The King of Heroes, Gilgamesh, left.
No fury, no unleashing of that Gate of Babylon capable of reducing all things to scorched earth in the blink of an eye, not even one more harsh word befitting his royal station. In the face of Seiji's undisguised, almost humiliating declaration that treated him as "prey," this King of Heroes who ruled the plains of Mesopotamia, the oldest and mightiest of humanity, only looked at him long and deep. In those red serpentine eyes that should have looked down upon all living things without a trace of emotion, complex feelings now churned like boiling lava, feelings no outsider could read: the towering killing intent of one whose reverse scale had been touched, the cool scrutiny of an unknown power, and even a sliver of wariness he himself was unwilling to admit.
Then he resolutely turned, and amid a deathly silence enough to freeze the very air, walked out into the deep night beyond the temple with the same steady, majestic steps he'd come in with, vanishing step by step.
His departure was not born of fear.
The word "fear" had long since been erased from the dictionary of this wise king, who had witnessed the end of the Age of Gods and shouldered the entire future of humanity.
His concession came entirely from the absolute reason and heavy responsibility of being a "King."
In that brief but perilous standoff of pressure moments ago, Gilgamesh, relying on his Grand-class Clairvoyance, had judged with perfect clarity that the power held by Seiji and those Servants behind him, whose auras were so strange and whose Saint Graph strength was downright absurd, was such that even if he held nothing back and deployed every top-tier Noble Phantasm in his treasury, he might not be assured of victory.
More importantly, once a battle between the two sides erupted, no matter the final outcome, the destructive aftershocks it produced would be enough to turn the Uruk he had guarded with a lifetime of effort, along with the hundreds of thousands of innocent subjects within the city, into the dust of history in an instant.
To gamble the very survival of all Uruk for the sake of his pride as a king was an act of utter stupidity, one that had long since been struck entirely from the options of Gilgamesh the "wise king."
But this in no way meant he would let the matter rest.
His temporary concession meant only that a more violent, more profound undercurrent, one sweeping across all of Mesopotamia and reaching even to the gods in the high heavens, was about to begin surging. A silent war between a new king and an old king had already begun.
...
Inside the temple, as Gilgamesh's mountain-heavy kingly aura faded entirely, the pressure that had grown so oppressive one could barely breathe slowly receded like an ebbing tide.
Ishtar let out a long breath, only then realizing that the back of her lavish divine robe was already soaked through with a fine layer of cold sweat. She patted her ample chest, still heaving from the tension, with lingering fear, and the look she gave Seiji turned more complex than ever before.
"You... have you lost your mind?!" She finally couldn't hold back and grumbled in a hushed voice, that voice carrying a note of near-coquettish worry even she hadn't noticed. "That's Gilgamesh! Humanity's oldest King of Heroes! The man who ended the Age of Gods with his own hands! And you provoke him like that, right in front of me? Do you have any idea, if he'd so much as shifted a single thought just now, this black tower under our feet that looks so solid would've been blasted from the conceptual level into the most basic particles by countless A-rank Noble Phantasms!"
"And what of it?"
Seiji sat back down on the throne carved from a single block of obsidian, lazily crossing his legs, as though the king who had gone head-to-head with the King of Heroes a moment ago, dominance radiating to the extreme, had only been an illusion.
He casually "borrowed" a God Crystal from Ishtar's loot-stuffed purse beside him and toyed with it idly between his slender fingers, saying lightly, "If he really had done it, I'd only have been happier. Because that would have proven precisely that he's nothing but a brute blinded by anger, a thug unworthy of my serious attention, rather than a final boss worth my energy to conquer."
"A competent player never lightly starts a fight before he's completely figured out all of a final boss's skills, behavior patterns, and hidden weaknesses. Clearly, our King of Heroes is a very clever player too. He knows how to conserve his strength at the critical moment, doesn't he?"
Ishtar listened in a daze. Words like "player" and "boss" were entirely beyond her, but she grasped one thing in general: this man before her seemed never to have placed that King of Heroes, who gave even her such a hard time, on an equal footing from the very start.
His arrogance came not from the fearlessness of the ignorant, but from an absolute confidence she couldn't yet comprehend or reach.
"So... so what do we do next?" Ishtar asked instinctively, and without realizing it she had already begun placing herself in the position of "partner," even "subordinate," actively thinking about the problems ahead. She knew full well that after witnessing that clash just now, she'd been thoroughly tied to Seiji's warship, a thing as dazzling as it was dangerous, with no way left to climb back off.
"What do we do?" Seiji smiled, that smile carrying a sliver of cold calculation. "Continue our business activities, of course."
His gaze seemed to pierce through the temple's thick walls and see, throughout the entire city of Uruk, those souls stirred by a single auction, their boundless greed ignited.
"Gilgamesh wants to play politics and intrigue with me? Wants to maneuver behind the scenes and slowly chip away at my influence? Fine, I'll see it through to the end. But before he painstakingly readies his chessboard, I'm going to turn the whole board, along with every piece on it, into mine first."
He turned his gaze to Medea, who had stood silently to the side throughout.
"Medea, how much longer until our God Crystals reach a quantity enough to initially cover the whole Uruk market? I need a precise timeframe."
"In answer, Master," Medea said with a bow, confidence glinting in her eyes, "calculating with the magic you provide as the energy source, my high-speed gemstone alchemy array can run nonstop for twenty-four hours. Within a single day, it can produce a hundred thousand standard units of God Crystal. Within three days, every corner of Uruk, from the vaults of kings and nobles to the purses of common folk, will flow with your wealth. Within a week, its influence will cover all of Mesopotamia."
"Good, very efficient." Seiji nodded with satisfaction.
"Ishtar," he looked again at the goddess, money-mad and wide-eyed at the figure "a hundred thousand." "Next, I have a very important task to give you."
"What task? Are we going to raid someone's vault?" Ishtar perked up at once.
"Something more interesting than that." The corner of Seiji's mouth curled into a wicked arc. "I want you, in the name of my business partner, to open the first God Crystal exchange in the busiest district of Uruk."
"Exchange?" Ishtar blinked her beautiful ruby eyes, clearly not understanding.
"That's right." Seiji explained patiently. "I want you to use our endless supply of God Crystals to buy up, without limit, everything of value in the hands of those nobles and priests! Gold, gems, rare minerals, or land, slaves, even the ancestral weapons and Mystic Codes passed down through their families!"
"I'm going to use an unprecedented financial storm to make the God Crystal, in the shortest possible time, the one and only standard for measuring all value in this world! To turn gold and gems into a pile of worthless junk!"
"At the same time," his voice dropped lower, brimming with a bewitching magic, "I want you to announce to the whole city that in three days I'll be holding another auction on an even grander scale. And this time the finale lot won't be some little trinket like a Life Potion that can only heal the body."
He paused, watching Ishtar's expression turn gradually horrified, and said word by word:
"It's a divinity."
"A divinity bestowed by my own hand, one that can let a mortal ascend to the heavens in a single step and become a new god standing shoulder to shoulder with you and me!"
When these two weightless yet infinitely heavy words came out of Seiji's mouth, even Ishtar, a genuine, bona fide true god, couldn't help sucking in a breath of air cold enough to freeze it solid. Those beautiful ruby eyes of hers brimmed with disbelieving horror and absurdity, as if she'd heard the maddest, most delirious raving in all the world.
"You... what did you say?! You want to... auction... a divinity?!" Her voice turned shrill with excessive shock, even cracking. "Do you have any idea what you're saying?! This is impossible! Divinity is the supreme authority woven together from the laws of the world and the faith of countless generations of humanity! It's unique, impossible to replicate! It's the very foundation of what makes a god a god! How could it possibly be auctioned off as a piece of merchandise?!"
In her understanding, divinity was the bedrock of what made a god a god, the absolute boundary dividing the divine from the mortal, the perishable from the immortal, the manifestation of the world's highest-tier rules. A god could be killed by a stronger existence, but its divinity would only be reclaimed by the world's Counter Force (Gaia or Alaya), or be forcibly devoured and inherited by another, more powerful god after a brutal battle.
And yet now Seiji was saying he would "bestow" divinity? And put it up for "auction" besides?
This was no longer simple blasphemy. This was challenging and overturning, at the most fundamental level, the laws and order of this Age of Gods world that had run for tens of thousands of years!
"Why is it impossible?"
Watching her make such a fuss, as though the sky were about to fall, Seiji gave a light, dismissive chuckle. His eyes held a sliver of condescending pity, like an observer from an advanced civilization examining a native trapped in an old era with a calcified mind.
"In your eyes, divinity is a mysterious, supreme authority. But in mine," his fingers tapped lightly on the armrest of the throne, producing a crisp sound, "it's nothing more than a somewhat higher-level, higher-privilege piece of program code, a super-administrator account bound to a specific world's rules."
"As long as you have a powerful enough computer (the system) to reverse-engineer its underlying logic, find its composition and operating principles, and then possess a powerful enough server (the Black Pyramid / the Grail) and an inexhaustible energy source (God Crystals / Seiji Fujiwara himself)... never mind merely copying one, even optimizing its functions and mass-producing it to my specifications is hardly a difficult thing to achieve."
As he spoke, the system had already laid out in his mind, in the clearest and most intuitive data-stream form, the essential structure and core vulnerabilities of this world's "divinity," reverse-engineered from Ishtar's divinity sample.
[Deep Analysis Report on the Composition of Divinity:]
[Core Element 1: Concept Authority. In essence, a long-term, vaguely-termed privilege-borrowing contract signed with the planet's Counter Force (Gaia). Contract contents include macro concepts such as sky, wealth, war, and death. Vulnerability: the contract is neither singular nor exclusive; there exist vast gray areas and undefined privileges ripe for exploitation.]
[Core Element 2: Faith Power. In essence, the raw, unprocessed stream of spiritron information emitted by intelligent life (primarily humans) during mental activities such as prayer, worship, and fear. It is the biomass energy that drives "Concept Authority." Vulnerability: energy supply is extremely unstable and easily affected by shifts in human society; energy conversion efficiency is extremely low with severe waste; and it is easily contaminated by negative faith (hatred, forgetting).]
[Core Element 3: Divine Saint Graph. The god's own spiritual core, the "biological server" and "vessel" carrying the previous two. Vulnerability: Saint Graph strength and stability vary widely; most gods' Saint Graphs carry historical damage or defects (such as Ishtar's vessel of possession).]
"You see," Seiji's gaze swept over Ishtar as if he could see through her, inside and out, "your divinity as the Goddess of Venus is, in essence, nothing more than a concept-privilege lease contract on beauty and abundance signed with Gaia, then painstakingly driven by the meager Faith Power the people of Uruk provide when they pray to you each day, with all of it finally packed into this Saint Graph vessel of yours, one possessing a human body, whose power output is wildly unstable because of the conflict between the host's and the original's consciousness."
He delivered his final verdict without mercy:
"Riddled with holes, low in efficiency, an energy system utterly dependent on external supply, and carrying the enormous risk of divinity collapse the moment humanity abandons you. Honestly... the most primitive, most backward piece of design garbage I've ever seen."
Every sentence Seiji spoke was like an utterly sharp scalpel forged from the most cutting-edge technology, dissecting the divinity Ishtar took such pride in from the inside out until nothing was left whole, laying bare those fatal weaknesses she'd never noticed or had instinctively ignored, naked and bloody, before her eyes.
Ishtar listened, dumbstruck, her pretty face flushing red (with shame and anger) one moment and going pale (with horror) the next.
For the first time, she felt her innate sense of superiority as a god ground to powder before this man, not a speck left. The way he regarded her was not the way one looks at a majestic, awe-worthy god, but the way one looks at an "obsolete electronic product" full of bugs, liable to blue-screen at any moment from a system crash.
"Then... then what about this... Artificial Divinity you mentioned? What exactly is it?" she managed, her voice dry, a note of consultation already creeping unconsciously into her tone.
"Simple. A perfect optimization plan."
Seiji snapped his fingers.
A standard unit of "God Crystal" floated slowly into the air between him and Ishtar, radiating a steady, majestic glow of magic.
"First, the energy system upgrade." He pointed at the God Crystal. "This thing stores highly concentrated pure magic inside it. The energy is clean, the structure stable, the output efficiency extremely high. Use it to completely replace that inefficient, hugely unstable Faith Power as the brand-new core energy driving the authority. From now on, a god will no longer need humanity's prayers and worship. The wellspring of power will come from me alone."
Then he pointed toward the temple's obsidian dome, formed of countless Age of Gods runes, that seemed able to connect to the Root of the world.