Greed: All For What? - Chapter 1783: Protection Donation.

“Take note that the divinity is not just to defend myself against the ancient titans. It will also strengthen me enough to defend against any other threat that gets close to the divine city. I might not know how much divinity you have to give me to strengthen me enough to defeat the titan that is currently waking up, but I know for certain that there will be other threats in the future other than the ancient titans.”

“So now we will vote. You will decide how much I am worth to you. If you are ready to live outside in the wild without my protection, then you can disregard my safety. You can also disregard my safety if you are sure that you can defeat the ancient titan. We will always have this vote when a new threat appears or a new ancient titan awakens.”

A list appeared in front of the gods. It started from 1 divinity to 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 up to 1,000,000. Each god had to vote starting from the first amount on the list. If the majority votes for it, then it will pass. Then the vote on the next amount will be tallied.

Every god had to vote on every amount. There was no option to abstain. Those who refused to vote automatically voted against it. The highest amount that passes will be the amount that every god has to give.

Legion-1 voted for 1, 10, and 100. As for the rest, he voted against them. They were just too expensive for him.

He would like to vote for 1,000, but Legion doesn’t have that kind of divinity. Even though all nine of them are counted as one god, 1,000 divinity is still not something they can give monchalantly.

1,000 divinity is the maximum amount of divinity that godlings and other god seeds can have. It is also 10 levels for true gods. So it is a lot to give. They also don’t think the other gods will be able to afford 1,000 divinity. Especially since most of the gods in Gemmis are godlings. The vote was announced after a minute. Gemmis summarized it for everyone to hear: “The call to contribute 1 divinity passed. 10 divinity passed. 100 divinity also passed. But 1,000 didn’t pass, and the rest didn’t either. So it is decided. Every god in Gemmis must contribute 100 divinity in less than 24 hours or lose the services of Gemmis.”

The bell rang again. This time it rang for three times. The third time was the loudest.

It didn’t come to Legion as a surprise that the gods agreed on 100. Everyone here is a true god who is the leader of other gods. 100 divinity is not a problem for them. It is literally one level to them. They can all afford it, and to a certain extent, so can the godlings.

“Now for the fourth and last agenda item for today’s session. The matter of the protection range of Gemmis. There have been many complaints by gods to extend the protection of Gemmis into its surroundings so that it will be easily accessible. The complaints state that the four gates are an inadequate channel of access to Gemmis.”

“So we are to vote to extend the zone of non-violence into the surrounding area or vote to keep the arrangement we currently have.”

Legion-8 and every other god were presented the option to make the surroundings of Gemmis, specifically the area 10 meters away from its walls, fall under its protections.

This is important because, despite Gemmis being already large enough, the only way to get access to it is through its gates. Those same gates can be blocked or stalked.

So if someone is returning from a hunt, weakened and near death, others can take advantage of them by waiting at the gates. But if the protection is extended beyond the walls of Gemmis, the gods won’t need to return to Gemmis anymore to gain its protection.

And those who like to ambush gods will have to seal off Gemmis completely to do so. That is currently impossible to do.

Legion-1 thought to himself, “This will change the dynamics of hunting.”

As an efficient hunter who thinks taking advantage of others is good, he would like to keep the current system. But as someone who might end up in the position of the hunted, the extended protection is welcomed.

He ultimately decided to vote for the extension. It is because he is not doing much hunting recently, and he would like to make things difficult for those who hunt.

It might be a shortsighted decision, but he believes that if he can’t have something, no one else should have it either. In this case, if he can’t ambush gods to take advantage of them, then no one should be able to.

Gemmis spoke to them after a minute of voting, “The votes have come in. 735 voted for it. 212 voted against it. 55 abstained. The vote to extend the protection has passed.”

This came as a surprise to him. He didn’t expect such a large majority to vote for the extension. He was thinking about it as the bell rang four times.

“I guess everyone cares about their safety more than I thought.”

What he didn’t know was that the true gods have stopped using hunting to acquire divinity. They don’t even hunt for divine beasts anymore. This is because the stakes have become too high.

Hunting for anything right now means losing the protection of Gemmis and risking death at the hands of stronger gods. Losing half of their divinity is not something they can recover from easily considering that the half of level 100 is 5,000 divinity. That’s already five times the total divinity of Godlings.

This heavy loss is why there was an unspoken arrangement not to attack each other randomly when they go out to hunt. But that didn’t work because of gods like Crystal Hoard, who likes attacking anything in sight whether they were gods or divine beasts.