"Delete"

Daniel and the others' conversation set Gawain's thoughts wandering uncontrollably.

Ever since learning that the concept of the "Upper Narrator" and its related faith had emerged in Sandbox One, he had been thinking about the nature of the gods in this world and the process by which all concepts related to gods came into being. The two questions that concerned him most were these:

First, how had the gods of this world come into existence? Second, what role did the System of Precepts that arose around these gods play within the entire system of faith?

In this world, the concepts of countless faiths and their corresponding gods had all originated from the Eternal Stone Tablet. In Gawain's judgment, the Eternal Stone Tablet should have served merely as some kind of "guiding medium" for the mortals of this world. It came from that God-Slaying Fleet of old, and for reasons still unknown, it carried traces of the gods it had destroyed. Ordinary people in this world could not, like him, read the fleet's battle reports from those ancient metals. They could only sense some lingering power left behind by those gods—and since a god's power often also signified a god's knowledge, the mortals who first encountered the Eternal Stone Tablet had, in effect, indirectly learned the gods' knowledge from it.

The knowledge of gods possessed an irresistible corrosive and assimilative effect on mortal minds.

It was upon this foundation that the many religious faiths of the present world had been stirred into existence and gradually developed. This was clearly different from the faith in the "Upper Narrator," which had arisen entirely from nothing within Sandbox One.

Gawain had always been puzzled by this—in this world's actual history, this era of Mortal Civilization had only developed its many religions after coming into