Chapter 178: Chapter 173

Copy pasting the new lines from the Veggie Moth gave me a new, disturbing filter on the eldritch world. Turns out, there was more than one realm or level to interdimensional bullshit, and the stuff often overlaps. I tweaked some of the sensors and updated the AIs’ coding to perceive the new realm, and then handed the new info to NOD for them to play around with.

 

As for myself, the whole idea about belief was an interesting and dangerous thing to dabble in. From the little I’ve worked with so far, belief as an energy source is a powerful thing, even with how inefficient it was. You needed a lot of people to firmly believe in something for it to overwrite metaphysical reality, but unless you fully remove all traces of belief in that something, it was nigh impossible to undo the changes wrought.

 

At the same time, genuine worship generated a different sort of energy, one that, if I’m reading the moth right, could be drawn upon at any time like a reservoir. The only problem is that the connection seems to be highly complex, and from what I saw in the console, the worship of the believers had the ability to affect changes to their object of faith. 

 

If I’m reading the clues correctly, the Veggie Man was actually once a vegetable-looking eldritch thing that lived up to its name. Then somehow, its followers associated it with moths, and all the plant-related abilities became ‘N/A’ values, and its…portfolio, for lack of a better term, got changed to a knowledge vampire.

 

So…yeah. I’ll be putting off godhood for a while yet I think. Until I can figure out how not to fuck myself over with the growing pool of faith power that’s connected to the idea of me. It’s easy enough to just take the power and claim godhood, but with how much of a frothing mix the reservoir is, I have no idea if doing so will cause a drastic, irreversible change to me.

 

Too much of a gamble right now, and I’ll need time to properly delve into that topic. In the meantime, I just used new sight to take note of the pool of worship I was collecting. It gave an idea of what the more loyal people thought about me, so at the very least it’s another metric to rate myself as a ruler.

 

The deadend didn’t mean I didn’t come away with anything useful though. With the knowledge of belief, I could create minor ‘miracles’ which sustained itself with what were basically faith circuits, and with enough bending of the rules I could even pull off a metaphysical feedback loop. The upkeep on a small scale was negligible considering that those minor miracles could feed off the base beliefs of its host. So long as they believed it worked, it’ll work. That sort of thing.

 

Plus I could just top up the inevitable energy decay via console. 

 

So for now, Piper, Cait and Curie no longer require conventional nourishment. They can still eat, they just don’t have to to sustain their health. One convenient side effect of that was that they didn’t have to use the toilet as often as well, indefinitely if they kept from food and water completely. They didn’t even need to live off my cum - that was just a side trigger that I could enable if I wanted to - but the three of them found the idea fun enough that they acted like they did.

 

Kinky girls, this harem of mine.

 

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Anyway, as I left the occultists to explore the tech tree of divinity, I had the expansion slowed to a halt after the Nexus engulfed Ohio and Virginia, as well as most of Michigan and parts of Indiana, Kentucky and North Carolina. We were also taking up about half of Ontario at this point. 

 

Eva’s update showed just how many robots we’re lacking to maintain the usual air patrols, infrastructure upkeep, and other various tasks within the Nexus, to say nothing of the military reserves whose minimum level was rising. The eastern regions of Quebec, Maine and beyond were still undergoing restoration, and the amount of land we got out of the northern expansion was significant enough that it was starting to dent the eldritch materials required for mass land cleansing.

 

The tradeoff to some might seem poor, considering the Nexus mostly got winter wastelands and some desperate tribals, but I saw it as a massive swathe of potential farmland. Dr Penske, with some help from NOD, had come through with quite a number of cold-resistant plants, including fruits, vegetables and grains.

 

Couple that with an extensive terraforming to level the uninhabited swathes of land (because what is expensive to me, really?), and the less hospitable northern regions of the Nexus would be host to automated farms for a new range of crops and orchards. We’ll have massive forest reserves as well, of course, partly for sustainable lumber, partly to ensure the forest diversity is a thing, and partly to keep as a tourist spot. And maple syrup, can’t forget maple syrup.

 

Stuff’s the only thing that the radmoose and ice bears like enough to use as a taming tool. Would be nice if the Doomgeese had a soft spot for it as well, but alas, those monstrosities could only be appeased by a sufficient sacrifice of raiders.

 

So it was time for another turtling phase, and this time I let Eva be less involved in the civilian planning. We have admin staff that could use some variety in their tasks after all. Plus Gwen was floating the idea of splitting up the admin into specializations, so it was a good time to see how well each section operated. Agriculture, urban development, transport, interior peace and other categories got their own departments, while the main admin would, if this trial proved to be successful, become the Nexus Federal Administration.

 

The Nexus bureaucracy was expanding at last, and I made note to keep an eye on that new monster’s growth. Theoretically, with automation and interlinked AIs, we could trim it down to an efficient thing. The human element needed some monitoring and/or training, but I guess we’ll have to see how corruption takes root in this state that I’ve made.

 

Here’s to hoping I don’t have to end up fully automating the departments with new AIs. Though maybe as a precaution, I’ll set aside the northern tip of Quebec for a server farm to accommodate more processing power…

 

Why do I have a feeling that I might as well convert the whole of Canada into server space?

 

Maybe I’ll have to make plans for a proper Arctic expansion to set up a server arcology.

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