Chapter 180: The God-Creation Project
Early the next morning, the three of them checked out of the inn. Using the crystal ball and blood sample once more, they'd already confirmed Grawvor's location — he hadn't entered the city at all, but was somewhere near the Furo River, by Furo Mountain, southwest of town. This time they didn't hire a carriage, heading into the mountain on foot instead.
Plenty of parties were tracking Grawvor by now, and between the various divination spells being cast on him, there was simply no way for him to vanish entirely.
Grawvor was only now beginning to understand that this world was nothing like what he'd imagined. Having narrowly escaped Solomon's search the day before, he'd learned the shape of this world from his host's own memories, and had clung to some faint hope until reality crushed it entirely. He'd more or less absorbed everything his original host had known by now, though the lingering consequences of that absorption were something he had no time to worry about at the moment. He remembered, dimly, the goblin genetic transformation project — meant to elevate goblins into a form close to divinity. Something had gone wrong along the way; several of those who'd undergone the transformation had gone mad, launching a doomsday project meant to annihilate all life. He couldn't say where it had gone off course, only that he remembered a fireball, an atomic detonation, tearing across the land, and in that same moment, diving into a transformation pod, sinking underground into hibernation.
When he woke, he found an enormous stretch of time had passed, and that he was already being hunted by a species called humans. He knew of this race — the goblin nation had once stood as the most powerful of its age, its science advanced, while humans had taken an entirely different path, developing something called magic or witchcraft instead. Goblins had never managed to master it themselves. Primitive as it seemed, it had proven unexpectedly powerful. Goblin scientists, after long study, had concluded that magic was a means of driving energy through pure will — a form of individual evolution in its own right.
Goblins, though, were born with insufficient mental power, unable to use magic no matter how they tried. Scientists had exhausted every method, achieving some results — using magic crystals' amplifying effect on mental power, for instance, to let certain gifted individuals channel simple spells through such tools — but on the whole, magic simply didn't suit goblins.
In the final decade before his own transformation, a scientist had proposed genetic engineering as the answer. After capturing numerous human mages, they'd studied both mind and body, dissecting many of them in the process, and finally launched what came to be called the God-Creation Project — pursuing their goal through genetic engineering. What goblins needed wasn't only external power, but strength woven into their very being. But tragedy followed. Several atomic bombs, freshly developed, fell into the hands of madmen who declared that the weak had no right to exist. What exactly happened after that, he had no memory of at all.
From his host's own memories, he'd pieced together what had happened ten thousand years ago — why the goblins alone had been wiped out while humanity survived unscathed. He found himself puzzled by it. Goblin civilization had, by then, developed classical mechanics, and the atomic bomb had been something of an accident — no one had yet understood its true principle, scientists still exploring the cause even as it produced explosions of staggering force. How could such devastating energy be unleashed from something so small? Was it truly some kind of devil's weapon after all?
Across those ten thousand years, some fundamental shift had occurred in his own mind, bringing him close to the divine state the goblins had once envisioned — mental energy capable of existing independently, if only for brief spans. His method of applying it, though, remained crude, with no real technique behind it at all.
When he'd taken the risk of seizing Grawvor's body, and after a hard-fought struggle finally devoured Grawvor's soul entirely, understanding settled over him. The goblin empire had become nothing more than a footnote in history — worse, goblins themselves had become a byword for filth. In humanity's own textbooks, goblin civilization was never mentioned at all.
Human magical history recorded only, in passing, that goblins had once possessed an advanced mechanical civilization, destroyed for reasons unknown — perhaps divine punishment — and that in the aftermath, humanity itself had abandoned the study of mechanical science entirely. Humans now ruled this world unchallenged.
Waking, seizing Grawvor's form — he'd worried, at first, that goblins might refuse to accept him back. As it turned out, there was no goblin civilization left to accept or reject anything at all. He let out a bitter, wordless cry toward the sky, demanding of heaven itself: Why?
He teetered on the edge of something unstable, a thought surfacing that death might be preferable to this. He considered ending his own life right there. It was then that a group of people saved him — though they hadn't come to save him at all. They'd come to kill him. Among them, a fifth-tier fire mage struck first, a dark red beam of scorching light bursting from his fingertip.
Grawvor had been caught in the grip of his own inner turmoil at that moment — not ordinarily prone to such despair, but having taken Grawvor's body, though Grawvor himself was dead, the resentment left behind hadn't simply dissolved. Without realizing it, that lingering resentment had been working on him, nudging him toward self-destruction.
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But the instant the attack came, a flash of danger cut through the resentment's hold on him, if only for a moment. He raised a hand, and Mars's Shield appeared — also called the Fire Shield. In Grawvor's own memory, this was an emergency response, no thought required at all. A crystalline red shield materialized before him, catching the scorching beam. Grawvor had originally been a senior fire mage, and casting this spell would have demanded a proper incantation and gesture from him — yet this new Grawvor summoned it with nothing but a raised hand.
Grawvor's memories served him well here — he'd had raw energy but no technique before; now, with those memories, he'd become a true mage in his own right.
Mars's Shield absorbed the scorching beam entirely, and the mage across from him panicked at once, realizing Grawvor had cast the spell without so much as an incantation — Arcanist-level strength, at minimum. How was he supposed to fight that? He'd barely turned to flee when Grawvor closed his hand in the air, and a burst of flame erupted around the mage. With that closing gesture, the flames collapsed inward with a roar, a scream cutting off as the man became a living torch.
Grawvor turned his attack on the others at once — a thief and a handful of low-tier knights. The thief had barely gone invisible when a casual fireball turned him into a burning corpse. The remaining low-tier knights fell to a wave of Meteor Fire Rain moments later.
Only then did Grawvor pause, struck by how efficient human magic actually was — costing him barely a tenth, perhaps less, of the raw energy he'd have spent doing the same thing directly, and yet producing effects of such staggering scale.
His thoughts drifted, unbidden, to technology — how wasteful it was by comparison. A steam engine barely reached thirty percent efficiency, and that after decades of refinement. Magic, by contrast, converted energy with an efficiency that defied belief. And then there was humanity's own theoretical framework behind it all — elemental doctrine, an entirely different system. Genuinely fascinating.
Having killed several people, his attention had shifted, the will to die draining out of him entirely. Survival became his first priority now. He had no mind left to spare for studying magical theory. One thought lingered, though — going somewhere remote to see whether any goblins had survived after all. Impossible for now, though, with so many humans hunting him. Where should he go from here? In Grawvor's memory, the highest human authority was the Pope, head of a religion, ranked among the half-gods by magical power tier — not yet a true god. He wanted to see what that tier actually meant, wanted to measure himself against the legendary peak humans claimed to have reached. He'd woken remarkably powerful, exceeding even the goblins' own projections for the transformation — but that had been in his original body, now abandoned. In this borrowed human form, he had no clear sense of his own actual standing.
It seemed, from the memory of that first legendary human mage who'd attacked him and been repelled, that his own strength matched or exceeded a legendary mage's own. With that thought, he set off toward Holy Eton, humanity's religious center.
After two hours' travel, he found people ahead checking travelers along the road — likely searching for him. He glanced around, found no one nearby, and gave a cold laugh, sweeping a hand out. Meteor Fire Rain crashed down from the sky while he was still an arrow's flight away, catching the checkpoint guards and a few passersby entirely off guard against a blanket assault of this scale. Amid the explosions, limbs flew — but from within the chaos rose a curtain of water, Water Curtain shielding several lives from the worst of it.
Neither side exchanged words. The moment the water curtain rose, wind blades shot out from within it in swarms, shrieking through the air, glinting cold as a horde of wasps, descending straight at him. Two figures burst out alongside it, greatswords flaring with light, charging him at speed.
He gave a short grunt, and Mars's Shield rose again before him. The wind blades, numerous as they were, all shattered against it, the sound of impact ringing without pause. The two knights closed the distance, and he roared, throwing both fists forward — twin pillars of crystalline light streaking toward them. This wasn't human magic anymore — this was his own way of fighting.
Both knights roared in answer, light flaring across their bodies, their blades blazing white, the clash ringing out like thunder. His own body was driven back two steps, while the two knights were sent flying backward like kites with their strings cut.
Understanding clicked into place at once — knights. Another way humans drew on internal energy. Knights, it seemed, were no weaker than mages.
Before either knight could hit the ground, he struck them each with a scorching beam. Both watched, wide-eyed, as the beam tore through their bodies mid-air, their vision going dark before they crashed to the ground.
Grawvor, half-consumed by something close to madness, closed the distance to the water curtain in an instant, flame gathering in his hand into a long spear, driving it into the curtain with a boom. The water rippled violently. A second thrust followed, and the curtain shattered entirely — one of the mages within went pale, staggering, blood welling at the corner of his mouth.
The other, younger mage watched him in open terror, though his mouth kept working through a rapid incantation — a lengthy spell, even simplified, still demanding real time to complete. The spell had already taken shape in his mind, and he was pouring mana into it in a desperate rush, a great wind spell capable of sweeping away an army nearly finished forming.
Grawvor gave a cold laugh, and hellfire surged up from the ground beneath the two mages almost the instant the wind spell completed. The ground split open where they stood, fire erupting upward as the sweeping wind spell tore outward at the same time, the whole scene dissolving into chaos, impossible to make out clearly. When it finally settled, both mages had been reduced to charred corpses, and Grawvor stood there still, a few tears in his clothing the only sign anything had touched him at all — clearly unharmed.