Chapter 38
“How troublesome,” Zareth muttered to himself as he meticulously studied his surroundings.
It’d been a while since he had conducted his most recenty ritual, and he’d almost forgotten just how tedious it was to set up the necessary components. That was even more the case with a ritual as ludicrously complex as the one that Cerebon had stuffed into Zareth’s head at the end of their little history lesson.
Zareth swept his gaze across his laboratory—which had been cleared of pretty much all of his experiments and alchemical equipment. The members of his cult had been… moderately disturbed by some of the things that Zareth had been forced to relocate; however, the vast array of esoteric runes and arcane symbols that he’d painstakingly etched into every inch of the laboratory’s fleshy surfaces were completely necessary.
How does this nonsense even work? Zareth irately wondered not for the first time as he noticed and fixed a small error in one of the runes. He much preferred the System and its slightly more defined rules than the nonsensical squiggly lines that Cerebon swore would work as intended.
After the god had offered his full and unwavering support in pursuit of their shared agenda, he and Zareth had spent a while discussing the matter in Cerebon’s divine realm. Although Cerebon insisted that it would be relatively easy to get the other religious groups on board to form a pantheon after he came into accord with their respective deities, that wasn’t quite enough in Zareth’s opinion.
A truly reliable alliance needed more than just superficial shared goals and verbal agreements if it was going to stand the test of time. It needed mutual interests that were tightly intertwined and bound together in a way that couldn’t easily be undone by the changing whims of mysterious deities.
Zareth couldn’t trust that ancient history related to the System War would be enough. As someone who had tasted the bitterness of betrayal, nothing but ironclad assurance would satisfy him.
His conversation with Cerebon had led to Zareth proposing and discounting many different ideas on how to accomplish that, and they’d eventually settled on a… very ambitious plan.
It’s just a shame those plans require me to spend literal hours setting up this damned ritual, Zareth thought with frustration. I can’t even have Vidhatri or anyone else help me because I’m the only one who was given the knowledge to—