Without further ado, Chen Cheng followed Brother Octopus through space for an unknown distance. When Brother Octopus tore open the void, the deity and the octopus appeared above a Faith River filled with the suffering wills of countless beings.
This was Chen Cheng's first glimpse of what reincarnation truly looked like in this world. There were no souls with physical form, only the unwillingness living beings felt at the moment of death.
The Faith River was far from stable. It trembled violently along its entire length, as though a giant had seized it and was trying to swing it like a club.
"What do you need me to do?"
"Grow. Grow as large as you can, then jump into the river with me."
As Brother Octopus spoke, his body rapidly swelled.
Chen Cheng glanced at him. Brother Octopus had the Reincarnation Divine Core to replenish his power, but Chen Cheng had no such thing.
He looked at the river, formed from the painful, unwilling Faith of countless beings at their deaths, and used the Faith Binding Method he had just learned.
Using the emperor of the Thornflower Empire as his anchor, he succeeded in binding the Faith within the river.
At that moment, Chen Cheng understood what it meant to say that knowledge itself was contamination.
While alive, the beings in this river had all known of the Thornflower Empire and its emperor. By taking that as his divine name, and as the actual emperor, Chen Cheng could invade their spiritual Faith in reverse and draw upon it for his own use.
His Eyes-Closed Deity swelled like a balloon: a hundred zhang, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, until it finally reached ten million zhang.
Chen Cheng finally understood why the captured gods he had seen in the Crystal