Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 276: A Serendipity Plan

After finishing their exploration of the War of Divine Judgment ruins, the two of them, having finally put this matter to rest, at last set out for home and, three days later, returned to Snowmist Lodge in Icehammer City.Compared to the dusty, rushed journey there, the trip back was far more relaxed.

Over those three days, Yvette deliberately slowed her pace, letting Shuanghua act as her guide as she took in some of the Snowfields’ grand sights. Along the way, they also rescued a few lost adventurer parties and handed out several holy witch statues.

Once they got back to Snowmist Lodge, Yvette slept like a log through the entire night, and only woke up the next afternoon to the sound of Shuanghua knocking.

Side note, Shuanghua was knocking on the sliding door between the courtyard and the bedroom; probably, after hiding for so long, she’d already picked up the bad habit of never using the main door.

Soon, at Yvette’s lazy response, Shuanghua slid the door open and stepped into the room, bare feet touching the floor.

Seeing the chestnut-haired girl lying on the bed, wrapped up in the quilt into a ball with only her head sticking out, she paused for a moment. She hadn’t expected her mysterious and powerful Grandmaster to have such an adorably girlish side.

Then she bent down, offered a respectful greeting, and said, “Grandmaster, I’ve already contacted Senior Sister, but I’m afraid it’ll take quite a long time before she can get here.”

Over the past four hundred-odd years, since nothing too urgent had happened, basically all of her contact with Tertia had been through the official channels between Snow Country and the Academy of Truth.

And what were those official channels? In practice, it just meant having beast-tamers control flying monsters to carry letters to the Academy of Truth. Given the distance involved, even with speed-specialized Northwind Hawks as mounts, it still took more than half a month.

Such a sluggish pace of information transfer, of course, came from a mix of reasons. For instance, there was the massive Sit Kingdom sitting in between; you couldn’t exactly ask Sit Kingdom to help forward Snow Country’s official messages. Then there was the lack of profitable airship routes, which meant no air freight. On top of that, because the returns were too low and for all sorts of other reasons, the technology for alchemical communicators iterated very slowly and never became widespread.

The Ultra-ancient Civilization did have means of ultra-long-distance communication, but that kind of high-end tech was so advanced that even Tertia, famed for her knowledge, couldn’t make heads or tails of it, much less reproduce it.

So, all in all, even if Tertia set out for Snow Country the moment she received the message, it would still be at least a month before she arrived.

Yvette herself, however, didn’t really mind. The main reason she wanted to meet Tertia was to keep the Silver Witch Church, once it gained some reputation, from being treated as a target to be suppressed by the Academy of Truth.

As for the rest, it was to have Tertia look after Lucia a bit. With that demon-race bloodline, she needed help keeping it covered up so she wouldn’t be exposed.

Yvette stretched lazily and struggled her way out of the warm cocoon of blankets. She could, of course, choose not to feel the cold at all, but she really liked this feeling—bitter chill outside, cozy warmth under the covers, like turning on the AC and pulling up a quilt in the middle of summer.

After that, Shuanghua immediately came over and carefully helped Yvette get dressed, changing her into a thick cotton robe called a “Samis,” a specialty of Snow Country.

Her hands were a bit clumsy, though; the red cords on the standing collar and side lapel ended up tied in a very… abstract way. Yvette didn’t notice at all, but Shuanghua herself felt a little embarrassed and hurriedly asked, “Grandmaster, what should I do next?”

At the mention of next steps, Yvette fell into thought, the outline of a plan she’d roughly finalized the night before surfacing in her mind.

She didn’t actually want to become an enemy of the True Gods, but with the Ancestral Holy Spirit suppressing Dugrabi, the Crimson Sanctum naturally became her putative opponent, and a divine war in the future was very much on the table.

And if she was going to stand against a True God, the best leverage she could see at the moment was the faith-element.

After all, without a supply of faith, gods would go mad; since True Gods also had to gather faith, they were hardly exempt from that rule.

If she could weaken the Ancestral Holy Spirit on the level of faith itself—whether that meant forcing him to come out of the divine kingdom that served as his safe house, making him show some other weakness, or even pushing him into some sort of peaceful deal—that would all be the best she could hope for right now.

So she said straightforwardly, “I want to spread faith in Snow Country. I need your support.”

“All right,” Shuanghua answered at once.

She had no objections, of course.

She wasn’t really a god to begin with, and didn’t need faith; if anything, the fact that so many people worshiped the Snow Emperor only weighed on her like a heavy burden.

She had even been planning to descend in Divine Descent later, to strong-arm the major clans into returning command of the Ancestral Rites Council to the Snow Emperor Temple, so that the Snow Emperor Temple could smoothly spread faith in the Silver Witch throughout Snow Country.

But as soon as she brought up that idea, Yvette promptly shot it down.

First, it wasn’t necessary. Second, it wouldn’t work very well: even if the believers forced themselves past their mental block and actually converted to the Silver Witch, they wouldn’t be truly devout and wouldn’t contribute much faith-element.

What Yvette needed were devoted believers, and to get those she could only rely on performing miracles herself. Once tangible serendipities built up into a certain atmosphere and trend, they would become unstoppable; at that point, if the Snow Emperor Temple stepped out to lend its support, tweak a few doctrines, and publicize the intimate relationship of “both mentor and friend” between the Snow Emperor and the Silver Witch, everything would naturally fall into place.

Of course, there was a small snag: she didn’t have much faith-element to work with. Based on an Apostle-level with 1,000 mana as a baseline, she only had sixteen points. Snow Country was vast, with countless small, isolated settlements; it wasn’t like Adelock, the adventure capital, where you had a natural base. Using a “model case” like Lightning Apostle Ezra to draw in believers wouldn’t be nearly so easy.

So, naturally, Yvette started thinking up some lower-tier serendipities that didn’t require Benediction power.

Things like various wonderful little items, magitech gear, one-use magic scrolls, and the like.

Using statues to randomly deliver revelations and guide people to discover those treasures sounded pretty good too.

The problem was: where were all these treasures supposed to come from?

For that, she would need to make use of the industrial zones she’d built on Ish Island.

Those industrial zones were currently under Ice Rain’s complete control. Whatever she wanted, all she had to do was raise the request; as an avatar of the God of Machinery, Ice Rain could rely on the industrial zones’ resources to handle every step from blueprint to finished product with ease—even mass production.

Of course, transporting things off the island required consuming Aberrant Mana.

But as luck would have it, she now had the ability to create a divine realm, and the anchor point for that realm hadn’t been set yet.

In other words, she just had to anchor her divine realm to Ish Island, and she could continuously move all kinds of items produced in the industrial zones into the divine realm, then enter the realm herself to pick them up. Any high-quality materials she obtained in the Mortal Realm could likewise be shipped back to the island the same way for further processing.

That way, even without Apostle-level Benedictions like Ezra’s, she could still pull off a large-scale, low-cost bombardment of serendipities.

By then, even without Shuanghua swallowing her pride and personally stepping in, the old powers would find it hard to stand in the way of the Silver Witch Church’s growth.