Chapter 911
He found himself being constantly questioned about the other Ascended gods. He spoke of Maul, whose doctrine promised the martial fortitude required to shield one’s home and hearth from the encroaching wild beasts and the storms that tore at their fields. He asked of Ursula, whose grace was a balm for those whose bonds were fraying under the strain of poverty and illness, offering a path to fortify the fractured ties of family and community.
Seeing their desperation, the old man shared the critical, liberating truth he had gleaned from his godling tutors, the divine path was not a jealous monopoly. He taught them that one did not need to pledge an exclusive, singular loyalty to one deity. The Ascended were not contradictory in their dominion, rather, they were complementary facets of existence.
He instructed them that one could indeed worship multiple gods simultaneously, provided it was done with the correct intent and strict adherence to the specific doctrine of each. He taught them that they could invoke Maul for the iron to defend their gates, look to Ursula to maintain the sanctity of their homes, and still keep their hearts open to the transformative drive of Flowua to push them toward innovation.
The shift in the populace was palpable, a quiet revolution of spirit that terrified the local elite. People no longer stood in the town squares waiting for the authorities to address the failing harvests or the encroaching blight, the once-passive peasantry had become self-reliant, their eyes no longer turned towards the gilded halls of the nobles, but toward the doctrines they now practiced in their own homes.
When a storm tore through a local dock, the villagers did not petition for state-funded repairs instead, they invoked the grace of Maul to fortify their resolve and shared the burden themselves, applying the teachings of Ursula to ensure that every family bond remained intact during the reconstruction. They were building their own resilience, creating a social fabric that the nobles could neither tax nor control.
The authorities, accustomed to a populace that looked to them for survival, were suddenly confronted with a collective that had deemed them obsolete. Whenever a magistrate arrived to impose a new tax or demand labor for the state, he was met with a polite but clear indifference. The people had found a higher guidance in the doctrines of the Ascended, and in their newfound capacity to change their own circumstances, they had discovered that they no longer required the permission or the patronage of the powers that be to reclaim their world.
Anger and Hatred made the noble eyes turn to the old man. He was someone they now needed out of the way. The nobles realized that a direct strike against the old man was a tactical disaster, to kill him outrightly was to invite the wrath of Flowua, and to make him a martyr was to accelerate the very revolution they sought to quench. They needed a weapon that could destroy his credibility without painting him as a saint of progress.
Just as they hope, an opportunity presented itself. The sudden, unnatural emergence of a colossal tree, its gargantuan shadow and sprawling, subterranean roots threatening to blot out the sky over the Humanity Kingdom provided them with the perfect scapegoat and reason.
The Humanity Kingdom had long been a quarantined, shunned blight on the western continent, isolated from the rest of the world. Even though the old man had been granted passage beyond its borders, it was due to special reason. For an outward apperance to show they cared for theses scared victims.
The terror associated with the Humanity kingdom remained visceral. For the common people, the name "Erik" was synonymous with the catastrophic ruin of his own realm, a history of atrocities that still haunted their collective memory.
The nobles seized this atmosphere of dread with surgical precision. They spread the narrative that the old man’s rise and his teachings were nothing more than a sophisticated distraction, a smokescreen designed to divert public attention while the Humanity King, Erik, prepared a new wave of horrors.
They cast the old man not as a teacher, but as a conspirator. Because the populace already harbored a deep-seated, instinctive fear of anything originating from that cursed territory, the lie found fertile ground. The people, who had only recently learned to look to themselves for strength, now felt the familiar, cold grip of terror. The nobles rhetoric transformed the old man’s light into a suspicious gloom, successfully weaponizing the people’s own past trauma to drive a wedge between the teacher and his followers.
The unraveling was swift. The unity the old man had forged disintegrated under the weight of old fear, where once there was solidarity, there was now a frantic scramble for self-preservation. Some of his followers clung to the doctrines with desperate conviction, but others, harboring hidden ambitions, weaponized his own lessons. They saw an opportunity to purge the "taint" of the Humanity Kingdom and elevate their own standing by acting as the new arbiters of local justice.
The old man, who felt he had finally touched the hem of true progress, watched in shattered disbelief as the very people he had empowered turned upon him. He was dragged through the town square he had once filled with hope, and bound to the stake by hands that had learned to channel strength and resolve from the very gods he had introduced to them. Using a twisted perversion of his own logic, claiming that protecting the community from the "Humanity Kingdom’s influence" was a higher duty of Maul and Ursula, his accusers declared him a source of contagion.
In the shadows, the nobles stood as silent, smug witnesses to the carnage. They did not need to raise a hand or issue a single decree, they allowed the commoners to perform the execution, their presence a silent taunt. Their expressions communicated a cruel, unspoken truth "Look at the autonomy you championed. Look at the result of commoners taking matters into their own hands. This is the chaos that comes when you hand a blade to a child"
As the flames licked upward, consuming the wood and the man who had sought to lead them out of the dark, the old man’s screams were not those of a martyr, but of a man realizing the ultimate, bitter irony of his work. He had taught them how to defy authority and embrace their own agency, and in their terror-stricken state, they had used that very power to destroy their teacher. His final cries of "Why?" were swallowed by the crackle of the fire.
The fire consumed the teacher, but it proved utterly incapable of burning the flame he had lit. While the nobility basked in their small win, they soon discovered that the old man’s reach had far exceeded the borders of the western continent. His records, painstakingly copied and distributed, had already taken root in distant lands, blooming into a wildfire of autonomy that no decree could quench. His goal, a humanity no longer bound by ignorance was been achieved, yet he was gone, never to witness the fruits of his struggle.
For the nobles, this was a bitter, nauseating reality. The execution, intended as a definitive closure, had instead become a global catalyst. However, they proved why they have held their position for so long. They understood the old man’s death as a masterclass in human nature.
They have always known the volatile lesson of the "pauper-turned-king" when those without power taste it, they are often the first to turn it into a weapon against their own kind to secure their new, fragile status.
The nobles saw this hence, shifted their strategy from overt suppression. They understood that the collective faith was not a unified front, but a fractured landscape of hidden rivalries and jealousies. Many of the newly empowered worshippers looked upon their neighbors not with the camaraderie of shared grace, but with the covetous eyes of those who wished to keep the divine favor and power for themselves.
The authorities began to offer these select individuals, giving them a different kind of power, the power of status, exclusivity, and privilege. A little political currency here, a whisper of "divine preference" there, and those who had once been oppressed became the new gatekeepers.
The promise of elevated standing above their peers was all it took, the nobles effectively transformed the movement threatning their rule into a self-policing hierarchy. This lead to a situation where most commoners were no longer uniting to break the status quo, they were now too busy suppressing each other’s growth, trying to outdo the other, scrambling for the scraps of influence the nobility strategically tossed into the fray.
As for the tree, the true nature of the colossal tree remained a tightly sealed secret, known only among the highest-ranking lords and nobles who had received word from the capital. Rather than sharing the truth, they weaponized their monopoly on information, steering the populace along paths that served elite interests while keeping the masses blind to reality.