(3rd POV)
"You sound very confident about the power you had back then." Arthur studied her with undisguised curiosity. "How strong are we actually talking?"
Ressète read the doubt in his expression. She didn't seem offended by it. "I could show you directly, if you're truly interested. A memory."
"Go ahead."
He agreed before he fully understood what that meant. The next moment, he wasn't in the great tree anymore.
He was behind her eyes.
The perspective was Ressète's, and she was moving through the void — not the familiar void between star systems, not the dark between galaxies. This was something else entirely
Something that shouldn't have been traversable at all. She was outside the universe. Beyond the boundary of the reality that contained the Divine World, that contained everything Arthur had ever known or mapped or considered. The Divine World itself — an incomprehensibly vast plane of existence — sat inside a universe the way a city sits inside a continent. And she was beyond that.
Traveling to another one.
He had no reference for the duration. Time moved strangely in the memory. But eventually — after fifteen years, he understood somehow — Ressète crossed over, and a different universe opened up around her.
It was burning.
Galaxies were at war. On a scale that made individual worlds irrelevant, civilizations and pantheons were tearing at each other across distances that swallowed comprehension. Countless lives, extinguished in the arithmetic of conflict so large it had stopped registering as tragedy and become something closer to weather.
Ressète settled into one of those worlds and attempted to make contact with its gods. She came without hostility, without territory to claim. She came because she had seen what was happening and found it intolerable.
The gods didn't take her seriously.
They were fighting for faith, they explained. That was the nature of things. That was the purpose.
Ressète's patience lasted exactly as long as it took her to understand that they meant it.
What followed was not a war. It wasn't close enough to be called that. She killed them — all of them, every god in that universe — with the methodical finality of someone removing a problem.
Then she turned her attention to the living beings responsible for the worst of the cruelty and removed them too. What remained, she rebuilt. Cultivated. Guided through centuries of gradual development, steering them toward something better than what had been there before.
She became their sole goddess. Not by conquest, but by the simple fact that she was the only one left, and she had chosen to care.
Arthur came back to himself.
He looked at Ressète differently now. The math had rearranged itself while he was in the memory. She outstripped Solarus — the current God of the Sun, the dominant divine force of his world — so thoroughly that the comparison barely functioned. Solarus would not have been a meaningful obstacle to the being in that memory.
"You had that kind of power," he said, "and you still died. How?"
Ressète was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was measured, but something moved beneath it.
"The Divine World developed a consciousness. Not metaphorically — it became aware, and it made a judgment." She exhaled slowly. "It decided that the gods represented inequality. That our existence distorted the natural order of things. And it concluded, logically, that we needed to be eliminated."
"The great deities fought back. The war lasted a hundred thousand years. The universe collapsed several times — Faith Power held it together each time, barely. And eventually, we won. The Divine World's consciousness was suppressed and reverted."
"But the victory cost everything." Her eyes didn't change, but something behind them did. "The deities emerged from that war hollowed out. The Divine World itself was wrecked from the inside — its energy reserves, once immense, had been spent or corrupted. And the gods had never relied solely on faith as a power source. When the ambient energy of the Divine World began to fail, they had nothing to fall back on. They started to collapse."
She continued without rushing. "The dying gods destabilized what was left of the Divine World. Something was born from that chaos — creatures powerful enough to threaten even the weakened deities who remained. That became the Age of Chaos. The Age of Deities was finished."
A pause.
"And in that chaos, I fell as well."
She'd been telling it all with studied composure, but the composure had limits. Her eyes gave her away — a subtle disturbance, deep and old, the residue of something that had never fully settled.
Arthur sat with it for a moment. He hadn't expected this. The Divine World had its own history of catastrophe, its own collapsed age, and the gods of that era had operated on a scale that made his current existence feel like a preliminary sketch.
"That's a genuinely terrible story," he said quietly.
Ressète nodded once. Then her voice shifted — not unkind, but direct. "You feel invincible right now. I recognize it. Every young deity does." Her gaze held his steadily. "In my age, you would not have been. Not even close. Whatever ceiling you've imagined for your power, there were beings in that era who would not have noticed you."
"I'm not saying this to diminish you. I'm saying it because the gods who fell the hardest were the ones who forgot that the ceiling existed. Don't make that mistake."
Arthur absorbed this without deflecting it. She wasn't wrong, and he knew she wasn't wrong. He nodded.
Then a detail from her account snagged his attention. "You mentioned that the gods back then didn't rely on faith as their primary energy source. What were they drawing from?"
"The Divine World itself." Ressète settled into explanation with the patience of someone who had thought about this for a million years. "The ambient energy of the Divine World was extraordinary in that age — vast, dense, inexhaustible by any measure we understood then. Divine Kingdom territory was critical for that reason: the more territory a god held, the more of that energy they could access and contain. Territory meant power, directly and literally."
She continued: "Now, that relationship has inverted. The ambient energy in the Divine World is a fraction of what it was — degraded, diminished, still faintly corrupted from the war. Territory still matters, but for a different reason: it determines how many followers can be housed and sustained. The faith those followers generate has become the primary fuel. The land itself gives far less than it once did."
Arthur filed this away carefully. He'd absorbed some Divine World energy before — enough to know it was there — but the surface layer had always felt off. Tainted in a way that made it less appealing than the clean return of faith. Now he understood why. He hadn't been imagining it.
The corruption wasn't incidental. It was historical.
"The gods today rely entirely on Faith Power. I'm no different." Arthur looked at her directly. "Is there a way to break that dependency? Even partially?"
It wasn't the question he'd come here to ask. He'd come for souls, for the Matrix project, and instead he'd walked into something far more valuable. He wasn't about to walk away from it.
Ressète considered him for a moment before answering. "Understand something first. The deities of my age didn't draw faith from a single universe. I personally wasn't among the most powerful of that era, and yet I held dominion over hundreds of universes as Goddess of Love. The faith flowing into me came from realities you haven't visited and couldn't count." She let that settle. "And even with all of that — we didn't rely on faith. That tells you the difference in scale."
Arthur said nothing. There wasn't much to say.
"As for the Divine World's energy now — you're right that it's unreliable. Corrupted at the source." She closed her eyes briefly. "But the weakened deities who survived the war found a way to work around it. They learned to channel their Faith Power across their territories and use it as a conversion mechanism — running it through the corrupted ambient energy and purifying it. Turning what was tainted into something usable. Something that could genuinely strengthen them."
She paused, then added: "Before the war, we actually used our faith in the opposite direction — feeding it back into the Divine World to support its natural energy regeneration. A reciprocal relationship. That practice died with the Age of Deities. No one is doing it now."
A long exhale. Something tired in it.
"That knowledge is worth more than you know," Arthur said. "Thank you."
"It costs me nothing to share it." Ressète's tone was indifferent, but not dismissive. Then, without moving, she added: "You didn't come here for history lessons, though. What do you actually want?"
Arthur accepted the pivot. "The Spirit Order's goal — overtaking the physical world, replacing the Seen World with the Unseen one. Is that actually achievable?"
Ressète made a sound that might have been a laugh, quiet and a little dry. "Truthfully? I don't know."
Arthur blinked. "You don't know?"
"I was already a deity when I first encountered spirits claiming they intended to replace physical reality with the Unseen World — to live eternally, to feel again, to make the Seen World the secondary existence." She opened her eyes. "I didn't know how it was possible then, and I have spent a million years here trying to work it out. What I've concluded is this: if it can be done at all, it would require unifying every Unseen World in this universe — every version, every pocket — and combining the total power of all of them into a single coordinated effort."
"We haven't made contact with a single other Unseen World in all that time. Not one."
Arthur rubbed the side of his head. The scope of it was genuinely unwieldy — not impossible to grasp, just heavy.
He set it aside.
"So it's an ambition that may never be fulfilled." He shook his head. "As it happens, I have something that might give the spirits what they're actually looking for — the sensation of physical existence, the senses, the experience of being alive — without needing to conquer anything." He looked at her steadily. "Would that interest you?"
The composure that Ressète had maintained through the entire conversation — through a million years of waiting, through the memory of a fallen age, through the ruin of everything she'd once been — finally cracked.
She stared at him.
"You can actually do that?"
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