Thanks for the invitation, I just entered the chat group after traveling through Under One Person.

Chapter 228 Born in Faith

To say that the world of Under One Person has entered a period of divine rule is not entirely accurate. Only those countries that were once prosperous but are now in decline, such as the other three of the four ancient civilizations, have had gods descend upon the world, and the countries themselves do not have a strong force to resist, will be ruled by gods.

Major powers possessing nuclear weapons are fully capable of restraining these deities. The gods in these various myths and legends only possess some of the abilities depicted in the stories, and are not as exaggerated as portrayed in those tales.

These gods, according to the chat group's ranking system, are only at the third tier, with varying degrees of strength among them. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are technological weapons that have already reached the fourth tier, enough to threaten these gods.

If the great war that destroyed Japan hadn't come so suddenly, starting with the eruption of Mount Fuji, and if one of the combatants hadn't been their own gods, and if the war hadn't ended so quickly, leaving no time to react, Japan would have been wiped out. If they had had time to launch nuclear weapons, both the gods like Amaterasu and the transmigrators like Yiqing would have been threatened.

Needless to say, China is an even bigger player. Even without nuclear weapons, its sheer combat strength makes it a place where these third-tier gods can act with impunity.

Of course, fanatical believers are indispensable in many countries, leading to some chaos worldwide. The Ugly country is one of the countries with the most intense conflicts with deities.

Kukulkan, the feathered serpent god, saw modern tourists carving "I was here" on reliefs, saw cement roads cutting through the source of the sacred well, and saw genetically modified corn growing on the altars dedicated to him—those corns that should have been offered to the gods no longer had the blood of sacrifice stained in the ancient rituals on their ears.

The feathered serpent's scales transformed into millions of fluorescent butterflies, each wing reflecting the burned-down Mayan library, the temples converted into churches, and the ancestral skeletons buried in sugarcane fields.

Kukulkan suddenly let out a more muffled wail than the previous eruption of Mount Fuji. He understood that the people here had not truly destroyed the Mayan civilization, but rather had allowed it to linger in a state of cultural annihilation through a more cruel method.

Those terracotta figurines enshrined in museum glass cases, those totems distorted and modified on tourist souvenirs, and those deities adapted into video game characters are poisons more deadly than the fire of foreign conquerors.

This feeling is not hard to understand. It's similar to the anger that Chinese people felt when they saw the Japanese version of Journey to the West, which was neither fish nor fowl and was completely fabricated, before the 86 version was even made.

Under this pressure, the Mayan gods, led by Quetzalcoatl, fought fiercely against the Ugly Kingdom. Although the Ugly Kingdom couldn't deploy nuclear weapons on its own territory, its other high-tech thermal weapons were extremely powerful and could rival these gods.

Su Yun thought for a moment. If he remembered correctly, the upper realm of Under One Person was the True Realm of Journey to the West. So where did these gods from various countries come from?

There are a few who are quite powerful, such as Zeus, Odin, and other gods in their respective mythological systems, who are "god kings" or "creator gods" and have reached the level of celestial beings.

While the number of celestial beings in a single mythological deity may not be as high as the number of celestial beings in China, the total number of them combined exceeds the number in China. This is because many powerful celestial beings in China have already truly ascended to the upper realms.

Out of curiosity about the origins of these deities, Su Yun examined their essence and finally understood. These deities were all born from the power of faith.

One of the methods used in Under One Person already reflects their true nature; that's right, it's the God Mask.

The birth of deities is essentially the embodiment of the spiritual energy of all living beings. When humanity's worship of a certain concept reaches a critical point, faith will solidify into an independent spiritual entity.

For example, Odin in Norse mythology was not born, but rather a collective obsession of Viking warriors with "war glory," which gradually coalesced into the god-king wielding Gungnir during a thousand years of warfare.

This power of faith can be temporarily materialized through the sacrificial rituals of believers, just as users of divine masks gain power by performing divine acts.

Because *Under One Person* is a lower realm within the true world of *Journey to the West*, and because the theocratic constraints of Chinese civilization had long been broken, the faith gathered by people in China through praying to gods and Buddhas is simply a single force, concentrated on the corresponding "deity" symbol. The situation is different abroad; in many places, theocracy still reigns supreme, and there are no corresponding gods in the upper realms for these civilizations. Thus, "divinity" was born from this ever-accumulating faith.

The divine entities corresponding to the divine altars, having gathered the power of faith, took physical form and became the deities that people see today. It can be said that they belong to the legitimate pantheon of "gods and immortals".

Based on this principle of creation, it is easy to determine the strength of these gods.

The belief systems of god-kings like Zeus and Odin were highly unified, and the absolute obedience of the ancient Greeks to the "Olympian Order" allowed Zeus's power to permeate every sacrifice in the city-state. This systematic belief, like a sophisticated circuit, could concentrate the scattered power of faith and efficiently transform it into its own strength.

The Mayan belief in deities was significantly weakened by colonial destruction. When colonists burned Mayan ceremonial tablets and forcibly converted them to Catholicism, the belief, which originally focused on "agricultural abundance," was fragmented into a tourist attraction, leading to a substantial decline in its influence.

This is why the Mayan gods, such as the feathered serpent god, were so enraged after their resurgence and fought fiercely with the Ugly Kingdom. While the Ganges River in India may be polluted, India, as a theocratic superpower, provides Shiva with considerable power and has a large population.

Therefore, even if the Indians defecated in the Ganges, Shiva only issued a warning. These colonists in the Americas undoubtedly uprooted the Mayan gods; it's no wonder they were furious.

If they don't spread their fame and attract more believers to offer them faith and power, then those born from that faith will eventually perish with the collapse of their civilization. In that case, dying sooner or later is the same as dying later; the Mayan gods don't care how advanced your technology is or whether you're the world's leading power—they just do what they can.

Domestic cultivators focus on self-cultivation and rarely rely on external forces. Furthermore, with the nationwide cultivation plan being continuously implemented and the patriarchs of various sects showing no intention of appearing, the domestic situation remains stable.

Other national leaders, however, were different; they couldn't simply stand by and watch their countries revert to theocratic rule. Except for a few declining ancient kingdoms that quickly became theocratic powers due to a stronger enemy, the situation in other countries was generally one of relative balance of power.

"Oh dear, I'm sorry, I really saw this by accident." Su Yun just wanted to investigate the origins of these gods, but he accidentally glanced at them and discovered the secret plan being carried out by the remnants of the Fusang forces.

In a secret base on a small island, a group of survivors, led by a surviving Onmyoji, are performing a forbidden ritual involving vengeful spirits and corpses. They are fusing a large number of collected corpses with the roots of a cherry blossom tree that has absorbed vengeful spirits and mutated.

They reshape alternative beliefs with the twisted doctrine that "vengeful spirits are gods." When the people still living in Japan begin to dream of ancient warriors cutting themselves with their swords, it is actually these cherry blossom trees absorbing these distorted beliefs.

The corpses were not only those of ordinary humans, but also the remains of gods, Yamata no Orochi, and other yokai. Su Yun could tell that they seemed to be trying to create an evil god similar to the demon god that had been destroyed. And judging from the nearly complete monster on the island, they were almost successful.

A section of the Yamata no Orochi's body, stretching over a kilometer in length, coils like a living vine around a cherry tree trunk thirty meters in diameter. Golden sap seeps from between the scales, creating a striking visual contrast of "blood and cherry blossoms coexisting" with the falling cherry blossoms.

Its head soars into the clouds, with a pair of spiral coral horns on its skull, covered with a translucent keratinous layer that refracts rainbow-colored cracks under the light of lightning, like solidified lightning.

Deformed cherry blossom branches continue to grow from the severed limbs on the trunk, with eyeball-shaped flower buds on the branches, which make a sound like a baby crying when they open and close.

This thing's upper and lower jaws are covered with barbed crystal teeth that fit together perfectly like precision gears when closed. Its body can twist and fold at will, and it can even integrate parts of its body into the branches of a cherry tree, then suddenly emerge from a tree hole dozens of meters away.

The more Su Yun looked at it, the more familiar it seemed. Wasn't this the Divine Dragon from Sekiro? It was just a different color, with the blood-black color of Orochi as the main body. Overall, they were pretty much the same.

(End of this chapter)