I fabricated myths to guide the revival of spiritual energy.

"A false god... stole my lamb."

The oracle was brief, for even the Lord of Light himself could not discern the true nature of the dark gold power that had forcibly severed His right to His faith. He could only instinctively sense that a small portion of His "soul property" had been forcibly taken from Him by an unreasonable force.

"Have you found out? Which direction is it?" Cardinal Herman, the leader, stood up, his face so gloomy it seemed like it could drip water.

"Reporting back to the Archbishop, the location of the causal break... is in the wasteland at the very edge of the Western Frontier. There is only a small heretical temple there, which we have long since trampled to pieces," a high-ranking priest reported tremblingly.

"Border wasteland?" Archbishop Herman scoffed, a hint of contempt flashing in his eyes.

He thought it was some rival superior god system of the same level that had launched a full-scale divine war, but it turned out to be just an abandoned wasteland.

"It must be an ancient wild god buried in the old era, who luckily absorbed some remnants of faith and is trying to revive in that no-man's-land. Or it could be a ridiculous probe by some hostile pantheon on the border," Herman made his arrogant judgment. They could never have imagined that this was not the revival of a wild god at all, but an invasion from another dimension.

"The divine grace of radiance cannot be profaned. How dare a mere wild god touch the property of the supreme god?" Archbishop Herman waved his jewel-encrusted scepter and coldly issued the temple's highest order, "Send word to deploy the 'Purification Squad.' I will personally lead the squad, gathering twelve knights of divine grace, accompanied by the Holy Oracle."

He walked to the altar at the deepest part of the temple and respectfully picked up a sacred object that emitted a dazzling white light—the Soul-Locking Scales.

In the pantheon, slaying false gods is secondary; the most important thing is to reclaim the souls of believers.

"I will weigh the souls of those lowly people anew on the scales. I will show that false god in that remote wasteland who the true ruler is."

……

Meanwhile, in the border wasteland, a dilapidated temple stands.

The cold rain washed away the bloodstains on the ground. Eve drew a broadsword of fine steel that she had taken from the Templar's corpse and coldly surveyed her surroundings.

In a corner of the temple ruins, a dozen survivors who had just knelt down were huddled together, trembling.

Eve did not become merciful or saintly simply because she had become the "First Priestess." She was perfectly clear-headed. The backlash from that heretical priest before his death made her see the truth of this world clearly: without enough people kneeling down to offer their faith, this new, dark gold temple would have no power, and she herself would sooner or later be crushed into mincemeat by the old theocracy.

"Smash those remnants of the old gods completely."

Eve, sword in hand, gave her first command to the survivors in an unquestionable tone.

The survivors exchanged bewildered glances. Their long-standing fear of the gods held them firmly in place. An old, one-eyed serf trembled as he backed away, his voice filled with terror: "No...we can't smash it. If we offend the Lord of Radiance, we'll be thrown into divine fire for ten thousand years after we die...This new god saved us, but He's just another cannibalistic master. I...I want to run, I want to get away from here..."

Eve did not comfort him with gentle doctrines, nor did she express any grand, compassionate aspirations.

She stepped forward, grabbed the old serf by the collar with her blood-stained hands, and dragged him to the ruins of the ancient gods.

"Don't you understand?" Eve's voice was hoarse but coldly realistic. "Run? Where can you run to? In the eyes of the Old Gods, we don't even deserve to be dogs. We are just waste to be skinned and bled! The Old Gods wanted us to die, but just now, it was this New God who let us live."

She shoved the broadsword made of fine steel into the old serf's hand, turned around, and swept her gaze across all the survivors with a sharp, piercing look.

"Kneeling down isn't about surrendering your life," Eve said, her words deliberate and resolute, "but about taking it back!"

This statement, devoid of profound theological logic, struck like a resounding slap, sharply awakening these desperate mortals.

Yes, the old gods wanted them dead, the new gods wanted them alive. The deal couldn't be simpler.

The old serf gripped his broadsword tightly, then suddenly let out a hoarse roar and slammed it down on a broken statue of an old god. Immediately afterward, a dozen survivors, as if ignited with a lifetime of suppressed rage, picked up stones and broken swords from the ground and smashed everything in the temple that bore any trace of the old gods to pieces.

Eve walked to the temple's weathered stone wall. Having no paint, she dipped her hands directly into the blood of the judge and high priest on the ground, and with the help of her memory and the throbbing deep within her soul, she meticulously traced the intricate and profound dark gold divine runes on the wall.

Cruel and bloody, yet it carries a shocking sense of religious subversion.

As the last blood-red vein fell, the "pseudo-god fragment" that had merged into the stone wall was fully activated.

Dark golden light flowed within the temple like breath. The fragments of pseudo-godhood began to automatically read the names of the dozen or so survivors, their wounds, and the marks deep within their souls.

The first "Dark Gold Temple Register" belonging to the Earth system in the Pantheon was officially generated at this moment.

Miracles befell these mortals.

The slave brand on the old serf's neck, representing the death pact of the Radiant Diocese, faded little by little under the dark golden light, like pencil marks erased by an eraser, until it disappeared completely. The magical whip marks on the others, inflicted for failing to pay their faith taxes, also began to scab and fall off at a visible speed, and long-lost strength surged back into their withered bodies.

They touched their bodies in shock, finally realizing that this inconspicuous, dilapidated temple, and this new god whose name they didn't even know, could actually withstand the unshakeable chains of the old gods' rules.

thump.

The dozen or so people knelt down before the dark gold divine runes once more. This time, it wasn't simply a matter of survival, but a deep-seated reverence and sense of belonging.

Eve stood beneath the divine runes, feeling the warmth emanating from the Dao Lord rune on the back of her hand. She knew that the temple was beginning to function, but this was far from enough.

She walked to the dilapidated entrance of the temple, her gaze piercing through the rain-soaked wasteland.

Less than two miles from the temple, a long caravan of slaves trudged through the mud and water on a desolate road. Dozens of guards were driving hundreds of prisoners of war, children, and conscripted poor people to the heart of the Radiant Diocese for a blood sacrifice.

Eve's eyes instantly sharpened.

She did not kneel before the altar to beg Gu Qing to send down divine lightning to kill the escorting officials, nor did she wait for divine guidance.

She turned around, looked at the dozen or so believers behind her who had just regained some strength, and raised the broadsword in her hand.

"The new god has given us new life and new weapons. Now, we must go and take more people back."

This was not a one-sided crushing defeat by overwhelming odds, but a bloody struggle for survival launched by ordinary people at the bottom of society.

Eve, with a dozen or so followers, took advantage of the rain to quietly sneak up to both sides of the convoy.

Eve leaped out of the mud as a guard from the Radiant Parish brandished a barbed whip, ready to lash a fallen child.

The escort officer sneered, just about to cast a low-level divine spell to activate the divine grace shield on his body.

Eve raised her left hand, and the dark gold divine runes on the back of her hand flashed instantly.

"Break!"

No lengthy chanting was needed; it was merely a wisp of the underlying rules of erasure borrowed from divine runes. The faint divine grace emanating from the escorting officer vanished instantly, like a candle flickering in the wind.

Before the escorting officer could react, Eve's broadsword had already pierced his throat.

"kill!"

A dozen or so believers, like demons crawling out of hell, grabbed weapons they had picked up from the knights' corpses and pounced on the escorting officers who had lost their divine magic.

The battle was extremely fierce. Eve herself was still mortal, and she had several deep, bone-revealing gashes on her body; some of her followers also lay in pools of blood. But with divine grace blocked, the escorting officers were nothing more than ordinary soldiers, and faced with a group of beasts driven mad by the will to survive, their defenses quickly crumbled.

As the last guard collapsed in the mud, Eve wiped the blood and mud from her face and looked at the hundreds of slaves locked in the prison wagons, their eyes blank and terrified.

She stepped forward and shattered the iron locks on the prison cart with a single sword stroke.

"Come with me. To the temple."

In this bloody battle, Eve truly understood for the first time the message this new god wanted to convey: faith is not supplication, but exchange. She provided these people with a way to live and shelter, and their will to survive and gratitude would become the purest fuel, nourishing the newly born dark gold temple.

When Eve led the hundreds of freed slaves back to the temple, as they watched the shackles of the old gods shatter one by one in the dark golden light and knelt deeply before the divine runes.

The number of followers of the Dark Gold Temple instantly surged from a dozen to over a hundred.

Boom—

As the first wave of stable and large-scale faith power was absorbed by the fragments of the false godhood, the ruins of the temple miraculously began to change. The collapsed stone pillars seemed to be lifted up by an invisible hand and pieced back together; the damaged walls were automatically partially repaired as dark golden light flowed around them.

The dark gold divine pattern that was originally drawn with blood has now completely merged into the texture of the stone wall, becoming deep and clear.

……

At the same time.

Kunlun Heavenly Palace.

Gu Qing sat on the throne, and the vast stream of data clearly presented everything that was happening on the border wasteland before his eyes.

He watched Eve take the initiative and fight valiantly, and watched the temple begin to rise from the ruins. There was no surprise in his eyes, only a hint of cold satisfaction.

He didn't intervene. Not because he couldn't, but because he didn't need to.

Not every anchor point requires his step-by-step manipulation, like a puppeteer. The most terrifying method for one civilization to devour another is to plant a seed that will spread automatically. Eve's hatred and will to survive were the perfect catalyst for this seed.

Gu Qing saw it very clearly. The key to breaking the deadlock in the pantheon of beliefs was not to fight the gods sitting in their divine kingdoms with bayonets, but to steal sheep.

As long as someone like Eve continues to seize mortals from the major pantheons, establish temples, and rewrite their faith affiliations, it's tantamount to constantly draining the foundations of the gods' kingdoms.

There's no need for a galaxy-destroying war. The day the flock is completely robbed, those high and mighty divine kingdoms will simply crash down from the sky.

……

However, the Old Gods' revenge came faster than expected.

At the edge of the border wilderness, the rain gradually stopped.

A group of people exuding a terrifying aura have already set foot on this barren land.

Twelve heavily armored knights, riding unicorns of light, led the way; a saintess with her eyes covered by a white cloth followed closely behind, carrying a scroll.

At the very center of the procession, Cardinal Hermann stood atop a magnificent palanquin. He raised his head, his sharp, hawk-like eyes fixed intently on the distant, dilapidated little temple.

To ordinary people, there was nothing there, but in Herman's spiritual vision, a dark golden pillar of light, completely unlike any known pantheon, was rising from there.

Hermann's face darkened considerably. He sensed the contempt emanating from that beam of light.

He took out the sacred artifact, the "Soul-Locking Scales," which emitted a white light from his robes, his voice as cold as the ice of the deepest hell:

"Go to that temple. Take out all the fanatics of false gods..."

"Send him to the stake."