Hogwarts: From Selling White Peppers to Becoming a God

Chapter 444 No Chance of Victory

God was killed.

Those guardian spirits were merely the original deities, with weak divine power and still chaotic consciousness. Their magic was all attached to the stone tablet, and they naturally perished after the stone tablet was destroyed.

But Murphy became the new god.

Destroying those stone tablets did not shatter the shamans' faith; on the contrary, the powerful force displayed by Murphy inspired them to develop a different kind of faith.

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

When he returned to the valley where he had started, he found that the broken stone tablets were gone, replaced by a statue that looked exactly like them.

Strands of spiritual energy gathered from the shamans and worshippers and flowed onto the statue, but when Murphy approached, they returned from the statue to Murphy himself.

An extremely full and uplifting feeling filled his heart. Countless emotions, feelings, fears, hopes, desires and so on mixed with those spiritual powers were like all kinds of seasonings, sour, sweet, bitter and spicy, all of which swept over his heart, making him feel a moment of dizziness.

He seemed to have truly transformed into a god sitting high in the sky, looking down upon all living beings.

Fortunately, he quickly realized that these were impurities in the spiritual power transmitted by those believers, their "definition" of their own God, and their imagination and shaping of God.

He spent a lot of effort to suppress the effects of these impurities.

Then he was both amused and exasperated.

Mental power, which is another dimension of magic, can be transformed into magic by Murphy with a slight conversion. This is why those gods possess immense magical power.

Having this magic is naturally a good thing. The previous time travel had already used up most of the magic he received from Pan. He can now accumulate some magic for the next time travel and won't have to worry about being trapped in this era.

But the one who originally intended to exterminate the gods became the only true god, a result that is somewhat ironic.

In a way, he might be able to use this opportunity to develop followers and become the only god by virtue of his knowledge and magic that are beyond the reach of this era.

Imagine if the belief in him as the only god could continue for tens of thousands of years, until the future when there are billions of people, how vast would his magical power be?

This is even quite feasible. At this time, all the gods are still in their infancy, and he has a significant first-mover advantage over them. Moreover, he knows better than any other god what is more likely to bewitch people and attract believers. In addition, with the miracles brought by his immense divine power, it is not difficult to unify the faith of the world.

But this idea was quickly abandoned by Murphy.

First of all, he disliked such manipulative tactics, especially one that would last for tens of thousands of years.

Magic is a good thing, but if you have to do work you don't want to do for ten thousand years just to get magic, then do you have control over the magic, or is the magic controlling you?

Secondly, while the power of faith is immense, it is not without its price.

Believers' faith in God is mostly utilitarian, mixed with countless personal obsessions and desires, as well as fantasies and shaping of the deity itself. If too much of this spiritual power is received, the deity itself will inevitably be corrupted.

Moreover, he destroyed the gods so that humanity as a whole would embrace rationality, bringing him more knowledge and development. In a sense, it was to awaken humanity from the worship of gods and to make them stand up and face the reality of the world, not to make more people kneel down to him.

Perhaps the upper limit of the path of faith is also very high. With his immense and unparalleled magical power, he might be able to unleash truly miraculous magic that could change the world. But if he were the only person in the world with free will left, and everyone else were reduced to vassals and NPCs, spending their days in a daze of flattery, how empty that would be.

Ultimately, it is just a self-centered idealistic world. Even if one becomes the ruler of that world, new knowledge cannot be generated. One will only accumulate and overfit secondary information derived from existing cognition, and will eventually lead to self-isolation and rigidity.

That was definitely not the future he wanted.

However, this incident also served as a wake-up call for him: simply destroying those gods and idols is meaningless; what should be destroyed most is the "god" in people's hearts.

Otherwise, no matter how many times he destroys the bodies of these gods, they will always be reborn in the filth.

In the process, Murphy also figured out the elements of the birth of gods.

He traveled to various places and realized that the birth of gods was inseparable from wizards.

Ordinary Muggles cannot concentrate their mental energy; only wizards can use the power of imagination to depict the image of a deity during prayer, and gradually give life to the idols they worship through long-term, continuous mental projection.

In other words, the gods were actually created by wizards.

However, none of those wizards realized this.

Since the magic network does not exist in the world today, it is very difficult for wizards to convert their magic power into magic. Their amount of magic power is not much less than that of wizards in the future, but they lack sufficient knowledge, systematic training, and the rules and assistance of the magic network. Therefore, the probability range of "wave function collapse" caused by their magic power is very small, making it extremely difficult for them to cast a spell.

Only by chance can they release one or two spells with their own magic, and those spells usually seem more like a "coincidence," "good luck," or "miracle." They find it difficult to summarize the rules of magic, and therefore it is difficult to reproduce it.

In contrast, the spirits born from their prayers possess far greater magical power due to the greater spiritual energy they receive. These nascent spirits can perform magic simply through "imagination," with a success rate far exceeding that of wizards. Naturally, wizards perceive them as having a higher status than themselves.

They could never have imagined that these gods, far beyond their own capabilities, were created by themselves.

Therefore, Murphy decided to try to teach the wizards some knowledge about casting magic. Perhaps, if humans could exert magic on their own, then there would be no need for gods.

However, this process was much more difficult than he had imagined. Without the help of the magic network to help the wizard organize and guide magic, in order to complete a more powerful spell using the magic power within the wizard's own body, a more precise "path imagination" was required. The closer the "path imagination" of the spell was to physical reality, the easier it would be to succeed.

Therefore, if Murphy wanted to teach them magic, he had to impart more systematic knowledge of various subjects.

Even common sense that is taken for granted by modern people may have been unheard of by ancient people tens of thousands of years ago. If an ancient person wanted to be able to freely cast some relatively simple magic based on their knowledge, Murphy might have to spend several years or even more than ten years teaching them.

However, he lacked such patience, so he adopted a more convenient method. He found the most knowledgeable and wise shamans from various tribes and directly taught them the basic knowledge of various subjects through "memory copying".

Then they would pass on this knowledge to the remaining wizards.

Afterward, he lived for another six months under the patronage of his followers to ensure that the knowledge he had passed down had not been distorted too much. Only then did he use his divine power to reactivate the third time converter and send himself two hundred years into the future.

The reason he didn't send it to the more distant future was because he wanted to verify the results of his experiment.

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

Within the giant city stood several towering statues of gods, some of whose faces were vaguely familiar—they were the shamans to whom he had once imparted his knowledge.

With knowledge and magic, they truly no longer needed to create other gods.

Because they themselves became gods.

"Haha..." Murphy couldn't help but chuckle in the shadows of the statues.

He finally fully realized the ultimate meaning of what Cornunus meant by "the immortality of the gods".

It's not that people's belief in a particular god will never disappear, but rather that humanity as a whole will never lose its belief in the concept of gods.

As Christ God said, people are always lazy and prefer to entrust their thinking abilities to an authority that is more powerful than themselves.

There will always be people who, for power, profit, or various other reasons, exploit the weaknesses of others to portray themselves as gods.

God is immortal unless humanity as a whole abandons illusions, unless every individual can be self-aware, introspective, self-loving, and self-reliant, and can refrain from blaming others, running away, or shirking responsibility, and bravely take on their own destiny.

However, that is such a difficult thing.

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 this chapter)