Cthulhu Gonfalon

It’s hard to salvage the situation now…

Sui Xiong flopped onto his desk and watched the translucent Main Plane floating in the air with a pained expression on his face. This model was created with Divine Power and could reflect the reality happening on the actual Main Plane. Sui Xiong had all along used this model to monitor situations there as it was a trusty model. Now, he could see that many of the areas on the Main Plane were reflected with light and dark yellow colors, with the most serious being areas around the Commonwealth of Gold Coins: The Goddess of Fortune never really had much power and now was no exception. She was slow to react and did not like to show all her cards at one go; thus even as she ordered rainfall, she did not go too overboard, and the effect was not too great.

In comparison, the situations on the prairie were much better. The various Orc gods had been supplying water to the land, to the extent where the Master of Order had ordered them to halt operations. They had supplied about two years’ worth of water and even caused a minor flood. The flood was still ongoing, and thus it somewhat combatted the issue of the drought. To be honest, Sui Xiong admired these intense Orc gods… They had managed to somehow flip a drought into a flood!

“They must have tried to supply as much water as they could in a short period of time, knowing that Master of Order would eventually stop them.” Morani smiled as he spoke.

Morani was extremely familiar with the Orc gods as he was their old friend and could be considered an old Orc god. This was why he was an expert in their working style.

Another group of people who had procured crazy rainstorms would be the Human God System. However, they took on a method dissimilar to the Orcs and instead chose to create hundreds of rivers and fill them up before starting the rain.

One may assume that this method brought similar results to the Orcs’ style, but in fact, it prevented the threat of flooding and was more efficient for the farmers.

The Human God System, however, focused only on some of the human countries and not on protecting all. The areas that received rain were the Kingdom of Light, the Kingdom of the Blue Moon and the Kingdom of Thousands of Springs. These countries were geographically adjacent, and all had the church of human gods as their national religion. In comparison, the Duchy of Thunder, the Mifata Federation and the Dhaka Commercial Association in the South, as well as the Commonwealth of Gold Coins in the West did not have human gods as the main faith.

“Those bastards… They are really petty! Those not of the faith are all humans, why can’t they help them out as well?” After hearing Javier’s explanation, Sui Xiong couldn’t help but grumble.

“They do not have the resources to give full aid to everyone; thus, it is up to them how they want to spend it. In any case, there are many good gods who gave aid to the other areas already.” In contrast, Javier was more nonchalant about the whole situation.

Sui Xiong sighed and looked at the model again. Although there were sufficient areas that were green, a new layer of yellow was surfacing on the projection.

After a while, Sui Xiong spoke up again.

“How long… do you think these solutions can hold up for?”

“A few months, maybe.”

“If rainwater is conserved, maybe a year?”

“One year is too optimistic; it’s impossible. The water will be used up or dried up eventually.”

The gods started an intense discussion. Sui Xiong did not join in and chose to continue glancing at the model.

He had a bad feeling about the whole situation.

During autumn, this feeling of impending doom became reality.

Due to the complete lack of rain in the entirety of summer, the previous issue became a pressing problem again. This time, the drought was most serious for the Commonwealth of Gold Coins, and in many parts of the land, the ground had started to crack. As for the crops… If rain fell right at that moment, there perhaps could have been hope. Otherwise, more than half would become unsalvageable. The Goddess of Wealth was extremely anxious, and she paced back and forth with worry. She had already sent out all the Oracles and patron saints under her to help save the situation, but it seemed like her efforts were in.

the Goddess of Wealth’s plans were similar to those in the past, which was to obtain water from the Water Element Plane. However, with the restrictions on the Main Plane, even legendary-level Oracles could not use their power to their potential. Even with the help of the Goddess of Wealth, each Oracle was only able to gather enough water to fill about 10000 acres of land daily. While 10000 acres sounded like a lot, the northern and southern areas of the Commonwealth spanned more than 5000 kilometers, and the western and eastern areas spanned close to 4000 kilometers. In other words, the entire country took up land amounting to more than 1500,0000 kilometers. They had not fully developed the land, and thus, cultivated ground took up about 15% of the country’s land. One could thus say that there were about 2250000 kilometers of farming land, or 550 million acres to water.

The conversion between acres and kilometers seemed dissimilar to that on Earth to Sui Xiong, and he was unsure whether it was his own fault for being inattentive in physics classes. Was his arithmetic sense really so bad?

Well, in any case, there was the issue where even if an Oracle could supply one acre of water to the land each day and created a small river in five days, 550 million acres was impossible to fulfill. A simple calculation would show that they would require at least 110 million Oracles to create rivers every five days!

If this were outside the Main Plane, sustaining 110 million Oracles would not really be an issue. However, on the Main Plane, to maintain such activity, infinite amounts of power would be spent.

The reality was that if Sui Xiong had not chosen to give aid, with the plans by the Goddess of Wealth alone, the Commonwealth would long have fallen. Even with Sui Xiong’s aid, things were already tough.

Although the Goddess of Wealth did not specialize in war, she was still rather strong as a god and could vaguely sustain 1000 to 1500 Oracles’ activities in the Human Realm. This was about the general standard of great Divine Power. Among her friends, she was the only one who could do so.

Yorgaardman and Sui Xiong were both stronger than the Goddess of Wealth. However, this was rather negligible as they did not have as many Oracles under them. For the activity of Oracles collecting water from the Human Realm, mass-produced Oracles were unable to participate. Only elite Oracles had the intelligence to complete such a task. Even if we added the number of Yorgaardman and Sui Xiong’s elite Oracles together, there would still be less than 500 Oracles, let alone 1000. Sui Xiong had about 300 elite Oracles under him, while Yorgaardman had less than 100. In comparison, God of Law, Law Brans, had about 2000.

In any case, after everyone compiled their Oracle count, there were still impossibly behind with only approximately 3000 Oracles. What made the situation worse was that even if all 3000 Oracles were used, the situation in the Commonwealth would still be rather unsalvageable…

After all, 15% of the land of the Commonwealth of Gold Coins was farming ground…