"You want him? Then he's yours."
Eurydice had successfully turned a deity into a pillar and was thoroughly satisfied. He had no interest in the old deer, who couldn't be eaten and felt too strange to kill.
What mattered most to him now was whether the crystal pillar could activate, whether the Thorn Deer Deity's divine authority would work, and whether it would work outside the Semrio Continent.
He hadn't worked so hard for so long just to create something that only worked on the Semrio Continent. It would only count as useful if it still worked on the scale of the Astral Plane.
So he was genuinely impatient.
"Then let's go." Kroya understood his impatience and promptly took him and the crystal pillar to an area that had yet to be reclaimed.
This place was already outside the Nolant Kingdom. Kroya couldn't even remember which country it belonged to.
The other party had been so friendly that they insisted on giving him this territory, threatening to kneel and weep if he refused. In any case, one noteworthy detail was that this had originally been a grain-producing region affiliated with the Earth Mother Goddess Church.
-the boundless plain before them had once supported all kinds of fruit trees and food crops. Its harvests had supplied the Earth Mother Goddess's faithful.
Having enough to eat was actually a very good benefit. The Earth Mother Goddess's faith was essentially the second largest in the Human Kingdoms, while the faith of Light ranked first. One offered the fruits, vegetables, and fine foods produced by the earth; the other offered eternal life surrounded by holy light.
But when the Earth Mother Goddess Church withdrew, one of its saints had cursed the once-fertile soil outright. Thorns and spikes of rejection covered the land. They were