Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 268: Convergence of Divergence (IV)

But even after they finally gave him the proper attention, their first reaction wasn’t hostile. There had been many challengers over the ages since they had ruled as Gods. The one in a million talents, of the already small subset of people who could latch onto faith and manipulate it, using it to grow their authority.

The Gods usually didn’t react hostile to such beings, first, because all the major authorities had been claimed for eons. And second, because these new divines could be brought under their wings, depending on the aspect of their authorities.

These new divines ended up as angels, swords, executioners, or even sons or daughters, depending on the God and the lore that surrounded them, adding new aspects to the God’s lore, and further solidifying their authority.

The Gods had thought Phineas to be the same. But they quickly realized how sorely wrong they were.

Phineas didn’t conform to any established authority. The authority he wielded wasn’t just some aspect of a greater authority... And neither was it something tangible like Thor’s thunder and strength, or Odin’s wisdom, or Hades’ dominion over the dead.

It was Error. The authority over the places where every other authority broke down.

Every God’s authority had exceptions it hadn’t been built to handle. Every rule to their authorities had a circumstance that was its flaw. A flaw that was usually tied to the very nature of the God themself. Phineas’ Error authority allowed him to find those flaws and move through them freely.

The Gods couldn’t bring him under their wings because the Error authority reached into all of their wings simultaneously. He wasn’t an aspect of any one of them. He was the flaw in all of them.

And so the wariness set in. Then the conferences.

Odin organized the response. He called the major Gods together and laid out what he saw: a being whose authority grew with every domain added to the divine order, because every domain was more rules and more exceptions to those rules and therefore more material for him to exploit. An authority with no natural ceiling.

Once Odin framed it clearly, the other Gods listened and came to the same conclusion, then developed a plan of action: To go after the Errant’s believers first.

The influence the other Gods had built over centuries was used to the fullest. They sent down divine educts to their priests and mouthpieces, and community by community, the stories attached to the Errant’s name were crowded out by louder and older ones, the Gods using their institutional weight to redirect faith at a pace slow enough that the people experiencing it didn’t fully understand what was happening.

One season there was less talk of the Errant in the markets. The next season his stories were being told with corrections attached. The season after that the corrections had become the standard version, and the season after that the name "Errant" produced blank looks in places where it had once produced recognition.

Finn watched the faith diminish and felt the memory of the sensation return. The connection thinning source by source. Normally, Phineas, the Errant in the memory, should have been panicking. A God losing their believers... their memory being erased from the world of men, was no small thing. If was in essence, a sentence to death.

No God could survive without believers. History had shown that clearly multiple times. Great and powerful Gods relegated to figures of myth simply because they no longer had worshippers, their authority reduced to nothing.

But Phineas had no such fear. Before the Gods had even begun to scheme against him, he’d begin taking steps. From the onset he’d always been a curious one, so it was no surprise that even after becoming a God, he was still delving into the core mechanics of Godhood. He kept asking the question, "why?"

From his perspective, building lore, and then faith to gain divinity didn’t explain why that could even work at all. Yes, it was only a select sunset of people that could do this at all... but why? Why only them? Why not others? What was the defining factor that separated people like him from normal Mundane humans?

He pondered on this for years even after gaining divinity and becoming a God.

And finally, after many trials and errors. Many spirals down different thought processes that bore no fruit. After many hypotheses and experimentation, he eventually came to an answer.

Consciousness.

Of every religion, over every era. Of every God, Goddess, and Pantheon, there was one thing that was common across all...

Ego death.

Or in simpler terms, surrendering oneself to the God in question. Defying all common sense, mortal inhibitions, and placing an absolute trust, body, soul and mind, to a God.

On the outside it seemed trivial and frankly bore no correlation to consciousness, but Phineas, after many years had come up with a theory:

The select rare few who could go on to become Gods were simply people who had an easier time defying the limits of their mortal consciousness.

Just like Finn had experienced in the trial of the Crimson Fist Tyrant, every consciousness was restricted to the form they originally bore. Human consciousness was confined to the limits of the human mind and senses, just like every other living — and non-living thing, as Finn had discovered.

But there were defiers.

People who could transcend such limits naturally. People who could see, hear, touch, feel... sense beyond the human limits.

These were people whose consciousness could tap into the greater consciousness that exists in every single thing, down to atoms.

These were people who later became sages, priests, renowned war prodigies, miracle makers... The form they came in differed, and so did the lore that followed them. But the commonality dwelled in the uniqueness of their consciousness... or in other words, their soul.

They gained more and more power by acting as convergence points for the wills of the lesser consciousnesses that couldn’t tap into the greater consciousness all around them by themselves.

This was faith, as discovered by Phineas.

Whether he was right or wrong, he didn’t know in full, until the Gods came and wiped out his believers. Erased his memory from the mouths of men.

He’d already attempted separating himself from the idea — the convergence of belief — that his believers had of him as the Errant.

And when the Gods finally made their move... he came to the conclusion that truly, faith and authority were two separate things.

The shock on the Gods’ faces when he still moved told the whole story.

In their thousands of years of ruling as Gods, they had never seen such a thing. A God stripped of believers, stripped of lore, stripped of every external source of authority, and still wielding power. Still standing. Still finding the gap in their coordinated strike and moving through it with the same totality as if nothing had been taken from him at all.

It froze them for just a moment. A single beat of collective disbelief from beings who had not been surprised in ages.

Phineas didn’t waste it.

He moved through the gap his Error authority had opened in their coordinated attack and escaped before any of them had recovered enough to give chase.

With his Error authority, he precisely inserted himself directly into the cycle of reincarnation, defying any sort of imagination they might’ve had as to where he’d escaped to. He slipped into the cycle the way he had always moved through flaws in structures, finding the point where the mechanism of the cycle met its own exception and passing through it without triggering the detection that would normally accompany such a transition.

Even Hades, whose dominion covered the cycle of reincarnation entirely, didn’t register the entry.

Then he was gone.

And immediately, the divine order of Earth erupted.