Chapter 43 — Internal Rifts of the Divine Court

Wasteland Camp of the Blind Spot, deep in the night.

Inside the protective shed, the dim yellow light swayed slightly under the tin roof, casting large, messy, and mottled shadows.

Wrapped in the heavy waste-lead blocking blanket, Orion's complexion looked to have a bit more color than the previous physical day. The wounds on his chest caused by causality rejection, after being pasted with a thick layer of lead mud and star-marrow powder, had finally stopped frantically spewing golden divine blood outward. However, whenever his divine core tried to rebuild the broken law circuits in his body, he couldn't help but let out one or two muffled groans, the muscles beneath his bronze skin tensing in pain.

Elias sat on an old ammo crate nearby, holding a small piece of hard, compressed ration in his hand.

In the shadows not far away, Vespera (Umbra) wore a slightly oversized, dark grey ship's logistics officer trench coat. She did not look like a completely unremarkable refugee female worker; her movements were smooth, her expression cold.

But every time Orion glanced at that corner out of the corner of his eye, the Orion tattoo on his collarbone would uncontrollably twitch violently a few times. It was a nearly instinctual fear for survival, even if this woman hadn't moved a single finger at this moment.

"Don't look at her, she's our logistics supervisor, only responsible for inventorying supplies." Elias noticed Orion's gaze and spoke plainly, "Put away your divine intuition. In this blind spot, any probing of high-dimensional energy is just inviting the scanning frequencies of the external fleets upon ourselves."

Orion forced down the shudder deep in his divine core, withdrew his gaze, gritted his teeth, and grinned. "Mortal boy, this subordinate of yours... is truly not simple. Alright, since we're already tied to the same boat, what do you want to know from me?"

"I want to know the operational structure of the Divine Court." Elias broke the compressed food in his hand and handed half to Orion. "When I was in the lower waste mines of Tartarus, I had only ever seen low-tier divine envoys and patrol squads like Gar. But from your descriptions, the Heavenly Court doesn't seem to be a sacred, inviolable monolith, but a massive bureaucratic empire?"

"Bureaucratic empire? Haha, that term is used perfectly!" Orion struggled to sit up, took the food Elias handed him, and chewed it haphazardly. "The Divine Court is essentially a highly corrupt, faction-ridden giant interstellar meat grinder! Under the destiny algorithm of the LinBoo Astrolabe, all causality and lives provide energy for this machine."

A gleam of mockery and wildness flashed in Orion's eyes. He pointed to the unseen high sky above his head:

"You mortals always think gods are one entity, thinking that as long as they are gods, they will unite to exterminate you all in order to maintain a so-called 'supreme order'. Wrong! Dead wrong! In the eyes of those high-dimensional lords of the Divine Court, you mortals don't even count as enemies; you are merely the 'coal' and 'electricity' used to keep the astrolabe running. And what the lords care most about every day is the permissions, resources, and division of seats in the Inner Cabinet in their own hands!"

"The secular power network of the Divine Court is actually a 'one brain, two wings' dual structure." Orion slowly extended two thick steel fingers. "The ruling 'brain' at the very top is the Divine Court Inner Cabinet, composed of the Planetary Chief Gods. As for the Twin Gods, Lord Astra and Lord Umbra, they actually transcend secular political affairs; they are the physical incarnations of the LinBoo Astrolabe's laws and the system administration gods, equivalent to nominal faith totems and star-track maintainers. The Inner Cabinet is the empire's supreme center of power. For example, God King Jupiter, he is the Chief Minister of the Inner Cabinet, holding the universe's great benefic star and supreme legal authority; he maintains the Leviathan's stability through continuous expansion. God of Saturn, Saturn, on the other hand, is the cold Inspector Elder. They do not directly manage each star zone, but they control the universe's most fundamental physical and causality laws; with one sentence, they can lock down your jump channels. There are also other Chief Gods in charge of different domains."

He wiggled his first finger and continued, "And below the Inner Cabinet, it splits into two completely parallel power blocs—the first wing is the Twelve Zodiac Lords. Those are frontier military commanders like the Aries Lord. Nominally, they obey the Inner Cabinet's commands, but in reality, every Lord physically possesses their own massive star zone territory and interstellar army. In their territory, the Lord is the absolute local emperor. Furthermore, the Lords usually only take orders from the patron Chief God behind them—for example, the Aries Lord, nominally taking orders from the Inner Cabinet, actually only sells his life to his backer, the God of Mars, Mars. The Aries Legion is the private army of the God of Mars."

He raised his second finger and sneered: "The other wing, completely equal in rank to these military commanders, are the Lords of the Twelve Houses. They are the central civilian officials of the Divine Court. These civilian Lords do not have direct private armies, but in their hands, they hold administrative management rights across star zone borders, the purse strings, and causality law audit data. These civilian officials want to take back the military power and resources from the military lords through compliance audits every day; while the military lords curse the civilian officials as vampires every day, constantly threatening to level their House offices with interstellar motherships. For example, the Lord of the 6th House, Asclepius, manages corvée and life data, while the Lord of the 8th House, Goddess of Magic Hecate, controls death and taboo technology. They have been keeping a close eye on the Aries Lord's little maneuvers."

Elias listened extremely intently, his dark eyes flickering: "So, the Zodiac Lords and the House Lords are two parallel chains of power, crushing against each other?"

"Exactly! They are of equal rank, neither subordinate to the other, and they mutually find each other an eyesore!" Orion snorted, sneering, "Take the Aries Lord secretly embezzling the high-dimensional star-marrow ore, for instance. The Lord of the 6th House, Asclepius, had actually noticed the clues from the data long ago, but he has no troops, and absolutely dares not send people directly to the main star of Aries to audit the accounts. The Lord of the 8th House, Goddess of Magic Hecate, on the other hand, has been secretly collecting the Aries Lord's violation materials, wanting to deal him a fatal blow at God King Jupiter's round table meeting. These civilian officials are waiting for an opportunity. They know the Aries Lord sent his private soldier Gar to the blind spot to silence people, and they even deliberately erased Gar's SOS alarm on the Star-network, all to make this wildfire burn brighter! They want to use the resistance of you mortals to blow up the Aries Lord's unauthorized troop movement into an unmanageable political scandal. By then, the civilian official bloc of the Inner Cabinet will be able to reasonably unite to impeach the Aries Lord, stripping him of his military power and divine core!"

"What about the Twin Gods?" Elias suddenly asked. "Astra and Umbra, what roles do they play in this bureaucratic machine?"

Hearing these two names, Orion's expression became unusually complex.

"They are the incarnations of the most fundamental causality laws on this Star-network." Orion took a deep breath, a trace of extremely hard-to-detect tenderness and pain flashing in his expression. "After Creator Goddess Ananke exhausted her divine power weaving this net of star-tracks and fell into eternal slumber, the two halves of divine consciousness she split into became today's Astra and Umbra. The elder sister Astra governs the destiny output end. She is too clean; she shouldn't be staying in that dirty mud pit at all. She always bears the weight of the entire astrolabe alone, using her Starlight Spindle to try and 'stitch' all the loopholes in the lower realm. But she doesn't understand that this net itself is already rotten. Her stitching can only delay the collapse, while continuously overdrawing her own origin divine power; it's boiling a frog in warm water, numbing the mortals while squeezing herself dry."

He paused, subconsciously glancing toward the female worker in the trench coat in the corner. Deep in his divine core, he felt another piercing wave of death intent, forcing him to retract his gaze, his voice lowering: "And the younger sister Umbra governs the interception and deletion of the inner network. She advocates for silencing and termination, believing that what is rotten should be thoroughly excised. As for me... my natal chart is engraved with the death knot of the death tribulation of Saturn and Pluto. This is a causality predetermined long ago when Creator Goddess Ananke wove the Star-network in ancient epochs. Astra has repeatedly defied the laws of the Inner Cabinet, using her origin strings of light to forcibly obscure the star of doom for me. But I am a warrior. I cannot watch her tear her own pure divine core bit by bit for a cursed demigod like me. I forcibly tore apart her threads and defected from the Divine Court, not because I hate her, but because I would rather die standing under Scorpio's stinger than be a parasite sucking dry her divine power."

Hearing this, Elias let out a long breath of murky air.

He finally understood.

Why was the Mortal Vanguard able to survive in this dead zone until now? Why, after they beheaded Gar, did the Divine Court's divine punishment of destruction not smash down on them overwhelmingly in the first instant?

Because this massive Leviathan empire of the Divine Court already had its joints stuffed full of the rust of factionalism and corruption. Those high-and-mighty divine civilian officials were treating mortals as free chess pieces to grind down the strength of their political enemies; while the arrogant Zodiac warlords, wary of audit impeachments, were forced to timidly march their troops in secret.

"No matter how massive the Divine Court's astrolabe is, their own people have already torn the net." Elias stood up and clenched his fists, his handsome face flashing with strange determination under the light. "This is the survival soil for our Vanguard. We don't need to defeat the Aries Legion head-on; we just need to be jammed tight right here like a nail, ripping the Aries Lord's wound wider, and let the civilian officials and military generals of the Heavenly Court fight it out among themselves first!"

"Haha, well said!" Orion laughed loudly. "Those idiots think they are the chess players, not knowing that chess pieces can crack their teeth too!"

And in the dark corner, Vespera (Umbra), upon hearing the words "crack their teeth," paused her hand gestures slightly.

Under the hood of her trench coat, her mouth pursed into a cold and amused curve.

This self-replicating, bloated, and corrupt bureaucratic system of the Divine Court Inner Cabinet was the very root of all evil that split her from her elder sister Astra. Astra always carried infinite patience to soothe the turmoil of the low-dimensional worlds, using her warm golden light to "stitch" the loopholes on the "star-tracks," window-dressing a false peace, deceiving herself into believing that as long as no large-scale collapse occurred, the billions of mortals under the astrolabe could survive in illusory tranquility. But she completely failed to understand that it was precisely her repeated compromises and "false healings" that provided the best protective umbrella for the greedy, mad warlords and civilian officials inside the Divine Court, allowing the highly toxic filth in this Leviathan machine to pile up more and more, eventually rotting to an unmanageable degree.

Destruction before construction was the only way to break the deadlock.

She coldly watched this mortal boy in front of her, who was carefully planning how to sow discord in the gods' interest chain. At this moment, deep within the core of her cold, rational heart, there was actually a trace of extremely rare gratification.

Smash it, mortal.

Use your insignificant physical iron knives to fiercely stab into the most fragile joints of these decaying gears.

Smash that high-and-mighty, utterly hypocritical golden chessboard completely to pieces.

Elias turned around and latched the empty ammo crate. Outside the door, veteran Caleb was standing in the wind, his expression still somewhat gloomy. When he saw Elias lift the curtain and walk out, he immediately went up to him and asked in a low voice, "How is it? How much of what that demigod said can be trusted?"

"All of it," Elias answered against the cold wind. "He has no reason to lie to us at this time, because there are only two paths before him—either survive with us by tearing open the Aries blockade line in the blind spot, or be dragged back to the Divine Court's disciplinary platform again to accept being crushed by the death tribulation laws. He wants the Aries Lord finished even more than we do."

Caleb smacked his lips, his mechanical eye spinning a few times, slowly nodding. "If the inside of the Divine Court is really like what he says, then we still have time. Barnaby is already stepping up the smelting of Gar's gravity gun. Since these gods themselves are rotting from the inside, then we will be the variable that smashes their abacus!"

"Go help Barnaby, Caleb," Elias patted the veteran's shoulder. "Tune up every electromagnetic gun we can use. The real battle is coming soon."

The gale swept over the desolate ruins of the blind spot. The figures of the two men silently blended into that deep night, leaving only the yellow light in the protective shed quietly swaying in the cold wind.