Back in the present truly angelic voice resounded in my head.

- It is not like I can stop you. Just make sure to keep contact and please don’t mess up with mortals too much.

- That’s what I mean. You said it yourself. Were it not for Household rules you could destroy the current me anytime. I think that only by “playing” down there in what essentially is the safest sandbox for me I can grow strong enough to beat you in fair fight. Strong enough not to shame my inherited Divinity with my lackluster performance.

- I have already been convinced, Your Divinity. Just one more thing. Please be aware of beings that do not fall into the Heaven’s embrace. Demons and other otherworlders are not controlled by Heavens. While we, angels, constantly monitor the situation there might be great deal of newcomers in those troubled times. Some might slip through our network.

- No worries, Archie. I’m not stupid even while looking like a stupid. I mean comparatively, I am not the wisest either. I’m going to inform you of any irregularities. I won’t take any chances while still in training. I will bravely retreat if I find myself in any danger!

Archie, I mean Armaediael, facepalmed hard. She sighed, but quickly after, she regained her composure. She fixed her glasses up.

Shit. I realized it has slipped from my lips. My nickname for Archie was heard. Please ignore it, scary lady.

- Just go.

- So.. may I take an angel with me? As a travelling companion? Preferably a female one?

- No! I mean, Your Lordship, we are quite busy in here and on high alert since he left us. I advise against it.

- Okay, I haven’t really considered that. I value your advice greatly, you know.

- Then please make haste to make more angels!

- Huh, this is a first. How do I make angels? Is this the ‘bees and flowers’ talk time?

- There are neither bees nor flowers involved. I don’t understand what gave Your Grace such an idea. The basis for creating or strengthening angels is pure Divinity The Divinity is created from mortals’ belief.

I guess she is as strict as she looks. Of course I already knew that. It was written in the booklet.

- Then all we have to do is wait. Or should I redistribute some of mine?

- No, not at all. Please keep what you already have. It is almost the bare minimum to remain on the Throne and not to stump the growth of Your Godship.

- Do you want me to influence mortals to “believe” more? That would be hard without revealing the identity of mine.

- Exactly. No one said it would be an easy job.

- No one asked nor interviewed me anyway. I will do my best, I guess.

This was going to be really tough. After all there was this little snippet of information saved in the very back of my brain. Belief is the more fervent, more common among the populace, the more they suffer hardships and the less educated they are. This was proven for any religion or cult in the Earth’s history. I was rather reluctant in making local situation worse for the mortals, when I have lived among them my whole life. Such actions would clash with the very purpose of my job.

The only thing that was left was to do some miracles. It is disputable whether miracles occurring throughout Earth’s history were genuine or not. I personally didn’t believe in them. Can an atheist become a god? Apparently in otherworld it is possible. Would I remain one was a thing, that.. really didn’t matter right now. I was really curious whether or which ones of Earth’s gods were “real’.

Miracles would usually cost Divinity. The goal of a miracle was to convert, so a perfectly normal event could be classified as such. Of course a blotched miracle would have an opposite effect.

It was rare on Thrope to be an atheist. More likely was to lose faith due to getting on bad terms with almighty. All of that were either dependent on “fateful” events I had not direct control of or God’s Church and actions of its clergy. I had no idea whether or not they were doing a good job. It would be hard to estimate as the power of belief was not something I could quantify in small scale. Would everyone be able to produce 1 unit of it when one hundred percent efficient? I want to conduct a global survey.. – such ridiculous thoughts were coursing through my brain.

- Is it even possible to quantify by whom or where the power of belief is produced? – I asked the archangel.

- We can account to where the belief is farmed from, but to get personal data, a believer would need to be watched over. To do it for everyone would be too taxing on our resources. Especially angel resources.

- What about real-time measurements?

- You can do it via "Status Check" Throne magic, Your Majesty. The results would be meaningless, though.

- Then it is as I have guessed, huh. Please prepare me a detailed map of averaged amount of belief everywhere. It would be helpful to know what regions need to be tackled the most urgently. Do we have info on the population distribution? I want to correlate the data with assumption that a person can produce the same average amount of belief.

- This will be done. The second map is always updated real-time. It can be requested any time with the power of the Throne.

- Splendid. That would be all, don’t let me keep you behind your schedule. Too much, that is. Thank you, Armaediael.

Now all I had to do was to find out where to start my adventure. I have no guidelines regarding belief so I will probably look for some rookie city to start slow. Are there even rookie cities?

Search term: *rookie*

..huh.. only a few titles (Rookie, Rookie Slayer, Forever Rookie..), some taverns (Rookie’s Retreat, ..), but no “Rookie Town” popped out..

Maybe a different approach is needed. Let’s display population’s and monsters’ levels on the map.

Ugh.

What a colorful mess. Not very informative though.

Looking at the level distribution it was basically dangerous everywhere. Only on very high zoom were there pockets of similar levels. I guess you could call them monster habitats. Apparently nowhere could really be called a “safe town”. What a bad zone planning! I stopped the search lest I find there were no lava danger zones either.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Then maybe Dungeons?

Yes, that’s a hit!

There are multiple types. Divine Dungeon of Ythall sounds like a nice place.

Now then, I can’t ask my subordinates to waste time and pla.. I mean work hard with me down there.. Obviously I should either adventure solo or find some mortal companions. Solo style has a small number of advantages to a loner like myself. The thing is I know only little about this world and how to fight effectively. War is never a solitary effort and leading an adventurer party would be precious experience.

Though hopefully it would be my Archie commanding the troops in any conflict.

Having that said let’s look for potential harem members.

Input term: Harem Guild.

Ideally it would be a place to hire harem members from.

Unfortunately the only find was a brothel, which naturally was not something I would be okay with. I guess I should just buy some tamed monsters. I hope their intelligence won’t be lacking nor will they be too troublesome to take care of.

Input term: “tame*” OR “taming”.

There are a few hits here and there on Thrope’s map. Guess it is not widely popular. Maybe taming an animal is easier than building such relationship with a monster. Browsing through the results I get the idea that it is not common to trade such monsters around. Taming is probably based on Affection meter. Affection grows with time in –mon collecting games. Time, which I don’t have too much of. Honestly I’m quite scared of what may pop-up from beyond the world boundaries.

There are quite a few enslave monsters or even summons present. One particular monster called Dracolisk caught my attention. It resembled a komodo lizard, except the head, which looked exceedingly draconic. Not that I have ever seen a real dragon. Also it was the size of a horse.

It was being commanded to fight on the frontline by a party of adventurers. Most of them specialized in long distance attacks with quite a few mages to boot. The enemies were also lizard-like, but much smaller. They were spitting yellowish transparent saliva and wherever it landed would start smoking. If that wasn’t acid.. it might have been base. Or heat?

It was hard to tell from image-only playback. I used Identify on one of the splatters and it was indeed a fine sample of Keruvian Lizard Acid. Thanks to that enslaved monster the second line was perfectly safe. Good for them. Enslaving monsters might be the way to go. Still I could nitpick that it would disregard the morale of one’s troops as the monster would be forced to obey even the most suicidal of orders. The strength of the slave would never truly belong to the master.

As to mock my thoughts the large monster started rampaging. Dracolisk was now covered with large patches of newly formed blisters. The root cause revealed itself quickly. The sturdy yoke was smoking heavily and magical looking sparks were flying in the air. My guess was that it was the very item that controlled the Dracolisk. With few swipes of mighty claws the yoke was no more. Keruvian Lizards were promptly ignored and the former slave pounced on its masters. Despite previous successes over the horde of acid-spitters the physically weak party members fell one by one. The only one to dodge was a ranger, but just as he landed a fistful of acid landed on his chin. Truly a gruesome fate.

It was at this point that I had reacted myself. Maybe I should have stepped in and saved them. It would be a lie to say I was not afraid of getting burned by acid. I had not known those unfortunate strangers. I could resurrect them, but it would use up some amount of Divinity. I was supposed to accumulate that, not spend it. My guts were telling me raising a deader would cost a lot.

Watching fellow humans (and other sapient species mixed into that party) die for the first time in my rather short life was causing me to hyperventilate. When I finally stopped panting the wounded dragon lizard had already left the battlefield. Keruvians were eating melted corpses of both the fallen adventures as well as.. those of their dead comrades. Ugh.

I tried calmly analyzing the situation.

One.

Enslaved monsters were a fucking ticking bomb.

Two.

Monsters, hypothetically, wouldn’t fight other monsters if there was nothing (i.e. food, territory, females) to be gained. They loved easy prey.

Three.

Second line fighters that can’t defend themselves even for a while are truly useless.

Four.

Even strong back-fighters need a tank in front of them. Probably more than one.

Five.

Bad treatment of your slaves is ill-advised. Sure you could intimidate them into submission and control them for a while, but when their chains finally break, they will hit you as hard as you hit them.

Slaves, huh.

As rice is the staple food of all Asians, so are the slaves the staple of isekai. What were my feelings toward slaves? Obviously it was discomforting. I was raised in a society, where the slavery was either hidden for from sight or hidden in plain sight.

First one existed in dregs of society, in bordellos and similar, wherever the law was just a word. Third world countries mostly.

Second type was much more problematic to tackle. The problem being was that this type was quite legal. Both the governments as well as some black-hearted “employers” would hold the “free” citizens economically hostage. Adult financial life was a turbulent ocean infested with loan sharks. The sharks wouldn’t bite if you wouldn’t ask them to. And, boy oh boy, you would. When even politicians would encourage you to take loans, when wages were just enough to get by, when uselessly expensive items were made to be the goal of your life.. Both governments and big companies were constantly trying to increase their holding over your fate. In my opinion they were slowly succeeding in that regard. Earth was becoming a scary place to live in. I was glad for this summoning – a little bit.

Now the local slaves.. I didn’t know about them too much. Were they criminals? Were they prisoners of war? Were they innocent chaps captured by slavers? Would someone voluntarily become one to escape poverty? Was slave status hereditary?

The advantages of slave harem, sorry, I mean slave party members were definitely secrecy they would keep. At least, I suppose, tat slave collars were magically forcing slaves to obey their master’s orders. In a way even my household members were bound to me not too dissimilar as slaves would. I intend not to abuse that bond too much.

Searching for slaves and excluding animal and monster ones I was astonished with the number of records found. Slaves were abundant. They constituted about 13,7% of population. On second thought countries like Ancient Roman Empire would have as much as ~30 to 40%. Analyzing map data in comparison to region’s total population there were countries which had more than 20% slaves as well as those that had almost none. Probably the slavery was illegal there.

I think the slavery abolishment trend was starting to take root in late sixteenth century on Earth. There must have been quite a few powerful otherworlders that opposed slavery. Perhaps one or more of them reached godhood at the end of the road. Nevertheless slavery remained.

I have decided to try my hands at being a slave master. Were it to turn too morally disgusting to handle or if even some other problems occurred it would not be too late to release or sell the slaves. That said, I would never treat them like items. Never. I fully intend to treat them as a band of mercenaries. Forced into a contract mercenaries, but..

Okay.

Let’s search for some high level slaves. Unfortunately there is almost none that are actually for sale. There were few male and even fewer female ones. Unfortunately while their levels were high, their potential was quite low. For my convenience potential was displayed numerically, as calculated by the Throne of Heavens. I did not intend to groom and equip someone who couldn’t reach even a level of a newly-born angel. It would be a total waste.

I revised the sorting by the potential level. Now there were plenty of ownerless slaves with lower levels, but high potential. The highest potential was in high fifties. I would accept anyone with potential of at least 40.0.

Potential could be understood as maximum level one could attain after training. There were situations that could increase one’s potential, but there was no certainty in ever encountering them. Angels would start with body at level 35, but with potential reaching at least 60. Their potential and to some extent level could be further increased with divinity so it was somehow a meaningless value.

I understood one thing clearly. The Throne was not omnipotent in its assessments and the assigned levels were only artificial. I myself was marked as level 1 god with a potential of about 16, which was pretty low. After changing several aspects of my physical body like obtaining divine blood, my level and potential skyrocketed to incredible numbers of 3 and 37 respectively.

After learning my first spell (light magic ”Light” spell) my potential surged even more. Probably it signified that the path of mage opened for me. The level did not raise though. After all Light was a pretty lousy spell with insignificant impact on combat as well as non-combat activities.

Since high-potential slaves for sale were abundant I decided against min-maxing whom I was going to hire. My first destination was Ythall, which had a few slave markets with them, I decided to make a choice just there.

I almost forgot. The only clothes I had were of two quite inappropriate sets. One was from Earth and the other were a loose toga from Heaven. Yeah this would not fly. I heard there was a Treasury somewhere in Heaven.