Once again, we continued on our travels. Still moving further away from the town I once called home, still heading northwest following that siren’s song of a possible distant Nexus. I wasn’t quite confident of its location, it might be on a different continent and I’d have to cross the ocean but time would tell. Hopefully, the Nexus was simply across the continent, somewhere in northern Canada or Alaska or somewhere up north. Trying to estimate locations based on a vague directional vector was nearly impossible, I had tried to use a world map but the vagueness of the direction I could feel meant it might terminate anywhere from Eastern Siberia to Central Canada or pretty much anywhere in between. I was too far away to get a better idea of the distances involved, other than it was currently far away from me. How far? That, I couldn’t tell until I was a lot closer.

Not that it currently really mattered. The Nexus hadn’t fully formed, at least judging by the still lingering turmoil in the Astral River and even if it had, I wasn’t strong enough to control a Nexus just yet, especially not one still settling down. I’d need time and power to achieve that, both things I could only acquire by travelling and searching for adventure and challenges.

Sadly, I had no idea if there were any challenges to be had, or if there were whether I should take them. The biggest potential problem I could see was that I didn’t want to accidentally wipe out the remaining humans. Not until I knew there was another option for labour and civilisation, there were some things I couldn’t easily make myself, regardless of my power. Thus, I had to remain cautious with other humans, especially those who might successfully recreate civilization. Preferably one friendly to magic users but I had a feeling that wouldn’t be in the cards, not with the Gods having their own plans. I couldn’t believe that deities like Zeus or Odin didn’t have plans prepared to induct people into their worship and have them spread things out, taking over smaller communities as they went.

If not for my lack of social graces, combined with the negative social traits I had picked up, I might have tried to establish myself in a permanent fashion, using Luna and her connection to Hecate to set up a social organisation of magic users, a Mages’ Guild or something along those lines. But I simply wouldn’t be the right person to head such an endeavour, of that I was well aware. I was more likely to cause persecution than I was to head it off, the events at Apple Gate Farm had shown that. Instead, I hoped that by travelling and teaching those I met, I could create a social acceptance of the Arcane at the grass-roots level, providing alternatives to the Divine Magic I could easily see spreading.

Hel, it already had, thanks to the Gods somehow empowering Clerics and teaching them without having mortal agents in play. Unless I was completely wrong, there hadn’t been a former Traveller in the community we just left and yet, Sarah and Kyle had established a connection to Hestia. In their dreams, as they claimed, though I had no way to verify that statement, they claimed they had gone to bed one night and woke as Clerics of Hestia. How I was supposed to compete with such efficiency, I had no idea and could only hope that I wasn’t the only one providing Arcane instruction. Or that people learned by themself and established their own path, apart from the Divine. Sadly, I had a feeling that few would, it was simply a lot more convenient to follow a Deity, at least from what I had heard. Not that Luna would agree, her own abilities required plenty of study and experimentation but I wasn’t sure if that was specific to Hecate or if other users of Divine Magic played that part down in order to proselytise.

A part of me was tempted to simply kill off all clerics I could find, or at least all of the Gods I considered troublesome. While I had no list of those, almost all Gods could be troublesome, there were a few I had my eyes on, chief amongst them Sunna. Sadly, if Gods could empower Clerics in their dreams, it would become an endless game of whack-a-priest, where I travelled around and murdered people for nothing but falling for a divine con and the Gods replaced the murdered clerics as soon as I was out of the area.

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Unless there was some sort of cost involved in that dream empowerment, or if there was some condition that needed to be completed, I could kill as many clerics as I wanted and achieve nothing. Nothing, but the constant disruption of communities, all of which would remember Arcane Magic as something to be feared, allowing the Gods even greater influence. No, trying to go that route would be foolish long-term. And I needed to play the long game, as I had no doubt the Gods did.

That idea drove home just how enormous the task I had set myself was. If I wanted to revive Sigmir, I needed enough power to break the natural cycle in a massive way. Doing something not even the Grandmother dared to do, though I wasn’t sure if it was because she simply didn’t want to invest the massive effort for fairly little return or if the Gods themself had forbidden it. Or if she simply was unable to in the first place, any of those was a plausible answer and I had no way to know which was the right one or if they were all correct in their own way.

Whatever the case, if the Gods wanted to block me, I would go against them, as insane as that sounded. I had my path and eventually, I’d reach its end, my Titanic Ambition demanded nothing less. Or I might die, in which case I could only hope that I’d meet Sigmir again in whatever afterlife there might be.

However, considering the Titanic Ambition trait in contrast with the Pale Lady title made me wonder. Were they the initial steps on two different paths? One, the title, leading down the Path of Gods, where I might eventually establish my own divinity and become some sort of Goddess, with my own flock and countless worshippers. The other, the Path of Titans, granting massive power but concentrating all that power into a single entity, namely myself.

I had no idea how exactly that might work, but just from the way I thought about deities, I had a feeling that the Divine Path would likely give me more overall power, at least if I was diligent in gathering followers. If enough people prayed to me, all offering their Astral Power, the sheer quantity would become a quality of its own. On the other hand, Titanic Ambition, as it currently was, greatly increased my own attributes but that was ultimately dependent on me, not on outside power.

Thinking about it, that might be the primary draw of the Path of Gods, that the power one could gain was unlimited. As long as one could gather more followers, the overall power would increase, the only real limit was how many potential followers there were. And with multiple worlds involved, or multiple Universes or something along those lines, that number was… well, it was big.

Whereas advancing on the Path of Titans would be limited by diminishing returns, gaining levels would become more and more difficult, skills would max out and so on. Though I had no idea what actually happened to a maxed skill, nobody had managed to do so in the Beta, nor had I heard anything about that on the forum. A few people might know, but if they did, they hadn’t shared.

Yet another item to be put on the list of things to find out. That list was growing by the day and while I was working on solving one of those items, I doubted I’d ever manage to truly empty it. But maybe that was for the best, the world would be an incredibly boring place if everything was known and nothing left to find out.

Either way, while a part of me was considering the far future, there were far more immediate concerns. Mainly, the next destination on our path and what to do once we got there, wherever there might be.

Visit another town or the next big city where we’d most likely find another group of survivors or should we search for points of interest, places where the change had warped reality in some fascinating way, like the strange stretched forest with its insane flora?

Both options presented their own challenges and with them, their own opportunities.

For now, I had simply decided to follow the interstate, mostly because doing so gave us a fairly even and smooth surface to travel on, along with the occasional Shattered or Scorched, lingering since the change had it. Maybe Lia and I could use one of those as a test subject to spread vampirism.