Hogwarts: From Selling White Peppers to Becoming a God

Chapter 445 Attempt

"Gods are actually a concept. They are an imagination. They are the embodiment of humanity's fear of the unknown."

Therefore, the gods as a whole cannot be killed.

Countless corpses lay scattered on the long stone steps. Murphy, holding a blood-dripping greatsword, slowly ascended the stairs.

"However, you individuals will still die and be consumed by other beliefs. The human mind is like a depression; even if you drain the water out, it will always fill a pond during the next rainy season, but the fish and shrimp that once lived in that pond will also die in this change."

"I've heard many stories about you. You've killed many gods, and they say you possess a weapon that controls destiny." At the highest point of the stone steps, on the throne of the god-king, a giant with three faces spoke. "You are indeed as arrogant as they say. Calling gods fish and shrimp, then what are you? A fisherman? A god-killer?"

"I?"

"I'm just a lost traveler, here to earn some money for my journey," Murphy said, lightly swinging his greatsword.

The sword suddenly vibrated 137 times in the quantum and material states, accurately striking the three-headed god who seemed to be frozen in fear. The blade, thin as a single atom, easily pierced the god's skin, which was comparable to metal, as if it were cutting through the air without any hindrance.

All three faces showed fear and disbelief.

"I made one hundred and thirty-six prophecies, each time fleeing to a different location, but you always managed to strike me down. Why...?"

Murphy grabbed the head with three faces and let the giant's body crash to the ground, blood flowing down like a stream, as if laying a red carpet on the stone steps behind him.

"Magic is useful, especially when it's in the hands of someone who knows how to use it," Murphy said. "The atomic structure of this sword was adjusted and made by magic. It's a flawless nanomaterial, and under the influence of magic, it can possess both microscopic and macroscopic properties."

"When it is adjusted to a microscopic state by magic, all its atoms are within the probability cloud around me that has not yet collapsed, which can be said to cover all the space within about ten meters around me. When it is aggregated into a macroscopic state, it can appear anywhere."

"What determines where it will collapse is not my guess, but the quanta in your body that have become entangled with some of the matter in the sword."

"The 136 prophecies you made are, to me, nothing more than 136 possible probability collapses. But no matter where you choose to appear from, this sword will inevitably sever your neck."

"The Blade of Destiny," the three-headed god murmured. "So this is the Blade of Destiny."

"Fate?" Murphy chuckled mockingly. "It's nothing but a trick of probability."

As Murphy spoke, he completely shattered the three-headed god, and at the same time, he stretched out his right hand, forming a vortex in his palm, which completely plundered the latter's divine power.

As he said, he was just there to raise money for his time travel trip.

Since transforming a group of wizards into gods in ancient times, Murphy has used the Time-Turner to make several jumps, but these times were all time travels along the flow of time.

Murphy did not give up on his plan to destroy the gods, but kept trying various methods, but the results were all unsatisfactory.

For example, during his last time travel, he tried to spread scientific thinking among Muggles, but it was just regarded as another kind of magic. Even though he painstakingly cultivated a few people with scientific thinking, after they passed away, their knowledge was indeed passed down as useful things, but the scientific methodology was still submerged in endless ignorance.

This made Murphy realize that without a broad educational foundation, it would be almost impossible to promote scientific thinking. It requires a lot of practice and sufficient mental training, which means it is destined to be a skill that only a very few people can master.

So this time, Murphy decided to take a step back and travel around trying to inspire people's ability to understand themselves. He guided people to give up worshipping others in the way of "self-awareness," not outward, but inward, to seek spiritual liberation in their true selves and become their own gods.

He has spent five or six years on this matter, ensuring that his "self-awareness path," based on Buddhism and modern psychology, has spread widely. Now he is ready to turn back the clock a hundred or two hundred years to see the results of this experiment.

Now that he had gathered all the "divine power," he took out another time converter.

He doesn't have many time converters left, but with each absorption of the substances that melted during time travel, Murphy is becoming more and more adept at using the power of time. This manifests in his daily life as he can now propel himself into a doubled time flow without relying on the time converter.

In fact, during the battle against the three-headed god, he also used a portion of the power of time in order to counter its prophetic abilities.

From the perspective of time travel, prophecy, especially accurate prophecy, can actually be seen as an "observation" of the future.

Once observed, things will inevitably change to some extent due to the act of observation. Especially in the quantum realm, this change becomes very obvious and may drastically alter the probabilities of various possibilities.

To prevent the three-headed god from altering the probability of a future through prophecy and "observing" it, thus "determining" the future to some extent, and then taking different measures to avoid being killed, Murphy used the power of time while drawing his sword, keeping himself in a state of superposition of several seconds at the same time, in order to resist the collapse effect caused by the opponent's observation behavior.

At this moment, Murphy once again injected his divine power into the Time Converter, and then the same thing happened again: the Time Converter merged into his body, and he thus arrived two hundred years in the future.

He immediately began searching for the results of the previous experiment.

But soon he found himself failing again.

After his departure, his "path of self-enlightenment" was transformed into a religion. His disciples preached in his name, and his image gradually changed from an enlightened being who promoted self-enlightenment to a deity who came from the divine realm to save mankind.

Seeing the "Awakened God," who was less than a hundred years old, looked somewhat like himself, and had already begun to receive offerings like other gods, Murphy, in a fit of rage, killed it.

After several failed attempts, Murphy was somewhat discouraged.

But this also made him fully understand a principle: the overall state of human "awakening" changes with the level of material production and life. Given the current capabilities of human groups, there are indeed too many things in this world that are beyond their control. It is impossible to make them escape the reality of living in a low-productivity society and gain a higher level of ideological awareness out of thin air.

Only when productivity is highly developed, technology is advanced, and humanity has driven the unknown beyond daily experience—that is, around the year 2000 AD, which he lived in before—or even further into the future, will there be a chance for gods to completely disappear.

However, if this is the case, it would take a long time to develop technology in order to eliminate the gods, and if the gods exist, how could humanity possibly have many opportunities to develop technology and civilization?

This seems to have become another paradoxical spiral of the chicken and the egg.

"No, that's not right."

Murphy suddenly realized that he had gone astray.

His original purpose in going back in time was simply to find a way to control the gods.

The future return of the gods indicates that from around the fifth century to around the second millennium AD, the gods only temporarily withdrew, rather than being destroyed.

Under the laws of time travel, the future that has already happened cannot be changed even if one goes back to the past.

In other words, one should abandon the idea of ​​completely eliminating the gods at this stage and instead turn to a more pragmatic approach of restraint.

The important thing is to find a way to restrain them and make them disappear from the scene over the past one or two thousand years, giving human society time to develop technology and civilization, that is, time for humankind to accumulate resources that can truly eliminate them.

But what should we do?

Murphy pondered for a long time.

Suddenly, an idea popped into my head.

He now had a general understanding of the process of the birth of gods and had sufficient experience with faith and divine power.

He now knows that humans are the creators of gods, but at this stage, due to limitations in productivity, it is unrealistic for humans to deal with gods in such a direct way as extinguishing faith.

However, what if we look at it from a different angle?

If humans can't defeat the gods, then what about the gods themselves?

They have been constantly absorbing and evolving from one another, and the gods are full of contradictions.

Is it possible to exploit this contradiction to make them attack each other and restrain each other?

Moreover, gods originated from legends.

Although once consciousness is generated, deities often enslave believers in return, believers can, to some extent, influence deities due to the existence of spiritual pollution.

So, if one intentionally spreads legends of gods, is it possible to change their behavior and thus control them?

(End of this chapter)