Great Breakthrough and Great Advance

The gods of the New World were actually incredibly powerful, far beyond the violence that early industrialization could unleash.

Although various limitations prevented the gods from effectively wielding their power in the New World, the power they could display still far surpassed the limits of mortal understanding.

But the gods had concerns. Their power faced immense obstruction on God Star, and they had to deploy an enormous amount of energy at once just to transmit a tiny fraction of it.

It was like humanity launching rockets powered by chemical energy. Because of gravity, every kilogram of material sent into orbit required sixty to seventy times its weight in fuel.

The immense initial investment made the energy projected into the New World completely uncontrollable. Even with the aid of faith Altars to recalibrate it, effective control was impossible.

The early Chaos Gods had repeatedly and brutally used their own energy to interfere with the New World, and the result had been world-ending disasters.

The Chaos Gods had personally wiped out the giants who believed in them, leaving not even scraps behind. The resulting backlash had completely extinguished them over a thousand years.

The Ancient Gods that rose from the corpses of the Chaos Gods made the same mistake. As a result, the newly risen Feathered race died out just as completely, and the Ancient Gods swiftly moved toward destruction as well.

However, the Ancient Gods had not died completely. Over the long years that followed, they underwent round after round of revival, and the pantheon of Old Gods was born.

To spread out the risks, the Old Gods carefully selected different dependent races as sources of faith. They were soon assimilated by their own followers, and their forms underwent tremendous changes.

The Abyssal One became a forty-eight-tentacled, three-headed octopus. The Sea