I Am the God of Games - Chapter 267

Chapter 267: God Sprout

The change occurring to the Roaring Blaze Tiger Warrior was nothing special in appearance, but it was exceedingly obvious to the gods.

If one had to put their finger on it, it was just like having a plain mortal suddenly turning into a chosen Saint.

Still, the change occurring to the Roaring Blaze Tiger Warrior was complex since he was special in the first place.

Any other god would most likely have been confused by the change, but since Xi Wei had been observing the area through the Players, he vaguely understood what had happened.

***

When the Players first arrived on the Western Continent, Xi Wei had the feeling that the land itself seemed to repel the divine. It is like a fog of war that made it hard even when he tried to spy through his Divine Eye.

At first, Xi Wei had theorized that the land had been cursed by some god, or some phenomenon in the War of God and Demons had led to this.

He finally realized that his theory was mistaken from what happened just now.

The power that pours into the Roaring Blaze Tiger Warrior was crude and unrefined, but he was positive that it was divine energy—a power that only the gods could use.

Reasonably speaking, the nonhuman natives had no gods since most of them engaged in ancestral worship or even worshipped their own predecessors, aside from the few who worshipped Bellphon, God King of Beasts.

But as their population increased, ancestral worshiped slowly manifesting their belief into a divine being—just like the God of Games who existed before Xi Wei’s transmigration.

Be that as it may, the god manifesting from the ancestral worship of the different nonhuman tribes would mean a discrepancy since there so many different ancestors in question that the belief couldn’t be unified. Moreover, the largest tribe of nonhumans were at best five or six hundred, meaning that there was no way a god in the genuine sense could come to exist.

There would be some who would interrupt here, asserting that Xi Wei did not even have that many believers before he transmigrated. But wasn’t he a standard-issue deity now? That was incorrect because the manifestation of the God of Games did not depend on the handful of believers existing when he transmigrated.

Instead, it was the hundreds and thousands of loyal believers who worshipped the God of Games during the golden age of Tierra!

Be that as it may, the God of Games that manifested remained vulnerable and unstable, and so much so that it didn’t even have sufficient intelligence to help his own believers amidst the fall of Tierra. Xi Wei’s transmigration was merely an opportunity seized through his Authority to transmigrate.

And therein lies the question: could manifesting divinity be successful over time even if numbers were lacking? Could belief be enough to birth a god if all nonhuman tribes worshipped the same ancestor over almost a thousand years?

Sadly, it did not work that way. If belief could accumulate with time anyway, gods of belief would not fall in the absence of worshippers.

Nonetheless, belief that accumulated over extended eras would still have certain effects, and the long history of the nonhumans managed to form an entity similar to a budding god. It was just a chunk of energy that had no form, a mere condensation of divine energy that shrouds upon the corresponding tribe—those were not gods, and naturally not bound by the restraint of Rules so as to exist in the Prime Material Plane instead of being pulled into the divine realm.

It was precisely because the god sprouts were many that they mutually affected each other, eventually forming a bounded field that true gods would have a hard time sensing, firmly prying a chunk of the Western Continent from the eyes of the other gods.

Be that as it may, real gods of belief would fall to the threat of death once their believers vanished, let alone the god sprouts which didn’t even possess divinity.

That was why the god sprouts would instinctively retaliate against the enemy who caused the potential wipeout of their believers—in contrast, they wouldn’t care about their own believers as long as they didn’t all go extinct.

Even if the nonhumans were unaware of the existence of god sprouts, they would have a vague idea after living on the Vierlin Plains for almost a thousand years. Experience would allow them to theorize and categorize situations, hence developing rules for some of their tribes—as an example, the war between two tribes must stop at certain points, any hostility ceasing when the outcome was very much decided without a complete extinguishing of the enemy’s race.

That was why even weak nonhuman tribes such as the Long Ears could survive from ancient times until now.

And at the moment, the Mountain Tigers were in the dire straits of potential extinction.

Naturally, their god sprout would activate its automated defense mechanism and infuse itself as pure divine energy unto the Roaring Blaze Tiger Warrior, elevating him into an existence comparable to the Saints of other faiths!

Finally getting to the bottom of things, Xi Wei stroked himself with his tentacle at a spot where his chin should be: Since the god sprouts created a bounded field in the Vierlin Plains where the nonhumans dwelled and the other true gods had a hard time seeing what happened there, wouldn’t he be unnoticed even if he overdid things a little?

That being said, Xi Wei didn’t actually make a direct move in the end.

There were still many Players there who wouldn’t be dying off anytime soon anyway. Moreover, other Players were all leaving aside what they were doing after receiving the urgent quest assignment and were headed in this direction, and would be reinforcing the current forces in half an hour.

It was not necessary for him to interfere directly for now. Observing and handling things according would work better in his favor.

***

“Die, bastard!” The Roaring Blaze Tiger Warrior bellowed.

Having become a pseudo-Saint and leaping up to Level 55—an equal footing with the Revived Nightstalker, punching out at the Nightstalker even before it could wake up!

The massive blood wings behind the Nightstalker immediately branched out, shaping a shield and attempting to guard against the blow, only to be punched through by the fist which then landed directly on the Nightstalker’s face, sending him flying out of the ancestral hall!

Like a stone skipping over water, the Revived Nightstalker bounced a few times over the ground and only stopped when it crashed into a wooden hut.

His whole face was punched inside, his chin punched into a tilted, horrific angle.

But the Players weren’t optimistic, however. Only a tiny bit—a twentieth of the Nightstalker’s HP bar, in fact—was punched away.

And even as the Roaring Blaze Tiger Warrior gave chase and tried to press his attack, a rain of blood started to pour down from the skies.

At first, the Players all assumed that the rain would be poisonous or erosive, and prepared to counter in return—only to realize that nothing was happening.

However, it was the stagnating blood water on the ground that began to squirm, shaping into bloody creatures of abnormal forms that charged towards the Roaring Blaze Tiger Warrior and the Players!