LIGHTNOVELONLINE 26 – Invasion
While I was only focusing on getting more believers to get more divine power, I hadn't forgotten my goal for the test the school gave me.
The goal was not only for my kingdom to pass the test, but only the gods with the best kingdoms could pass the test, which meant that even if I lived in peace in my kingdom, if my kingdom wasn't one of the best, I could fail the test.
So it was important to arm and develop my kingdom better.
One of the advantages I had was that my kingdom was based on mages, mortals who had much more destructive power than mortal warriors.
This firepower that my kingdom had was something that would be extremely useful in the battles to come.
The problem was that just as mages had a great advantage with powerful firepower, they also had a great disadvantage in that they had fragile bodies, low mobility, and low stamina, which made it difficult for them to move around and attack other kingdoms...
That wasn't even the biggest problem the Arcantor Kingdom had militarily.
The biggest problem was that the country simply didn't have an army of warriors!
Since the wizards controlled the country and felt superior to the warriors, those with magical talents were often idolized and those with martial talents were often just ignored...
You could be a martial genius in Arcantor and no one would know about it, let alone care.
This was a big problem for me, because having an exclusive army of mages with extremely low mobility was terrible, and made me feel like Arcantor was a turtle.
The mages had very powerful attack power, but they couldn't get out of Arcantor easily, which made it very easy to defend the kingdom, but extremely difficult to invade other kingdoms, something I would definitely have to deal with in the future, or rather, as soon as possible.
If I just put it off, by the time I really needed the solution, it might be too late.
The more I thought about it, the harder it became to find a solution.
If I had an infinite deadline for this test, I wouldn't have a problem, because I could promote the development of a powerful army in Arcantor after years, especially since the security of the kingdom was guaranteed with the mages.
But since I didn't have that luxury, I had to find another way to invade other kingdoms...
To my surprise, while I was feeling all my believers to find someone who could give me inspiration, I noticed that one of the believers was very far away from the others...
When I turned my attention to him, I noticed that he was moving farther and farther away from the capital of Arcantor, apparently towards other cities!
When I took a closer look at this believer, I noticed that she was reading a book from the [Library] while sitting in a comfortable carriage, surrounded by private guards protecting her and several carts full of goods.
This believer was a merchant!
As time passed, I noticed that not only was she a believer, but all the guards around her were also Internet users, although they used it for much less time than she did.
From the amount of time she had been using it, I could tell that she was at least an apprentice mage.
Her merchant group's first stop was a small village 12 hours away from the capital of Arcantor.
The most surprising thing was that after she stopped in that village, four new believers appeared there.
And the next day, after she left that place, those 4 believers who stayed quickly became 8, then 16, then 32, and soon all 67 people in that small village had become my believers!
When I saw this happen, my eyes lit up as I looked at this young woman.
Just as I remembered from my previous world, where the church sent missionary groups to other places to convert people into believers of their religion, wasn't this believer doing exactly the same thing?
Considering that everywhere she went she was converting people into believers of the God of the Internet, she was doing exactly the same thing as the missionary groups.
What's more, what she was doing was completely disguised as a group of merchants who were just selling spices from one place to another for profit.
She may have just advertised the Internet to a few people in that small village because they were curious about the book she was holding and wanted to earn some Internet coins without too much effort.
There was something very famous in my previous world, something that many countries did to spread their influence in disguise.
Japan doing it with anime and manga, Korea doing it with music groups and TV dramas, and of course, the USA exporting all kinds of culture around the world.
To the point where every young girl knew about K-pop, every boy knew about anime, and every adult knew about rock stars and the American dream.
This export of culture not only internationalized the country, it also painted a very good image of that country to the people of another country and made those people dream of visiting those places or even moving there and leaving their original country.
Nowadays, Arcantor is already a benchmark kingdom for magic, many young people with magical talent risked long journeys to come to Arcantor to learn magic and change their lives, but that was all Arcantor had to offer before.
Fortunately, that had changed now, because there was also the Internet!
If Arcantor couldn't invade other kingdoms militarily, couldn't we invade other kingdoms culturally?
Winning believers in other kingdoms might count as an invasion in the eyes of the Teachers, right? After all, I would literally be stealing believers from other students and converting them into my believers.
With the Internet in other realms, I could even paint the image of Arcantor as something even better, and convince people to actually leave the realms they were living in to come and try life in Arcantor, just like the USA did with the American Dream.
Considering that my firepower was the lowest among the other gods, as I literally used 10 times more Divine Power for each attack, this was a great way to do it.
I was at a huge disadvantage in head-to-head battles, but of course, I was getting a lot more Divine Power than the other gods.
As long as I had 100,000 Divine Power points for a battle, I could theoretically fight a god of the same rank as me who had 10,000 Divine Power points.
There would be variables in this, as these gods were offensive deities, they could use even less Divine Power for attacks than I had imagined, or they could develop special attacks that would use the same Divine Power as me, but with a more powerful attack power.
I wasn't stupid enough to think that I knew everything and that I knew everything that was on the table when I faced other gods, so the best I could do was prepare for the worst.
And one of those preparations was more subtle invasions.
Instead of invading with an army of thousands of mages, I could invade with a simple trade caravan and conquer a country's population very quickly.
If one trade caravan could do that much damage, what could 5 caravans do? What could 10 caravans do? And even 100 caravans?
This discreet invasion was so tempting that I knew I had to do it, but if the gods of these kingdoms knew what was going on, their attack would be inevitable.
I could rely on Arcantor's mages to defend the kingdom from the army of the other kingdoms, but I could only rely on myself to defend the other god's kingdom, and the best way to do that was simply to accumulate as much divine power as possible and rise as high as possible.
If the god who wanted to invade me came as a Rank 2 Embryonic Divinity, and I was already a Rank 5 Embryonic Divinity with 500k points of Divine Power accumulated, what could that poor god do against me?
My disadvantage was that I spent 10 times more Divine Power on attacks than other gods, but my advantage was that as the God of Creativity, I could use creative attacks in many different ways, completely escaping the restriction that gods naturally had on their main element.
With my mind focused and centered on this small trading caravan, I decided to contact the girl leading the caravan and propose a deal.
There's nothing better for dealing with businessmen than a deal that could benefit them handsomely!
I just needed some time to perfectly plan my approach to get the most out of it, and of course, I would not fail to use my Big Data, or rather Small Data, as I would have to manually look up her data on the Internet to use this knowledge to my advantage to convince her.
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