Raiju appreciated the fact that Maria was willing to listen to her advice, so she gave her another piece of information.
“Master, even though you’ll become a god and won’t have to worry about demigods and the like, you still have to be careful.”
“Explain.”
“I know for certain that there are a few exceptions among the ranks of the demigods, who are more powerful than the gods. You won’t have to worry about the Goddess of Sorrows sending one of these people to deal with you, Master, when you use the Goddess’s Tears, since there’s no way any one of these powerful demigods would willingly lower themselves to become agents for another god,” Raiju answered.
“So there are some demigods like that, huh?”
“That’s right, Master. Some are so powerful that they rival some of the high gods despite still being partially mortal, so you have to be extremely careful when dealing with any one in the Divine Realm.”
Maria shrugged and replied, “Well, I’m not one to be making enemies left and right, so I’ll take your advice to heart. I won’t offend anyone unless they offend me first.”
After Raiju finished saying her piece, Maria quickly steered the conversation back to its original point for this time’s meeting. Carmilla and the others had received their answer regarding the issue with the Divine Realm, so the meeting continued in the proper direction after that. They still needed some time though to wrap their heads around the information that Maria had already stepped into the Divine Realm and was currently on her way to becoming a Goddess.
If Ash was present, he would’ve been completely ecstatic about the news of his Empress becoming a Goddess. That idiot had always been trying to put Maria on top of a pedestal after she had helped him get his revenge along with regaining all of the things he had lost in the past. He may not have been Maria’s first believer, but he was definitely her most ardent one at the moment–even more so than Alexa, who had been worshiping her from the start.
The meeting continued and the discussions evolved in a rather peculiar way. It started with Maria’s plans to create the [Return Scrolls] and [Return Crystals] to matters regarding how she’d develop her new religion and spread it across the planet. The first half of the meeting discussed mostly about how they would manufacture the [Return Scrolls] and [Return Crystals]. Maria’s brothers were supportive of the idea of making an industrial line to further ease the manufacturing process, but she needed to work out the specifics with her dwarven craftsmen.
Advertising and monetizing the items to the players was easy and Gerald said he’d be able to handle that side once the first batch of goods were completed. Naturally, he was going to use his guild to advertise the items to the rest of the player base, so Maria knew that their sales would be extremely good once they were put on the shelves of her nation’s various markets.
Training the NPCs to replace the players in the industrial line wasn’t too hard and with the head craftsman, Danor Dwarfsong’s support, discussions proceeded smoothly on that end.
Danor had been complaining that there were too many artisans in the Empire and so little work. Most of the projects Maria had planned were all finished, since the basic foundational infrastructure of all her nation’s cities, towns, and villages had been more or less completed by now. They just needed to keep on growing from there and Maria was confident that nothing would go wrong since the dwarves had done a splendid and extremely remarkable job.
At the moment, there wasn’t anything ‘big’ that she had planned, so the vampire dwarves had been feeling a little bit useless as of late. At most, she’d need her dwarven craftsmen to create weapons, armor, and siege equipment for her army since they were at war, but most of the process for that had become automated since Maria was bringing in her ideas from the real world to the game to make things a little more convenient for both the players and her NPCs.
Most of the large-scale blacksmithing jobs are now using automata and golems to automate the tedious, non-stop work. These automata and golems were things that the dwarves themselves created because they were not against the idea of having more manpower on their side. Who knew that their own invention, which was inspired by the robots Maria described to them which was in a ‘different’ world, would slowly push them towards their current situation where they felt useless to their beloved Empress?
Having everything automated was nice and all, but the vampire dwarves felt that they were slowly losing their place within Maria’s Empire, since their roles were slowly being replaced by the very creations they created. Their plight–if people could call it that–didn’t go unnoticed by Maria. She knew what they were going through at the moment since it happened in the real world to some extent, but she honestly didn’t know what she could do for them, since the convenience and efficiency of her automated crafting line was something that she couldn’t just give up on.
She was aware that a lot of the vampire dwarves had been migrating to Heltania Undercity, where their skills were still needed, since the work there highly required a dwarf’s delicate touch.
Not even the automated dolls and golems could copy the delicate touch and expertise that the dwarves had. Her nation’s high-quality standard-issue armors, tools, and weapons could be forged by the automated crafting line made up of automata and golems, but if she or anyone else, for that matter, wanted something of superior quality, requesting a dwarf to make it was still a must.
This was Maria’s true purpose in creating the automated crafting line. She couldn’t have her precious dwarves wasting their time on creating standard items. Even though their quality was important, the automata and golems could do that. She needed her dwarves for more important matters, which was why she tried to free up their work hours.
Unfortunately, who knew that her good intentions would lead to her dwarves’ current plight? It wasn’t something that she even considered at the time when she asked her dwarven craftsmen to make the crafting line and all of the other high-tech conveniences that the citizens of her Empire regularly used.
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No one knew this, but Maria’s nation was growing more modern and more futuristic compared to the fantasy-medieval setting that Vanhal was supposed to be in, though this part of her nation was still being kept a secret from the public eye. Some people did see that the Dire’s cities were much more advanced compared to the previous worlds’ cities, but the players who noticed this deliberately ignored the fact, since they were still confined to the game’s fantasy-style worlds. Their minds would change, however, once they saw Maria’s underground city, Heltania Undercity.
The undercity had magic elevators, bullet gondolas, large floating platforms with buildings on them, and other incredible magical technologies that Maria purposefully kept hidden from the public and gathered together into a single hidden city, all because she thought that it was cool.
When she first showed the city to her friends, they were completely mind-blown because it was like they had stepped into a city from the future. The city was still rather empty compared to its massive size because the citizens that lived there were placed there under special admittance.
No one could go to that city unless they were invited by Maria or selected through a special lottery that would be randomly pulled every month. Also, once those people started living in Heltania City, they couldn’t go back to the surface until Maria allowed them to and the only way that would happen was when the secret of her underground city was made known to the masses.
If the secret never got out, then they’d have to stay underground forever, but it wasn’t like their lives were boring or confined. Maria made sure that her citizens would never feel that way, which was why she was expanding her area of influence in the Underworld. All of this, however, was only made possible because her vampire dwarves had been so motivated in creating all of Maria’s ‘crazy’ ideas that she took from her modern-day knowledge.
Maria just needed to show the dwarves a rough blueprint of the item she wanted, along with a brief description of the item’s function, and the dwarves would develop the item based on the blueprint using their own insight and understanding. The dwarves considered all of Maria’s ideas that she got from real-life to be crazy and absurd, but this gave them the zeal to turn her ideas into reality.
Their own motivation was the cause of their current predicament, but it wasn’t like the dwarves didn’t know that Maria only meant well with what she was doing. It was their own thoughts that drove them to their current situation and yet their beloved Empress was always looking for a way out for them. Like right now, Maria was planning something new again and this gave Danor hope and motivation again. He didn’t want himself and his dwarven brethren to be tossed aside by their Empress once their roles were no longer useful to her–which of course would never happen since Maria wasn't that kind of person.
Maria decided that the industrial line this time would be focused solely for the dwarves’ benefit and she would do nothing to automate the manufacturing process of the [Return Scrolls] and [Return Crystals]. It would take some time to teach these dwarves, so for now, they still needed the players to fill-in for the time being until Maria’s artisans were ready to completely take over.
Her NPC subordinates decided to leave that part for her brothers to discuss, since they were in charge of mediating the interactions between the players, since they were also players. Gerald and Mikael decided to continue the discussion with the Fallen Angels guild so they needed to invite Maria’s friends over for a private meeting.
Since the discussions regarding the [Return Scrolls] and [Return Crystals] ended there, the meeting continued on and for the second half, the NPCs began discussing Maria's class advancement quest–particularly her ascension to godhood. To the NPCs, it was a rather important topic of discussion because it was regarding their Empress becoming a Goddess. The relaxed vibe from the first half of the meeting disappeared as a heavy and extremely serious atmosphere replaced it.
The NPCs began their discussion and what they discussed felt very detached from Maria and her brothers’ perspectives on the topic. Maria felt quite conflicted with the current topic of discussion, while her brothers thought that the entire thing was extremely funny and had to do their best from saying anything that would offend the NPCs, who were taking it all very seriously.
It was especially so for Gerald who, at the moment, wanted to just tease the heck out of his little sister and make fun of her until her face turned completely red while her head steamed from the embarrassment he would inflict upon her.
Gerald and Mikael were watching–in real time–the NPCs forming serious plans on how to create and build a cult that was based solely around worshiping their younger sister as a Goddess of Death, Fortune, and War. In their minds, the NPCs were completely crazy, especially with all of the absurd–yet completely serious–ideas that they were throwing out onto the table.
Maria couldn’t help but feel embarrassed at this point, especially since she saw Gerald giving her ‘the smile’ and ‘the look’ that he would always give her when he finally found something to tease her with. Even though the topic was just about discussing her class advancement progression, the thought of creating and spreading a religion about her was very, very odd–to say the least.
As Gerald was boring holes into the side of Maria’s face and secretly laughing at her, Mikael could only hold his head while trying hard not to listen to all of the crazy things his sister's subordinates were currently talking about. It was cool and all that his little sister was going to become a Goddess inside of the game, but when sensitive topics like creating a religion about her and what not, came to be discussed, he really wanted to stay out of it for some reason.
The players would probably laugh about things like this and view it as nothing more than another quest, so if another player was able to be as fortunate as Maria and could class advance into a god or goddess, they probably wouldn’t plan anything ‘weird’ like Maria’s NPC subordinates who were taking things a little too overboard.