Greed: All For What? - Chapter 1762: More Gambling.

If their believers don’t pray frequently, then they will be on their way to death. As it is, they had spent a little more than 600 DE in their fights. It is a little more than the total DE of a single clone and about 12.8% of their total DE. That expenditure was just in a few hours of fighting, but they are already running out of prayers to replenish it.

As it is, they can only look forward to the evening prayers to get another bump in their supply of prayers. They may have a lot of DE between them, but they won’t be able to replenish it if their expenditure increases more than their current rate.

It is because while they have access to each other’s DE, they have the same believers. A single god would be content with the amount of prayers they are getting, but it is not nearly enough for 9 of them.

Legion-9 said with optimism, “At the very least, we should be getting more prayers soon. War always increases the faith of believers.”

Legion-1 didn’t agree. He said, “But we should not prioritize prayers above our believers. War will cause us to lose more believers than prayers if we are not careful.”

Legion-9 insisted, “Even so, war is the only way to get believers quickly. The alternative is to wait for childbirth and the maturity of the next generation before we can harness their faith. On the other hand, we can gain new believers by stealing them through war. The boon to prayers is just a side effect.”

Legion-5 suggested, “Authority is powerful, but divinity cannot be neglected either. It rendered about half of our Authority useless and rendered the Authority of others completely useless.”

This led to a discussion on what their next plans should be. They have learned a lot from their fights, apart from the material gain that they earned. For one, they know what it means to have a fight where both sides lose something.

They won the skirmish with the god seeds that ambushed them by a landslide. Their enemies didn’t manage to hit them once because they protected themselves with Divine Shield. But they still lost DE because of it. It is something that having a lot of divinity in Endurance would have prevented.

On the other hand, their enemies had more Divinity than them, but they lost badly because their Authority was severely lacking.

The importance of Authority is clear. Unfortunately, they have reached a plateau for it. They can’t gain more in a short amount of time without resorting to drastic actions that might lead to them losing the amount of Authority they have currently. To gain more Authority is to gamble the ones they have.

Divinity is not exempted from that risk either. The god seeds that they killed lost half of their divinity when they died. They could have gained more of they had won, but they lost the gamble.

Their saving grace is that their Authority is intact. As long as their believers don’t know that their gods are weak, their Authority will not reduce even if they die over and over again.

Now Legion is on an edge. They want to maintain their advantage in Authority so they are getting their tribe ready for war. It is a gamble that they might lose and therefore lose their advantage in Authority. It is a dilemma that every god must face.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions. What’s more, it might affect their goal of acquiring divinity and divine crystals because chasing after one will take up their time and energy to acquire the other others.

Killing gods doesn’t drop divine crystals, and killing beasts doesn’t drop divinity. They had asked their angel why divine beasts as divine creatures don’t drop divinity. It had said that the divinity of the slain beasts was taken or stolen from them.

They can’t do anything to stop that. So they have to decide to pursue and prioritize either one.

They need divinity badly because they are running out of prayers. If they use Divine Energy the way they just did, they will run out of Divine Energy very soon and die. Until they find other ways to acquire Divinity, killing other gods is what they have to do.

The clones understand the importance of divinity and also realize how easier it would be for them to acquire Divine crystals if they had a lot of Divinity. Unfortunately, pursuing Divinity means they will have to delay the acquisition of Divine crystals, which might be detrimental to their goal of being the first 100 godlings.

They were bouncing ideas off each other when they heard an announcement throughout Gemmis.

-Regional Announcement.

-Congratulations to Crystal Hoard for being the 1st Godling in the Northern Realm.

-The ranking list is now available.

The clones heard that and made up their minds. They have realized that nothing is certain. Everything is a gamble. Any decision they make might make them lose out on something else. They can only do their best. That means they have to utilize their advantage over other gods.

Currently, their advantage is their high Authority and their ability to share divine energy with each other. They gained the advantage of Authority because they stayed longer in the mortal realm. That means the god seeds who are currently in the mortal will take away their advantage when they ascend. So they are running out of time to fully utilize their advantage.

The best thing to do to make sure that they are not rendered obsolete when that happens is to have a lot of divinity to resist divine spells. So they are going to use their current advantage over Authority to acquire Divinity first.

The next thing they decided on was not to make the same mistakes that the other god seeds make. The group of 10 that attacked them were working together. Their cooperation was good, and it worked well for them as they divided the divinity they earned evenly between each of them. This made them strong as a group. But Legion is not going to do that.