Chapter 1302 - 589: Twisted Destiny (First Update)

Chapter 1302: Chapter 589: Twisted Destiny (First Update)

"..."

Of late, the Destiny Walker’s head had been aching incessantly.

As the Great Shepherd of the Destiny Church, he was the highest leader of the Church of Destiny in this age.

Almost no one in the outside world knew of his existence; even among the Gods, scarcely any had taken note of the strange stirrings hidden within the shadows.

Even within the Destiny Church itself, not many possessed the qualification to know of the Destiny Walker.

He was far too ancient.

The Goddess of Fate was one of the very first of the Ancient Gods, and Her Church had been founded in those primordial days.

As a Saint who had, in the Ancient God Era, offered his mortal flesh to Destiny long ago, the Destiny Walker’s existence far surpassed that of the vast majority of the present faith-born Divine Spirits.

His consciousness had long since interwoven with the River of Destiny; he had witnessed the rise and fall of countless civilizations, and beheld the ascension and downfall of Divine Spirits.

After the fall of the Goddess of Fate, he did not follow the newly risen Goddess of Fortune.

To the people of the world, the newly born Goddess of Fortune was the offspring of the Goddess of Fate, or even the very reincarnation of that Goddess Herself.

Yet to that portion of the Destiny Church led by the Destiny Walker, She was by no means the Divine they served, but a thief who had stolen Her authority.

He firmly believed that the true Goddess of Fate no longer existed, leaving behind only a vague imitator that resembled Her in form.

After several failed attempts, conducted in secret, to set right what had gone awry, the Destiny Walker abandoned the idea of directly seizing back the authority of the Goddess of Fate.

Even if that authority were reclaimed, the Goddess of Fate could not be resurrected; at most, another new god of destiny would be born, perhaps merely a new "God of Fortune."

The authority of the Goddess of Fate had been lost in the instant of Her fall; relying solely on the incomplete authority lodged in the Goddess of Fortune was far from sufficient.

The first and most crucial step was to resurrect the Goddess of Fate; only after that could they reclaim the authority that had been stolen by others.

It was then that the Destiny Walker made a decision.

He led the remnants of the Destiny Church into a Divine Forbidden Area, and there, they vanished without a trace.

He chose to erase himself from the eyes of the world, to fade completely from all sight, hiding in the dark and shrouding himself beneath Destiny’s shadow.

At the beginning, there were still those who remembered him; the memory of Divine Spirits was, after all, formidable.

Among Them, there were even some who awaited the day when the remnants of the Destiny Church would emerge from the Forbidden Area to cause trouble for the Qi Fortune Church.

Yet as time flowed on, all things gradually changed.

On the scale of several thousand years, no matter how dazzling an existence once was, it would appear infinitely small.

As the earliest of those Ancient Gods gradually withered and sank into slumber, fewer and fewer remained who remembered Them.

When the wars of the Gods ended and the Belief in Gods ascended to the stage and utterly ruled the world, the existence of the Destiny Walker faded all the more swiftly.

The newly born Gods cared not even for the Ancient Gods, much less would They be on guard against the remnant Church of a Fallen Ancient God.

In the end, the Destiny Walker succeeded; he completely erased every trace of himself from the mortal world.

And during this time, the Destiny Church was not merely hiding; they had never ceased their work.

The Destiny Walker and the Destiny Church concealed themselves in a darkness known to none, quietly interfering with the course of Destiny in the world.

This was destined to be an exceedingly long process, yet they were not in the least impatient.

For Destiny is never hasty.

With only the slightest of nudges, the slightest of interventions, the final outcome of Destiny would be utterly altered.

The greater the span of time, the greater that alteration would become.

They confined themselves to the most infinitesimal of operations.

Like gently moving aside a stone from a path a Farmer was to pass, causing him to return home half an hour earlier and thus happen, by chance, to save the son who was about to fall into a well.

Or perhaps, in the study of some scholar, allowing a breeze to turn a page in an ancient tome, inspiring him to make a crucial discovery.

Or perhaps planting a wisp of unease within the dreams of some general, prompting him to adopt a more cautious deployment on the battlefield.

These subtle disturbances were like pebbles cast into the River of Destiny; ripples spread outward, eventually converging into a tide that could reshape an era.

The members of the Destiny Church were not blindly self-assured; rather, they possessed ample grounds for confidence.

Though the Goddess of Fate had Fallen, Her Divine Artifact had not been destroyed; it had ever remained in the grasp of the Destiny Walker.

[Divine Artifact · Eye of Fate]—an artifact of little offensive power, yet whose capabilities were shrouded in unfathomable mystery.

It could observe the destinies of all beings, and even enact minor alterations.

It was a sphere woven from countless interlaced "threads of destiny." When it floated, it would slowly rotate, its interior reflecting star-like points of light—each point representing the destiny-trajectory of a single Life.

When the Goddess of Fate immersed Her will into it, She could behold the countless branching paths extending from those trajectories, and could intervene in them.

In the hands of the Destiny Walker, this Divine Artifact could exert but half its power; he could only observe, and even that not completely.

Yet even so, it remained a Divine Artifact.

By relying on it, the Destiny Church might not yet possess the power to observe the destinies of the Gods, but beneath that level, there was almost no mortal who could elude their gaze.

From mortals on the low end to Epics on the high, without a single exception.

They laid out their arrangements in the dark, and once they observed the target, they would intervene.

For the first several thousand years, everything still went more or less smoothly.

Under the operation of the Destiny Church, the course of the world gradually leaned toward the direction they desired.

They guided certain civilizations to avoid disasters that might have led to total annihilation, allowing them to continue developing.

At times they would also issue warnings about dangerous existences, send admonitions to the Gods, and quietly erase some heresies that were far too dangerous.

They even pushed for the birth of Heroes at certain critical historical junctures.

Under the adjustments of their unseen hands, the world maintained a fragile balance, slowly advancing toward a predetermined direction—that direction ultimately pointed to the resurrection of the Goddess of Fate.

And the slumbering will of the Goddess of Fate really did gradually begin to respond!

Although she had not fully awakened, she was already able to unconsciously answer the prayers of her believers.

After entering the Era of Faith, this process continued to accelerate.

Since the Power of Faith could be used to help the Gods increase their strength, there was no reason it could not help them resurrect.

Everything seemed to be developing in a good direction.

However, in the recent period of time, the situation began to undergo some subtle changes.

Especially in the last few hundred years, many special variables appeared, and quite a number of "destined ones" were lost.

A city of sin that they had deliberately guided for a hundred years, which was originally supposed to give birth in the future to an Epic Level Evil Lord, was burned to ashes by the Dragon Breath of an unexpectedly irritable Giant Dragon, turning into a field of scorched earth.

In the original Destiny, thirty-seven years from now it would have nurtured a tyrant named "Black Crown," who would unify the surrounding dark forces and unleash a war that swept across several Kingdoms.

Although that war would cause countless deaths, it would also give rise to three true Heroes and prompt four Kingdoms to form an unprecedented alliance.

There was also a certain seaport where, originally, a Pirate King who would in the future command the sea routes of three seas was supposed to appear, but he was killed by the song of a Sea Siren while he was still a young sailor.

That young man, nicknamed "Iron Hook," should have miraculously survived a storm ten years later, gained the recognition of a Ghost ship, and over the next twenty years built a sea Empire that made every trade caravan tremble in fear.

The Church had even placed three "Luck Marks" on him to ensure he could survive the crises of his early years.

Yet he still could not withstand the annihilating voice of the Legendary Sea Siren.

There was also a Fallen divine chosen who was supposed to climb from a down-and-out minor noble to a high position, ultimately becoming a great noble and ruling slaves with iron-blooded tyranny, yet he was hacked to death by a flurry of blades during a sudden slave uprising.

And there was a Vampire Prince whose bloodline was supposed to regress and awaken the Ancestral Blood, yet he was killed by the daughter he had turned, who then seized everything from him.

And then there were...

And these unforeseen changes, at their root, all came from shifts in Destiny that allowed certain special existences to be born.

The Destiny Walkers noticed the birth of these variables, but did not think too much of it; after all, such Alien Species had never been rare.

In the long span of history, there would always appear some existences that broke common patterns.

They were not "destined ones," but rather Alien Species shown even greater favoritism, the "special bodies" that many people spoke of.

The Destiny Church would usually mark them as "observation targets," and then decide, depending on the situation, whether to guide, use, or eliminate them.

In most cases, the disturbances caused by these variables were local and temporary, and would soon be smoothed out by the self-correcting power of the River of Destiny.

But recently, things started to feel very off.

Especially in the past year, the hidden plans kept undergoing unforeseen changes.

The Destiny Church understood better than anyone how mutable and free Destiny was; no one could guarantee one hundred percent that the future would unfold exactly as they wished.

However, to be fair, the number of twists was getting a bit ridiculous, wasn’t it!?

Leaving aside some scattered distortions, there were even places where large-scale alterations of Destiny had occurred.

In the Frost Crystal Kingdom, the King did not die, and the entire royal family was preserved along with him.

This alone led to a whole series of subsequent changes.

The power of the nobles was suppressed and even completely purged, and the power of the Divine Spirits was drawn into the Kingdom.

As a result, some mortals who were supposed to die survived that brutal winter, and their deaths were not used to stimulate the awakening of a certain destined one.

After that, changes appeared in the Dark Territory as well: a Super Giant blood sacrifice prepared to please the God of Sinful Desire was stopped.

Later again, the war of the Holy City of Radiance ended at a rate that far exceeded expectations, allowing more people to survive.

The god-disaster in the Northern Lands was completely beyond the expectations of the Destiny Church; they had never imagined the God of Sand and Stone would meet his end so soon.

And then, just when they were anticipating more shifts in Destiny, he went and exploded straight into a field of fragments.

These bizarre changes one after another were enough to drive the Destiny Walkers insane.

Small matters went wrong, big matters also went wrong; one could say there were very few places where things did not go wrong.

If only the Destinies of mortals up through Legendary were changing, that would still be acceptable; but now even Epic Level "destined ones" were being affected, their Destinies twisted as well.

Even the Destiny of Grand Mage Finn, whom they had regarded as an excellent chess piece, who had already completed his cultivation and successfully advanced to Epic, showed signs of deviation.