Returning to his body, the first thing Mark did was to carefully pull out the wooden door from its frame. He did not need the frame, and only the door, as even if the door was lying flat on the ground, it could still be used. He did not however want to lose something like this since it was basically his ticket back to Earth.
Immediately, he set up a few candles from his pocket in a triangle and took out a chalk to turn the triangle shape into the very recognisable shape of Unity. He then closed his eyes and prayed with the door on top of the symbol, and then entered the Sefirot; Amalgamation of All.
He picked up his own prayer and looked over at it, following it all the wat to the new planet, which was in reality on the other side of the cosmos, and looked at the door he was sacrificing to himself.
For this to work, he would have to use a lot more power of the Amalgamation of All, but it was worth it if he could keep the door safe, and ready to use anytime he needed. Thus, using two bucket's worth of newly formed and very light black liquid, Max accepted the sacrifice and it directly entered the Amalgamation of All.
However, Max kept it separated from the black substance, isolated in its own little bubble so that his Sefirot would not mistakenly corrupt either the Wanderer's powers within the door, or the corruption from Mother Goddess which might make the door become unusable, and that was not something he could have.
Not until he had successfully created his religion and returned back to Earth. Talking about Earth, Max had already given tasks to both Tom and Ademisaul; namely they would be the ones to head over to the Warriors & Sea Bar at Pelican street, in the White Rose Borough of Pritz Harbour, to deliver the money Max had promised. This journey would take them at least a good few weeks, and that it if nothing unexpected happened along the way, so Max could basically forget about Earth for around a month and focus on his mission here.
Plus, he had made sure to pay the hotel enough for another 2 months just in case.
One thing that excited Max was the fact that when he was accepting the door as a sacrifice, he did not feel any supernatural beings or powers in or around the new planet, which meant it was basically exactly what Max needed at the moment.
Taking care of his route home, Max opened his eyes and saw there was only an empty wooden floor and a few candles in the shape of a triangle. The drawing of chalk on the wood had completely vanished, and this was something Max was rather happy about.
He had spent quite some time to create this ritual that used the chalk itself as a medium and used up the chalk in exchange for establishing a connection, thus removing the process of having to destroy the symbol of Unity after the sacrifice. This would help Ademisaul, Tom, himself, and any new members of the church of Unity in the future cover their tracks as they escape official Beyonders.
Max quickly blew out the candles and let them cool down before putting them away. As of now, he had quite a few extra candles, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
Looking around, Max noticed that there was a closet with clothes for a man and a woman inside, but they appeared to be rather worn-out and misused. Still, they appeared to be cotton clothes, not some incredibly course linen, or some worse material. Compared to the reast of the shabby house, these two pairs of clothing which were matching in style were clearly different.
'They must be working for someone with political power, like a noble or a knight.' Max thought to himself as he carefully walked across the house and finally found an exit.
Leaving the dusty and stale house, Max took in a breath of the incredibly fresh air. Compared to Backlund, or even Tingen, the air here was incredibly pure and untainted, the forest right in front of his eyes clearly helping with that.
Turning his attention away from the forest that seemed to stretch on forever, Max looked at the shabby village behind the house he was just in, looking at the slightly larger house in the centre of the village. Compared with the rotting wood used for most of the houses, the wood used for this one seemed to be incredibly well-maintained, and it even had a wooden fence around it with a well-kept garden.
All of this was visible to Max, who was at the outskirts of the village since the village itself was only 20 houses strong, and the house he just left was on a slight slope, a bit higher than the rest of the village.
'This place is too small.' Max finally concluded as he saw the state of the place. Although he would be able to easily fool the people of a struggling village like this one into believing in Unity; himself, it would not help a lot in the long-run. There would naturally be a lot of pushback from whatever was the ruling organisation of this land; most likely a medieval kingdom or empire.
Thus, it made more sense to directly talk to the ruler of this land, make a deal with them, and then slowly, but while remaining uninterrupted, spread the religion throughout the nation and making everyone true believers. Then he could plan for world domination.
But that was in the future. For now, Max turned away from the village. He touched his body to make it less dense for a while, and ran an incredibly large distance without leaving any footsteps.
Unlike Earth, where Max had to be careful of even a single use of his powers, here, he was free to do whatever he wanted. A sense of freedom filled his heart as an innocent smile spread across his face as he ran through the forest. He no longer needed to be careful of supreme beings at insane levels of existence scrutinising his every move.
Not only did he had a crazy angel scouring him constantly, he also had a being above gods possible trying to help him for unknown reasons, and maybe even a really scary true god spying on him secretly. And he also had someone or something constantly trying to mess with his mind.
But none of that was here. He was free here. Free from the spying. Free from the constant vigilance. Free from the manipulation.
And then he immediately came to a stop as he realised something. He did not know the language of this world… Immediately, Max went back to the village and this time he went straight for the centre of the village, still having his body being less dense and thus none of his footsteps were actually being imprinted on the soft and wet ground, not much sound coming from it either.
Carefully, he sneaked into the open window of the house and looked around. His footsteps did not make much noise as he was still light, but this process was rather taxing for him. So he needed to finish this quickly.
He went from room to room, avoiding the room where he could hear someone snoring and finally found it. A study room. Once inside, Max walked up to the shelf with countless scrolls and gradually increased is weight to the point that he no longer needed to use his Spirituality, making sure to do it slowly enough that no noise was made.
Next, he pulled out a scroll and opened it. The symbols were strange, but crudely simple. They were essentially squares, circles, and triangles which were sometimes hollowed out, and sometimes filled in, with dots randomly placed around the shapes or inside the hollowed out shapes. There was also a line that would bisect the shapes vertically or horizontally and these shapes would not have dots in or around them.
In essence, they had around 32 characters, a bit more than the English language, but still manageable. However, there were no images with this text, so it was effectively impossible to know what it means. Worse yet, Max did not know what it sounded like.
'It seems I need to kidnap someone…' Max thought to himself as he activated his powers again and walked towards the room with the snoring noises. There he confirmed that it was indeed a human living here.
'I could also act like an innocent person who lost his memories, or even someone who got injured on his head and lost his memories, but then again, that would be too time consuming. I need to learn how to speak the language at least. And within a month…' Max thought to himself as he apathetically looked at the hold and frail-looking man sleeping peacefully on the bed.
'It seems you will be the one to teach me.' He reached out a hand to the old man and covered his mouth, causing the old man's eyes to open, still half asleep. Only when he saw an unknown young man staring at him in the middle of the night did his eyes widen in surprise, but by then the drug in the cloth around his nose and mouth had taken effect and the old man fainted.
'Yup, so they are definitely humans… this stuff might not have worked otherwise.'
And with that, Max had his slav- intern teacher.
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Shoutout to the following for power stones:
Myself: 498 (Yeah I know... I get 3/day and throw them all into this fanfic)
GuYueFangYuan: 114
Tidraus: 80
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