Middle-earth, Zhentil Keep.
Ever since Saints' Calamity began and the gods fell, forced to walk the mortal world in the forms of mortal saints, Bane, the God of Strife, had not been idle either—or rather, he could not afford to be idle.
He needed constant activity and thought to divert his attention from the mortal state that plagued him.
The passage of several thousand years had long since made him forget what it felt like to be mortal.
It felt as though his soul had been stuffed into an endlessly intricate machine that would only return sensation and act when given commands.
Yet he had to admit that when, from a god's perspective, he turned his attention inward and examined the mortal shell he was forced to inhabit—when he immersed his awareness into a single red blood cell within the body's ceaseless flow of blood, allowing the body itself to choose the path of exploration—he felt, beneath that microscopic world, a mystery and allure that could rival divinity itself.
He knew this was the miracle of life itself, a riddle mortals might spend their entire lives unable to unravel.
Yet he also knew that, for him at this moment, this riddle was a "trap."
For if he stubbornly immersed himself in the microscopic realm of mortals, it would not only fail to grant him any direct power in his current state.
It would instead cast him, once a god, into the perilous predicament of "dimensional descent."
When that Silver Dragon had cast them out of the divine realm in their saintly forms, they had already felt this deeply. The countless possibilities that had once unfolded before their eyes had all been severed as if by a sharp blade, as though they had fallen into a narrow maze where they could