"Well, I am interested to see whether my stopguard held," Gaia thought as she looked toward the Vatican, where the Pope was beginning his breakthrough to Stage One. The timing was sooner than she had expected, which made the situation considerably more interesting than she would have preferred. She watched carefully, knowing that the Pope was about to experience changes that would affect far more than his personal strength. Once he crossed that threshold, he would gain access to a new class, and unlike the temporary classes humanity had received at the beginning of the mana era, this one would be something entirely different.
The first three classes available to humanity had never been intended to represent their ultimate paths. Gaia had designed them as placeholders, giving people enough power and direction to survive the sudden arrival of mana without allowing millions of people to die from ignorance. They were simple, practical choices that helped humanity adapt while the world itself was changing around them. Once someone reached adulthood or broke through Stage One and became a Mortal, however, the system could finally offer classes based on far more information.
Those classes could be influenced by a person's abilities, experiences, profession, personality, accomplishments, and even the faction to which they belonged. In some cases, a powerful faction could also possess the means to grant a specific class to one of its members. The Pope, however, was about to encounter something far more unusual than any of those possibilities. He would receive a unique class that could belong to only one person because, quite literally, he would become the Pope.
That was what made Gaia nervous.
The Pope would not merely become stronger after his breakthrough. His new class would represent his position as the mortal leader of Christianity, and that meant the class would inevitably interact with the religious power surrounding him. The Holy See had already been under considerable pressure during the years since mana appeared, as several countries had become increasingly hostile toward the resurgence of organized religion. Some governments were even attempting to remove large numbers of religious citizens from their territories.
That situation had created a problem that was far more practical than theological arguments.
Money.
The Holy See had lost access to enormous amounts of wealth and resources as political tensions increased, while at the same time its leaders were desperately trying to maintain their influence over their followers. Yet the greater problem was not their finances or their territory. It was the fear that people would simply stop believing.
Humanity had been given strength.
People could now cultivate mana, develop extraordinary abilities, enter dangerous secret realms, and perform things that previous generations would have considered miracles. Yet despite all of that, there had still been no obvious evidence that the gods humanity worshipped actually existed. Mana had appeared, the System had appeared, and the entire structure of reality had changed.
But God had not appeared.
Neither had the gods of the other major religions.
Gaia knew exactly why.
Humanity's gods did not exist in the traditional sense that most believers imagined. They had been created by humanity itself through centuries of belief, stories, prayers, traditions, and cultural energy. When billions of people believed strongly enough in a particular divine figure for long enough, that belief eventually accumulated into something capable of developing into an actual entity.
Mana had provided the final ingredient.
Before mana arrived, those beings had possessed no meaningful ability to interact with reality. They were closer to enormous collections of cultural energy than actual living gods. Once mana flooded the world, however, that energy could finally begin forming something resembling consciousness and power. Gaia had recognized the danger immediately and had imprisoned them before they could fully awaken.
She had not done it because she hated religion.
She had done it because she had no intention of allowing newly awakened entities to immediately begin manipulating humanity.
The second problem was considerably worse.
The gods were corrupted.
Humanity's beliefs had never consisted entirely of love, hope, devotion, and kindness. People prayed to their gods when they were desperate, angry, frightened, grieving, jealous, or seeking revenge. Centuries of suffering had become intertwined with those beliefs, and all of that negative cultural energy had accumulated alongside the positive energy.
The result was something Gaia did not want walking freely across Earth.
Even the most devoted believers had created their own images of what their gods should be like. They had imagined their personalities, their appearances, their desires, and their judgments. Those ideas had accumulated over thousands of years, mixing with stories of miracles and punishments, wars and disasters, prayers for salvation, and desperate demands for divine intervention.
Jesus had suffered from the same problem.
The countless interpretations surrounding him had become part of the cultural energy that shaped his existence. Humanity's own doubts had also become intertwined with that energy, including the repeated arguments that gods did not exist and the anger of people who believed they had been abandoned. Gaia had no desire to see what would happen if such an entity awakened without any restrictions.
The answer would have been horrifying.
If an ordinary human somehow established direct communication with one of those corrupted gods right now, Gaia believed the result would be catastrophic. The person would not receive some peaceful divine revelation and return to their daily life. They would risk being overwhelmed, enslaved, and reduced to little more than a mindless vessel.
Gaia could have destroyed the gods.
That would certainly have been simpler.
Instead, she had chosen imprisonment because destroying them would have wasted an enormous amount of cultural energy. That energy represented something far too valuable to throw away, especially when she believed there might still be a way to turn the problem into something beneficial for humanity.
Her solution was simple in theory.
Humans with sufficiently pure hearts and sufficiently strong beliefs would be allowed to borrow power from their respective gods. The amount they borrowed would be small, and before it could be fully integrated into their bodies, their own cultural energy would alter and cleanse it.
If Gaia's theory was correct, the process could gradually purify the gods themselves.
It was an experiment on a scale that made even Gaia uncomfortable.
The Pope was about to become the first major test.
Gaia watched the Vatican carefully as the man's breakthrough approached. Once he crossed Stage One, he would discover things about his religion that no human scholar could ever have uncovered through ordinary research. He would learn that his god existed, but he would also discover that the truth was considerably stranger than anything written in the scriptures.
What he chose to do with that knowledge was no longer Gaia's responsibility.
She had already provided humanity with a path.
The same principle could eventually be applied to the world's major religions, particularly Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, though the exact results would depend on the people who attempted to walk those paths. Gaia was genuinely curious about how humanity would respond once religion was no longer a matter of faith alone.
Would they celebrate?
Would they panic?
Would governments attempt to control the phenomenon?
Would religious leaders attempt to suppress the truth because it contradicted their teachings?
She had no idea.
And, for once, Gaia was willing to let humanity answer the question itself.
She would intervene only if the situation became dangerous enough to threaten humanity as a whole.
Unfortunately, another problem was already occupying her attention.
Her fishing operation in Saint Martin was not going particularly well.
Gaia had hoped that the bait would attract something more substantial, but so far, the creatures investigating the situation had been little more than small fry. Some of the leads had been useful, but most had ended in dead ends that revealed little about the void or its agents.
She had never expected the plan to work immediately.
The void was dangerous precisely because it was patient.
Gaia had been given an enormous amount of information about it when she became the System, and roughly a quarter of that knowledge concerned the Void, the Abyss, and the dangers associated with them. That alone demonstrated how serious the threat was. Unfortunately, knowing that something was dangerous did not automatically make finding it easier.
The Abyss was already becoming more noticeable.
Gaia could feel its influence spreading across the planet, like tiny insects crawling through cracks that should have remained sealed. She knew she might have to deal with those pests for the rest of her existence, and although she had accepted that possibility, acceptance did not mean she had to enjoy it.
She especially did not enjoy what was happening in the United States.
The country had far too many problems hiding beneath its surface, and its uncontrolled greed was beginning to irritate her. The events surrounding the private equity firm were only one example of a much larger problem, and Gaia could see the consequences accumulating.
Greed itself was not inherently evil.
Human ambition could build civilizations, create discoveries, and push people toward greatness. But when greed became powerful enough to ignore every warning and every consequence, it eventually became something else entirely.
A force that needed to be restrained.
Gaia had no intention of stopping the consequences if the United States continued down that road. If the punishment eventually became severe enough to swallow the entire country into the Abyss, then so be it. Humanity had been given countless opportunities to choose its own path.
The fate of the United States would ultimately depend on what it chose to do with them.