Chapter 39: New Blessings
Zephyr spent the first day after the upgrade the way he’d spent the first day of every major power spike in Theos Online: reading the manual.
The Authority domain tree was larger than he’d expected. Not in breadth — the blessing count was modest compared to Forge or Life, which had sprawling trees with dozens of nodes. Authority was narrow. Five blessings, two miracles, three passives. But each one was a multiplier, and multipliers interacted with each other in ways that made the total greater than the sum of parts.
He started with the passives.
Mandate was already active — the faith-stabilization effect that dampened doubt without eliminating it. Zephyr had deployed it territory-wide during the Rank 2 completion, a blanket effect that covered every believer within the Chapel’s extended range. The effect was invisible. No golden glow, no divine pulse. Just a settling — the way a building stopped creaking after its foundations cured. Every believer’s faith became fractionally more resistant to erosion.
The data confirmed it. Faith tier fluctuations — the micro-shifts between Provisional and Casual, between Casual and the unnamed tier above it — had smoothed. The graph line, which normally jagged like a heartbeat monitor, had flattened into a gentle curve. Believers weren’t becoming more faithful. They were becoming more *stable*.
Sovereign’s Presence was the FP generator. The fifteen percent stacking bonus was already compounding with the Chapel’s existing fifty FP/day passive, producing income numbers that made the optimizer in him lean forward.
[FP INCOME BREAKDOWN — Day 1 Post-Upgrade]
[Base generation (100 believers): 558/day]
[Chapel passive: +50/day]
[Rank 2 scaling: +50/day]
[Sovereign’s Presence (+15% to all believers in range): +84/day]
[Total: 742/day]
[Projected at 120 believers: 920+/day]
[Projected at 150 believers: 1,200+/day]
The exponential curve was alive. Every new believer added to the base, and Authority’s percentage bonus amplified the addition. At scale, the numbers became absurd. At five hundred believers, his daily income would exceed what most Rank 3 gods generated. At a thousand, he’d be producing FP at a rate that Rank 4 gods would notice and envy.
The flywheel he’d designed in Theos Online — the theoretical model that had never been tested because no player at Rank 1 had the patience to pick Authority over War — was spinning in reality for the first time.
Now the blessings.
***
Crown’s Voice went on Krug first.
The blessing was targeted — unlike the passives, which blanketed the territory, Crown’s Voice required direct deployment on an individual. Cost: 150 FP. Effect: amplified the target’s natural leadership qualities by thirty percent. Not mind control. Not charisma injection. Enhancement — the same way Stoneskin enhanced physical durability, Crown’s Voice enhanced the intangible quality that made people listen when certain individuals spoke.
Krug was in the Chapel when Zephyr deployed it.
The Handler didn’t feel a dramatic change. No surge of power, no golden aura. The effect was subtler — a deepening of the quality that had always been there. When Krug spoke, his words had always carried weight because he chose them carefully and delivered them honestly. Crown’s Voice didn’t change what he said. It changed how far the words traveled, how deeply they landed, how long they echoed in the listener’s awareness.
Through the upgraded bond, Zephyr explained: *This blessing doesn’t make you louder. It makes you more yourself. The version of you that people already trust — amplified. Use it the way you use everything else. Carefully.*
Krug’s response came back as an impression rather than words — the feel of a man receiving a tool and immediately weighing its ethical implications before considering its practical applications. The priest understood that a blessing which made people listen harder was a responsibility, not a weapon.
Good. That’s why he got it first.
Vark was next.
The military commander received the blessing during a training session — standing at the edge of the drill field, watching three enforcer squads run the Burrow Strike formation with the critical attention of a man who saw flaws the way surgeons saw incisions. The Crown’s Voice deployment was invisible to the enforcers. What they noticed, starting that afternoon, was that their commander’s corrections felt *clearer*. Instructions that had previously required repetition landed on the first delivery. Tactical adjustments communicated during drills were absorbed faster, retained longer, executed more precisely.
Vark didn’t know he’d been blessed. He didn’t need to know. The improvement registered as professional satisfaction — the relief of a teacher whose students had suddenly become better at learning.
Zephyr considered deploying Crown’s Voice on Nix. The Goblin’s unofficial role as resource manager would benefit enormously from enhanced authority — fewer arguments with craftsmen, faster compliance with allocation decisions, smoother logistics across every department.
He decided to wait. Nix’s authority wasn’t divine — it was earned, through competence, through the relentless precision of her data tracking, through the quiet menace of a Goblin who could tell you exactly how much you’d wasted and make you feel it in your bones. Amplifying that artificially might actually weaken it. Nix’s people listened to her because she was *right*, not because she was blessed. If they started listening because Crown’s Voice made her words hit harder, the foundation of her authority shifted from competence to magic, and magic could be revoked.
Leave Nix organic. She’s more effective without divine augmentation than most leaders are with it.
The decision wasn’t efficient. It was correct.
***
Steadfast went on the weak points.
The faith economy had a vulnerability that Zephyr had been tracking since the first Provisional-tier conversions: the bottom rung. Provisional believers — the ones who believed because they’d seen evidence, not because they’d felt something — were structurally fragile. Their faith was rational, conditional, tied to outcomes rather than conviction. In a crisis — a siege, a famine, a visible failure of divine protection — Provisional believers broke first. Their doubt cascaded upward, infecting Casual-tier believers, creating a chain reaction that could collapse an entire faith structure in days.
Zephyr had seen it happen in Theos Online. A Rank 5 goddess named **Lysandra the Evergreen** had lost sixty percent of her population in a single week when a rival god’s raid destroyed her primary temple. The physical damage was repaired in three days. The faith damage took two years to recover, because the temple’s destruction had shattered the belief of every Provisional-tier follower simultaneously, and the cascade had eaten through her Casual tier before stabilizers could be deployed.
Steadfast was the stabilizer.
The blessing targeted individual believers — cost 80 FP per deployment, permanent effect. It reduced faith decay during crises by fifty percent. Not elimination — reduction. The fear still existed. The doubt still whispered. But Steadfast inserted a buffer between the doubt and the decision to leave. It gave believers a reason to wait, to hold, to not make permanent choices based on temporary circumstances.
Zephyr deployed it systematically.
The mother whose child had been saved — she was Casual tier, mid-range, her faith born from gratitude rather than calculation. Steadfast settled into her belief structure and her tier ticked. Not immediately — over the course of three days, as the blessing integrated and the baseline stabilized. Casual to Devout. The highest natural tier below the Handler’s unique classification.
[FAITH TIER UPGRADE — Mara (Human)]
[Casual → Devout]
[Daily FP contribution: 10 → 25]
[Note: Tier change attributed to Steadfast stabilization + organic faith growth. Blessing did not CREATE faith — it prevented existing faith from being undermined by ambient doubt.]
The distinction mattered. Steadfast didn’t manufacture belief. It protected belief that already existed. The mother’s faith had been growing since day eight — each morning prayer, each interaction with blessed enforcers, each harvest of impossibly fast wheat had deposited another layer of genuine conviction. But the layers had been eroding at the edges — the quiet, constant appetite of doubt, the human mind’s inability to accept the miraculous without questioning it. Steadfast plugged the erosion. The existing faith held, and without the constant leaking, it accumulated faster.
Zephyr deployed Steadfast on fourteen more believers over the next three days. All Provisional or low-Casual. All showing the early signs of faith instability — the micro-fluctuations that his expanded divine sense could now detect in granular detail. Each deployment cost 80 FP. Total investment: 1,200 FP. Total faith stabilization: enough to prevent a crisis cascade that could cost him two thousand FP per day in lost income.
Insurance. The optimizer approved.
***
Day seven post-upgrade. Zephyr ran the first Census.
The miracle cost 100 FP and produced a dataset that his interface organized into the cleanest report he’d seen since leaving Theos Online.
[CENSUS — Territory of the Grand Ordinator]
[Population: 103 believers + 6 non-believer defenders = 109 total residents]
[Racial Composition:]
[Lizardmen: 42 (including 11 Cradle-generation adults)]
[Gnolls: 19 (13 believers, 6 defenders)]
[Kobolds: 18]
[Humans: 15]
[Goblins: 9]
[Faith Distribution:]
[Devout: 4 (Krug, Mara, 2 elder lizardmen)]
[Casual: 47]**
[Provisional: 52]
[Military:]
[Ironscale Enforcers: 12 (Stoneskin-blessed, stonesteel-armed)]
[Scout Division: 4 (Runt, Pip, 2 Gnoll scouts)]
[Gnoll Defenders (unblessed): 6]
[Combat-rated civilians: ~20]
[Total effective combat force: 42]
[Economic:]
[Forge Hearth (Tier 2): Operational. Stonesteel partial production.]
[Agricultural sector: 3 wheat fields (accelerated), 1 vegetable plot, fishing]
[Kobold tunnel network: 14 corridors, 3 storage chambers, 2 escape routes]
[Chapel (Tier 2): Active. +50 FP/day. Faith concentration zone.]
[FP Economy:]
[Income: 803/day (base + Chapel + Authority passives)]
[Reserve: 4,211 FP]
[Burn rate: ~150/day (blessing maintenance, passive effects)]
[Net daily surplus: 653 FP]
[Strategic Assessment: STRONG]
[Growth rate exceeds projected curve by 14%.]
[Warning: Territory claim visible at Rank 2. Exposure risk increasing.]
Eight hundred FP per day. Net surplus of 653 after costs. At this rate, the reserve would rebuild to pre-upgrade levels within a week and hit five digits within a month.
The Census was a snapshot. A freeze-frame of a civilization in motion. But the freeze-frame showed Zephyr something that the daily trickle of incremental data sometimes obscured: the macro trend.
Three months ago, this was a village of thirty lizardmen with iron weapons and a fire on a rock.
Now it was a multi-racial settlement of 109 people with a Chapel, a forge, an agriculture sector, a professional military, an underground tunnel network, and a divine economy growing at geometric rates.
***
Harsk watched the enforcers train.
He sat on the low wall beside the drill field — the perimeter wall he’d helped build, stone he’d carried, mortar he’d mixed. His iron axe lay across his knees. The weight was familiar. Comfortable. The weight of a weapon that didn’t come from a god and couldn’t be taken away by one.
The enforcers were running the Burrow Strike. Vark stood at the center of the field, calling adjustments with the clipped precision that had always defined his command style — except today the corrections were different. Sharper. The commander’s words landed harder, carried further, cut through the noise of the drill with an authority that hadn’t been there two days ago.
Harsk didn’t know about Crown’s Voice. He didn’t know that the blessing existed, or that it had been deployed, or that the commander he was watching had been enhanced by the same divine machinery he’d refused. What he knew was what his eyes told him: the enforcers were better. Faster. Their skin hardened more visibly when struck during sparring — the Stoneskin effect that he’d observed for months, now noticeably stronger, the stone-grey flush spreading across scales with a speed and completeness that hadn’t been there before.
The god had gotten stronger. The blessings had gotten stronger. The gap between blessed and unblessed had widened.
Harsk looked at his iron axe. Good iron. Potter-forged. The best the settlement could produce for someone who wouldn’t accept divine materials. It was adequate. The word Aldric used — adequate. The minimum standard below which you didn’t go and above which you didn’t bother, when you were building something that only needed to function rather than excel.
His lieutenants were scattered through the settlement. Reth — the one who’d slipped away in the night, whose Provisional conversion was a secret that Harsk couldn’t acknowledge because acknowledging it meant acknowledging that his pack was splitting further — was at the southern gate. The others were working. Carrying stone. Hauling water. Earning the roof over their heads with labor that would never be enhanced, speed that would never be blessed, hands that would always be exactly as strong as biology made them and no more.
A Gnoll adolescent crossed the drill field — one of the converted pack members, a young male whose Stoneskin blessing had been deployed three weeks ago. Harsk watched him move. The boy was faster than he should have been. Stronger. His reactions during the drill were a half-second ahead of what Gnoll reflexes should produce at his age.
The blessings were changing his pack from the inside. The converted Gnolls were becoming something that the unconverted Gnolls would never be. Not better — *different*. Enhanced along a trajectory that diverged from the natural Gnoll baseline with every passing week.
Harsk had seen this before. Different god. Different blessings. Same trajectory.
He tightened his grip on the iron axe. Stood. Walked to the southern gate, where the work was honest and the weapons were adequate and the only thing a man owed was his labor.
The drill continued behind him. The enforcers improved. And the gap widened.
***
Zephyr reviewed the military data. Forty-two combat-capable fighters, twelve of them blessed. Against what? Demeterra’s army was thousands strong — even depleted by war, she commanded forces that would overwhelm the settlement’s defenses in days. A direct confrontation was still suicide. The math hadn’t changed.
But the math was changing *faster* than expected.
The exponential curve was the weapon. Not the enforcers, not the stonesteel, not the formations. The curve itself — the Authority-amplified growth rate that turned each passing month into a larger multiplier. Every day Demeterra didn’t notice was a day the gap between "rounding error" and "strategic problem" narrowed.
Time was the currency. Authority was the interest rate.
Zephyr closed the Census and turned his attention south. The divine sense — expanded, sharpened, reaching five kilometers beyond the territory boundary — detected what it always detected: the faint tremors of the god war. Ground vibrations. Displaced wildlife. The echo of miracles fired at targets too far away to identify.
The war was still raging. Demeterra was still busy.
And every day she stayed busy was a day the Grand Ordinator grew.