Steampunk Era: Mad Abield

"Old Hoffman was a member of the Church of the Harvest Goddess, but he was also a member of the Secret Keeper sect, a minor faction under the Church of the Harvest Goddess, responsible for guarding an Evil God that had been sealed by a legendary hero in the previous epoch."

Under Ferreiro’s narration, Malin heard a somewhat absurd story—that legendary hero had slain an Evil God in a small village. Because the Evil God possessed the characteristic of eternal life, he ultimately sealed the god inside a sacred Starstone and then... planted it in his chest.

Malin thought about many questions, but in the end, he asked the one that puzzled him the most—How big was the stone?

"The kind of question you’re asking is the problem, lad. Everyone else asks how powerful the Evil God is, only you would ask this," the old Bishop of the Church of the War God said with a look of surprise.

"Being sealed by a legend, how powerful can such an Evil God be?" Malin turned his head and spoke, "Compared to the horrors I’ve seen, if this one can’t beat a legend, what right does it have to call itself an Evil God."

After thinking it over, the old Bishop of the Church of the War God laughed and nodded, "Indeed, you’ve climbed the staircase, so you are entitled to speak this way."

Malin knew that the old man was referring to the day he met with that horror, and he also nodded with a smile—as for mentioning that horror’s name, it was even simpler for Malin; he had met it himself, so what was there to worry about merely mentioning its name.

Moreover, in Malin’s view, Chaos Folk at the level of petty vendors could be called Evil Gods, those from Ails’s realm of death could be called death gods, but the so-called Evil Gods from his own land... they were nothing but minions. Compared to them, they were merely Transcendent beings who had stepped beyond the mortal realm and still needed faith to nourish their divinity. Yet, they could be sealed by legends... it was hardly a loss of divine face to mention it.

The last time in Farol Principality, he could see that Chaos warriors lacked even proper armor, and those believers were merely experts at taking a beating in their tattered clothes. It was only with difficulty that a Chaos Priest appeared, and they were so weak compared to their colleagues on the northern frontline. If the combative power of the northern priests could be represented by a value of five, then the priests from Farol would only be a decimal point after a zero, with no comparability whatsoever. If they had to compare, it was perhaps like the difference between a tiger and a mouse.