Bobby Grant POV:

Everyone else started finishing up their training at the same time. No one else had come over for the strength training I had. We then were rounded up and sent to the dining room again for a quick meal before integration training.

Now that some people had been training with experts, they had started to be able to use their powers. A lot of people were still playing with them at the lunch table and one person even blew up their own lunch by accident. The knights basically let us be and didn’t interfere.

The new abilities had everyone distracted from the situation. Most were positive but there were a few who seemed gloomy.

May still looked like she was going to stab someone at any time, but I’m growing used to that. There was also Tony’s friend Julian who looked straight up depressed. Kristen went up to talk to him and I paid attention.

“Why do you look so sick Julian? Not like you.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Tony could be getting put on a pyre right now for all we know. Meanwhile everyone else is just fucking around and enjoying their new little ‘gifts’. Just because I’m not looking to roast someone with godly powers like a certain someone who needs to eat their food to keep their strength up, doesn’t mean I’m not worried or pissed off.”

“...”

Both of them turned to May as Julian spoke. She sighed and didn’t say anything, but began to eat the food in front of her. Julian turned back to Kristen.

“I’m not dumb enough to go up against a world I know nothing about, but I’m not going to get comfortable either.”

As he spoke, Julian went to stab his food with his fork at a normal speed while not looking. There was a cracking sound and the fork went straight through the wooden tray and into the table beneath it.

Julian looked down in surprise and then sighed.

“Can’t even eat food like normal with this stupid body.”

Since Julian had a straight stat increase he was amazingly strong right off the bat. He had been crushing door handles and taking bricks out of walls he ran into all day. He had hurt himself a few times and needed the priest to help. The inconveniences were likely not making his mood any better.

“Don’t worry about Tony. He’ll be fine. The prince signed his name in the little death note so Tony might be miserable but we’ll see him again. Also you should really use a spoon, that fork is a weapon for you now.”

Kristen seemed pretty nonchalant about everything since we got here. I hadn’t seen a stronger emotion besides interest in her all day, not that I was able to pay much attention with coach Creed tearing my arms apart.

I stopped tuning in and finished my food before they came and moved us to the same hall where they showed our pages on the first day. A group of professor types moved up to the stage and their voice was projected out to us somehow in a way where they weren’t any louder but their voices were crystal clear. Then started the only history lesson that I had ever sat through that didn’t make me doze off.

Apparently the world we are in has many names but the Toltan empire calls it Sumir. Sumir was basically filled with simple wildlife and no intelligent beings until about 4000 years ago. At that time multiple creatures from different worlds were summoned here for an unknown purpose. The reason for the summoning was debated by many, and so was whether the different worlds that the intelligent species were summoned from came from the same universe or parallel universes, but the truth was no one really knew why it happened.

While the creatures of Sumir were not intelligent, they were ferocious. The intelligent species were thrown into an extremely hostile environment where almost every creature and plant had a way to kill you. They struggled for survival, not understanding why this was happening but needing to live nonetheless.

The creatures of Sumir had weird abilities that species with more technology based civilizations could not understand. However, a few of the races who began to cooperate for their survival eventually found the answer through an intelligent being with a world that was entirely different from theirs.

Mana, magic, energy; there were many words but in essence it was natural power that flowed through the world. Some of the species had developed entirely based on magic and were not surprised by the abilities that the creatures showed. They also taught the others how to harness this same power in small ways.

Slowly, the founders of this world found that they had the power to drive back the creatures as they cultivated their strength and learned of abilities that they themselves could use thanks to the magic power. While less than half the original number of intelligent creatures were left, these remaining ones began to adapt, develop, and thrive.

They were the first 1000 and they went on to be the new owners of Sumir.

Some of the species cooperated with each other while others split off to find places suitable for their race to live.

A good portion of the beginning species were humans with small differences but with many different worlds and backgrounds. They set off as a whole to find land warm enough to support them as the area they first arrived in was far too cold for them to grow crops like most of them did on their home planets. Other species that were more adaptable stayed behind where they started and others moved to more favorable climates. This was the beginning of the different civilizations.

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The humans had a large portion of people from Earth from around the same era as us, which still leads humans to believe that Earth is a planet in a different universe without the same time axis as Sumir. Thanks to this the culture of the humans, the development of their technology, and a lot of other factors like language were shaped by this large group.

The demons, despite the name that makes them seem like denizens of hell, came from the multi-species group that stayed in the more barren lands where they were first summoned to the world. They inter-bred and made a wide variety of species and the blanket term of ‘demon’ is something the humans used to categorize them as a whole.

They said they would give an in-depth lesson on the demons another day and continued with the origin of themselves, and more importantly to them, their gods.

One thing that was different between Sumir and the home planets of all the intelligent species was the power of faith. It was something that they only learned of after many years on the planet. People who were relied upon and seen as being more important started to gain power at a faster rate than everyone else. This wasn’t only something that happened to people who were good leaders or virtuous. People who earned a high reputation for violence or dominance also had their power rise rapidly. The races only figured out what was going on after it was too late to stop the tide. Individuals who got more powerful, got more famous for whatever they used their power for, and this in turn made them even stronger from the recognition of others.

For example, the goddess that the empire now worships was one of these individuals. She learned how to summon water from thin air by making a portal to a spring she had seen in the lands between the barren lands and the lands where the humans settled. Thanks to this she saved a large number of them from dying during a drought that hit only a few years after they settled. This gave her a reputation for being able to summon things and being benevolent. As her reputation rose she became able to summon things from further and further away, and more and more things at one time.Her reputation and power rose and many began to rely on her, even revere her for the lives she saved.

Then came the day that tipped the scales:

She summoned something from Earth.

She had been home-sick for her planet and felt like reading a comic that she was never going to be able to finish. Jokingly she told one of her friends that she would see if she could summon the newest issue from their old planet and gave it an attempt half-heartedly.

And it worked. She got the issue of the comic that came out the day they were pulled from Earth that she hadn’t bought yet.

Everyone lost their minds.

People praised her as a goddess and thought that they had a chance to return to their homes after many years. People’s belief in her became fanatic and frenzied.

That was when people found out about how much power faith held.

As people surrounded her that day she began to scream as more power than her body could handle began to flow into her from the fanatical beliefs of those around her. Everyone watched in horror and amazements as she disintegrated into particles of light while maintaining here human form.

For some this just cemented their view of her being a goddess and she actually became one. She lost her body but found she could still interact and speak to those who believed her to be a goddess, but not the others. People, excited by her new power, asked to see if she could now transport them back home.

This was when the first problem of divinity (besides blowing up apparently) was discovered. She had gained divinity through the belief people had in her ability to summon, and only to summon. Apparently semantics are very important when you become a god because her ONLY power left was to summon things to her and her followers, not to send something in the other direction. She had become all powerful in one aspect, and had lost her ability to change anything else in the world that did not pertain to this power. She couldn’t physically move objects, only summon them. She couldn’t use any other spells or powers she had before, she could only summon.

She could not send people home.

She could only summon things from their worlds.

Many lost all the hope they had gathered in her and the second problem of divinity was discovered. When people stopped believing in her the power she had drastically fell. She became unable to summon things from other planets and needed people who believed in her to feel faith to give her the power to even use basic summoning. Faith was collective, those who feld faith “charged” the god with power, and the god using their power had to spend that charge to use their divine strength.

While the goddess of summoning lost many followers she still had many who stayed under her guidance and continued to show faith, who founded the basis of the church of summoning today.

The same sort of ‘ascension’ to divinity happened many times in the first few decades of Sumir’s history, and a pantheon of gods slowly formed.

The god of summoning, death, light, force, rules, grace; these gods and many others rose during this time and became able to affect the world only as their given title allowed.

I was fully invested in the story they were telling when the time came for us to stop for the day. Integration training was over. So many questions about the technology of this world and using English were answered but so many more questions came. The professor types assured us that they would be teaching us every day and we would eventually have a good grasp of the world. I had originally felt like I would hate this portion of our new daily lives but now I was interested. If normal people could become gods in this world….

What this meant couldn’t be fully understood with my low brainpower. From what they said being a god had too many negatives. I would rather be strong the old fashioned way. But now I was interested in how faith worked and if it affected people just enough to not make them ascend.

May had been grumbling throughout the whole lecture close to my seat and I decided to ask her why. She had a… well let's say “special” view on the topics they discussed.

“The god of light kept grumbling about how only half of what they said was true. He just wouldn’t shut up, that's why I was mumbling.”

Interesting.

After all of that listening and memorizing I was tired but we moved directly to the next portion of our day, the practical training.

The practical training ended up being the most boring portion of the whole day. We were treated like new recruits and so they only worked on footing and walking in time the whole day. It was incredibly boring despite how much I had looked forward to it, so I was really disappointed.

We went to eat one more time and then were sent back to our rooms, just to do the same routine the next day.

And the next day.

And every day after that for the next month.