Chapter 154: Xiaoshuang the Angel
"I can see it, I can see it!" Xiaoshuang crowed, hopping about with delight. "What a strange feeling — I'm actually in two places at once, and it still feels like just one person. That's Nobi, that filthy goblin, putting on such airs like he's civilized."
Xiaoshuang chattered on happily, though Evan had no idea a green projection of her had just manifested in his own shrine — really nothing more than an upper chamber. Days ago, when Evan had manifested his own divine sign, Nobi had nearly gone mad with joy. He'd already had statues made of Evan and Xiaoshuang, pressing his tribe into worship — since he was king, they'd gone along with it, though without much real conviction behind it.
Nobi had spun a story claiming Evan was the reincarnation of Barsa, the goblin god, promising that under his own leadership the goblins would return to prosperity. His people had remained half-convinced, until that miracle proved it beyond doubt — Evan had genuinely become a god to them, worshipped now as the God Evan.
Today Nobi had come to pay his own respects. As the new king, he'd cleaned himself up considerably and put on some weight besides — though he genuinely had leadership talent, and the goblins had grown noticeably stronger under him.
Mid-worship, the light flared again, and Xiaoshuang appeared. The whole gathering dropped to the ground in an instant, Nobi included — clever as he was, he still lived in a world where gods were real, and divine majesty remained beyond anything even he could fully rationalize away.
"Welcome, Angel Xiaoshuang, in her descent! May the god walk with you!" The chant rose the moment she appeared, startling her for a moment before she composed herself, settling into an expression of pure satisfaction.
"Honored archangel, right hand of the god," Nobi said, bowing low, "our tribe has reached the limit of what we can grow on our own. Does the god have some way to help us grow further?"
"The god says he has given you this land. Tend it well. The beasts of this earth shall give you meat and milk, and the people of this land shall be your servants," Xiaoshuang said, drawing loosely on scraps of the human Scripture she'd picked up drifting through human society with Evan — she'd even flipped through a copy once — improvising freely now to project her own authority.
"Which direction should we expand?" Nobi asked.
"West. There's another goblin tribe there," Xiaoshuang said, eyes rolling with mischief. She'd known about that western tribe long before ever meeting Evan — had nearly fallen into their hands herself once. Here was her chance. Hmph. Serves them right for bullying her.
That tribe sat roughly twenty miles off, fewer than a hundred strong, living in dugout burrows. The moment Nobi heard this, he leapt up, waving both arms, shouting, "The god has shown us the way! We shall expand our land and strike down the other tribe!"
Xiaoshuang looked thoroughly pleased with herself. "Go make your preparations, then. Don't mind me — the god sent me here to survey his territory." With that, she flicked her wings and flew off.
Evan, of course, had no idea any of this was happening. He'd only pieced it together bit by bit from Xiaoshuang's later chatter, and he found himself without much ambition on the matter — some vague sense told him that ascending to godhood wasn't quite what he'd once imagined, and since the faith and divine power flowing to him kept getting shunted aside by some force within his own body, one he hadn't yet learned to direct, he hadn't given it much thought either.
Nobi led his goblin forces out and, after suffering a handful of casualties, managed to capture the rival tribe entirely. That other group had degenerated badly, having lost even the faintest trace of civilization — armed with nothing but sticks, they'd charged forward in a mob, and once a few of them fell, the rest scattered in a panic.
Nobi directed his men to round them up one by one, and recalling the god's own words, converted the lot of them into slaves. With one careless remark, Xiaoshuang had just reintroduced slavery into goblin society.
She played at this for several days until her divine power ran dry, then withdrew reluctantly. The connection faded on Evan's end, and she looked at him, hoping he'd let her do it again. Evan shook his head and shared the method with her mind instead.
Her small face fell. She'd accepted worship too, after all, and could presumably draw on it herself — but a year and more of accumulated faith only stretched to a single use. She looked to Evan again, and he said with a smile, "Don't look at me. I don't understand how this divine power or faith actually works either. It might well have transferred over to you, for all I know."
He'd meant it as an offhand remark, but something did seem to shift. He checked himself carefully and found nothing had changed on his end. Xiaoshuang felt a stir within herself too, as though some power had settled into her — though she was rather scatterbrained about it and didn't think much of it either.
What neither of them realized was that Evan's careless remark had, in that very moment, actually diverted the flow of faith around him, most of it redirecting to Xiaoshuang — and both of them, none the wiser, had just missed a genuine chance to understand divine power for what it was.
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Winter break was half over when Jessica published another paper: The Mechanism by Which Humans Transform into Werewolves, entirely her own work this time. Since Evan had invented the light microscope, the instrument had become a common fixture in Hollingburton's laboratories, and Jessica had found something like a dark element present in werewolf blood. She hadn't abandoned elemental doctrine entirely — she remembered Leonardo's own paper, published not long after he'd received Evan's microscope, titled Minute Organisms, revealing for the first time the existence of what he called bacteria.
Jessica discovered signs of dark elemental influence in the blood and studied it carefully under the microscope, finding a tiny organism distinct from bacteria — lacking the full cellular structure Leonardo had identified. She named these entities viruses.
Genuinely astonished by the discovery, she pursued it further and eventually concluded that this so-called dark element was actually produced by these tiny organisms. In truth, she'd made an error here — one that wouldn't be corrected until much later — mistaking what was really just a form of toxin for a dark element.
Her paper proposed that werewolves were simply infected humans, and that if the toxin produced by these organisms could be cleared from the body, a werewolf could be restored to a normal person.
The paper earned silver-tier ranking, though it sparked two very different reactions the moment it appeared — one camp holding that this was the Creator's punishment for sinners, the other insisting the Creator had nothing to do with it at all, that werewolves were simply unfortunate souls.
Pope Clement VIII flung down his copy of Magic. Another heretic. His personal guard had already quietly reported the incident to the Inquisition, and though the Pope maintained he knew nothing of it publicly, in truth he understood perfectly well what was happening — it was time these heretics learned a lesson.
The Inquisition dispatched three of its finest. One was Augustin, called the Dark Punisher, who wielded the Spear of Nolahadin — a weapon left behind by the ancient hero Nolahadin, ordinarily only a cubit long but capable of extending to fifteen cubits once its sword-force activated, a genuine divine weapon in its own right.
The second was Abraham, a necromancer and thief both, known as the Shadow Punisher — his magic already at Arcanist level, and his thief skills at the senior tier besides. Thief ranks ran simply, from low to mid to senior, and above that, the title of Thief King.
The last was Fiso the Schemer, whose particular gift lay in raw intellect — a master planner, carrying an arsenal of concealed weapons and known widely as the King of Hidden Blades.
Sending out these three meant fielding some of the finest talent the age had to offer. But Hollingburton sat in Norse, a region where the Creationist Church's strength ran thin — a chapel existed there, certainly, but to preserve the balance struck with the Druids, dating back to an agreement Emperor Kaiwang himself had made, the Church was forbidden from sending anyone above knight-tier strength into Norse at all.
So while the faith had spread through Norse, the Church had never truly held the land in its grip. Any number of shadow organizations had taken root there instead — dark elves, Druids, and Hollingburton stood as the three great powers of the region. Hollingburton, relatively speaking, kept the most agreeable posture toward the Church; most of its people held to the Creator's faith in name, but purely as personal belief, never subject to Church authority, let alone anything like a tithe.
The three operatives' mission: slip into Norse and assassinate Evan and Jessica. They didn't dismiss Jessica outright, but neither did they take her especially seriously — just a senior mage, as far as they knew. Evan, though, they treated with real weight — rumor held he was none other than the lich Nicholas.
Raphael, in particular, had suffered three defeats at his hands, the last costing him even his red dragon — and word later spread that the dragon had been sighted roaming the Black Forest, free. The once-feared Blade of Gabriel had become something of a running joke.
The three slipped into Norse, and Evan had no idea any of this was happening at all. What was Evan doing right now? Discussing the crafting of magical items with Emma.
That Evan could craft magical items was hardly a surprise by now — he'd made an enchanted sword and a set of boomerangs before, with a distinctive method of his own, finishing them in gold and silver plating that hid the sigil array entirely beneath the surface — a technique genuinely unheard of in this world.
But what Evan and Emma were discussing now wasn't any ordinary magical item — it was the legendary category known as divine artifacts. Magical items came in many forms — staves, scrolls, enchanted weapons — each ranked into upper, middle, and lower tiers, but one category stood entirely apart: divine artifacts, said to have been used by the gods themselves. Mages had long dreamed of crafting one, though none had ever succeeded. Only a handful existed in the world, three of them held by the Church — a stone-bound Scripture, the Pope's own scepter, and a cross-star pendant. All three looked deceptively plain on the surface, seamless and whole, showing no visible sigil work at all.
Two more existed besides — the Druids' oaken scepter and the dark elves' Blade of Darkness. Mages had only ever glimpsed these from a distance, both appearing as ordinary objects, though the Blade of Darkness at least carried some hint of its true nature.
The blade's edge flickered with a dark, glossy sheen, giving it something of a divine artifact's presence. The others gave nothing away at all — mixed carelessly among ordinary objects, no one would have thought twice about any of them.
Their power, though, proved extraordinary. The cross-star pendant had blazed brilliantly at the Battle of Prinburg, one strike putting eight of the vampire Thirteen Clans' ten princes into deep slumber and vaporizing the other two outright — this after the Church had been steadily losing ground before that.
The Druids' oaken scepter had never truly displayed its full power in open battle, but by all accounts, when Emperor Kaiwang once drove the Druids into steady retreat, a private meeting followed — meant to persuade the Druids to abandon their own faith entirely, which instead ended in a peace settlement. The reason, it was said, lay in Emperor Kaiwang witnessing the oaken scepter's true power firsthand, forcing him to accept peace terms with the Druids after all.