Within the large church, Sacred sat upon her throne, as usual, holding fancy-looking books in one hand and an inked feather in the other. Her hands blurred as she wrote down entire books in matters of seconds.

Finally, after a couple of minutes and over 200 books later, she stopped and allowed the feather in her hand to vanish into golden motes.

Heaving a frustrated sigh, Sacred leaned back to rest her back on her throne, her wings automatically turning immaterial as to not block her.

"This should be enough, right?" She muttered to herself, eyeing the 1000+ books that she'd written over the entire day. Each of these books was specific to either a martial art, a technique for some weapon, or just general information on warfare.

She'd dedicated quite a bit of her mental faculties to achieving such results in a short time. Her reason for doing was that she hoped that, thanks to these books, her soldiers would be stronger than their enemies. She knew she couldn't rely solely on words to make her soldiers stronger, but it should be a great help.

Still, she planned on personally training the first generation herself and then assigning them as commanders and trainers for the future soldiers. While she wasn't a generally vain person (she was, she just didn't like admitting it), she knew she was a good teacher. Maybe not the best, but with her power, if she couldn't churn out some top-grade generals and warriors easily, then she should just kill herself and be done with it.

She rubbed her temples as a headache threatened to rear its ugly face. She was swamped with work, and honestly, it was really starting to tax her. She had a number of huge projects as of now that she needed to finish: the army, the government, the church, and finally, her biggest plan of all, her personal divine realm.

Sacred wanted a separate dimensional space carved outside the earthly realm that she could use for her experiments, and to store the souls of her followers. Each time someone who prayed to her enough died, their souls would automatically be attracted towards her, and Sacred thought it to be her responsibility to manage these souls. Obviously, she didn't have that many as of now, since her following was still pretty small, but in the future, she would need somewhere to store them other than her own body.

Heaving yet another tired sigh, Sacred slumped further down into her seat. The army would require at least a couple incarnations to teach them, meaning at least 20-30% of her consciousness. Then, the divine realm needed to be thought over and planned, while also accumulating the horrifying amount of faith energy that was required. That was at least another 40% consciousness gone. Then, she also needed to make sure the civilian matters of her people were cared for, and that her priests weren't fucking things up. That took another 15%. Finally, whatever mental faculties were left were totally concentrated on furthering her own Domains, which were really starting to plateau due to her lack of complete focus.

Her senses alerted her to people coming into her temple, and she immediately sat upright, changing her posture from tired beyond belief to one of confidence, power, and dignity. And maybe a tad bit of arrogance in there as well.

Coming into the great hall that was the temple's main area, over 40 priests gathered in an orderly, if not a bit nervous, manner. They neatly arranged themselves in lines in front of her throne, going by order of power and position. Obviously, Helen stood at the very front, along with three other priests that Sacred heavily favored.

Eyeing them approvingly, Sacred lazily waved her hand, causing all the books she had written beforehand to appear in front of the priests.

"Each of these books contains enough knowledge to transform a simple man into a great general. Your job will be to find people to transcribe them and put them in lower temple, where both children and soldiers can benefit from them."

She allowed her priests time to go over them, and then had the books float over to a corner so they wouldn't encumber the rest of the meeting.

"Now, on the topic of soldiers, I wish to finally create a standing army for my people. I alone cannot, and will not, guard over everything myself. While I have some ideas, I would like to hear your ideas, so speak up." She said, and immediately, discussions and murmurs came from her cute little priests.

Over the following hours, many ideas were made, rejected, remade and improved upon. Finally, Sacred put her foot down when she felt that the current idea was the most efficient and feasible one.

"Silence!" She ordered, and immediately, all the noise stopped. "While there can be a lot of improvement, we are still small. We will divide the army into three main sections: The police force, the frontline soldiers, and the holy warriors. I will personally train the holy warriors, and their job will be to act as the main spearhead for our forces."

She planned to have the police force separated into two sections, the peacekeepers loyal to the church and the church alone, and the occupation forces, which would act as militia to occupy and bring order to conquered territories. This wasn't anything particularly novel, but she did plan on including several priests into both forces of the police in order to keep the policemen themselves in line. Of course, this wasn't doable right now with the meager amount of priests, nor was it necessary, but it was good to plan ahead.

As for the frontline soldiers, those would be the main fighting force. Their job was pretty obvious: Kill the enemy. They would be the main fighting force, and also the one who would, unfortunately, have the highest casualty rate. Sacred chose to not separate them for now, but she planned to form specific corps based on specialization later when she had more manpower available. Things like the Scout Corps, the Archer corps, the Mage corps... Basic, but efficient. That was Sacred's main goal.

Sacred frowned slightly at that. She had a bunch of priests, but they were all still pretty weak overall, but she had absolutely no mages. That had to be changed, and soon.

Humans were much less attuned to magic than elves were, and were much weaker than beastmen. They were just okay in all areas, and that was a bit problematic for Sacred, as what she needed were incredible specialists, not a jack-of-all-trades.

Finally, the last and most important section of the army: The holy warriors. These would be the absolute elites of elites, the most powerful warriors under her command. Naturally, the level of power she expected wasn't something feasible for a normal human, but luckily, she was a goddess, and one with a very convenient domain.

Earlier on, she had used her Ruler and Soul domains to form something she cheekily called a Cultivation Path. It was incredibly similar to what she did to her own priests, but while priests got stronger by training their souls by absorbing her the world energy through her power and connecting their souls further with their Sacred Goddess, this path was different.

It focused heavily on training the body by transforming it using divine energy, which they would obtain by transforming the energy of the world through what she dubbed divine symbols.

These symbols started as simple wings tattoos formed on one's back, somewhat like those priests held. However, as one progressed through the path, the symbols would gradually transform and cover more of the body, and if one completed the path, the tattoos would transform into spiritual wings, which would symbolize their complete connection to Sacred Light, as well as act as excellent conductors of divine energy.

There was one drawback to following this path, however. Sacred was a bit nervous about creating powerful warriors that could potentially cause trouble, therefore, the stronger one got by traveling the path, the more their souls would fall prey to Sacred's influence. If one completed the path, they would forever be unable to so much as think of disobeying Sacred's will.

It wasn't exactly like taking away someone's free will, but it was somewhat similar. Truth be told, Sacred's goal for her divine realm was to use it to influence this world, projecting her influence down upon her followers at minimal cost, allowing her to gradually turn the population into absolute zealots.

While that was still far-off in the future, Sacred knew that the moment she completed her divine kingdom and somehow found a way to connect it to the mortal realm, the profits gained would be immeasurable.

Sacred believed in the saying that the more power one had, the greater one's responsibility should be. This was shown in her way of governance, and the way she treated her followers. She expected very little of those with little power but demanded the absolute best from her elites. Hence, she had absolutely no plans for abusing her influence, should the plan come to fruition.

As her priests left the temple with the orders to immediately begin recruitment into the police and army, Sacred stopped Helen from leaving with a call of her name.

Bowing deeply, Helen looked up into her Lord's eyes, still excited at the prospect of finally being able to fight back against their elven, beastly and demonic oppressors. Although she'd only met beastmen once or twice in her life and never seen even a sniff of a demon, she had still heard stories of their cruelty towards mankind, and thus was more than happy to have them purged from this world.

"Helen," Sacred called with no small amount of humor in her voice. "Don't think I haven't seen those eyes of yours as we discussed the holy warriors."

Helen's cheeks flared bright red as she was caught red-handed. "I... I just-"

She stopped as a golden-rimmed book was suddenly thrown at her chest. She stumbled back as her arms reflexively caught the book. She blinked a couple of times and then looked at the book's title before gaping like fish.

"T-this... It's the Holy Warrior's path?" She asked with wonder in her eyes. Sacred laughed lightly before waving her away.

"Next week, when I will announce the first generation of Holy Warriors, I'll be expecting you up here in the temple to begin training. You already have a head start, and I'm expecting great things from you. Go now, and use your time wisely. You're going to be off the mission board until I deem your training enough."

Helen nodded rapidly, tears threatening to spill from her eyes. She clutched the book to her chest as though it was her own baby, and she quickly left the temple to head towards her room in the lower temple.

When she was sure Helen had left, Sacred let out a loud groan as she slumped back on her throne. "Ugh... So much fucking work." Even though it was physically impossible, Sacred felt as though she really did have a headache.

With a sigh of resignation, Sacred stood from her throne and vanished. She needed to comb through the population of her followers to find those with the best compatibility in the cultivation path. It was easy enough for her, as she only needed to watch the soul of a person for a couple of seconds to determine it's compatibility, but since there were over 5000 people to look through... It wouldn't be easy.

However...

A couple of minutes after Sacred had vanished, a shadow slowly crawled up from the ground and gradually formed into a short, horned demon with blood-red skin.

A crazed grin spread on the demon's face as he looked at the throne. "Jejeje... Foolish godling. His Majesty will be pleased with all of this information."

Reactivating his Shadow Merge technique, the demon transformed back into a shadow and quickly went back to his demonic lord's palace, where he planned to give all the information he'd just obtained by peeking in on this meeting.

From what he'd seen, it was obviously a jumped-up demigod trying her hand at forming her own nation. Considering she hadn't even noticed him, she wasn't very powerful, which was good for his lord. While it was a bit annoying that her followers were humans, his lord did mention that the elves and beastmen were starting to show signs of forming an alliance.

Once he was back at the palace and with the information, his lord would reward him handsomely. Perhaps, his own territory might even double just from this one espionage mission.

But, life isn't so easy.

"Eh? Why isn't this working?" He exclaimed, furrowing his brows in confusion as his shadow merge refused to activate.

The demon suddenly froze, eyes as wide as saucers as a soft hand landed on his shoulder. A delicious breath tickled his neck, making him shiver.

"I've yet to capture a demon to interrogate, but... You know what, child, you're an okay spy. I was just in need of somebody to take create a spy corp for me..."

The demon tried to fight back, to move, to do anything. However, an overwhelming power held him in place as his body turned into golden motes. There was no pain, only a terrifying sense of loss, and the knowledge he was dying.

"Don't worry, my child... Once I properly show you my light, you will learn to accept me, and give your everything to me..." Sweet words resonated in his ears even as his head and brain turned into nothingness, and like that, the demon known as Hagrid Brightfire was forever lost to the world.