Artificial Angel

After some time, Backlund returned to its usual peace.

At street corners, newsboys waved the latest Backlund Daily, hoarsely hawking the headlines, which had shifted from the "God's Cross" outside the city to the romantic escapades of some viscount.

Edwin also concluded his perfectly timed "serious illness" and reappeared in the public eye.

He looked somewhat thinner, his complexion pale, but that only won him considerable sympathy.

At the tail end of the social season, he even received quite a few letters of concern.

After returning, he devoted most of his time to work.

On one hand, he introduced more civilian electrical appliances, such as electric fans, radios, phonographs, and so on.

For instance, a phonograph named "Nightingale," its casing made of expensive Burmese teak and capable of playing the latest opera excerpts with exceptionally high fidelity, swiftly became the new favorite of ladies' afternoon tea salons.

The profits brought by these luxury goods were astonishing.

And he invested those vast sums into expanding the company.

He assembled more generator units and erected more utility poles.

On the other hand, another "project" was proceeding at the same time.

He constructed a higher-sequence Reformer potion.

He no longer merely distributed potions. Instead, he directly packaged those writings and stuffed them into the Beyonder characteristics.

They gathered greater strength, like scattered seeds, and began to take root in the Kingdom of Loen, as well as nations such as Feysac and Intis.

This stirred imperceptible ripples in the sea of humanity's collective subconscious.

So-called faith did not point solely toward the seven orthodox deities seated high above in the spirit world.

When tens of millions of people developed a unified understanding of the same thing or the same ideal, that immense spiritual power itself became the seed of a kind of "divinity."

With