Chapter 862: Ch 861: Leave It to the Professionals

Athena's room

An endless grassland stretched as far as the eye could see, with birds and animals playing across the plains.

Ryo sat at a glass table and waited quietly.

Before long, Athena approached with a small packet of tea leaves in hand. She sat across from him and began taking out the tea set. "Tea only today. No alcohol. That all right?"

"That's fine. It's not like I'm much of a drinker anyway." Ryo nodded and handed her a golden crystal. "This is a memory crystal I made."

Athena didn't take the crystal. Instead, she rinsed the tea set with warm water. "Algol already told me about what happened. Well, she basically stuffed the information directly into my head without asking, but I suppose that technically counts as telling me."

Ryo paused, then said helplessly, "Do I need to apologize?"

"Forget it. Otherwise, she'll probably add another few hundred years to my sentence." Athena set down the cleaned teacup and poured Ryo a cup of warm tea. "So the goal is to preserve that world you just observed?"

"Destroy a world? Those people are really that extreme?" Ryo froze in disbelief.

Athena smiled at him as though she were looking at an innocent young man who had yet to leave school and discover just how dark the real world could be.

Ryo fell silent for a moment. Then his expression darkened. "I see."

Unlike the Campione world, where the gods could actually see that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks, the Crimson World was, in their view, nothing but bad news.

"..."

Athena gave a slight nod without saying anything further. She merely swept a hand over the glass tabletop, and a sheet of parchment and a quill appeared beneath it.

"This matter is troublesome in one sense, and very simple in another."

"Algol thinks it's troublesome because her approach to solving problems tends toward brute force. But in reality, while this kind of slander could indeed provoke some particularly violent gods into destroying the world, actually dealing with it is just a matter of submitting a report to the Pantheon Hall."

As she spoke, Athena put on a pair of half-rim glasses with gold trim and looked at Ryo. "Why didn't you give up on the observation in the first place?"

"A thief doesn't leave empty-handed..." Ryo replied. Then he coughed twice and added, "You know, I was only one step away from being an official rule-breaker. And with Algol there too, I figured it wasn't impossible to deal with..."

"Hm. An attempt was made to sever the connection, but an unexpected development occurred. Something with deep ties that would have been difficult to foresee in advance." As Athena spoke, the quill beneath her hand began writing on the parchment by itself, even though there wasn't a breath of wind.

Ryo paused, his expression turning strange. "What exactly is this 'development with deep ties'?"

Athena glanced up at him. "I haven't decided yet."

Then she asked, "Did you find a counterpart of Zeus in that world?"

"Didn't seem like it. Hmm... but speaking of which, Alastor is an epithet of Zeus. Still, no, they're not counterparts."

As soon as Ryo said that, the quill began writing again. He leaned over and took a look.

{The suspected cause of the incident is that the counterpart of a certain divine king from the Greek pantheon underwent an unknown change within that world, the benefits of which cannot currently be determined.}

Ryo blinked, then said strangely, "Isn't that basically admitting I observed that world just to screw Zeus over?"

Athena looked up at him as if he were an idiot. "If you and Zeus were the two people being blamed, who do you think more people in the Pantheon Hall would want dead? You, or Zeus?"

"Obviously Zeus!" The answer flew out of Ryo's mouth. Then he immediately caught on.

Right!

The cost of sharing the blame between two people was obviously less than dumping it all on one person. And if one of those two happened to be someone everyone particularly disliked, the spectators would naturally be far more eager to kick that person while they were down than to go after the other guy.

Although Ryo had a strong suspicion that Athena simply wanted to screw Zeus over, he wisely kept his mouth shut.

At that moment, Athena asked, "Did you bring anyone back to Little Garden?"

"I was planning to bring a few people back, but I haven't..."

Before Ryo could finish, another paragraph appeared on the parchment.

{As a remedial measure, the accomplices responsible for fundamentally disrupting that world's mythological genealogy have been brought back to Little Garden and sentenced to ten thousand years of imprisonment.}

After writing that, Athena looked up at Ryo.

"Later, go build a dormitory in the backyard. Keep it on the smaller side. As long as each person's room is under two hundred square meters, that should satisfy the requirements."

"You call that imprisonment?" Ryo asked with a deeply bizarre expression.

"For gods and buddhas who each have a planet-sized divine palace, two hundred square meters isn't even enough space to build a bathroom," Athena replied calmly.

"What do they need bathrooms for?" Ryo asked curiously.

Athena shot him an annoyed glare. "You're asking way too many questions today!"

Ryo shrugged.

Then he watched Athena gather up the parchment and raised an eyebrow. "So all you have to do is submit something like that?"

"As if." Athena raised her voice slightly and shook the parchment in her hand. "This is just the executive summary. It's for you and me. As for all the detailed documentation..."

She waved her right hand.

A small mountain made entirely of scrolls suddenly appeared beside the glass table.

"This should be enough." Athena stroked her chin and nodded slightly.

Ryo stared wordlessly at the mountain of scrolls, which covered more than eighty square meters and stood six meters tall.

After a long silence, he finally asked, "Where did you even get enough material to write all this?"

Athena answered blandly, "The 'World Observation Report' Aishelia provided when she returned earlier. You can think of it as a 'Creation Summary Report.'"

"After all, isn't the root cause of this whole incident the fact that that child helped the Crimson World create its order? So naturally, it makes sense to start writing from the very beginning of creation."

So you're really using data from the beginning of creation to pad out the report? Are you trying to put whoever reads this to sleep for several thousand years?

Ryo was stunned. "Will anyone actually read this?"

"Most of them won't read it all. They'll only look at the final conclusion. But occasionally, there are still diligent gods and buddhas who'll choose to read the whole thing." Athena paused, "...Besides, most of this data is useful to gods and Buddhas. You can think of it as a bribe left out in the open. Whether they choose to accept it is their business."

In other words, use benefits to make the gods forget their displeasure and give them a convenient excuse to let the matter go?

At last, Ryo understood why Algol had told him to come to Athena.

This was definitely not something Algol could handle. Her brain might have evolved a little, but not to this level.

Once she had finished, Athena clapped her hands and took a sip of tea. "Later, remember to hand these documents over to personnel from the Heavenly Army. And remember, absolutely do not give them to the joint Pantheon Hall enforcement department sent by Thousand Eyes."

"You don't want Thousand Eyes to get them? What's the reason?" Ryo asked in surprise.

Although he had connections with both Thousand Eyes and the Heavenly Army, his ties with Thousand Eyes were deeper. Besides, the Heavenly Army was a law enforcement organization. Indra couldn't openly bend the rules or engage in corruption, so they would still have to deal with him seriously.

"The reason?" Athena gazed calmly at the sky. "Isn't the fact that Thousand Eyes processes cases a thousand times faster than the Heavenly Army enough of a reason?"

"Got it!"

Ryo suddenly understood and promptly stored the documents in his Gift Card.

Later, he would personally hand them over to the Heavenly Army personnel sent to receive them.

Still, Athena really was someone who belonged inside Little Garden's system. When it came to procedures and all the unwritten rules, she understood them far better than he did.

If it were an outsider like him handling this, the whole matter would probably have been incredibly troublesome.

"Thanks for this," Ryo said, giving her a grateful smile.

"Forget the thanks. If you could just give me a little less to worry about in the future, I'd be the one thanking you." Athena let out a weary sigh, sounding like an exhausted mother.

Ryo was left speechless.

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