A Faith Called Science

It was precisely because of these ripples that some structures once hidden in the depths of the ocean became clearly visible.

He saw countless tiny points of light representing individuals, from which extended hundreds of millions of slender, fragile yet incomparably resilient threads of spirituality. These threads converged, tangled together, and climbed upward.

The one most heavily affected was undoubtedly the deity closely tied to the concept of "night."

In Backlund, the Evernight Goddess had the most believers. Moreover, when the lights dispelled the darkness, it directly left an indelible mark upon those believers' subconscious minds.

And that was the disturbance within the sea of collective subconsciousness.

It also exposed the relationship between gods and believers in this world.

Gods did indeed exist by relying on faith.

But this reliance was not the indirect use of faith as a form of energy that he had initially imagined.

Rather, it directly made use of the collective cognition of believers to continuously shape, define, and even distort the essence of a god.

It was an extremely dangerous symbiotic relationship.

A typical example was the world of Under One Person.

In the world of Under One Person, due to the special nature of Primordial One Qi, there were likewise many methods of harnessing the faith of human groups.

Directly adding the vast, chaotic aspirations of all living beings onto oneself would inevitably result in the loss and alienation of the self.

Even in that world, enlightened masters who practiced Dual Cultivation of Life and Nature and possessed clear, lucid hearts found it difficult to preserve their true selves beneath such a deluge. In the end, they would become aggregates of the thoughts of all living beings—false gods who had lost their "selves."

The Beyonders of this world, meanwhile, lacked systematic methods of cultivation