# Chapter 1: The D-Rank Twin Godly Kingdom
Deep in the night, mist clung to the cobblestones of Graystone Alley. At the top of a crumbling tenement on the city's fringe, a guttering gas lamp swayed in the draft seeping through the cracked windowpane. On a scarred oak table, silver-blue ancient runes glowed faintly along the channels of divine power. As the last wisp of pale gold divinity drained from Laia's fingertips and the final arcane character settled into place, the entire oracle array faded silently into the air.
She leaned back into her creaking leather chair and let out a long, slow breath.
Her gaze drifted to the irregular water stains spreading across the ceiling, and she fell quiet, lost in thought.
When had things ended up like this?
She could not remember clearly. All she knew was that her soul had drifted through the chaotic void for untold eons, her past shattered into fragments. Only a wisp of residual consciousness from the Ancient God of Silence had accompanied her when she descended into this world of deities. In her early years here, she had not yet forged a godly kingdom. Bearing the title of a half-baked deity, she could barely scrounge up enough to eat.
In this world woven from countless planes, gods stood at the apex of all living things.
They could forge their own exclusive godly kingdoms from the boundless chaos, sow the seeds of life within them, and draw power from the faith of their thriving subjects to condense into **divinity crystals**—the very foundation of a god's longevity, authority, and defense against void corruption. A mighty god could snuff out stars with a flick of a finger, yet this power was never a free gift.
Every god, upon reaching the age of eighteen, received one chance to attempt forging a godly kingdom. Those who succeeded walked the path of divinity; those who failed would never reach the heights of power. A godly kingdom was bound to its creator's very soul—they flourished together, and they fell together. Should a kingdom be shattered by the void tides, its deity would suffer severe damage, at best losing all cultivation, at worst being reduced to a **godservant**.
Godservants were those whose kingdoms had crumbled, or who had never managed to forge one at all. They retained strength far beyond that of mortal subjects, yet lost the means to sustain themselves independently. They could only swear fealty to more powerful deities, trading loyalty for shelter and a trickle of divinity to survive.
In plain terms, they were little more than high-ranking servants.
Yet even servitude required staying alive. Cut off from divinity crystals, a god's soul would slowly erode away in the void, until they fell from the divine realm and vanished without a trace. The stronger the god, the more terrible the cost: a first-rank god could survive ten days on a single divinity crystal; a second-rank god consumed one crystal per day; a third-rank god required ten times that amount. The higher the rank, the wider the gap grew. Only godservants, whose needs were one-tenth that of a full deity of the same rank, had the easier path—an escape route for down-on-their-luck deities.
Laia was currently a second-rank god, and her power was still quietly climbing, already brushing the threshold of the third rank.
The thought alone made her teeth ache.
For any god born into a divine bloodline, breaking through to a new rank would call for three days of feasting and celebration. For Laia, however, a rank advancement was nothing short of a disaster.
Orphaned and adrift, she knew all too well the vast gap between herself and the ancient divine clans that had thrived for thousands of years. She harbored no grand ambition to ascend to the throne of a God-Emperor. Her greatest wish was simply to muddle through life in peace. If worst came to worst, becoming a godservant would not be so bad—unflattering though the title was, a decent master could grant her a stable life for centuries. She had even heard that some benevolent chief deities granted their godservants entire planes to call home.
Unfortunately, an accident had derailed all her plans. Through a stroke of random luck, she had passed the selection and enrolled in the Yanhuang Imperial Academy of Divinity, the highest institution of the Yanhuang Empire.
The Yanhuang Empire was recognized as one of the mightiest empires in the divine realms, and its academy stood as the premier school for aspiring deities, boasting astonishing faculty and resources. Years ago, the empire uncovered rampant abuse within the academy: scions of powerful clans hoarded resources and bullied students of humble birth. After sweeping reforms, the academy strictly prohibited any discussion of family background on campus, with expulsion as the penalty for violations. It also created one special recruitment slot and five need-based admission spots for students from poor backgrounds.
The five need-based slots were open to applicants across the entire empire, overseen jointly by the imperial monarch and the great divine clans—scrupulously fair. The rules, however, were clear: students who failed to forge a godly kingdom after enrollment would receive a stipend and withdraw automatically.
In practice, these five slots had long been little more than a formality.
Bloodlines were a harsh barrier. Those born into the lower classes rarely succeeded in forging a godly kingdom at all; even when they did, their talents were usually mediocre, and they would soon be expelled for falling short of academic credits.
Laia was one of this year's five need-based students.
And her godly kingdom was rated the lowest possible rank: D.
Worse still, it was a rare twin godly kingdom.
Godly kingdoms were graded on five core metrics: barrier strength, initial territory, void corruption, resource abundance, and attribute potency. Ranks ran from SSS at the top down to D. A single metric at A-rank or above qualified a kingdom as top-tier, with a real shot at reaching God-Emperor status one day.
The stats of her twin kingdom were nothing short of a hellish starting hand:
- **Barrier Strength: D-Rank** — Fragile and brittle; it cracks under the slightest surge of the void tides.
- **Initial Territory: SS-Rank** — Vast and expansive, yet half consists of the eternal Umbral Realm. If left intact, racial conflict intensity will increase by 2000 percent.
- **Void Corruption: D-Rank** — Half the realm is perpetually shrouded in void mist, never to see the sun.
- **Resource Abundance: B-Rank** — Not barren, but far from prosperous.
- **Attribute Potency: A-Rank** — Inherited from an ancient deity's remnant power, with remarkable growth potential.
Staring at the wildly polarized stats, Laia had seethed through many a sleepless night.
Twin kingdoms held enormous growth potential in theory, but not when one half was the Umbral Realm. Creatures born there were imbued with a bloodthirsty battle instinct, ferocious in combat and driven by an almost obsessive craving for light. Left to grow strong, their first move would be to surge into the light half of the realm and slaughter every living thing there.
For any orthodox deity, the standard solution would be to purchase purification oracle cards, wipe out all life in the Umbral Realm, seal off that half of the kingdom, and focus on safe, steady growth on the light side.
The problem? Oracle cards cost divinity crystals.
A single low-grade purification card could erase only one thousand living beings. Clearing the entire Umbral Realm would cost a staggering number of crystals. Worse still, massacring one's own subjects temporarily shuts down the faith channel, creating a dry spell with zero income—no faith, no divinity, for days on end.
Following the orthodox path, she would starve to death long before she could even afford the cards, let alone survive the faith drought.
After much deliberation, Laia had thrown caution to the wind.
Drawing on the faint residual memories of the Ancient God of Silence in her soul, she had spent nearly a month of exhausting divine power, revising dozens of versions of runic scripts, until she had finally engineered a strange plant: the **Sun-Blessed Tree**. With soil, water, and a tiny amount of energy, these trees could glow steadily and emit warmth, casting a permanent, faint light over the endless night of the Umbral Realm. It had been just enough to balance the power between light and dark, ensuring neither side could overwhelm the other.
She had saved their lives, but a new problem soon followed.
By keeping the Umbral Realm and its inhabitants, she had doubled her total population—yet her faith conversion rate had plummeted by sixty percent.
To make matters worse, her D-rank barrier was so fragile that a void tide crashed against it every seven days. On the timescale of her kingdom, that was one apocalyptic wave every seven years.
Any other god would have poured crystals into reinforcing the barrier by now.
But Laia was poor.
Desperately poor. So poor that she had stumbled upon a ridiculous truth: the void tides, supposed to be an existential threat, had instead become a regular "hunting season" for every race in her kingdom. Void creatures had dense, high-calorie meat—excellent food. Their bones and shells could be forged into weapons and armor. Even the stray void energy seeping through sped up crop growth, turning barren soil into fields of grain and vines.
The very invasion she had dreaded had turned into the steady food supply that kept her entire kingdom alive.
But none of that was her biggest headache.
Laia tapped a finger in the air, and a full view of her godly kingdom unfolded before her.
The vast twin realm was split by a long, rugged mountain range. On one side lay sunlit plains and forests; on the other, dusky black earth and smoldering volcanoes. Six races thrived across the land: humans, elves, and dwarves on the Luminant side; demons, shadow-kind, and ancient dragons in the Umbral Realm.
By all logic, six such different races should have been at each other's throats long ago.
But poverty had a way of uniting everyone.
The pressure of survival outweighed every racial grudge. Even the light-fearing shadow-kind had to work with their neighbors across the mountains to survive each void tide. The shadow-kind needed grain from the light side to survive; dwarves traded forged weapons to demons for ore; even the proudest ancient dragons relied on humans to clear void bugs from around their lairs.
Everyone pulled together to get by.
No one, however, worshipped their god.
Laia stared at the pitifully low faith value on her status panel and fell silent for a long time.
The farming techniques, forging recipes, and Sun-Blessed Tree cultivation methods she sent down were all accepted gratefully by all six races, used masterfully, and often improved upon with their own innovations. But when it came to prayer and sacrifice? Humans were busy plowing fields, elves were busy tending saplings, dwarves were busy at their forges, demons were busy checking hunting gear, shadow-kind were busy catching up on sleep, and the dragons… the dragons were hibernating.
There was not a single regular prayer ritual to be found.
Occasionally, in a good harvest year, humans would leave two baskets of grain at the village edge, and dwarves would set down two newly forged shovels. They would mutter something about "good luck this year"—and who they were thanking was anyone's guess, but it certainly was not their rightful creator deity.
Strictly speaking, all hundreds of thousands of her subjects were false believers.
She was still lost in thought when a line of glaring scarlet warning text flashed across her status panel:
ALERT: Abnormal void fluctuations detected. Minor void tide expected in 72 hours. Advise immediate defensive preparations.**
Laia: "…"
Great. Here we go again.
She pushed herself up from the table, glanced at her meager remaining divinity reserves, then peeked over at the Umbral Realm—where demon clans were already sharpening their claws and the ancient dragon had lazily lifted one eyelid. Quietly, she picked up her bone rune pen.
Oh well.
Let them fight.
There would be extra rations afterward.
At the very least… she would not have to lift a finger herself.