Chapter 42: Census
Six months since the first fire.
Zephyr ran the second Census on a morning in late autumn, when the swamp’s ash-colored mist hung low over Ashenveil and the wheat fields gleamed gold under the pale sun. The miracle cost 100 FP — the same as before. The data it returned was a different civilization.
[CENSUS — Territory of the Grand Ordinator (Ashenveil)]
[Date: Month 6, Day 4]
[Population: 131 believers + 5 non-believer defenders = 136 total residents]
The numbers told one story. The details told another.
In six months, the settlement had changed in ways that no single statistic captured. The original camp — the clearing near the river where the first tents had stood — was unrecognizable. Stone buildings had replaced every temporary structure. Aldric’s masons had built twelve permanent residences, a granary, a tool shed, and a bathhouse that the humans had insisted on and the lizardmen had found confusing but not objectionable. The streets — they had streets now, packed-earth paths between buildings, laid out by Skrit’s engineering crew with the meticulous attention to drainage gradients that Kobolds brought to every horizontal surface — connected the residential quarter to the Chapel, the Chapel to the forge, the forge to the fields.
The Kobold tunnel network had reached its defensive completion. Fourteen primary corridors, six emergency escape routes, three storage chambers with three weeks of preserved food. Every building in Ashenveil had a tunnel access point — some obvious (the main entrances, marked with Kobold script), some hidden (behind false walls, under hearthstones, inside closets). The town could be evacuated underground in four minutes. Skrit had timed it. Twice.
The forge had expanded. A second crucible — built by Kera, the Gnoll blacksmith — stood beside the Potter’s original Hearth. Production capacity had doubled, and the cinnaite supply, carefully rationed by Nix’s allocation schedule, was sustaining a steady output of three stonesteel ingots per week. Every enforcer now carried stonesteel primary weapons. The agricultural teams worked with stonesteel tools that turned plowing from a two-day ordeal into a half-day task.
The wheat harvest had happened.
Not the accelerated growth that Genesis Bloom produced year-round — the actual harvest. The reaping of the first full crop, planted in spring and grown through summer and cut in autumn by humans and lizardmen working side by side with stonesteel sickles. The grain was milled in a stone mill that Aldric had built in three days, and the flour was baked into bread by a human woman named Fen who had been a baker’s apprentice in her old life and who cried when the first loaf came out of the clay oven because it tasted like the bread her mother had made before the god war took everything.
The settlement ate bread for the first time. Hot. Fresh. The smell filling the Chapel during evening prayer, drifting through the streets, reaching the southern gate where Harsk stood his watch and smelled something he hadn’t smelled in years. Civilization.
***
The second generation of enforcers graduated on the same week.
Vark’s training program had produced its second cohort — eight fighters drawn from across all five races. Four lizardmen, two Gnolls, one Kobold, one human. Each one trained in the combined-arms doctrine that Vark had been developing since the Burrow Strike’s inception: formation fighting, coordinated retreats, tunnel extraction, and the stonesteel weapon techniques that required different muscle memory than iron combat.
The human was a surprise. A young man named Soren — one of the third-wave refugees, quiet, lean, unremarkable in every physical dimension. In a Gnoll-dominated fighting force, he should have been relegated to support roles. Instead, Vark had identified something in the boy’s combat testing that transcended species: timing. Soren’s ability to read an opponent’s movement and position himself ahead of it was instinctive, precise, and completely unteachable. Vark had tested him against Gnoll enforcers twice his size and watched the boy slip every charge, counter every lunge, and land strikes on joints and gaps that larger fighters left exposed by the physics of their own mass.
Soren became the first human enforcer. His stonesteel sword was shorter than the lizardman standard — fitted for a human grip and a human fighting style that prioritized speed and precision over the brute-force chopping that reptilian physiology favored.
The military now numbered forty-eight combat-capable fighters. Twenty blessed enforcers — twelve originals and eight new graduates. Six Gnoll defenders under Harsk. The rest were combat-trained civilians who could form a militia in emergencies.
Zephyr assessed the force against his threat models. Against bandits or raiders: overwhelming. Against a Minor God’s strike force: competitive. Against Demeterra’s army, even depleted: inadequate. The math was better. It still wasn’t good enough.
But the curve was moving.
***
Zephyr’s internal assessment ran parallel to the Census data — the strategic overlay that no mortal could see, no believer could access, the gamer’s analysis running beneath the god’s day-to-day management like a background process on a server.
He compared his progress to the Theos Online benchmarks he’d memorized years ago.
Average Rank 2 god at six months: 50-80 believers, one to two races, basic stone walls, iron weapons, single-industry economy. Average FP income: 400-600/day.
The Grand Ordinator at six months: 131 believers, five races, stone buildings, stonesteel weapons, three-industry economy (forge, agriculture, construction), Kobold tunnel network, professional military, and a divine economy running at 1,100 FP per day after all Authority bonuses.
He was running ahead of every curve he’d ever seen. Faster than Park’s legendary Korean rush. Faster than the top-ranked guilds’ coordinated starts. Faster than the theoretical models he’d built for his strategy guides.
Nix had compiled her own census — independent of the divine one, built from ledger entries and personal observation rather than miracles and system data. Her leather tally sheets now filled three shelves, and her quarterly summary had been delivered to Krug with the brisk efficiency of an auditor presenting findings to a board.
"Production output: tripled since month two. Food surplus: four months at current consumption. Forge output: three ingots per week, sustainable. Stone construction: twelve structures complete, two in progress. Population growth rate: six percent per month, declining — we’re running out of refugees." She’d paused. "That last one is a problem. I can grow our economy, but I can’t grow our population from inside. New people come from outside. And outside has stopped sending them."
She was right. And she didn’t know the half of why.
But the ceiling was visible.
[RANK 3 — MINOR GOD]
[Requirements: (Estimated)]
[— Believer count: 500]
[— FP cost: 50,000]
[— Defining Act: Establish formal diplomatic contact or territorial engagement with at least one other god]
[— Territory: Must extend beyond single biome]
The first two requirements were achievable. At current growth rates, 500 believers was eighteen months away. FP reserves would accumulate in parallel — the Authority flywheel’s geometric scaling would produce 50,000 FP in surplus within the same timeframe.
The third requirement was the problem.
Establish formal diplomatic contact or territorial engagement with at least one other god.
He couldn’t stay hidden. Couldn’t stay the invisible settlement in the swamp that nobody noticed and nobody cared about. Rank 3 required *interaction* — the system demanding that a god prove it could operate in the political ecosystem, not just grow in isolation. The Defining Act wasn’t a building or a battle. It was a handshake or a punch. Diplomacy or war. Either way, exposure.
The fourth requirement compounded it. *Extend beyond single biome.* The swamp was finite. To grow, he needed to claim territory beyond it — hill terrain, forest, plains. Territory that other gods might already hold, or covet, or notice.
The window of invisibility had been closing since Rank 2 made the territory claim visible on the divine map. Rank 3 would blow the window open.
But not yet. Not today. Today, build. Tomorrow, build more. And the day after that, build until hiding stops being an option and being visible stops being a death sentence.
***
The god war update arrived through the divine sense like a weather report from a distant storm.
The tremors had changed. For months, the seismic signatures from the south had been constant — the background radiation of two gods hammering each other with miracles, their armies clashing and retreating and clashing again in the grinding attrition that made divine warfare so costly and so slow. The tremors had been Zephyr’s weather vane, his dashboard indicator for Demeterra’s engagement level, the metric that told him how much time he had left.
The weather was changing.
The tremors had intensified three weeks ago. Then they’d become irregular — spikes and silences, the pattern of a war entering its terminal phase. One side was spending everything. The other side was absorbing the assault and refusing to break. The desperation was audible in the frequency data — miracles fired at rates that burned through FP reserves faster than any sustainable economy could replenish.
Someone was losing. Badly.
The refugees had stopped coming. For five months, a thin trickle of displaced civilians had arrived at Ashenveil’s borders — ones and twos, small families, the steady leak of a population being squeezed between two armies. Thirty-one new believers had come from this stream. But three weeks ago, the stream dried up. No new arrivals. No distant stragglers. The road south was empty.
That meant the front line had moved. The fighting was no longer in the buffer zone between territories — it had pushed deeper into one side’s claimed land. The refugees who hadn’t left already were trapped behind active battle lines.
Zephyr monitored the data with the patience of an analyst reading a stock chart during a crash. The war’s conclusion was approaching. When it ended, the winner would look up from the battlefield and survey the board. And the board would show, in clear digital text, a Rank 2 territory claim in the northern swamp held by a god named the Grand Ordinator.
The clock was always ticking. Now it was ticking louder.
On the seventh day of late autumn, Zephyr’s divine sense — ranging five kilometers beyond the territory boundary — detected a signature at the southern edge of his perception.
Not a refugee. The movement pattern was wrong — too deliberate, too systematic, the careful traverse of someone mapping terrain rather than fleeing through it. The figure moved along the territory boundary without crossing it, pausing at regular intervals, the methodical behavior of a professional.
A scout.
Zephyr tracked the figure for three hours. The scout circled the southern boundary — staying outside the territory claim, moving through the unclaimed terrain between Ashenveil and the distant war zone. Well-armed. Well-fed. Wearing leather armor that was standardized — not cobbled together from scavenged pieces, but uniform, produced by a forge that equipped many people in the same style.
This was not a random survivor. This was an employee.
The divine sense couldn’t identify the scout’s affiliation — no divine marker, no blessing signature. Just a mortal. But a mortal walking the edge of a god’s territory with the practiced confidence of someone who’d done this before, for someone who expected a report.
Someone has noticed us.
Not Demeterra. The scout’s approach vector was from the southeast — the wrong angle for Demeterra’s territory, which lay directly south. This was a third party. A Minor God, probably. One of the dozen smaller deities whose territories dotted the borderlands, exploiting the chaos of the god war to expand their own information networks.
Routine cartography. A scout mapping the region’s current territorial claims during a period of upheaval. Standard intelligence work. And the map now included a data point that hadn’t existed six months ago: The Grand Ordinator — Rank 2 — Northern Swamp.
The scout lingered for two more hours. Then turned south and walked away.
Zephyr watched the thermal signature recede until it passed beyond his divine sense range.
The window had cracked. Not broken — not yet. But someone’s map now showed Ashenveil’s outline. Someone’s report would mention a Rank 2 claim in a swamp that should have been empty. And someone’s god would read that report and make a decision about whether a Rank 2 neighbor was interesting, irrelevant, or dangerous.
The invisible settlement is no longer invisible.