Strange Rules

Several days later, at midnight.

Moni Brothers Tavern, underground wine cellar.

Rena had temporarily cleared out the basement, which had originally been packed with wooden wine barrels, making enough room for the ritual. However, the air was still thick with an intoxicating scent of wine.

Pete entered through the back door carrying a box, and the fumes made him a little dizzy. He shook his head hard, trying to clear it a little.

"The God of Knowledge is really generous. If it were any other god, using divine magic in a place like this would at least count as blasphemy."

Looking around at the surroundings, Pete could not help but make a sarcastic remark.

Rena was a little worried as well. "Will an environment like this really be okay?"

"It should be fine. I just tried meditating and asking the God of Knowledge. They did not indicate that there was any problem."

Rena had seen deacons from various churches use divine magic before, but those occasions had all been formal. The entire process had to be solemn, and every step had to be carried out meticulously.

But what did they have now?

The venue was a wine cellar that had been hastily cleared out. They had not even moved the barrels away, merely piled them against the walls first;

There was almost no lighting. There was a small skylight in the southeast corner of the basement, but it was close to midnight, and the moonlight filtering through it could not illuminate much. Most of the light came from a few candles Rena had brought down from upstairs as temporary illumination.

The dim flames flickered, and the magic circle hastily drawn in blue enchanted paint gave off a mysterious glow through the refracted light. Combined with the quiet atmosphere around them, and the two people meeting in secret...

A divine ritual whose effects they did not know...

An attempt to seek unknown, powerful forces...

Pete found the scene strangely familiar.

Thinking back carefully.

Wasn't this exactly like those black-robed lunatics in the cave?

The previous experience had left him traumatized, and Pete instinctively felt a little resistant to similar scenes.

Don't panic, don't panic. The God of Knowledge isn't some evil god. Evil gods are insane, irrational gods. The God of Knowledge is rational. The conditions are just limited right now, so the ritual site only looks a little strange!

Such a powerful god as the God of Knowledge will definitely have many people willing to believe in them once there is more time. Once there are more believers, things should get on the right track!

After psyching himself up, Pete took out the items he had brought one by one and placed them in their corresponding positions according to the information provided by the God of Knowledge.

"Get ready. We'll begin the ritual soon!"

"As long as you succeed, it will prove there is nothing wrong with this hand-built ritual system. Then we can make a fortune in Greenport's underground black market!"

"Then who cares about Dursley or whatever? None of it will be a problem!"

During the few days they had spent gathering the ritual materials, Pete and Rena had not been idle either. They conducted several experiments and discovered some rules that the God of Knowledge had not explicitly told them about, but which undeniably existed:

Pete tried sharing the casting methods for the [Arcane Missile] spell Noven had taught him through writing, verbal explanations, and other means at Caron Academy, but all of those attempts failed.

Whenever Pete tried to share the relevant knowledge, it was as though he vanished from the world. The people around him would automatically ignore his existence;

The knowledge recorded on a medium would turn into chaotic, disorderly scribbles as he wrote it down.

The methods were clearly in his mind. Pete had even memorized all the knowledge behind [Arcane Missile], from manipulating the Weave to calculating the specific spell model;

Pete even suspected that even if he abandoned his faith in the God of Knowledge now, he should still be able to cast the spell using the memories in his mind. Yet he simply could not share it with anyone else.

Rena also tried sharing with Pete the knowledge of the aptitude-testing ritual for professional classes, with the same result: failure.

This left Pete with no choice but to use the five knowledge points he had earned from completing the [My Lord's Truth Shines Upon the Earth] quest to exchange for the same knowledge from the God of Knowledge.

As for whether those memories would remain after abandoning his faith, and whether they could then be shared, the cost of abandoning his faith was simply too great for Pete to dare test it.

On Rena's side, she discovered several reliable ways to obtain knowledge points.

By praying diligently every day, she could receive one knowledge point. This was the earliest method they discovered, since she had to offer daily prayers to the God of Radiance anyway. Now, she merely had one more god to pray to.

The intelligent races of the Prantis Continent were generally polytheistic believers. It was common to worship one god and then another.

Besides that, Rena discovered a special way to obtain knowledge points:

After carefully cleaning the tavern as usual, she triggered a notification:

[Quest completed: Labor (Daily) (Repeatable)]

[You have obtained 1 knowledge point]

Rena told Pete about it, and after some testing, Pete further confirmed the method.

After Pete earnestly meditated and prayed to the Goddess of Magic, strengthening his connection to the Weave, he triggered a similar notification:

[Quest completed: Meditation (Daily) (Repeatable)]

[You have obtained 1 knowledge point]

However, when Pete cleaned the place as Rena had done, he did not trigger a corresponding notification.

Pete initially guessed that this might be related to the difference in their identities.

Rena was still only an ordinary person, while Pete was already a mage professional.

They had to do things appropriate to their own identities in order to obtain knowledge points.

Noven, in the Divine Kingdom, was equally interested in the patterns these two believers had uncovered.

When he had transmigrated here, aside from realizing that he was a god, he had been like an amnesiac. He knew nothing about his divine duties and authorities, or how to acquire faith. He could only feel his way forward through his believers, observing, analyzing, and drawing conclusions bit by bit.

For instance, when Rena cleaned, Noven could sense the power of faith being generated from her and gradually transformed into his divine power.

Although he had not yet figured out the causal relationship between the two, since doing so could bring Noven more divine power, he did not hesitate to reward his believers.

Giving out knowledge points would encourage believers to do more things that allowed Noven to gain more divine power.

Noven had also originally been a little concerned that directly imparting spellcasting knowledge might allow believers to exploit a loophole.

As long as one believer obtained knowledge by praying to him, in theory, they could share it with others. After all, Noven's divine power was not involved in the actual casting process for this spell-related knowledge. Noven did not seem to be a necessary component.

But judging from what his believer Pete encountered, Noven realized that things did not seem so simple.

Although his divine power did not participate in helping believers cast spells, the knowledge Noven obtained through his divine duties and authorities seemed to form a deeper binding relationship when imparted to mortals.

It was as though... there was some kind of identification code that could retrieve a believer's status anytime, anywhere. Only believers granted permission by Noven could possess, remember, and understand this knowledge!