Chapter 3: The Godless
The void was not empty. That was the first lesson.
What had looked like empty space was a map. A three-dimensional board with more moving pieces than he could count. He just hadn’t known how to read it.
He focused his awareness outward, pushing past the nearest star systems, extending his perception the way he used to extend his scouting radius in Theos. In the game, a newborn god had a default scan range of roughly one solar system. The scan was crude—just blips on a radar, color-coded by threat level.
Here, the scan was the same mechanic wrapped in different skin.
A pulse radiated from his consciousness, rippling outward through the void like sonar through black water. It struck asteroid fields, skimmed gas giants, sank into the atmospheres of rocky worlds. Data came back in fragments—not readouts, but impressions. Textures. Temperatures. The kind of information you had to feel before you could read.
And Zephyr spoke the language fluently.
Planet one. Third orbit from a yellow dwarf. Temperate climate. Heavy vegetation. Population: high.
He focused on it. The impression sharpened. Dense forests. Stone cities. Rivers teeming with boats. And layered over everything, a thick, golden haze that permeated the atmosphere like incense smoke.
Divine Signature: Strong. Multiple. At least three established gods with active Belief Systems.
He pulled back immediately.
Too hot. An established pantheon means territorial gods. Territorial gods mean proxy wars the second I plant a shrine. I have a hundred FP. They have millions. I’d be dead before I converted my first believer.
In Theos, the competitive meta had a term for newborn gods who spawned too close to established powers: "Content." As in, you became content for someone else’s highlight reel.
Planet two. Fifth orbit. Ice world. Subsurface oceans.
He scanned deeper. Aquatic civilizations. Merfolk, maybe. Hard to reach. Hard to convert. Faith generation required direct interaction, and divine influence weakened dramatically through water in the Theos engine. If this system ran on the same physics—and everything so far suggested it did—then an underwater civilization was a resource sink, not an asset.
Pass.
Planet three. Binary star system. Tidally locked. One side burning, one side frozen.
Narrow habitable zone along the terminator line. Sparse settlements. Small population. But the divine signature was there—faint, single, but present. Some minor god had already claimed the strip.
Pass.
He scanned further. System after system. Each planet a spreadsheet. Population versus divine saturation. Resources versus risk.
This isn’t exploration. This is real estate shopping.
He almost smirked at the comparison. In Mumbai, the richest neighborhoods had the highest security. The best properties were already owned. If you wanted to break into the market without capital, you didn’t buy in Bandra—you bought in the slums, fixed it up, and flipped it.
I don’t need the best planet. I need the most desperate one.
He flipped the filter. Stopped looking for strength. Started looking for desperation.
Show me the godless.
The scan pulse shifted—narrower, sharper, tuned to a specific frequency. Planets with life but no Faith network. Worlds where the divine signature read zero. Places where no god had bothered to look, because the return on investment was too low.
Most players in Theos would have scrolled right past these worlds. Why waste time on a starving village when you could conquer a thriving city? Why invest in the weak when the strong generated more Faith?
Because the strong already had gods. And the weak would worship anyone who fed them.
Contact.
A signal. Faint. Flickering. On the outer edge of his scan range—a small, rocky planet orbiting a dim red dwarf star. The planet was mostly desert. Vast stretches of orange and brown, broken by sparse patches of grey-green vegetation and the occasional dried riverbed that scarred the surface like old veins.
No divine signature. Zero. The planet was spiritually dead—unclaimed, unfed, forgotten.
But there was life. Faint, fragile, barely clinging to the surface. Small clusters of biological signatures, scattered across the wastelands like seeds thrown on stone.
Godless planet. Sparse population. Desert terrain. Low competition. Low risk.
Zephyr focused on the planet, pulling it into sharp resolution.
Let’s take a closer look.
***
The planet was worse than he’d expected. And that was perfect.
Zephyr’s perception dropped through the atmosphere like a falling stone—curvature, continents, terrain. Thin air. Nitrogen-heavy, laced with volcanic haze from the far hemisphere. Gravity a shade heavier than Earth. Surface temperature: murderous by day, freezing by night.
Hostile biome. Low habitability index. In Theos, this would be classified as a Tier 4 planet—minimum population cap, reduced Faith generation multiplier.
But those were baseline assumptions. Zephyr had turned Tier 4 planets into empires before. It wasn’t the planet that mattered. It was the players on it.
He focused on the nearest cluster of life signatures.
They were moving. Slowly. A column of figures trudging across an open plain of cracked, sun-bleached earth. No road. No trail. Just a scraggly line of bodies making their way through the heat.
He zoomed in closer.
Lizardmen.
Reptilian humanoids. Bipedal. Roughly six feet tall, with broad shoulders and thick, scaled hides that ranged in color from dusty brown to faded green. Their eyes were large, slit-pupiled, adapted for harsh light. Each one had a heavy tail that dragged behind them, leaving shallow grooves in the sand.
He counted them. Twenty-three. No—twenty-four. One was being carried on a makeshift stretcher between two others, its body limp, scales cracked and peeling.
They wore scraps. Not armor. Not clothing, really—just strips of cured leather and hide bound with crude rope. Some carried sharpened sticks. Others had stone tools, chipped and blunt. One—taller than the rest, with a ridge of dull red scales along its spine—hefted a rusted metal blade that looked like it had been scavenged from a ruin.
No formation. No supply line. No scouts. These aren’t soldiers. They’re refugees.
He tracked their heading. East, toward a cluster of rock formations. Shade, maybe. Their pace was too slow—the smaller ones at the back were stumbling every few steps. One female clutched an egg to her chest, mottled grey, wrapped in dirty rags.
Zephyr stared at the egg longer than he meant to.
Focus.
Young. Old. Injured. Carrying eggs. This is a tribe in collapse.
He scanned further. Behind them, to the west, the land was scorched—blacker than the surrounding desert, with the glassy sheen of superheated sand. Something had burned their territory. Something had driven them out.
Displaced. No home. No food. No water. No god.
Zephyr watched them for a long time. He watched the way the taller one with the red ridge—the leader, probably—kept looking back over his shoulder, scanning the horizon for something. Predators. Enemies. Whatever had destroyed their land.
Tribal species. Strong physical defense and regeneration. Herd loyalty. They’ll follow a leader who provides.
He ran the calculation.
Twenty-four Lizardmen. If all converted to Casual Believers: 24 FP per day. If even a third reached Devout status within the first month: 80+ FP per day. If the leader became a Fanatic—which was achievable with a well-timed miracle during a crisis—that was an additional 100 FP per day plus 1 DP per month.
Projected income at full conversion: 100-200 FP daily within the first month. Enough to unlock basic blueprints. Enough to start building.
It wasn’t a fortune. In Theos, the top guilds generated millions of FP per day from continent-spanning empires with populations in the billions. Twenty-four starving Lizardmen were a rounding error by comparison.
But Zephyr hadn’t started Theos Online with a continent. He’d started with a mud hut and three broken NPCs. Three years later, he’d owned the leaderboard.
Scale is irrelevant. Trajectory is everything.
He watched the leader again. The red-ridged one was moving through the column, shifting the stretcher’s weight, pressing two fingers against the injured one’s throat to check for a pulse. Not panicking. Managing.
He’s not just strong. He thinks. That’s rare in a tribal species at this tech level.
The column staggered on. The red dwarf was climbing. The heat would get worse. In a few hours, the weakest ones would stop walking. Then they’d stop breathing.
They need water. They need shelter. They need a miracle.
Zephyr looked at his Faith Points.
[ Faith Points (FP): 100 / 500 ]
One hundred points. Enough for one Blessing. Maybe a small Intervention. Enough to create a spring of water in the rocks ahead of them. Enough to drop the temperature in a localized area. Enough to make twenty-four dying Lizardmen look up at the sky and wonder if someone was watching.
That’s how you start. Not with thunder. Not with fire. With water.
In Theos, the veterans all knew: the flashy entrance was a waste of FP. You didn’t convert with awe. You converted with need. Thunder scared people. Water saved them. And the saved prayed harder than the scared.
Rule number one of conversion economics: don’t sell religion. Sell survival. Religion sells itself after.
He focused on the rock formation ahead of the column. He calculated the FP cost for a basic Blessing—water creation, localized temperature reduction. Twenty FP. Maybe twenty-five if he wanted it to last more than a few hours.
That leaves seventy-five FP in reserve. Tight, but operational.
The Lizardmen trudged on. They didn’t know he was watching. They didn’t know that the empty sky above them had an owner now.
Twenty-four. One planet. One god with nothing but a name he hasn’t earned yet.
Zephyr made his decision.
Let the game begin.