"No Niv, even if you chopped me into mince, it still wouldn't be enough to create that many sacred relics." Hel irritably pinched Niv's cheeks, kneading them back and forth.
Just listen to that suggestion—giving every underground worm a portion of the Authority of Death.
Earlier, using the maps of the three great empires, Hel and Niv had calculated that to blanket those empires with underground worms, they would need nearly thirty thousand of them.
And the territory of the Holy Court was only larger than that of the three empires combined, so deploying worms there would require at least another thirty thousand.
By that math, they would need no fewer than sixty thousand underground worms.
And equipping sixty thousand worms with the Authority of Death—there simply wasn't enough of Hel to go around, even if she were chopped to pieces.
Moreover, sacred relics were nonrenewable resources. They were organs of witches, produced by splitting off part of a witch's authority. Even restorative magic could not regenerate those lost organs.
This was something Hel had personally confirmed after obtaining the Authority of Healing.
She had once tried to see whether she could endlessly regenerate her removed appendix to mass-produce sacred relic traits—only to discover this harsh truth.
If sacred relics were really that easy to obtain, then the Holy Judgment Church, which controlled vast numbers of life-aspected mages, would have achieved "sacred relic freedom" long ago.
But the reality was that even minor flesh-transplant relics required one to be at least a fifth-rank transcendent just to qualify for an application within the Church.
And qualification didn't mean approval. Even among the three great empires, those who possessed sacred relics were extremely rare.
Only figures such as mid-ranking bishops who governed an entire ducal diocese, inquisitor knight-commanders who led elite transcendent squads, or abbesses of major royal convents were guaranteed approval for implanting lesser sacred relics.
At that level—and only at that level—would a cleric receive certain authorization.
So Niv's proposal of equipping every underground worm with a sacred relic was simply impossible.
"That's why, Master, the idea of replacing leyline energy with the Waters of the Yellow Springs is fundamentally unworkable," Niv said helplessly, spreading her hands.
If this plan had been easy to implement, would she have kept it shelved?
But clearly, Niv's solution was not what Hel wanted. Hel frowned and began to think.
"If flesh and blood can't serve as a vessel for a witch's authority, then could we use some other method? For example, directly splitting my soul—turning each underground worm into a possession-capable avatar.
"A soul is different from an organ. It can grow by devouring other souls.As long as my growth keeps pace with the rate of division, it would be equivalent to having infinite avatars. And with the computational power of the Brain of Reincarnation, I could descend into every underground worm in an instant."
"And then, after you're done using those poor worms, you'll just dump all of them on Niv to deal with, won't you?" Niv's gaze turned faintly resentful as she listened to Hel mutter through her thoughts.
Ever since the Brain of Reincarnation had been created, Hel had delegated more and more matters to Niv.
Take the devil ranch, for example—aside from harvesting high-grade synthesized traits there every night, Hel left almost everything else to Niv.
Add to that the administration of Mandrake Territory, the cleanup of underground ruins, and the modification of puppet knights…
At this point, Niv was practically being worked like a mule. She barely even had time to send her main body over to keep Hel company.
If six thousand—no, sixty thousand—underground worms were added to that workload, all simultaneously releasing the Authority of Death, Niv was fairly sure she'd crash on the spot.
"Master, while controlling sixty thousand underground worms at once is no problem for Niv, making them all activate the Authority of Death simultaneously is something Niv simply can't do."
To prevent disaster, Niv decisively voiced this concern.
Hel could understand that. Even after implanting sacred relics, it wasn't as though one could freely wield authority at will.
This power, which did not belong to mortals, imposed a tremendous burden on its user.
The greater the authority, the heavier the burden. And this burden didn't only include the oppressive pressure of the authority leaking outward onto the body—it also included damage inflicted upon the user's soul.
As such, having sixty thousand avatars simultaneously activate the Authority of Death was practically impossible.
The solution, however, was straightforward: equip those avatars with sacred relics. If they contained sacred relics, Hel could fully compile their souls and install an automatic subconscious program to activate the Authority of Death.
It was like installing an app on a phone. All the burden would be distributed onto the underground worms themselves.
This also meant that the strength of the underground worms mattered greatly—or more precisely, the strength of their souls.
After all, orichalcum-level durability already far surpassed the physical bodies of ordinary saint-tier beings. With this setup, the pressure on the Brain of Reincarnation would be significantly reduced.
And so, the problem returned to square one. Hel simply had no way to divide herself into sixty thousand parts without dying.
"If only things like hair or blood could count as lesser sacred relics," Hel said with a sigh.
Unlike greater sacred relics, which required a complete organ, lesser sacred relics still needed a whole piece of flesh. Materials like blood, hair, or fingernails—things produced casually through metabolism—did carry traces of authority, but the concentration was extremely weak.
So weak, in fact, that users barely needed to bear any burden at all to receive a short-lived blessing from that authority. Naturally, the power was nowhere near that of true sacred relics. And it also came with a time limit.
That was precisely why Niv had suggested sacred relics instead of ordinary witch-crafted objects.
"If the only difference between flesh and blood is the concentration of divine authority," Niv said after a moment of silence, having devoted much of her processing power to the problem, "then could Master use a sufficiently large quantity of blood traits to synthesize a lesser sacred relic trait instead?"
But upon hearing this, Hel shook her head helplessly.
"Probably not. I couldn't even synthesize a witch trait using sacred relic traits before. Traits from witch-made objects are even further removed—there's even less chance they could be synthesized into sacred relic traits."
Even so, despite what she said, Hel had already taken out a beaker and several test tubes, preparing to run an experiment.