The Era of Gods

12 Chapter 12 Starting the Battle
Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
From high above, a group of Snake People and a group of Grey Mist Fish People quickly approached each other on the narrow beach.

The three-kilometer distance took only about ten minutes to cover, and the silhouettes of the opposing sides became visible to each other. The Fish People had emerged en masse, numbering around six hundred, while the Snake People counted two hundred and twenty, and with their far larger stature, the scale of the two forces didn’t seem much different.

By racial disparity, normally six hundred Fish People would not possibly defeat two hundred-plus Snake People, a hundred would be challenging enough.

But now, this was Lin Xiao’s Divine Realm, where he had the home field advantage, and… Salted Fish Charge.

When the two sides were less than a hundred meters apart, his True Body appeared above the battlefield on the Fish People’s side, transforming into a colossal Fishman phantom enveloped in the golden light of Divine Power. The Fishman Leader incarnation of Lin Xiao immediately raised his weapon and shouted,

“The great Lord of the Grey Mist is watching over us, my children, charge!”

The moment his True Body appeared, all Grey Mist Fish People sensed it and looked up in unison.

In that instant, witnessing the descent of their own deity, the emotions of all the Fish People started to intensify. Over a hundred Fish People at that moment evolved from True Believers to Devout Believers, all nominal believers became True Believers, and more than ten Fish People transformed from Devout Believers into Fanatic Believers.

If this had happened at any other time, Lin Xiao would be ecstatic, but this time he couldn’t bring himself to feel happy.

Because, with his True Body descended, a malevolent will had locked onto him.

Before this moment, although he was inside the Divine Realm, he existed on a different plane only accessible to Deities and not on the material plane within the Divine Realm.

On that plane, he could observe the entire Divine Realm, invisible to anyone no matter where he went. But now, he had left the Deities’ exclusive plane and appeared on the material plane, an act often described as ‘True-Body Descend’.

Under normal circumstances, True-Body Descend wouldn’t pose a problem, but given the current state of affairs, his True-Body Descend meant that he partook in this invasion battle.

Most critically, he had been locked onto by another Demigod, that malevolent will I mentioned earlier.

The Snake People didn’t come out of nowhere; even summoned by cards, behind that transportation portal there lay another plane dominated by the Snake People, and the being known as Gras was a Snake People Demigod who had set his sights on Lin Xiao, this newly matured Divine life.

Within the rules, he wouldn’t normally be able to touch Lin Xiao—this was after all just a trial, even if the summoned Snake People came from Gras’s plane.

But once Lin Xiao made a personal appearance in his True Body, he was instantly detected by Gras, and according to the rules, since Lin Xiao’s True Body joined the battle, Gras could, abiding by the rules, make a move against him. These Snake People were extensions of his will, and he could use them to strike at Lin Xiao.

As a newly crowned Master of a Divine Realm, fully educated in the theory of Divinity, Lin Xiao, of course, understood this. But he had no choice—if he wanted to win this extra test without incurring heavy losses to his Clan, he had to take the risk.

The moment the Snake People and the Fish People charged together, nearing each other, Lin Xiao stretched out his hand immediately, repeating his old trick to summon a tide.

The Superhuman Power ‘Call the Tide’ had vastly different effects between the incarnation and the True Body. With the same expenditure of a hundred thousand faith value, the wave summoned by the incarnation covered only a few hundred meters while the True Body could call forth a tide that rose from the sea, reaching a kilometer in range and crashing down upon the battlefield.

Several Fish People in the Snake People group, presumably priests, simultaneously raised their Bone staffs and cast spells, a series of red glows burst forth, bestowing various Divine Arts upon all the Snake People.

The next second, a massive wave covered the sky and swept across the battlefield, submerging everything in an instant. Both the Snake people and the Fishmen were carried by the sea onto the beach, and as the waves receded, they helplessly slid back into the shallow waters, transforming the entire battleground from a beach to a shallow sea area in an instant.

This area was exactly the one that stretched from the beach into the sea, with water depths ranging from half a meter to one meter, extending up to two meters.

The tall Snake people could barely stabilize their figures by touching the sand with their tails, while the Fishmen were completely submerged.

But as amphibious creatures, Fishmen were more agile in water than on land, quickly recovering from the tidal surge. One of them burst out of the water, spotted a Snake person swaying with the waves more than ten meters away to the left, immediately raised the short spear in his hand aiming at the target, and with a ‘bang,’ a large splash of water exploded, and a white streak tore through the water at super-fast speed towards the Snake person.

This Snake person was indeed much stronger than the Fishmen and reacted quickly, screeching to stabilize his figure, both arms holding an iron sword high above his head and slashing down fiercely.

“Puff!”

“Squish!”

Two muffled sounds of bodies being pierced rang out simultaneously, followed by a huge spray of blood that quickly stained a large area of the sea red.

The Snake person staggered, clutching at the short spear that had completely penetrated his waist, and took a step back, while the Fishman was sliced in two by the Snake person’s blade and died on the spot.

A Devout Believer died like that, but Lin Xiao had no time to feel sad about it. This was just the beginning. In that instant, the battlefield, thrown into chaos by his personally cast Mockery, saw Snake people and Fishmen alike erupting into violence and tearing each other apart.

In less than ten seconds, more than forty Fishmen near the Snake people were killed, making up seventy percent, with the rest all seriously injured. But there were also over thirty Snake people wounded by the Fishmen’s last desperate Salted Fish Charges.

The golden humanoid light figure that Lin Xiao had become let out a light sigh. A burst of gold light erupted behind him, and two golden Angels flew out to open a gate of light. He stretched out his right hand and made a pressing motion forward, and from the corpses of all the dead Fishmen, small Fishman apparitions flew out swiftly rising and quickly disappearing into the light gate behind his head.

The souls of these Believers would be cast into another layer of the Divine Realm, the same layer he had previously occupied.

If one could say that the current location was the material plane of the Divine Realm, the plane where the Deities’ True Bodies usually dwelled, commonly known as the God Country Plane, then every dead Believer would enter there to be transformed into Prayer, or perhaps… Reincarnations?

Yes, it was Reincarnations.

This was a Divine Realm, not a God Country.

In the traditional Exotic Crystal System, when Believers die and enter the God Country, they are directly transformed into Prayers, returned to the peak condition of their lives, and then given different treatments based on the degree of their faith.

The lifespan of Prayers isn’t infinite. It is still the lifespan of their original Race, only they can live to old age without diseases or disasters. However, each death of a Prayer weakens them a bit. With too many deaths, their consciousness begins to blur, until eventually, they dissolve into nutrients and merge into the God Country.

But the Divine Realm of the Deities civilization in the Main World is different. It has integrated the functions of the God Country and has merged the features of the Primary Material Plane, adding the function of Reincarnation.

Firstly, the Deities civilization of the Main World refers to themselves as New Gods, different from the traditional old Deities of the Exotic Crystal System. Their Divine Realm is a hybrid of the Material Plane and God Country, with two interfaces within one Divine Realm; one side is the Material Plane, and the other side is the God Country.

Living beings reside on the Material Plane, and upon death, they enter the God Country within.