Fright

However, before he could even finish exhaling, the last remaining Snakemen Priest suddenly gave up resisting. He drew a bone dagger from his waist, set with gems and shaped like a snake's tail, and viciously plunged it into his own chest. The bone dagger immediately lit up with a blood-red golden glow. At the same time, the two eye-like gems embedded in its hilt lit up, and a suffocating presence appeared out of nowhere.

"Hiss!"

The Snakemen Priest hissed toward the sky. His pupils turned pitch-black, and streams of snake-like black vapor flew from them, rapidly shooting toward the corpses of every dead Snake-Man around them. When they flew back, each stream was wrapped around a Snake-Man soul, which plunged back into the Snakemen Priest's body.

As one Snake-Man soul after another merged into his body, the Snakemen Priest's aura rapidly swelled. A pressure belonging only to a demigod slowly emerged and quickly intensified.

"Holy shit, a demigod descending?"

As a deity himself, Lin Xiao naturally knew what this meant.

The demigod behind these Snake-Men was actually using this Snakemen Priest as a medium to forcibly send over a sliver of Divinity in order to condense an avatar.

Clearly, this Snakemen Demigod had set his sights on Lin Xiao, a newly born Divine Lifeform, and wanted to hunt him across worlds this way.

If an ordinary Divine Lifeform had encountered this situation, it would most likely have been finished. A demigod was far stronger than a Divine Lifeform, and even a mere avatar could easily crush nearly any Divine Lifeform.

Unfortunately, Lin Xiao was currently in class. He was a student, and teachers were watching over them during class precisely to prevent accidents like this.

When faced with such a situation, all he needed to do was stay calm, then shout, "Teacher, save me!"

"How dare you!"

A deafening roar came from the horizon. A golden finger as massive as a mountain descended from the sky and pressed down upon the Snakemen Priest, who was still condensing into form.

As if sensing this fatal threat, the black smoky souls surrounding the Snakemen Priest rapidly contracted, forming a pitch-black, eggshell-like shield. A savage Snake-Man face appeared on the shield and roared toward the heavens.

Then the golden finger pressed down. The eggshell shattered inch by inch, and the drastically transformed Snakemen Priest likewise disintegrated inch by inch. In the end, he turned to nothingness, leaving only a speck of golden light suspended in the air, constantly flickering and radiating Divine Power fluctuations that made Lin Xiao unable to stop himself from drooling.

This was a sliver of Divinity, sent across worlds by the Snakemen Demigod to condense an avatar. Now that the avatar and its will had been destroyed, only this sliver of Divinity remained.

A golden ray flew from the golden finger, wrapped around that speck of golden light, and rose into the air. Lin Xiao instinctively reached out and cried, "Hey!" The golden finger paused for a moment before continuing away.

After a while, Class Teacher Wu Hai's voice sounded in his ears:

"In theory, this sliver of Divinity was produced during this additional test and should belong to you. However, with your strength, it would have been impossible for you to defeat a demigod's avatar. According to the rules, you failed this additional trial. But the demigod avatar was an unexpected circumstance beyond the scope of the additional trial, so I have taken the Divinity. This additional test is judged a success, and the Divine Domain Card belongs to you."

"Ah!"

Lin Xiao let out a long sigh. This was within his expectations.

But it was still a sliver of Divinity. Watching it vanish right before his eyes made his heart ache.

After all, the most crucial thing in advancing from a Divine Lifeform to a demigod was Divinity. It was the essence of a Divine Lifeform. The stronger one's Divinity, the greater the Divine Power and Divine Domain one could carry. In particular, when a Divine Lifeform transformed into a demigod, it needed to condense a Divine Profession, which required enough Divinity to bear it.

The stronger one's Divinity, the more Divine Professions it could bear, and the stronger those Divine Professions could be.

Lin Xiao currently had only one point of Divinity. Even Yuan Hong, the strongest in the class, had only two points. To become a demigod, the minimum requirement was five points of Divinity.

Normally, one needed to accumulate one hundred million units of Faith Points, along with a certain amount of Divine Power, just to attempt condensing one point of Divinity—and success was not guaranteed.

A whole hundred million!

Lin Xiao felt as though he had missed out on a hundred million.

But there was nothing he could do. No matter how one looked at it, that sliver of Divinity did not belong to him.

Fortunately, he had passed this additional trial, and that Divine Domain Card was his. That was not bad.

With that, this Diagnostic Exam was effectively over for him. Next came cleaning up the aftermath.

The injured Murlocs returned to the tribe first, while the uninjured ones cleaned the battlefield. They moved the dead Murloc corpses, along with their weapons, to one side, then carried all the Snake-Man corpses back and piled them together.

More than two hundred Snake-Men had died, along with over three hundred Murlocs. The corpses were piled into mountains.

Only a little over two hundred Kinfolk remained alive in the Divine Domain. Their numbers had been cut down drastically, but fortunately, the surviving Murlocs were mostly the kind with double reproduction and survival rates. There were still more than twenty days before the final exam, and over twenty years was enough time for them to multiply again.

Looking at the two huge piles of corpses, Lin Xiao decided to burn them. The weather by the sea made corpses rot easily.

But just as he was about to act, a sudden idea occurred to him. Could he use his Creation Cube to do something? He was still unwilling to let go of that sliver of Divinity, but there was nothing he could do, since it did not belong to him no matter how he looked at it. It left him extremely frustrated, feeling as though he had suffered a loss and wanting to earn something back.

He thought, since the Creation Cube had functions such as decomposition and refinement, and could break down Cards to extract their cores, could it break down these corpses and refine something from them?

These corpses were useless anyway and were going to be burned. Why not test whether his idea would work?

It did not matter if it failed. But if it worked... He acted as soon as he thought of it. He looked up at the sky. By then, the Class Teacher and teaching assistant had already left, and there was no one outside the Divine Domain.

Flying above the pile of Snake-Man corpses, he extended his right hand. A ring of golden light flew out, rapidly expanded, and descended, encircling the mountain of Snake-Man corpses.

When the golden ring swallowed the corpse pile and closed again, the more than two hundred Snake-Man corpses had vanished.

He then repeated the process, swallowing the Murloc corpses on the other side as well. At the same time, he did not forget to have the Murloc Chieftain shout from the side:

"The great Lord of Gray Mist welcomes the brave warriors to my lord's kingdom. The evil invaders shall be cast into the Bottomless Abyss."

As an outstanding student with perfect theoretical grades in deity studies, maximizing faith had practically seeped into his instincts. He could spout nonsense without even thinking.

Amid the fanatical cheers of all his believers, Lin Xiao's true body shot into the sky and returned to the Divine Kingdom.

His Divine Kingdom was almost completely empty now. Unlike the Divine Domain, which had mountains and water, the Divine Kingdom contained only a stretch of chaos.

As a New God of the Main World, different from traditional faith deities, his core was the Divine Domain formed by the fusion of the Divine Kingdom and the Material Plane, two sides of the same whole. The Divine Kingdom's area matched that of the Divine Domain's Material Plane. However large the Material Plane was, the Divine Kingdom was equally large.

But for someone like Lin Xiao, whose Divine Domain had only just been opened, developing the Divine Domain's Material Plane was already difficult enough. The Faith Points he accumulated were not even enough for his own use, so how could he have any spare to decorate the Divine Kingdom?

Thus, although his Divine Kingdom was as large as his Divine Domain, its actual usable area was only about the size of a football field. There was only a crude palace. His residence and true body were located at the very core of the Divine Palace, while outside the palace, several dozen Murloc Petitioners decorated the place and served as guards.