Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 278: Who Else but Her

Over the next two days, in order to more easily discuss the topic of the “Silver Witch Church Development Guide,” Yvette Loxivia and Ice Rain moved their meeting place to the garden pavilion in the manor. Beside it was a small lake where red and white koi darted back and forth, making for a very pleasant scene.In the early morning, the sky above Ish Island was a flawless blue. Wisps of cloud floated across that blue-green dome and blurred into the distant horizon where sea and sky met. A few seagulls circled at the edge of their vision, letting out long, lingering cries.

After listening to Yvette’s account of her recent journey in the Snow Country, Ice Rain’s expression turned dazed and muddled. Only at the end did she finally say, “Miss Good Samaritan, your experiences are so complicated.”

Wearing a sleeveless sailor uniform that absolutely failed to cover her thighs, Yvette looked like a high school girl—no, more like a middle schooler—as she asked, “So what do you think?”

Although Ice Rain looked silly and carefree, Yvette had never once doubted her intelligence. After all, she was an avatar of the Mechanical God, and she’d managed to act her way through five hundred years without ever slipping up. As for why she seemed so innocent, Yvette felt it must be related to the nature of mechanical automatons themselves.

—No survival crises, no physical desires, no need to eat or drink; every day all she had to do was look for fun. With such heaven-defying conditions, of course her personality would end up like that of a carefree child.

Just like if Yvette didn’t have to face the True Gods head-on, uncover the truth of the War of Divine Judgment, and rescue Dugrabi, she’d have no motivation to run around doing all this.

Wouldn’t it be great to just soak in the hot springs with Shuanghua every day?

“I think it’s really interesting!” Ice Rain analyzed enthusiastically. “But Miss Good Samaritan, your development plan is way too primitive. You could totally use methods that are more efficient and way more impactful.”

Yvette knew exactly what she meant, but she decided to pretend she didn’t. She asked, “What methods?”

“What you need isn’t to steal followers from Miss Shuanghua, but to turn all those people who aren’t devout enough, the ones who can’t generate faith-element, into devout followers of the two of you, right? And those not-devout-enough folks are the vast majority in the Snow Country, right?”

“Right.”

“Then you can totally use a script to make them believe in you. For example, you and Miss Shuanghua can take turns playing the villain, staging fake crises, right? Then you show up to resolve them. Wouldn’t that turn all those casual believers into devout believers?” Ice Rain said, speaking with complete confidence. “Also, Miss Good Samaritan, you’re the God of Serendipity. You can set up those large-scale serendipity ruins, like dungeons in a game, and use them to mass-produce devout believers, right?”

“As expected of the Mechanical God.” Yvette clapped her hands, as if applauding this brilliant idea.

“Hehe.” Ice Rain puffed out her chest proudly.

“Then I’ll leave that job to you.”

“No problem!” Ice Rain agreed at once, then suddenly froze. “Wait, how exactly am I supposed to help you do it?”

“I’ll take care of that part for you. It’s related to some recent research I’ve been doing on faith spells. Once it’s done, I can open up a separate interface for you under the Silver Witch’s faith Authority and turn the divine realm into your workshop,” Yvette said. “On top of that, I can also have you meet up with Shuanghua again in the future—and with Tertia as well. With their help, they should be able to save you a lot of trouble.”

“Ooh, ooh, Miss Good Samaritan, you really think of everything.”

“Hmph hmph.”

After that, the two of them discussed various possibilities for implementing all kinds of serendipities.

All the ideas Ice Rain proposed—whether scripting events to trick believers, or creating those secret-realm dungeons straight out of a xianxia novel—were certainly not things Yvette had never thought of.

The problem was that they were all way too much trouble.

She wasn’t Abella; she had zero experience writing plots. Just thinking about having to draft storylines, juggle this detail and that detail, avoid plot holes, and maintain divine dignity made her feel like she wouldn’t even know where to start.

As for constructing things like serendipity ruins, she had even less of a clue. She wasn’t a game designer. If you asked her to critique whether a map was well designed, play the armchair champion and talk big, that was fine—but actually having her personally handle such a massive project? Yeah, no thanks.

What’s that? You say she’s a world-class slacker?

She’ll deck you with one punch!

Keep running your mouth and she’ll break your legs and flatten your chest.

Over the next two days, in the central manor on Ish Island, Yvette’s avatar once again sank into long-term “corpse mode.” She still had to teach Shuanghua classes as usual, study this new ability called the divine realm, and even occasionally turn around and consult her own grand-disciple about which details were important when building a divine realm, so there was no way she could hang around on the island all the time.

Ice Rain, however, didn’t feel nearly as bored as before. After all, in those earlier years she’d only started playing Island Tycoon because she truly couldn’t find anything to do. Now that she had clear project objectives, she felt at least somewhat fulfilled, no longer as hollow as she’d been in the past.

However, that happy mood vanished the moment the project actually started being implemented.

Because Ice Rain discovered that both of these tasks were nowhere near as simple as she’d imagined.

Let’s start with the serendipity events!

In their plan, serendipities were divided into three tiers. The first tier was the lowest level, focused on improving daily life—benefits that would trigger randomly after a believer prayed.

That part was easy. Once Yvette used the divine realm to link the two worlds together, all Ice Rain needed to do was deploy a large number of invisible shuttles in the Snow Country to deliver supplies.

The second tier was where things started to get tricky, because this time they had to send out things that could dramatically change someone’s life trajectory. At that point, every lucky person favored by the god had to be assigned an ID and recorded, then constantly observed and evaluated so their character score could be adjusted up or down.

Those with good character could receive more serendipities in the future, even becoming Apostles like Ezra Yarrow. Those with poor character would be judged case by case—if they were too vile, Ice Rain would need to guide other favored ones to eliminate them.

It was easy to imagine how complicated this would get. While most of the work could be handed off to other AIs, there would definitely be plenty of complex situations that required Ice Rain herself to make the final call, like a judge.

And even if acting as a judge sounded kind of fun, once they got to the third tier, Ice Rain started to feel completely lost.

Starting from the third tier, Yvette would provide a divine realm to serve as a reusable serendipity-world instance prepared specifically for adventurers. Its defining feature was that the anchor entrances would be restricted—only those with devout faith could enter.

But how to design it? That was where everything turned into a fog. The knowledge involved spanned an absurd range, from civil engineering to child psychology. Ice Rain even had to cram game level design on the fly, studying the experience left behind by her predecessors.

This was just way too exhausting, Ice Rain thought, as she studied while working, digging through the vast archives in the database.

But there was no helping it. This was Miss Good Samaritan’s request. As the most loyal Mechanical God in the world—who else but her?

Having covered the problems with the serendipity events, it was time to talk about the difficulties on the script-acting side.

This was actually a bit easier than designing the serendipity instance.

That was because Ice Rain had picked up the creative notes Abella had left behind, which recorded her various creative insights in a very academic style.

Ice Rain had only skimmed them, but she immediately gained all sorts of realizations: what kinds of little details could increase a sense of pressure, how to push the story’s protagonist—Ice Rain herself wasn’t sure why that was the protagonist—quickly into a mental breakdown, and so on.

With these creative notes passing the torch to her, Ice Rain felt even more confident about completing the tasks Miss Good Samaritan had assigned.

On a certain morning in early December, fine snow drifted outside, and the leaden clouds hung so low they were almost pressing down on the roof. Yvette opened her eyes and saw the ceiling of the hot spring courtyard. Dark wooden beams and white lime walls formed that traditional Snow Country style. But this time it wasn’t the suite she’d been using before—it was Shuanghua’s room in the very back.

The main reason was that lately Shuanghua had often been holed up in her own divine realm, exploring and experimenting with faith spells, so it would be a waste not to use this room. Besides, in a little while Anya Vida’s father, Mr. Vida, would almost be arriving, and she’d have to give his gold membership card back to him.

Of course, she didn’t have to worry about not having a room for herself. Shuanghua had already used the Snow Emperor Temple to wrangle usage rights for this exclusive room for her. Plus, after staying so long at Snowmist Lodge, all she had to do was show her face to the innkeeper couple and everything would be fine—no real problem there.

She also had her own things to do lately—mainly slacking off, er, exploring ways to use the divine realms.

For an ordinary divine-realm powerhouse, the layout of their divine realm was extremely important, because everything inside it was decided by the realm’s owner, all for functional compatibility.

For example, if you wanted to build a divine realm suited to fire-type divine arts, you naturally had to bring in a large number of fire-related things: fire-aspected crystals, a roaring ocean of lava, maybe even some fire-type magical beasts.

Only then could your divine realm provide the boosts you needed in battle, and in your spare time help deepen your understanding of your divine arts, thereby strengthening your Authority. In turn, that would feed back into your divine power—also known as Aberrant Mana—improving its acquisition efficiency.

But

Yvette had no Authority, and she couldn’t use Authority to generate Aberrant Mana. She didn’t care about that efficiency anyway, and she had no particular divine arts that needed special reinforcement. So for now, the main uses of divine realms for her were as storage pouches and spatial gateways.

Since she could construct multiple divine realms, it only took a few dozen points of Aberrant Mana to build a small, permanently accessible divine realm. Using that to escape was much cheaper than a flesh-and-blood marker—the latter cost ten thousand points for a single teleport.

She could also create several of them to achieve free back-and-forth travel between Ish Island and the Snow Country.

But even that wasn’t her current research focus. What she most wanted to accomplish right now was connecting two divine realms to each other.

Once she succeeded and opened up permissions, the divine realm would become a spatial corridor anyone could use. Ish Island would be able to obtain resources from the Mortal Realm, ensuring there would be no energy shortages in the future, while the Mortal Realm would receive an endless stream of serendipity drops from Ish Island.

That might allow the common folk of the Snow Country to be the first to step into a technological era.

A technological era different from the Origin Civilization—one where red flags were planted across the world!