Cthulhu Gonfalon

Another one to two months passed, and soon, it was winter.

In theory, due to the freezing nature of winter and the lack of evaporation, the drought crisis ought to resolve itself. However, in reality, it wasn’t so.

According to the God of Drought, in the previous 100 years, the overall trend was that there was always more rain than drought, meaning that there were lots of drought instances “conserved.” Now, especially as he was the sole god left, these drought instances exploded out all at one go due to the over accumulation of them. To settle this issue, the God of Rain had to take action… but he had already fallen. One could say that unless there was a new God of Rain that appeared in a timely fashion, this big drought situation would persist and worsen.

“How urgent is the situation now?” Sui Xiong asked.

“A new God of Rain needs to appear in… about one to two months,” Javier replied.

“That’s too short a time period! This plan is ridiculous! What do you want to do, go out and capture a wild the God of Rain back?” Sui Xiong was enraged.

As he mentioned, such a notion was simply ridiculous.

Before the investiture of a god could take place, one needed a period of training and an adjustment period to acclimatize to one’s new body conditions and finish building a God Kingdom. This time period was flexible, and those who took longer could possibly use tens or hundreds of years, while others only required a few months. Within this time, they were able to respond to disciples’ prayers and share magic, but they could not really expand on their priesthood. However, the drought situation was too urgent to wait for a new god. Human lives were at stake here!

Furthermore, currently, on the Main Plane, many living creatures were on the brink of extinction. Waiting a few more months would mean that they would disappear from existence forever.

If all the plants shriveled up and died and all the animals died of thirst, what would be the use of future rain?

As he considered this grave situation, Sui Xiong couldn’t help but sigh.

Usually, he was quick on his feet and could come up with good ideas quickly. Under such circumstances, though, he felt stuck and useless.

“What is the Master of Order thinking! This world is about to collapse, and he is still against the creation of rain… That’s just him being stubborn!” Sui Xiong complained.

“Well, he has his own way of thinking, and we can’t do anything about it. Many of the bigger gods have been trying to negotiate with him but to no avail.” Javier sighed.

“Hey! This is really terrible!”

“It is terrible, but what can we do? In the past, such a difficult situation has never taken place even if there have been other disasters that occurred. We can only hope that we manage to survive this somehow.”

Sui Xiong said nothing and sat in silence with a sullen expression on his face.

Hope? Hope was not enough to tide this world through the crisis. Was there really nothing else they could do but pray to stay alive? The more Sui Xiong thought in silence, the more his eyes clouded over with rage. There was also a thunderous expression on his face that scared Javier.

As an artist, Sui Xiong was a sensitive person and could be irrational when he was unhappy. In this case, who could even blame him given the situation?

After a while, Sui Xiong began to form a secret plan in his mind.

Even if one could not create rain or steal water from the Water Element Plane, he had other ploys in mind.

After Javier had left, he created a separate body entity to enter the Human Realm. This body entity swelled, and countless tentacles emerged.

These slimy, sticky tentacles reached out in all directions of the Human Realm. His main body landed in the North, in the icy sea, and became a huge pipe several kilometers long. At the same time, another of his clones materialized in front of the Goddess of the Ocean, Ariel.

“Could I trouble you to migrate the living creatures away from the Northern Sea? Those who are currently in this area.” As he spoke, Sui Xiong drew a circle on the map that he was holding.

Ariel glanced at the map and frowned, saying, “That area includes a mermaid city… Why are you collecting a lot of water?”

“Yes, I am. I really require a lot of water,” Sui Xiong emphasized.

“In that case, I suggest you head to this area instead.” Ariel drew another circle on the map.

“Although it is a bit further away, there are literally no living creatures there, and I will migrate the few living there.”

“Sure!”

Sui Xiong nodded and prepared to teleport his clone to the place Ariel suggested.

“I would just like to remind you that seawater cannot be used for watering fertile land. If you do so, the land will become useless. Animals who drink that water will also die of the saltiness.” Ariel couldn’t help but offer a word of caution as she observed Sui Xiong’s visible excitement.

“Don’t worry! I’m aware of that. I’m not stupid, so of course, I would have considered that in my plan.” Sui Xiong smiled.

Of course, he was aware that seawater could not be directly consumed or used to water crops. Seawater contained a high level of salt, after all. He wanted to use his Divine Power to remove the salt content from the water to convert it to fresh water before using it.

As to how he would do so… Sui Xiong was going to use distillation, of course!

Although his physics knowledge was not brilliant, he had vague memories of distillation experiments converting saltwater to freshwater in school. His teacher had demonstrated a total of six experiments, and in all of these cases, freshwater was successfully produced. Although he was not fully clear on the theory behind distillation, Sui Xiong was aware of the necessary procedures.

The first method was to boil the water. As long evaporation could occur, a large amount of condensation produced could be re-converted from gaseous state to liquid state of freshwater.

The second method would be pumping. Using an air extractor with a certain pre-set level of pressure, water could also boil at a temperature below the boiling point. The condensation produced could be collected in a liquid state, similar to the first method.

The third method would be freezing. As temperature decreases, water with the lowest salt content level would freeze first. While the water that could eventually be collected through this method was not pure freshwater, it would still have significantly lower salt content.

The fourth method would be permeation. One could use pressure to squeeze water through a permeable membrane, in which salt would not be able to pass through.

The fifth method would be through the exchange of ions. Freshwater could be produced by allowing water to flow slowly through a pipe filled with ion exchange resin.

The sixth and last method would be to use a cloud chamber. Saltwater was to be sprayed into a cloud chamber containing hot air. This would create large amounts of condensation very quickly, which could be converted to the liquid state of freshwater.

Among these six methods, Sui Xiong decided to eliminate the fifth one of ion exchange first as he did not know how to perform the exchange well. Even his teacher had been a little unsure of the specifics!

Next, he also eliminated the freezing method as he wanted pure freshwater and not water with a lowered salt content.

Among the remaining methods, the main idea was that either condensation needed to be collected or pressure was needed. The former seemed simpler, but there would be lots of concentrated brine produced. On the other hand, the latter was more complicated, and according to his teacher, there were high requirements for creating permeable membranes.

Since Sui Xiong was not an expert, so he decided to just pick a method and stick to it for the time being.