderon. Rift delvers with combat classes killed the rift folk and reclaimed their lost lands while the rest rebuilt and forged mighty kingdoms.

But even mortals can threaten these powerful gods with the right classes. Information about the supposed divine beings was discovered through communion rituals with dimensional beings that traded with dark mages for power or knowledge.

Dimensional mages could open or close the rifts to a certain degree and therefore allowed the delvers to grow far stronger than the gods were comfortable with. All of these classes were decreed as outlawed and only allowed if the person is a true devotee of the church and under constant supervision.

The gods were ruthless in their mission to protect their secrets and defend their positions. Inquisitions were formed to hunt down outlawed classes, and murder and torture were commonplace for the church. The gods even used their limited control over the unseen to create a new class called the holy sentinel that could strip a person of their class at serious risk to that person.

Their soul would be wounded and they would never be able to grow stronger. Even a common baker or bard could level up by fulfilling the requirements of their class, so not being able to level was the same as forever living as a child in the world.

But one man was determined to stop that injustice. He had lived for years in an extremely hostile place that had been off-limits for humans for hundreds of years ever since the rift folk emerged and slaughtered everyone in the area. Yet despite all odds, he not only survived, but thrived as his hatred for the fake gods pushed him to form a sanctuary for outlawed classes. He called it the defiers, and had set a goal of toppling the church and exposing the fake gods for what they truly were.

But even after rescuing hundreds of people of all sorts of illegal classes, they didn’t possess the might to oppose the church. Using dimensional magic, they created a hidden sanctuary as a final refuge against the church's tyranny.

The church had been hunting and slaughtering many such groups in the name of the three gods, yet they were never able to annihilate the defiers. After the group dropped off the map, the church turned a blind eye and resumed their effort of protecting their people from the rift folk. This would turn out to be their biggest mistake.

Hundreds of years passed with only whispers of the missing group, some reported that imprisoned dark mages would vanish without a trace and church branches would be burnt to the ground without leaving behind a single body. Rumors circulated for a long time about a skeletal figure roaming the streets in the borderlands and merging into the shadows.

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And one day, the defiers returned. The once exiled young boy who survived in the eastern wastelands had far surpassed anyone's expectations as he stood tall and strong in the form of an immortal elder lich. An army of countless shadows at his back and hundreds of high-level illegals by his side.

The defiers had hidden themselves away and slowly built up their strength out of the church's sight. Then came the holy war. The gods were furious at the existence of the defiers and called for all their believers to purge them from existence. But how could it be so simple?

Despite the church calling upon the powers of the gods and using their wealth and influence to force all the delvers and armies of the continent to attack, the defiers stood strong and retaliated.

The shadow lich became known as the god of death as hundreds of men died with every flick of his wrist. His army of immortal shadows were equally deadly and the powerful outlawed classes simply outmatched the church’s despite being vastly outnumbered.

The gods were furious but they were also cunning. The war lasted untold years but a standstill was soon found. The strongest of both sides fought directly, but battles would constantly erupt as the illegals fought to oppose the fake gods and their tyranny while the church fought to protect them.

In truth, Marcus Grey wasn’t some monster ruthlessly hunting down his own kind for more power, but was rather a cold and calculating genius that made countless discoveries about the unseen. He wrote many tomes of research and mastered magic from various classes including those he shouldn’t be able to use.

He had grown so powerful and knowledgeable that he discovered how to perform rituals and use complex magic without the assistance of the unseen, a feat no one else could claim proficiency in. To call him a peerless genius would be modest. He took the concepts of summoning and dimensional magic to another level when he split his soul into dozens of pieces that remained interconnected through the higher-dimensional soul realm he discovered. An absolutely insane achievement that not even the gods could achieve.

As a result, even on the rare occasions that he was defeated and killed, his soul would remain intact and he could reform his body around a different phylactery. One would need to destroy all of his hidden phylactery at the same time in order to truly kill him. A feat only possible if several worlds were simultaneously destroyed. After all, a necromancer could also dabble in summoning and who says one can’t simply give a phylactery to be protected by the strongest creature of the demon realm with whom he had a contract. The shadow lich was also rumoured to have connections with several other worlds and had supposedly encountered many otherworldly civilizations.

To call him immortal wouldn’t be too far from the truth. His powers were impossibly strong. After a few hundred years, he had evolved his class dozens of times and was close to becoming a god himself. If that were to happen, the gods wouldn’t be able to stop him from ascending and slaughtering them all. The shadow lich's talent far exceeded the three gods from what they could see, but they still vastly underestimated him. And so, a final plan was hatched. One to finally destroy the Defiers once and for all.

The church received word from their gods that a large rift would soon form that would destabilize the defiers' sanctuary and expose them to the world. The gods personally crafted a distraction to lure the shadow lich away and then ordered the church to form a pincer attack on the soon-to-be-exposed sanctuary. 

The battle was brutal as the defiers were pressured on both sides. A rift with powerful rift kin emerged right in front of their headquarters, and their strongest fighter and leader was away. Unable to contact him due to the rifts' interference and the church's attack, thousands died, including the shadow lich’s closest friends, disciples, and companions.

The church's execution of the defiers was finally successful and the people rejoiced. They were long since indoctrinated into the idea that the illegals were evil villains that sought to kill and raise them as undead, despite very few civilian deaths by the defiers.

When the shadow lich returned and discovered the carnage, his mind ice cold. His friends and disciples, whom he had lived alongside for several centuries, had all been slaughtered. The big family he had created and the sanctuary for the persecuted he had made were in ruins. And his wrath grew so all encompassing it practically blocked out the sun.

Two weeks after the extermination of the defiers, the church and the people were still parting openly. The kingdoms had lost many soldiers in supporting the church's war. However, they made a mistake. Unlike other lichs in history, the shadow lich’s didn’t keep his phylactery hidden away in his sanctuary. They had assumed he was dead after destroying the shadow lich phylactery in the sanctuary, but the lich did not die… They had just escalated a fight that that can’t possibly win. And they had just removed the only reason the shadow lich hadn’t wanted to fight an all-out war. 

When the shadows grew and an army of monsters and giant dragons emerged, the people had no chance of fighting back. The capitals and churches were the first to be destroyed, any resistance was futile, and the lich advanced. He summoned demons and eldritch monsters that he let loose on the world.

In a single day, half of all the kingdoms had fallen and the shadow lich’s army had replenished its ranks with the strongest fallen warriors of the church. The civilians were trampled like ants, people that had been celebrating the destruction of the defiers only hours ago were devoured by colossal dragons and slashed by undying shadow armies.

The hatred in his heart was so intense that he even raised the common folk as laughably weak zombies simply to desecrate their corpses and force them to attack their neighbors.

His anger and hatred were so intense that not even the crying children could make him think twice. To him, this world was beyond repair, destroying it and cutting off its connection to the fake gods was the only choice. The gods themselves did their best to fight back, but even as they used all their available power to support all their followers, the churches' protectors were struck down by dragon breath and a rain of pure liquid death.

Finally, when the last of the kingdoms had fallen and the lich was satisfied, he evolved his class for the last time as he finally ascended to challenge the fake gods. The three gods had once watched the shadow lich slaughter their followers whenever the inquisition sought to kill a large group of illegals, but never did they think he had amassed such power. Not even they possessed such might as they helplessly watched their monuments tumble and followers get slaughtered like cattle. For the first time in millennium, the three gods felt genuin fear.

When the shadow lich ascended, the battle was already decided the moment the unseen acknowledged his power. The first god was struck down almost instantly as the other two fought to destroy the lich. But he was far more skilled than any of them. He had waited patiently for centuries, slowly building his power to overthrow them and stop their oppressive rule. But their actions caused his cold and measured decisions to be replaced by unyielding and uncaring violence.

There was nothing they could do in the face of such overwhelming death. They weren’t his match in the mortal plane and they definitely couldn’t defeat him now. Their constant stream of power originating from the faith of their followers had completely stopped as the people of Elderon had practically become extinct. But they could still stop him, at an extreme cost.

Derian, the third fake god of space used the lifeforce of his fellow god to force open a rift in the fabric of reality. Inside, the space between space was located so far beneath reality that not even the unseen could reach. In other words, he trapped the shadow lich in the deepest layer of the space between space, where not even shadows existed. This was a place that even a god couldn’t access without sacrificing the entire power and lifeforce of another god.

But even as he was sealed inside a space so far from reality that even the unseen could penetrate, his rage wasn’t diminished. These fake gods had ruined his world and killed his friends, his family, his disciples, his dream. He wouldn’t stop until every last one of them died by his hand. Derian was the one responsible for the large rift that opened up on their sanctuary and was also the last surviving fake god. How could the shadow lich ever rest without getting revenge for his fellow defiers and stomping that bastard's head in.

And so, deep under the layers of emptiness and far from the veil of reality, the once shadow lich did the unthinkable. His soul had merged back into one when he ascended from pseudo-immortal to true immortal so he had no phylactery anymore, yet that knowledge still remained. And a new ritual modified from his experience as a lich began to be woven around his soul.

The unseen couldn’t reach him in the space between space, but he could still reach out. Not properly, since the dimensions were locked out from him, but you know what they say, when a door closes… Just enchant your soul without any assistance from the unseen and force it through a higher dimension where only souls can travel and backtrack your way from there. His entire existence had been reduced to one thing only. Destroy that god before he can find another world to infiltrate and ruin.

And so began the speedrun to godhood.