This young master truly has the ambition of a hero.

In this way, he would have a religion under his control, which he could use to compete with cults for control of the people's minds.

Chapter 162: The Chosen One

If religion is viewed as a tool that can be used to govern, then in this early stage when the people are not yet enlightened, it can indeed play a positive role in stabilizing and appeasing the public.

Dick mainly discovered that many people in his territory, especially the middle-aged and elderly over thirty, would think "learning is nonsense" when asked to study, but were eager to believe in religion.

The root cause of this phenomenon is that most feudal lords lacked effective grassroots management capabilities and never thought of providing public services such as education and medical care to the people in their territories. This allowed swindlers and cultists to take advantage of the situation.

After all, ordinary people need emotional support. Sometimes when they are sick or encounter trouble, if the lord is unwilling to help them, the people will naturally turn to those who are willing to help them. It is precisely in this process that the hearts of the people shift.

Since Dick took office in Lagug, he first physically eliminated most of the local bandits and underground churches, and then spent nearly a year building up the local grassroots, which gave Lagug a completely new look.

However, the influx of 120,000 new immigrants quickly overwhelmed the existing grassroots organizations, and the expansion of grassroots civil servants would take time, which allowed many old problems to resurface.

Regarding the issue of public opinion, Dick had figured it out: he would try to educate the younger generation, and since the older generation was more willing to believe in religion, he would create an "officially designated denomination" for them to follow.

Worshipping the winter god Ajax would be a good choice, since the winter god himself sleeps in the ground of Lagug and does not interfere in human affairs. Moreover, he is a "benevolent god" recognized by the church. If the worship of the winter god is simply re-established in the Lagug region, the church has no reason to object.

First, both sides share a consensus on combating cults, as they are a common enemy.

Secondly, the church never intended to enter Lagug, as it was the resting place of the Winter God, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it the Winter God's "holy land." Since the gods of the divine realm intended to win over the Winter God, they naturally wouldn't allow the church below to engage in such a malicious and provocative act.

Finally, Dick promised Naus that the Winter God Cult he had established could be nominally incorporated into the Sanctuary Church, but the Church would not need to worry about funding and clergy; they would handle it themselves.

After listening, Naus fell into deep thought, because he had never heard of this cooperation model proposed by Dick before, and there was no precedent for it. He needed to consult His Holiness the Pope.

Dick immediately stated that his initial intention in establishing the sect was to combat the cults that were growing within his territory and prevent them from bewitching innocent people. This was undoubtedly a religious war; if they won, half the credit would go to the church, and if they lost, it would be due to Dick's incompetence. He hoped that Naus could also convey this message to His Holiness the Pope.

After seeing Naus off, Dick thought for a moment and decided that he should discuss this matter with Ajax himself before taking action.

So the next day, under the guise of an inspection, he came to the woods of the Land of Rest. The white tree from before was gone, but the clearing was still the same. The surrounding trees seemed to be deliberately avoiding growing in this direction, and the ground was covered with a thin layer of snow that had not melted.

Dick stepped onto the snow, walked to the center of the clearing, sat cross-legged, closed his eyes, and let his mind and body go into a meditative state. Then his consciousness came to a pure white world covered by ice and snow, and then he heard the deep and gentle voice of the winter god Ajax coming from all directions.

“You’ve come, child.”

"I'm sorry to disturb your rest, but I do have something I'd like to discuss with you."

Facing the god of winter, Dick succinctly explained his contact with the church and his idea of ​​re-establishing the faith in the god of winter on earth.

In the realm of the Winter God, Dick entered in a soul state. His thoughts were almost transparent to the gods, so he could not lie and chose to tell the truth.

After listening, the Winter God pondered for a moment before speaking.

"Child, your motives are not pure."

"Yes, I have no intention of hiding this, and I can't lie to you, can I?"

"But you really don't have any bad intentions, and what you want to do is to help others... So go ahead and do it. I will allow you to use my name to establish a sect in the mortal world, but you must also promise me that you will treat the people you lead well and take good care of them."

"I promise you, this is also my duty as a leader."

"Very good, go ahead."

As soon as Ajax finished speaking, Dick was suddenly transported to the outside of an open space in the real world, and the footprints he had just left were no longer visible on the snow.

Immediately afterward, Dick noticed something cool and icy in his hand. Looking down, he saw it was a scepter made of pure ice. The scepter was over a meter long and taller than Dick when standing upright. Its top resembled a cluster of oak tree crowns. It felt slightly cool to the touch but wouldn't melt at all.

Amazingly, when Dick raised the scepter, even though the sky was clear, snowflakes suddenly began to fall from the sky, swirling around the small area around the scepter. At the same time, some information flooded into Dick's mind, making him understand how to use the scepter.

Clearly! This was a "sacred object" bestowed upon him by the god of winter. With this treasure, Dick would have no trouble attracting followers to his sect.

Back at the castle, Dick carefully stored the relic away. A few days later, Naus visited again, bringing a personal letter from the Pope and a complete set of bishop's robes and other keepsakes.

The church supports the establishment of the Winter God sect and welcomes believers of the Winter God to join the church family.

Clearly, the gods of the divine realm really wanted to win over the God of Winter, so they simply instructed the churches below to extend goodwill to the God of Winter's followers, as a way of doing him a favor.

When Dick produced the sacred object bestowed by the Winter God, Naus was dumbfounded.

As a high-ranking priest, Naus could tell from their first meeting that Dick had received divine favor, but he never expected that the Winter God would value him so much.

Dick told Naus that he had prayed fervently to the Winter God, who then bestowed upon him this sacred object and permitted him to establish a sect.

Naus was completely dumbfounded, thinking to himself, "If this kind of prestige were in the Church, they could be canonized on the spot, right?"

Thus, the establishment of the Church of the Winter God was officially confirmed, and it also received support and recognition from the Church of the Divine Realm.

Dick immediately announced the news and said that he would personally "build" a cathedral of the God of Winter on the hillside northeast of the town in seven days.

Chapter 163: Is this nun proper?

The belief in the winter god is not entirely without foundation in Laguge. People living in cold regions have more or less awe of the ice and snow in winter, and although many ancient folk legends have inevitably been distorted and misunderstood in the process of transmission, their origins can still be traced.

With the Holy Church endorsing Dick, everything fell into place.

Of course! To establish a sect, you need a sufficiently respectable pretext. Other sects either claim divine intervention or that a prophet received a divine message in a dream, so Dick naturally had to make one up too.

So Dick gathered a few of his brightest friends together, and they spent the whole night making up a mythological origin story that sounded plausible.

To summarize the story briefly, long, long ago, there was a winter god named Ajax, the embodiment of winter. His every emotional fluctuation, whether joyful, angry, sorrowful, or happy, would cause blizzards. To avoid causing trouble for his followers, the winter god sealed himself away. However, not long after his sealing, the snow kingdom that worshipped the winter god was destroyed, and Ajax's name was gradually forgotten over time, even being altered and exploited by malicious cultists.

In order to usurp the position of the Winter God, those evil gods joined forces to curse the sleeping Winter God, causing him to have endless nightmares. The extreme cold that has plagued Lagug for hundreds of years is caused by the Winter God's nightmares.

Fortunately, Dick Best, a "man who fell from the sky," came to Lagug to take up the post of governor. By chance, he destroyed the evil altar set up by the cultist Deer Head Gang, broke the curse of the evil god, stopped the winter god from having nightmares, and the super winter stopped appearing. The climate of Lagug was able to return to normal.

Later, Dick found ancient texts from the Sanctuary Church, which was "good, just, and upholds the truth," and learned that the real name of the Winter God was Ajax. He then decided to rebuild the faith for him in Lagug.

Throughout the origin story, half is true and half is false. After much deliberation, Dick decided not to reveal the truth about the destruction of the Snow Kingdom hundreds of years ago.

Having established the origin story, their next step was to develop a set of doctrines.

The suggestion from the Crimson Eyes is to keep things as simple and easy to understand as possible, because complexity and obscurity increase the difficulty of comprehension and are not conducive to initial promotion. They could certainly draw inspiration from religions on Earth, such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity, which all have their own "Ten Commandments" and share many similarities in content.

After some thought, Dick suddenly had a good idea. He took the "Eight Honors and Eight Shames" and changed a few terms to be more localized, and thus their doctrine was born.

Finally, there was the selection of clergy, which was the most crucial part for Dick.

The leader of the sect must be a trustworthy person who is absolutely loyal. Therefore, it is best to find someone from Dick's "core team" to take charge. The person should be eloquent and tactful.

Dick thought about it and realized that there really weren't any spare people available at the moment.

Dick made a total of ten summons, summoning a total of twenty anime girls. It sounds like a lot of people, but it wasn't even enough to fill the middle management positions when it came to establishing a local government and managing a territory with a population that had just exceeded 180,000.

Of these twenty people, four of the five ship girls are in the navy, with Ding An serving as the president of the merchant guild. Black and White Gunner is a cavalry commander, currently busy training the new recruits who were just enlisted this year.

Ruby Eyes is an internal affairs officer and the president of the farmers' association. Her daily workload is off the charts, and Joel serves as her secretary and bodyguard.

Tia is in charge of the secret intelligence department, and Momiji, Kasumi, Ayane, and Honoka are all under her command. However, as the intelligence network expands, her side has the biggest manpower shortage and simply cannot be mobilized.

Natasha and Shizuka Marikawa manage the medical department. Lily, who was originally a spy, has been transferred to the newly established chemical department. She is rarely seen, but you can hear her making noise every now and then!

All that's left are Rita, Lucoa, and Ai.

After gaining magical powers, Xiao Ai followed Dick to learn magic, and thus became Dick's apprentice. It was a bit too much to ask a sixteen-year-old high school girl to act as a priestess and deceive people.

Lucoa is capable enough, but she is a god herself (albeit an incarnation). If she were to serve as a priest for another god, the Winter God might not be able to accept her worship.

After searching around, only Rita, who had always been Dick's maid, remained.

When Rita learned that Dick wanted her to take over the cult, she immediately retorted, "Instead of drawing from the already stretched thin of existing personnel, why can't you summon two more people who are 'professionally suited'?"

You should know that when they went on their expedition to the orc capital, they took advantage of the chaos to loot the orcs' treasure vault and brought back a lot of magic stones. Even when the leaders of the Northern Alliance later divided the spoils, Lagug took the largest share, a whole box of high-level magic stones, enough for them to summon five or six more times.

Dick slapped his forehead. Oh right! How could I have been so busy that I forgot about that?

Dick quickly prepared the summoning ritual and selected "nun" as the type of person to be summoned.

The reason for not choosing a priest is twofold. Firstly, priests are considered established clergy members, and they often have a bond with the gods they worship. Dick's summoning might attract the younger ones and the older ones, and Dick dared not gamble that the other party would be friendly.

Secondly, the world of anime is not like the world of three-dimensional. In order to create the so-called contrast and pursue the taboo feeling of "blasphemy against the holy order", many nun characters in anime are not very serious. Dick does not need clergy who are too devout in their faith. Those honest people with too serious personalities would probably not be willing to cooperate with his actions.

However, when Dick finished the summoning and saw the two "big" nuns appearing in front of him, even though the two perfectly met the requirements, Dick couldn't help but exclaim in his heart, "These nuns look too improper!"

The two nuns, one blonde with red eyes and the other pink with green eyes, both had tall, model-like figures with a nine-head-to-body ratio. Their curvaceous bodies were incredibly hot, and their nun's habit was a highly revealing modified version, with an off-the-charts level of sexiness comparable to erotic clothing.

One woman openly exposed her northern hemisphere, her nun's habit with a side slit that reached past her waist, her long legs adorned with sheer white and black high heels. The other woman had a cutout at the abdomen, her unsupported southern hemisphere swaying in the wind, making one dizzy. Her two long white legs walked barefoot, seemingly without any underwear underneath.

So when Dick first saw them, he turned to Rita and gave her instructions.

"Make them new nunneries immediately, the kind that only shows their faces and is completely in accordance with church rules. Otherwise, if they appear in front of the congregation looking like this, our sect's reputation will suffer!"

Chapter 164: The Demon King can confide his troubles to the nun.

The two newly summoned nuns are both very powerful and influential.

The blonde nun is a Royal Navy ship girl named Enen from the game "Azur Lane". She is an aircraft carrier with UR-class stats and is the strongest ship girl that Dick has summoned so far.

Considering that Belfast also appeared when summoning "maids," Dick couldn't help but wonder if he could only accidentally summon powerful ship girls when he wasn't thinking about summoning them.

The other pink-haired nun is Sister Kitan from the anime "Want to Become a Magical Girl," and is a member of the "Monarchs," an early group within the evil organization Enormida.

So don't be fooled by the fact that these two are both wearing nun's clothes (modified) and are quite powerful. One is actually a ship girl, and the other is simply a female executive of an evil organization. They are both fake nuns with only a facade.

For a moment, Dick really wanted to complain about the "summoning fraud"—it wasn't a nun at all! But after taking a closer look at the two women's figures and appearances, he decided to let it go.

Isn't this fine?

After the two sides met, Dick introduced himself and gave a brief explanation of the situation.

Resentment readily accepted being summoned, as she was a ship girl completely recreated from Wisdom Cubes and resources. When she was born, two doors appeared before her, and she followed her instincts and went through the left one, thus appearing in front of Dick and recognizing him as her commander.

Dick thought to himself, "He probably intercepted a commander's shipment. That guy's probably going to be in deep trouble."

As for Qi Gante, her reaction was indifferent; she always had a long face and looked timid and submissive.

However, Dick had read the original comic in his previous life and knew that this pushover nun was actually a hidden boss with profound abilities, and her true purpose and strength were still a mystery.

However, considering that the original work is a comedy manga that mainly features absurdity, fanservice, and intense lesbian themes, there are hardly any normal people on either the protagonist or antagonist sides. They are either perverts, goofballs, or perverted goofballs. This character is likely to be a fun-loving person with a rather quirky thought process, rather than the kind of pure evil who wants to destroy the world. So there's not too much to worry about her causing any trouble.

Wait a minute! Lesbian?

Dick, like a blind monk, suddenly discovered the key point: his team was full of beautiful women of all kinds. If he were to add a lesbian, wouldn't that be like throwing a mouse into a rice jar?

A sudden surge of alertness made Dick look at Chigant again, only to find that the other was also looking him up and down with a strange gaze, a mixture of curiosity and incomprehension, as if he had discovered something new and unfamiliar.

“Miss Qigante, it seems you still have questions, but please feel free to ask.”

"There is one, but you... don't seem to be a girl?"

"???"

Dick paused for a moment, thinking to himself, "What kind of ridiculous question is this? Although I do look a bit younger and have a very delicate and handsome face because of my elven blood, I am not so much a girl with a boy-girl appearance that people cannot tell my gender at a glance."

But Qi Gante looked serious, not like he was joking with him.

"As you can see, I am not a girl, I am a boy."

"A man? What's that?"

After staring at Chigante for a full minute, Dick finally realized that the woman wasn't pretending to be stupid to amuse him; she genuinely had never seen a man before.

In fact, if Dick had shifted his gaze from the protagonists whose clothes were ripped off when he read the comics back then, and paid more attention to the passersby in the background, he would have discovered that there were no men in the original comics' world at all, and Qi Gante had naturally never seen one either. So when he first met Dick, he couldn't help but be curious about this "otherworldly humanoid creature" who didn't seem to be a girl.

As for how a world entirely composed of women can reproduce and thrive, they already have magical girls!

After learning a little about Chigante's doubts, Dick had to give her a brief explanation of the sex system in this world. After all, he was going to have her become a nun in the church, and she would definitely have to see male and female believers who came to pray often. He didn't want her to ask any strange questions.

Therefore, Dick decided that before letting Chigante take up the post, he would first have to give her the necessary training.

In contrast, Resentment doesn't exhibit such strange biases in terms of common sense. She takes the important task entrusted to her by the commander very seriously and expresses her determination to fulfill her mission. Furthermore, if Dick himself has any troubles, he can confide in her anytime, anywhere, and she will do everything in her power to completely eliminate all of Dick's worries.

Dick: You better really mean "annoyance"!

As Yuan Chou spoke, her strikingly large body moved closer to Dick on its own. This tall, long-legged beauty with a nine-headed figure was already tall, and wearing high heels made her extremely imposing when she got close. Dick felt as if he was completely enveloped in her shadow, and when he looked up slightly, he could only glimpse the upper half of Yuan Chou's face through the deep crevice between her legs.

If Rita hadn't coughed lightly beside him, Dick had no doubt that the heavy aircraft carrier, Resentment, would have run him over on the spot.

Thinking about it, this is actually pretty scary!

In short, as is customary, a welcome party should be held for the addition of two new companions. It's rare for everyone to be here today, and after working so hard for so long, it's time to relax a bit.

At the banquet, Resentment naturally integrated into the group of ship girls, becoming particularly familiar with Belfast, who was also from the Royal Navy. Although Resentment was a newly built ship girl, ship girls carry the historical memories of their original counterparts, so she was no stranger to Belfast.

Chigan was a bit of a surprise to Dick, because when he first met her, he thought she was a socially awkward older sister because she seemed timid and hesitant. But she turned out to be quite sociable and quickly became familiar with others. She didn't do anything overly intimate with anyone.

Dick only learned later that Qi Gante's real identity in the original world was a TV program host, who was very eloquent and whose "acting skills" were at the level of an award-winning actress.

What made Dick slightly uncomfortable was that while this person was chatting with others, their gaze would frequently drift towards him. That undisguised curiosity made Dick a little uneasy, so he quickly took a sip of fermented grape juice to calm himself.

At this moment, Dick saw that Ruby Eyes seemed to be in a daze. Having become quite familiar with her, Dick knew that she was probably thinking about political matters again. So he got up and came behind her, gently placing his hand on her shoulder. Ruby Eyes was so startled that she almost jumped up.