Chapter 380: Chapter 380: The Changing Situation (Part 2)

It had taken Lin Xiao almost four days to make it out of the mountain forest. On the third day, he had found a small thatched hut in the woods, which seemed to be a spot where hunters rested. Following the trails down the mountain, he had wandered around for the better part of the day before finally finding a path trodden by people.

Fortunately, he had prepared a set of leather armor this time, which would have been tough to manage with heavy plate armor even with his current constitution.

As he passed through a thicket, he came upon a wilderness overgrown with waist-high weeds. Looking into the distance, he could faintly make out the shadow of thatched huts and wisps of faint blue smoke.

“There’s a village!”

He tidied himself up a bit and waded through the tall weeds toward it.

The wasteland was truly barren, infested with insects and venomous snakes—he must have stepped on no fewer than ten venomous snakes along the way.

The snakes didn’t pose much of a problem; his boots offered high protection and the fangs simply couldn’t penetrate them. What really annoyed him were the tiny bugs that always seemed to find their way into the crevices of his armor unnoticed.

In any other domain, he could have emitted a totemic aura to scare off these little insects, but in this non-magic plane, Totem Power was utterly unusable. Here, all totem masters’ talents or abilities were disabled, leaving only their strong physiques and strength they gained from becoming Totem Masters.

Physical strength was the most universally applicable power across all the Crystal Wall Universes—there was no place where it could be disabled.

It could even be used in worlds where beings existed only as souls or spirits, as long as you had a physical body in that world.

Almost hacking his way through, he reached the vicinity of the village, where he was spotted from a lookout tower at the village entrance by two militia men dressed in burlap and wielding wooden spears. Seeing Lin Xiao fully armed, they lifted their spears and shouted as if they were facing a great enemy:

“￥#@#@%#…….?”

He quickly raised his hand and shouted back:

“￥#@#&￥”

This was the language of this world, which Lin Xiao understood a little. He had crammed the common tongue of this world during his half-month stay in the fortress.

But with so little time, he had only learned the basics and could understand only a few words. He guessed from the context and the few words he knew that what the militia were saying probably meant ‘stop, don’t come any closer.’

Lin Xiao sheathed his Horse Chopping Knife to show he meant no harm and took out a Wooden Carving from behind his back, holding it in front of him. He made gestures and mimed with his incomplete grasp of the language, leaving the two militiamen utterly puzzled.

Luckily, the act of sheathing his weapon was also seen as a gesture of goodwill in this world, and the militia had the patience to watch him gesticulate, speaking half-understandably, for quite a while before they tentatively responded.

After much effort in communication, eventually, a large crowd, stirred up from inside the village, came out to watch the spectacle, and after nearly half an hour, he was finally allowed into the village.

However, he was restricted to staying at the entrance to the village and not allowed inside, showing that they still harbored a considerable amount of suspicion towards him.

Lin Xiao didn’t mind this. He took out two silver coins and, through gestures and miming, managed to buy some tableware and tools from the villagers. He settled down here for the time being.

A village was a standard starting point.

It wasn’t about spreading faith here at the start. He didn’t plan to rush into spreading faith before getting a clear understanding of the situation. Instead, he considered whether he could hire some sturdy young men to form a small team for starters.

Of course, although he wasn’t in a hurry to spread faith, preliminary preparations were still necessary.

After buying tools and tableware with silver coins, Lin Xiao discreetly put on a ring in front of many curious villagers and children. He then placed the empty tableware on the table and performed a set of standard prayers as per his Clan’s mealtime rituals right there, each move filled with a sense of religious ceremony, fascinating the villagers and children.

After completing the standard prayer ritual, he discreetly activated the ring’s Summoning Table Spell. Suddenly, as if by magic, all kinds of delicious food piled up from nowhere onto the empty plates, eliciting amazed shouts from the spectators.

Lin Xiao ignored the shocked and incredulous looks, distributing most of the summoned food to the villagers around him and keeping only a small portion for himself.

He had learned in high school about proselytizing and managing faith. At the early stages of spreading faith, different tactics were needed facing different intelligent beings.

For instance, in dealing with a scholar, you could talk about knowledge, about truth. As long as you could overpower them with absolute advantage in what they excelled at, impressing them with awe, then through gentle persuasion and intrigue, there was a chance they could become followers.

If facing a warrior of great strength, then one had to talk about martial prowess, about power. In most alien worlds, strength often represented power and wealth.

Now, facing farmers, talking grand truths or boasting was useless—it was better to tempt them with sheer food.

There was no need to tell them that believing in God would provide food; words were useless. Showing them that devout worship of the True God would provide food was far more effective than saying anything else.

So when the villagers actually tasted the food and verified it was real, the news spread quickly through the entire village.

A normal person at this point might play the part of a godly charlatan and start preaching, but Lin Xiao didn’t do that. Instead, he drew out his Horse Chopping Knife and split a stone pillar at the village entrance taller than a man, and with a gentle tone, he rejected the village chief’s unreasonable demands.

In managing his faith, Lin Xiao had his own unique methods and talent.

This unconventional approach not only failed to anger the villagers, but instead inspired awe, especially among the strapping young men in the village, who worshipped him after seeing him chop a stone with one strike and effortlessly lift a boulder weighing thousands of kilograms with one hand.

“Lord Rore is definitely a powerful knight, I bet even the Baron himself isn’t this strong.”

A few young men sat in the shade of a tree, watching Lin Xiao casually swing a huge stone sword over two meters long, carved from stone, as if it weighed nothing. Their admiration grew even stronger.

The best way to impress these robust young men was to show off power, and not even that high-end of power; just a level that was slightly beyond that of ordinary humans was enough to astound them.

After practicing a certain sword technique he learned before becoming a Totem Master Apprentice several times, he stood with the sword at rest, and expelled a breath that hit a wooden post with a ‘crack,’ shocking the young men even though they had seen it many times before.

Placing the several-hundred-kilogram stone sword on a rack, he beckoned to the young men not far away.

“Is Lord Rore calling us over?”

An energetic young man ran over excitedly, wiping his hands on a white cloth and casually asked:

“Do you want to learn?”

The young men, thinking they had misheard, eagerly nodded their heads after a moment’s hesitation:

“We want to learn!”

“Very well, come to me every morning from now on.”

Half a month later, as dawn broke, Lin Xiao got up leisurely, opened his door, and outside on the ground, more than a dozen young men of various ages were practicing with wooden weapons.

By the well were basins filled with well water and wet towels. He washed his face and rinsed his mouth, then picked up his sword and went to the front of the clearing to watch them practice.

Obviously, they wouldn’t have learned much in just ten days, but at least they had a semblance of form.

This half a month, he hadn’t taught them anything substantive, merely a simple routine that functioned mainly to exercise their bodies, without involving any other powers.

The main purpose of these days was to temper their will and select the young men with some amount of determination.

After watching for a while, he went back inside to move out a big stone mortar and several large bags filled with herbs the villagers had gathered for him.

Of course, these herbs didn’t serve any specific purpose and weren’t part of any formula. They were just randomly collected by the villagers, mainly as a cover for the pills he was preparing to make later.

If things went as expected, this group of young men would become his first followers; naturally, he needed to enhance them a bit.

Besides, after he had shown the villagers his ability to summon food daily for half a month, many of them had begun to imitate his actions rather convincingly, praying before every meal.

Although it was ineffective and he had not yet felt a trace of the Power of Faith, it was a good start.

From occasional conversations with the villagers and his off-time excursions to survey the surroundings, he learned that the village was ruled by a Baron’s family called Gibson, with the Baron being named Herman Gibson. The family governed a small town along with eight villages, as well as a vast wasteland, a forest, and a small iron mine.

The Gibson Family had a castle located between the town named Gibson and the iron mine. It was said to house five knights and over forty professional warriors who could muster more than one hundred and fifty young men in times of battle, an average strength for a Baron’s territory.

The so-called knights, much like those in many Alien Worlds, referred to individuals with physical strength and vigor far beyond that of ordinary people.

Because this world lacked any supernatural powers or the so-called fighting spirit, Lin Xiao had quietly visited the castle of Baron Gibson and had seen these so-called knights. They were elite warriors with physical strength and might at least three times that of a normal man, equipped with expert fighting skills and superior weapons and armor, indeed an overwhelming force against ordinary farmers.

Now, Lin Xiao was presented with two paths: one was to spread his faith peacefully, finding ways to preach at the grassroots level and then influencing the aristocrats, taking the religious route.

The other was to propagate the faith by force, using formidable military strength to impose belief on the commoners—essentially becoming a powerful lord and enforcing worship among his subjects by decree.

Both strategies had their advantages and disadvantages, but it was certain that spreading faith by force would be the more arduous.

However, this was the best choice under the current circumstances since this was not a safe world. With sixty-six Children of Nightmare and Children of the Spirit Realm skulking about, ready to eliminate him at any time, he must have sufficient military strength to protect himself.

Therefore, he could only choose to spread his faith through force.

Of course, this didn’t mean that he had to train an army to defeat the Baron and become a noble himself—that path, while viable, was too cumbersome, and warring as a lord was always troublesome.

Lin Xiao planned to combine the church with military force, using might to protect the faith, and then using faith to unite the many aristocrats.