Chapter 34: The Convert’s Clock
The conversions began on day eight.
Not the way Zephyr had projected — not the steady, even distribution of a population gradually persuaded by consistent exposure. The first wave was sharp, sudden, and driven by something simpler than persuasion.
The farmer’s toddler fell in the lake.
The child — a boy, barely two, with the round-faced, uncoordinated confidence of a human infant who hadn’t yet learned that water could kill — slipped from the bank while his mother was washing clothes. The current took him. Three seconds of silence before the screaming started — the mother’s scream, the universal frequency of a parent watching their child disappear into something they couldn’t control.
An enforcer pulled the boy out. One of the junior lizardmen — a young male who’d been patrolling the waterline and who moved with the reflexive speed of a divinely blessed soldier whose training had included water rescue drills because Vark trained his people for everything, even the things that seemed unnecessary until they weren’t. The enforcer dove, surfaced, and lifted the gasping child onto the bank in a single motion that took less time than the mother’s scream.
The boy was fine. Wet, frightened, coughing up lake water, but fine.
The mother knelt at the shrine that evening. The father beside her. The grandmother. The grandfather. The three children. The two unrelated adults — the young farmer and the woman with the toolkit. Eight humans. Eight new believers.
[FAITH CONVERSION — Batch]
[8 Human believers added]
[Starting tier: Provisional (7), Casual (1 — mother)]
[Daily FP increase: +17]
Zephyr noted the pattern. *Trauma creates faith faster than prosperity.* The observation was clinical. Accurate. He didn’t like it — the implication that belief was most efficient when born from fear rather than understanding. But the data was the data. The mother had gone from unaffiliated to Casual tier in a single evening because a lizardman had pulled her child from the water, and the lizardman had been fast enough because a god had blessed him with Stoneskin and his commander had drilled water rescue, and the commander drilled water rescue because the god valued preparation over hope.
The system worked. The reasons it worked weren’t always comfortable.
Nix and the Goblins converted on day twelve.
The Goblin leader walked to the shrine during the morning prayer with the purposeful stride of someone completing a transaction. She stood in the prayer circle, her black eyes scanning the assembled worshippers with the rapid assessment that Zephyr had come to associate with Goblin intelligence — fast, comprehensive, and entirely utilitarian.
"I have a question," Nix said.
Krug, mid-liturgy, paused. The tribe watched.
"The blessings. The ones your enforcers have — their skin hardens when they’re struck, I’ve watched it happen during drills. And the priest — I saw him stop a charging boar yesterday by touching the ground. The animal’s feet locked in place like the earth swallowed them. Those abilities — your god gives them to believers?"
"The Voice grants blessings to the faithful," Krug said. "The deeper the faith, the stronger the bond, the more the blessings can grow."
"And the blessings persist? If I believe today and receive a blessing today, it doesn’t vanish tomorrow if I have doubts?"
"Blessings are permanent. They are part of you once granted."
Nix processed this. Three seconds. Four. The black eyes blinked once.
"I believe your god exists. I’ve seen what his power does to this land and to the people on it. I believe the advantages of faith in this territory outweigh the cost of independence." She paused. "Is that faith enough?"
Krug looked at her. The Goblin stood three and a half feet tall, her expression the flat, calculated neutral of someone who’d weighed every variable and concluded that sincerity was less important than accuracy.
"Faith is faith," Krug said. "The Voice doesn’t grade your reasons."
Five Goblins. Provisional tier, all of them — the lowest rung, the starting point, the faith equivalent of a signed contract with no emotional attachment. But Provisional generated FP. Provisional counted toward thresholds. And Nix’s particular brand of calculated belief had a quality that Zephyr found unexpectedly useful: it was *stable*. Emotional faith spiked and crashed. Transactional faith held steady because it was based on outcomes, not feelings.
The Gnolls converted in waves between days fourteen and twenty.
Pack dynamics drove it. The first three Gnolls to cross over were young — adolescents, impressionable, drawn to the shrine by curiosity and the visible evidence of blessings on the enforcers. They prayed awkwardly — the Gnoll body wasn’t designed for kneeling, so they crouched, heads lowered, the posture of submission that was the closest their species came to reverence. Krug adapted the liturgy. Standing prayer for Gnolls. The same words, different posture. Faith didn’t care about your knees.
Once three crossed, the pack followed. Gnoll social bonds were tight — trust flowed through the pack like current through wire. If three trusted members said the god was real, the pack’s instinctive response was to incorporate that assessment into the collective knowledge base. Not blind obedience. Pack trust. The same mechanism that let a hunting party coordinate without verbal communication, applied to the question of whether the gold fire on the altar was worth believing in.
Twelve Gnolls converted. Zephyr blessed them in batches — Fertile Growth on the two females (long-term population investment), Stoneskin on the three largest males (immediate military value, potential enforcer recruits). The remaining seven received no blessings yet. FP budget had limits, and Zephyr didn’t waste resources on Provisional-tier believers whose faith hadn’t stabilized.
[POPULATION UPDATE]
[Total believers: 95]
[FP income: 558/day]
[Reserve: 6,847 FP]
Ninety-five. Five short of a hundred. The number sat in Zephyr’s interface like an itch he couldn’t scratch — close enough to feel the threshold, far enough to require patience. A hundred believers was a milestone. Not just psychologically — systemically. The Rank 2 upgrade requirements were still undefined in his interface, showing only as **[LOCKED — Requirements revealed at threshold]**. But every rank-up in Theos Online had required a minimum believer count, and a hundred was the number that kept appearing in his projections.
Six Gnolls hadn’t converted. All of them Harsk’s inner circle.
And Harsk hadn’t moved.
***
Krug found the alpha at the southern gate. The same position — inside the palisade, as far from the shrine as the layout allowed, standing with his arms crossed and his amber eyes watching the camp the way a man watched a fire he wasn’t sure would warm him or burn him.
Day twenty-two. Eight days left.
Krug didn’t bring the staff. Didn’t wear the vestments. He came as a man, not a priest — two hands, no symbols, nothing between them but distance and the questions that distance contained.
He sat on the ground beside the gate. Harsk remained standing. The height difference — the alpha looking down, the priest looking up — was deliberate on Krug’s part. Coming to someone’s level was a priestly technique. Coming below it was something else.
"You don’t need to preach," Harsk said.
"I’m not here to preach."
"Then what?"
"To listen."
Harsk looked down at him. The amber eyes were tired — not the physical exhaustion of the march, which had faded under regular meals and the ambient vitality of Genesis Bloom. A different weariness. The fatigue of a mind carrying something heavy for a long time.
"You want to know why," Harsk said.
"I want to understand."
The Gnoll alpha was silent for a long time. The camp sounds filled the space — the forge ringing, hatchlings chasing each other, a Gnoll adolescent barking with laughter at something a Kobold juvenile had done. The sounds of a settlement that was working. The evidence Krug didn’t need to present because it presented itself every minute of every day.
"I had a god," Harsk said.
The words came out flat. Not angry, not bitter. The tone of a man stating a fact that had stopped hurting a long time ago and left behind something worse than pain — understanding.
"Varekh. Pack-god. The kind of deity that made sense for Gnolls — strength, speed, coordination. The pack hunted better under Varekh’s blessings. We moved faster. Our senses sharpened. The bond between packmates — the thing that lets a hunting party function as one body — became stronger. We could feel each other’s positions without looking. We could sense fear in prey from half a mile away."
His jaw tightened.
"We were more. Not just blessed — more. Varekh didn’t add to us. He elevated us. Every Gnoll under his blessing was the best version of themselves."
"What happened?" Krug asked, though the bond had already carried the impression upward. Zephyr was listening. The god above them, thin and distant at this range from the shrine, was leaning into every word.
"The war." Harsk’s voice didn’t change pitch or volume. The wound wasn’t fresh — it was scar tissue, old and hard and incorporated into the structure of who he’d become. "Varekh was a vassal. Minor god, bound to a greater power through a pact signed before my grandfather’s grandfather was born. When the greater god went to war, the pact activated. Varekh was pulled south. Not by choice — by system. The pact was binding. He couldn’t refuse."
He paused. The camp sounds continued. Someone was teaching the human children to catch fish with their hands. High-pitched laughter.
"Varekh used Descent. He manifested — physically, on the battlefield. I saw it happen. The sky split and he came down — a great hound, golden, the size of a hill. Beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And he fought. For two days, he fought. His claws tore through the enemy’s frontline. His howl shattered formations. He was *magnificent*."
The last word carried weight. Reverence, even now. The faith of a believer who had watched his god walk the earth and found the sight worthy.
"They killed him on the third day."
Silence.
"The enemy god’s champion drove a spear through his chest. Divine weapon — the kind that kills what shouldn’t be killable. Varekh fell. The ground shook for an hour. And then —"
Harsk stopped. His claws flexed — an involuntary spasm, the physical echo of a memory that the body remembered even when the mind tried to contain it.
"The bond didn’t break immediately. That’s the thing your priest doesn’t tell people — it doesn’t break clean. Varekh died and the blessings stayed. For a while. The speed was still there. The sharpened senses. The pack-bond. Everything he’d given us, burning like embers after the fire goes out."
His voice dropped. Lower. The register of something he’d never told anyone.
"The fade took weeks. The speed went first — gradually, like waking up from a dream where you could fly. Each day, a little slower. A little duller. The senses dimmed. The pack-bond — the thing that made us us, the connection between packmates that let us move as one — frayed. We stopped feeling each other. We started bumping into each other during hunts. Missing signals. Mistiming attacks."
He looked at his hands.
"We went from the best version of ourselves to the worst version, and it happened so slowly that we couldn’t even point to the day it changed. No clean break. No moment of before and after. Just a long, slow slide from more to less until we were just animals standing in a burned field wondering why the world felt wrong."
𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖
The amber eyes found Krug’s.
"Half my pack died in the months after. Not from the war — from the *decline*. Bodies that had been enhanced by divine power for generations couldn’t sustain themselves at mortal levels. Hearts that were built to pump blessed blood couldn’t pump the normal kind fast enough. Lungs that had breathed divine air choked on regular atmosphere. They didn’t die in battle. They died leaning against trees. Sitting by fires. Falling asleep and not waking up because the body that their god had built for them wasn’t designed to run without him."
Silence. The forge rang. The Hydra’s gold eyes watched from the lake.
"So I know your god is real," Harsk said. "I know his blessings work. I know his territory provides and his people thrive and the system functions exactly the way you say it does. I have no doubts. None."
He looked toward the shrine. The gold flame, steady and warm, reflecting in his amber eyes.
"But I also know what happens when it stops. I know what the fade feels like. And I will not — cannot — build my people’s bodies around a foundation that might die on a battlefield one day and leave us falling apart in slow motion for the second time."
Krug was quiet. He could feel the bond humming — the Voice above him processing, calculating, the Architect running scenarios the way he always ran scenarios. But the god didn’t send words. Didn’t send impressions. Just attention. The sustained, respectful attention of an intelligence that recognized a problem it couldn’t solve with numbers.
"Our god could face the same fate," Krug said. No lie. No reassurance. The truth. "Any god can be killed. Any bond can break."
"Then why do you believe?"
Krug picked up a handful of dirt. Swamp mud. Dark, rich, alive — the soil that Genesis Bloom had turned from dead clay into something that could feed a hundred mouths.
"Because the alternative is building alone." He let the dirt fall through his fingers. "And I’ve seen what alone looks like. I was alone before the Voice found us. We were dying. Slowly. The way your pack was dying after Varekh, except we never had a god to begin with. We were just animals in a swamp, and the swamp was winning."
He looked at Harsk.
"The god might die. The blessings might fade. But the walls we built won’t fall overnight. The skills we learned won’t vanish. The children we raised — they’ll remember how to build, how to fight, how to organize. The god gives us the *start*. What we do with it determines whether the ending matters."
Harsk said nothing. His jaw worked. The muscles along his muzzle twitched with the effort of holding something back — not words, but the instinct to argue with a logic that was frustratingly sound.
He turned and walked to the gate. Stopped. Didn’t look back.
"Eight days," he said.
"Eight days," Krug confirmed.
The alpha walked through the gate and into the evening. The golden light of the shrine caught his fur for a moment — just a moment — before the shadows took him.
***
Day twenty-five. Five days left.
Zephyr ran the projection.
[GRACE PERIOD — Status]
[Converted: 25/31 refugees (81%)]
[Remaining unconverted: 6 (Harsk + 5 Gnoll lieutenants)]
[Days remaining: 5]
[Projection: Unconverted will follow Harsk’s decision. Harsk’s decision: UNPREDICTABLE.]
Six believers. The loss was manageable — twenty-five successful conversions from the refugee wave had already exceeded his conservative projections. The believer count stood at ninety-five. FP income was stable at 558 per day. The military had absorbed three Gnoll males into the enforcer training pipeline. The Goblins were revolutionizing tunnel infrastructure under Nix’s direction. The humans were planting wheat that Zephyr’s Life domain passive was quietly accelerating.
He could let Harsk go.
The optimizer in him resisted. Harsk was an A-rank leader — natural charisma, combat experience, strategic instinct. His lieutenants were all B-rank combatants or higher. Seven military-grade assets walking out the gate would hurt. Not critically — the existing force structure could absorb the loss — but it was *waste*. Inefficiency. The thing that made Zephyr’s optimization instincts itch the way a misaligned spreadsheet made his old guild officers twitch.
He considered intervention. A miracle. A display of divine power so overwhelming that Harsk’s resistance would crumble under the weight of evidence. Zephyr had the FP for it. A Tremor Pulse — the Earth domain miracle — fired in the open camp would shake the ground for twenty meters and demonstrate power that no rational being could deny.
But that was the wrong play.
He’d learned this lesson in Theos Online. Year three of his career, during the server merge that had combined three competing deity databases into one continent. He’d watched Aurelius the Shining — a Major God, Rank 8, twelve million believers — lose half his population in a single month because he’d forced conversions through overwhelming displays of power. The believers converted out of fear. Fear generated Provisional-tier faith. Provisional believers broke first under pressure. When a rival god launched a modest offensive, Aurelius’s fear-converted frontline collapsed and the cascade took everything behind it.
Forced faith was brittle faith. The lesson had cost Aurelius four ranks and a continent. Zephyr had watched from his Rank 1 position and filed the data.
Some variables can’t be optimized. They can only be waited for.
The hardest lesson an optimizer ever learned. The one that separated the players who burned out at Rank 5 from the ones who reached Rank 1. Not everything responded to pressure. Not every system could be gamed. Sometimes the correct play was to set the conditions, present the evidence, and let the variable resolve itself — even if the resolution wasn’t the one you wanted.
Harsk would choose. His lieutenants would follow. The outcome would be whatever it was.
Zephyr set the monitoring flag and turned his attention to the thing that *could* be optimized: the Rank 2 threshold. Ninety-five believers. Five short of a hundred. The requirements would reveal themselves soon — and when they did, the next phase of the kingdom’s growth would begin, with or without seven Gnolls who couldn’t decide whether a god’s garden was worth the price of its fruit.
The faith graph climbed. The population counter ticked. And somewhere at the southern gate, a man who had watched one god die stood in the fading light and measured the distance between memory and hope.
Five days.
The clock ran.