Extreme Cold Era: Shelter Don't Keep Waste-Chapter 938 - 159_2

Long before setting out, they had reached a consensus—the Empire's homeland must not be left defenseless!

The claws of the Ancient Gods are omnipresent. If the Floating City or main fleet were deployed southward, who could guarantee that enemies lurking in the shadows wouldn't seize the opportunity to assault the Northern Territory?

Perfikot would rather bear the full pressure on the front line alone than allow the Empire's heartland to be exposed to danger.

Therefore, Sanderion did not rush to send the Floating City modules south but instead focused on another matter—how to provide truly effective support for Perfikot without weakening the Empire's homeland defenses.

Perhaps the answer doesn't lie in dispatching more troops, but in creating a brand new force, a proposal that could support Perfikot without compromising the Empire's homeland defense line.

She slowly raised her head, her gaze passing through the glass dome of the high tower, looking toward the southern sky shrouded in sandstorms, and muttered quietly, "Perfikot, how much longer can you hold on? And how can we help you?"

If Sanderion's worries reached Perfikot's ears, this young Empire Regent would likely just respond with a faint sentence: "Taking care of yourselves is the greatest help to me."

To her, the stability of the Empire's homeland is the most crucial backing. After all, if the rear falls, the achievements she gains on the front lines would be meaningless.

Through months of forced evangelism and oppressive rule, the New God's faith has already spread throughout the Desert Kingdom. Temples have risen from the ground, priests chant prayers day and night, and the populace is forced to participate in rituals—at least on the surface, the seeds of belief have been sown in every corner of this land. The collection of faith power proceeded more smoothly than expected, as a stream of Divine Power converges into the "New God" concept created by Perfikot.

However, the transformation of divinity has yet to be completed.

Perfikot knows very well that becoming a god is not something achieved in one fell swoop.

Even the "Ancestral Spirit" worshipped for generations by the native people of the Northern Territory only managed to barely consolidate a faint thread of divinity after hundreds or even thousands of years of devout worship.

And the new god faith she implements relies solely on a few months of forced execution. Even if it covers the entire Desert Kingdom, its foundation is far from solid.

Moreover, how much of this faith comes from the heart? How much is driven by fear or exchanged benefits?

Perfikot knows better than anyone that most of the belief she receives is merely a compromise of desert inhabitants between swords and bread.

There are very few truly devout followers, and such faith is ultimately shallow.

But even so, she still feels satisfied.

Being able to allow the concept of an unfamiliar deity to take root on this land in just a few short months is already considered a miracle.

The rest can only be entrusted to time—or some more radical catalyst.

"Faith can be forced, but divinity... ultimately requires sedimentation."

Perfikot gazed at the flickering holy fire under the temple dome, her fingertips lightly tracing the stone pillars engraved with prayers. She knows better than anyone—the true divinity cannot be summoned through violence alone. Those frenzied followers of the Ancient Gods might resort to blood sacrifice, slaughter, or use famine and plague to force desperate people to pray to the deities. These methods can indeed gather immense faith power in a short time and might even forcibly catalyze a twisted divinity.

But can such a "god" still be called a new god?

It's merely wrapping the madness and decay of old days with a new coat.

Perfikot doesn't need such a "shortcut." She would rather let divinity slowly gather than repeat the mistakes of those Ancient rulers. After all, the purpose of her creating a new god is to find a different path for this world—a path not eroded by madness and chaos.

So she doesn't rush.

But this doesn't mean she will relax in her advancement of the New God plan.

She even personally adjusted the laws of the Desert Kingdom, tightly binding the new god faith with daily life—not through fear, but through order and interests. Let the populace become accustomed to, rely on, and ultimately accept this nascent deity from their hearts.

For Perfikot knows when this plan succeeds, the chips in her hand will thoroughly change the course of this war.

Humanity appears passive in the face of the Ancient Gods partly because the Ancient Gods destroyed the entire world. They borrowed the power of the White Star to freeze the earth, plunging the whole world into extreme cold.

This indeed dealt a heavy blow to humanity. Without Perfikot suddenly appearing and forcibly changing everything with alchemy, perhaps human civilization would have faced a catastrophic extinction.

But this actually didn't have as much destructive power on human civilization as expected. Perfikot, throughout her journey from the Northern Territory to the Desert Kingdom, though she stayed mostly aboard the Floating City, occasionally going down to the ground, she was still able to see how human civilization survived beneath the winter.

Extreme cold of minus several dozen degrees is indeed severe and can indeed sever civilization and destroy the world.

Yet humans still manage to find ways to survive, even without the Energy Towers invented by Perfikot, they can persistently live on.

So this wasn't particularly fatal to human civilization.

Even without Perfikot's help, she believes human civilization can still withstand this catastrophe, just as the land below would eventually freeze completely in three hundred years.

Three hundred years' time—if humanity is willing to find ways, they could even escape this planet.

This option was once considered by Perfikot, but it means she would have to start from scratch to establish a complete set of astronautics industry systems and cultivate an entire set of astronautics talents, which would be too much workload for Perfikot.

If she hadn't calculated that even with all her support, achieving manned spaceflight would take at least decades and real space colonization at least a hundred years—even possibly in her lifetime unable to witness it—she might really have done it.

However, fleeing this soon-to-be-frozen planet is unreliable, so Perfikot can only choose another path, to solve the cause of this winter apocalypse.

And that's precisely why humanity appears so passive in the face of the Ancient Gods.

That is the participation of the gods.

The Ancient Gods once ruled this land, their faith penetrating into every corner of the old world.

Even though that was thousands of years ago, the echoes left behind by the Ancient Gods still deeply impact this world, even gradually drawing the gods back into this world!

Previously, through excavation of the Desert Kingdom's relics and prophecy searching, Perfikot has already clearly understood what exactly has happened in this world.

Thousands of years ago, when the White Star first arrived, the gods tried to resist, but ultimately most of the deities were infected by the madness and destruction brought by the White Star, thus most gods were assimilated by the White Star and carried away with its departure, marking the end of the mythic era.

The White Star itself contains destruction and derangement, polluting the gods, making them twisted and insane.

This also explains why the Ancient Gods act not like Good Gods but like a bunch of Evil Gods.

And now, the White Star descends again upon this world, the Ancient Gods longing to return to this world, even crafting this winter apocalypse, trying to destroy the entire planet.

What Perfikot needs to combat is this destructive will.

If relying solely on mortal power, it's very difficult to resist such world-ending calamities, after all, those gods who once resisted are all dead.

Without divine support, mortals find it challenging to resist such a disaster, given that in a world where True Gods exist, it's indeed difficult to counter without divine-level power.

Thus Perfikot crafted the Godslaying Armor to level the playing field, now she aims to create a New God to further narrow the gap between humanity and the Ancient Gods.