Chapter 449: No chance of winning

The gods were killed.

Those guardian spirits were merely the initial deities; their divine power was weak, their consciousness still chaotic, and their magic was entirely attached to the stone steles. Once the steles were destroyed, they naturally perished.

But Murphy had become a new god.

Destroying those steles did not shatter the faith of the shamans; instead, due to the immense power Murphy displayed, it gave rise to a different kind of faith.

As Murphy traveled to various places, destroying nascent deities everywhere, a legend gradually spread through the mouths of the shamans: the one true god had descended from the heavens, using divine thunder to execute the false gods, and from then on, there was only one great existence in the world.

So, when he returned to that initial valley again, he found that the stretches of broken steles were gone, and in their place stood a statue that resembled him.

Wisps of spiritual power gathered from those shamans and worshippers onto the statue, and when Murphy approached, they returned from the statue back into Murphy.

An extremely full and exuberant feeling flooded his heart. Countless emotions, feelings, fears, hopes, desires, and more, mixed into that spiritual power, passed through his heart like all sorts of seasonings—sour, sweet, bitter, and spicy—leaving him in a momentary trance.

He felt as if he had truly become a god sitting high in the heavens, looking down upon the bustling masses.

Fortunately, he quickly realized that these were all impurities within the spiritual power transmitted by the believers; they were the "definitions" of their god in their minds, the imagination and shaping of a god.

It took him some effort to suppress the influence of these impurities.

Immediately after, he felt a bit between laughter and tears.

Spiritual power, which is another dimension of magic, can be converted into magic with a little transformation; this is also the reason why those deities possess incomparably vast magic.

Having this magic was naturally a good thing. The previous time travel had consumed most of the magic he had obtained from Pan. He could just happen to accumulate some magic for the next time travel, so he wouldn't have to worry about being trapped in this era.

But the person who had originally intended to exterminate the gods had become the one true god; the result was somewhat ironic.

Come to think of it, he might be able to use this opportunity to develop believers and, relying on his knowledge and magic that transcended this era, become the only deity.

Just imagine, if he could sustain the faith in himself as the only god for ten thousand years, until the future with a population of ten billion, how vast would the magic he possessed be?

This was even quite feasible. At this time, all the deities were still in their infancy. He had a first-mover advantage far exceeding them, and he knew better than any god what could bewitch people's hearts and attract believers more effectively. Plus, the miracles brought by immense divine power made unifying global faith not a difficult task.

But this thought only flashed through his mind before Murphy abandoned it.

First of all, he didn't like to scheme against people's hearts like this, let alone do it for ten thousand years.

Magic is a good thing, but if one had to do work they didn't want to do for ten thousand years just for magic, then was it really oneself mastering magic, or was magic controlling oneself?

Secondly, although the magic brought by faith is vast, it is not without a price.

The faith of believers in gods is mostly very utilitarian. Their faith is mixed with countless personal obsessions, desires, and the fantasies and shaping of the deity itself. Accepting too much of this kind of spiritual power, the deity itself would inevitably be polluted.

Furthermore, he destroyed the gods to let humanity as a whole embrace rationality and bring him more knowledge and development. In a sense, it was to let humanity wake up from the worship of gods and stand tall to face the reality of the world, not to let more people kneel before him.

Perhaps the upper limit of walking the path of faith is also very high. Relying on incomparably vast magic, he might be able to perform magic that truly rivals miracles and changes the world, but how empty would it be to have only himself left in the world with free will, while everyone else became vassals and NPCs, living their days in flattery?

Ultimately, that would just be an ego-centric idealistic world. Even if he became the ruler of that world, no new knowledge could be produced; it would only be the continuous stacking and overfitting of secondary information derived from original cognitions, and it would inevitably lead to self-closure and rigidity.

That was definitely not the future he wanted.

However, this incident also gave him a reminder: simply destroying those gods and destroying those idols is meaningless. What should be broken most is the "god" in people's hearts.

Otherwise, no matter how many times he wipes out the shells of these gods, they will always return through reincarnation.

And in this process, Murphy also figured out the elements of the birth of gods.

He visited various places and realized that the birth of gods cannot be separated from wizards.

The spiritual power of ordinary Muggles cannot condense; only wizards can outline the image of a god through the power of imagination during the prayer process, and in the long-term continuous projection of mental images, gradually give life to the idol they worship.

That is to say, gods are actually created by wizards.

It's just that those wizards are all unaware of this.

Because there is no magic net in the world today, it is actually very difficult for wizards' magic to be converted into spells. The amount of their magic is not much inferior to that of future wizards, but they lack sufficient knowledge, systematic training, and the regulation and assistance of a magic net. The probability range of "wave function collapse" that their magic can cause is very small, so releasing a spell is extremely difficult for them.

Only by chance can they release one or two spells by relying on their own magic, and those spells usually appear more like a "coincidence," "good luck," or "miracle." They find it difficult to summarize the laws of magic, and thus it is difficult to reproduce them.

In contrast, the spirits born from their prayers, because they have received more spiritual power, possess more vast magic, so these nascent gods can complete a kind of magic simply by "imagination," and their success rate is much higher than that of wizards. In the eyes of wizards, their status is naturally higher than their own.

They could never imagine that this god, who far exceeds their own abilities, was actually created by themselves.

From this, Murphy decided to try to teach those wizards some knowledge of releasing magic. Perhaps, if humanity could exert magic by itself, then perhaps there would be no more need for gods.

But this process was much more difficult than he had imagined. Without the help of a magic net to organize and guide magic, to complete a spell with some power by relying on the magic within the wizard's body, one must provide a more precise "path imagination," and the closer this "path imagination" of magic realization is to physical reality, the easier it is to succeed.

From this, if Murphy wants to teach them magic, he must teach some more systematic knowledge of various kinds.

But even some common sense that modern people are accustomed to could be heavenly books never heard of by the ancients from ten thousand years ago. To enable an ancient person to freely release some relatively simple spells by relying on their own knowledge, Murphy might very well have to spend several years or even more than a decade teaching.

He didn't have such patience, so he adopted a more labor-saving method. He found the most knowledgeable and wise shamans in each tribe and directly taught them the basic common sense of various disciplines through "memory replication" into their minds.

Then they would teach this knowledge to the remaining wizards.

Subsequently, he lived under the offerings of the believers for half a year to ensure that the knowledge he passed down had not gone too far astray, and only then did he use his divine power to reactivate the third time converter, sending himself two hundred years into the future.

He didn't send himself to a more distant future because he wanted to verify the results of his attempt.

However, this time, when he returned to that valley again, he found that a magnificent giant city had already been built there.

And in the giant city stood several tall statues of gods, the faces of a few of which were vaguely familiar; they were exactly the shamans who had been taught knowledge by him.

Relying on knowledge and magic, they indeed no longer needed to create other gods.

Because they themselves had become gods.

"Haha..." In the shadows of those statues, Murphy couldn't help but laugh out loud.

He finally realized the ultimate meaning of what Cernunnos said: "Gods do not die."

It is not that people's faith in a certain god will not disappear, but that humanity's overall faith in the thing called gods will not disappear.

Just as the Christian God said, people are always fond of ease and hate work, and people are always willing to entrust their own thinking ability to an authority more powerful than themselves.

And there will always be people who, for the sake of power, profit, or various reasons, will exploit these weaknesses of others to build themselves into gods.

Gods do not die, unless humanity as a whole abandons fantasy, unless every individual can be conscious, introspective, self-loving, and self-strengthening, able to not complain about heaven or others, not escape or shirk, and brave enough to take on their own destiny.

However, what a difficult thing that is.

For the first time, he felt that in this war between himself and the gods, he might truly have no chance of winning.

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 450 =====