The Envoy's Trial

An Envoy's Trial

"Pusluo greets the Chief God." Pusluo bowed to Lincoln.

"Bobo greets the Chief God." The man beside Pusluo followed suit.

"Bobo?" Lincoln asked, puzzled. It took him a while to remember that Bobo was Percy's younger brother.

Back then, to set up Black, the Dark Paragon, Lincoln had sacrificed an ambitious Highgod. The compensation he arranged afterward might have been hypocritical, but it was better than nothing. So he'd had Pusluo teach and protect Percy's relatives. Still, there had been no need to bring them before him.

Lincoln scrutinized Pusluo. He'd explicitly ordered him not to reveal that the arrangement had been his idea.

Pusluo hurried to explain, "Chief God, I met Bobo on the Tulip Plane while spreading the faith. We hit it off immediately, and Bobo is exceptionally talented. In just a million years, he's fully fused five Mysteries. I brought him here to recommend him as a Sovereign Envoy."

Lincoln looked at Pusluo in surprise. He hadn't expected the Fire Cat to be so thoughtful. Knowing that Bobo was someone Lincoln cared about, he'd gone to the trouble of making arrangements for him. Still, fusing five Mysteries in a million years showed decent talent, but it wasn't enough to impress him. Bobo would need to become a Peak Asura, just one step short of reaching Paragon, or possess a special talent.

Lincoln said nothing. To Pusluo and Bobo, the silence was frightening.

Still, the envoy position was vacant, and Bobo did have a somewhat special background. Giving him a trial seemed reasonable. There was just one thing Lincoln wasn't satisfied with: if Bobo passed, both of his Sovereign Envoys would wield the Laws of Fire. That was too monotonous.

"Since Pusluo has recommended you, I'll give you a chance." Lincoln broke the silence with a smile. "Choose any Prefecture in any of the Four Supreme Planes or Seven Divine Planes. If you can challenge its Prefecture Lord and win, you'll become my Sovereign Envoy."

Bobo immediately bowed his head. "I'll win the challenge!"

His expression was grave. With the strength of a newly ascended Asura, challenging a Prefecture Lord was almost certain death. But things had reached this point, and he had no room to refuse. Neither he nor Pusluo could afford to be accused of making a fool of the Chief God. Pusluo looked just as grave, frantically trying to work out how to increase Bobo's strength as much as possible in a short time—and which Prefecture Lord Bobo might be able to defeat.

"As a Sovereign Envoy, you may choose a Sovereign Artifact. Choose carefully!"

Bobo and Pusluo jerked their heads up. Bobo asked, "Chief God, don't I have to win the challenge first?"

Lincoln smiled. "You're on a trial run. If you win the challenge against a Prefecture Lord, you'll become permanent. There'll be no need to go through all the formalities again. If..." Lincoln paused. "If you lose..."

He didn't finish, but Pusluo and Bobo understood. There was usually only one outcome for a failed challenge: death. And the Sovereign Artifact of a dead Sovereign Envoy would naturally be reclaimed by the Chief God. No one would dare keep it.

But challenging a Prefecture Lord with a Sovereign Artifact was very different from doing so without one.

"Chief God, I'd like..." Bobo began, but Pusluo stopped him. "Chief God, please allow me to offer Bobo some advice."

Lincoln fixed his gaze on Pusluo, then nodded.

A short while later, the two had reached an agreement. Bobo asked for a Material Defense Sovereign Artifact, and Lincoln granted his request, giving him a black breastplate and a Main God Token. He added, "Bobo, you're still on a trial run, so I won't give you any Sovereign's Might. But it wouldn't make much sense for you to challenge a Prefecture Lord without any. Pusluo, give Bobo half of your Sovereign's Might."

Lincoln wouldn't begrudge them such a small amount of Sovereign's Might. But Pusluo had been overstepping, so Lincoln was giving him a warning.

Pusluo and Bobo both froze, then hurriedly agreed. Pusluo broke out in a cold sweat. It didn't take much reflection for him to realize that he'd meddled too much and displeased the Chief God.

After Pusluo and Bobo left, Lincoln returned to the Divine Plane he had created, anchored to the Chainis Plane. All sorts of divine beasts lived there, collected by Lincoln over the past million years. None of them could compare to him, a Seven-Colored Heaven-Swallowing Python, or come close to Wukun or the Four Divine Beasts. Still, each had its own remarkable Innate Divine Ability. If he could understand them and find a way to apply them, he might be able to further strengthen his Sovereign clone.

Orf and Uterede, the two Paragon Sovereigns, had relied on techniques such as Space-Time Chaos and the Samsara Golden Body to multiply their attack power thousands upon thousands of times. Lincoln certainly wouldn't neglect that kind of research.

Another, less important subject still occupied a fair amount of his attention: studying how to overcome the reproductive limits of divine beasts. Everyone knew that the more powerful a divine beast was, the harder it was to produce offspring. Lincoln was a top-tier divine beast, yet even after more than ten million years, he still had no children. But the scholars of the Coiling Dragon Universe had done very little research on the subject and had achieved no results. After all, divine life was endless, and strictly speaking, there was little point in producing offspring.

Even the Four Divine Beasts Clan, a vast divine-beast family, had only five or six members in the second generation, despite having four in the first. Leiding and the others had each fathered only one or two children.

Come to think of it, Gaisresen and the others seemed to have either a father and no mother or a mother and no father. It was almost as if the Four Divine Beasts reproduced asexually.

Unfortunately, Lincoln wasn't obsessed with this sort of research. He'd kept at it over the past million years, but it did little to increase his strength or help him have children. He had, however, made some progress in studying the Bloodline Awakening of offspring. That was thanks to the good fortune of finding the crucial specimen, Milotic, early on. He'd successfully awakened the bloodlines of a small number of Saint-level magical beasts, but he still needed to work out the underlying principles, and some problems urgently needed solving.

"Greetings, Chief God!" Athos immediately dropped to one knee when he saw Lincoln.

Athos was already an Asura, and Lincoln had entrusted him with managing this Divine Plane for the past million years. The poor cultivation environment, reduced time for training, and divided attention had left little room for him to grow stronger. Even so, he had served Lincoln wholeheartedly. Reaching Paragon was almost impossible, and even if he did, defeating a Chief God would be utterly impossible. By comparison, serving Lincoln well offered at least the faintest, most distant hope of revenge and saving his people.

Before Lincoln could say anything, Athos followed him toward the research room and took out a bottle, handing it to him. "Chief God, this is my Quintessence Blood from the past ten thousand years."

Lincoln took the bottle and smiled. "You've worked hard, Athos. Without you, this research might not have yielded results even after a billion years." As he spoke, he couldn't help reflecting on the "charm" of a Chief God. If all he had was the status of someone who'd merely seemed to be a Paragon, how could he have gathered so many rare beings, even among divine beasts? How could he have persuaded a divine-beast Asura to willingly serve as a blood donor for years on end?

Athos gave a bitter smile. "Chief God, I never realized our Milotic bloodline had such an effect. I wish it didn't. Without this bloodline-awakening ability, the Clownfish are so numerous that we Milotic would have become a vast race in our own right!"

Lincoln smiled. "It's the Azure Dragon Clan's breeding and slaughter that reduced your people to raw materials. Wait and see. The Four Divine Beasts Clan has countless enemies, and even most Chief Gods resent them. One day, you Clownfish and Milotic will be free."