Merin, in his divine clone form, gazes down at the Deer-Orc shaman kneeling before him.

His eyes linger on Tillie. Just days ago, she had been in her eighties—wrinkled, frail, and fading. But with his recent promotion, her body has been renewed, transformed into that of a striking middle-aged woman once more.

They kneel not out of mere respect, but out of fear—fear that he might have withdrawn his favour from them.

When he ascended to Great Totem, he drew upon the strength of every orc-race in the region. And in the grand hierarchy of orc-kind, the Deer-Orcs sat at the very bottom, overshadowed by races far more capable.

“Do not worry,” Merin says, his voice calm but carrying the weight of divinity. “I will not abandon you. Now—gather the people and build towns across the region. A city for races with more than fifty thousand people. Towns for those with more than five thousand. And let the smallest races form their own villages.”

Tillie hesitates before speaking, “Lord… our population is less than two thousand.”

Merin’s gaze sharpens. “Then gather every Deer-Orc in the region. Form a city at the very centre. And move my body there.”

With that, his divine clone fades into the air, vanishing like mist.

Inside his sea of consciousness, Merin thinks to himself: First, separate them into their own areas. Then… I will find a way to make every orc race into one whole.

“Writing system,” he murmurs.

The orc races, for reasons lost to history, all speak the same tongue—but their scripts differ wildly, and all are still rooted in primitive pictographs.

He could unify them under the rune language he himself had created, but that would be far too dangerous. Runes are not mere symbols—they hold power. If a mortal were to draw one of his runes, their life force would be drained before the final stroke was even completed.

So, he begins to dismantle the runes—breaking them down into powerless letters. Simple, harmless, yet capable of uniting their written word.

It should have been simple. It was not.

The work takes over a year, during which he relocates to a newly constructed city. When the letters are finally complete, he spreads them directly into the minds of every tribe member.

Then, he issues his next decree: every orc race will specialise in producing one to three types of daily necessities. If they desire anything else, they must trade with the others.

Dependence will replace isolation.

And in that dependence, old hostilities would not merely be suppressed by his presence—they would wither away entirely.

The next step was to strengthen the tribes.

Merin no longer feared a single tribe attacking. He could crush them alone. But if more than one Great Tribe struck at once, their combined totems could block him from aiding his own people. And if his tribe suffered substantial losses, his foundation would weaken—pulling him back down to the Top Totem realm.

That was unacceptable.

He needed his tribes to be strong enough to hold the line until he could annihilate his enemies.

In every city, he established warrior academies and shaman academies, training them to fight and wield divine arts. In the capital, he personally took the top warriors and shamans from every race, honing them into elite champions.

He released advanced training techniques inscribed into divine patterns, no longer fearing that his people might turn on him.

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Five years passed before the education system truly took root. The shamans were taught runes—not for language, but for crafting. Soon, they could create magical instruments of war and industry.

Merin constructed a great library, filling it with his theories on rune-powered guns, trains, and even planes. He would not build these himself. Instead, he intended for the shamans of every orc race to work together to forge this new age of civilisation—an age centred entirely around him.

All the while, the region remained sealed. No outsiders could enter. None could leave.

With the foundations secure, Merin turned his attention inward once more, resuming his comprehension of the Law of Dream.

This time, he linked the dreams of every living being in his domain, weaving them into a vast, surreal dream world.

It was strange. Distorted. Absurd.

And yet, it was a forge for his understanding—because to truly master Dream, he had to abandon reality. Reality and Dream were natural enemies.

But there was danger. If he lost himself, if he ever began to believe the bizarre dream world was real, his mind would be trapped there forever.

Merin sinks into the Law of Dream, and at first it greets him as a soft, formless mist—warm, almost inviting.

Yet the moment he tries to grasp it, it splinters into shards of light and shadow, slipping away like water through clenched fists.

He soon learns that dreams are not bound by the laws of waking reality.

They are living things—shifting, mutating, reborn each time a sleeper exhales into unconsciousness.

One night, a dreamer’s mind might lift him into skies where mountains breathe and rivers flow upward into clouds of fire.

The next, he’s dragged into an abyss of glassy black water, where skeletal hands reach from below, each wearing the face of someone he’s known.

Every change tears apart the fabric of the Law itself, rebuilding it in an alien shape.

To master it, Merin realises, is not to chain it but to drift with it—like navigating a storm by surrendering to its winds.

He begins to weave delicate threads of formation into the shifting mist, but each is devoured within moments, replaced by shapes that writhe and melt before his eyes.

The Law of Dream rejects permanence as if it were poison.

His only choice is to craft structures meant to die—patterns that collapse and reform in the space of a heartbeat.

The longer he works, the more he begins to hear it: a rhythm pulsing beneath the madness, the heartbeat of the Dream itself.

The dreamscape bends to his will for a fleeting breath, then slips away, dragging him into a new reality before he can exhale.

His mind learns to move like quicksilver—never holding, never forcing—yet always shaping.

Each entry feels like stepping into a different existence entirely.

He stumbles from war-torn plains under a crimson sky, where giants hurl cities as weapons, into a forest of glass trees where the leaves sing his name in a thousand voices.

Joy becomes grief in the space of a blink.

A nightmare turns to laughter with a single stray thought.

Entire worlds bloom and rot away between one footstep and the next.

The truth emerges like a whisper in his ear: stability in the Law of Dream exists only for those who embrace the instability.

The more dreams he touches, the more his mind abandons the straight lines of waking thought.

He becomes both witness and architect, shaping storms of impossible beauty and terror in the same breath.

But as the nights stretch on, something begins to blur.

The scent of dream-flowers lingers when he wakes.

The echo of screams follows him into daylight.

And with every passing moment, Merin grows less certain whether he is a man dreaming of the world… or a dream imagining he is a man.

The dream world begins to react with the real world.

In the real world, the Law of Dream stands at the level of Great Totem.

Now, Merin opens a way within it, raising it to the level of a Superior Totem.

Those who come after him on the path of the Law of Dream will no longer need to carve out a way as he did—they will simply follow the path he has created.

With the world’s support, the World of Dream starts to spread, pulling the consciousness of every living thing—from an insect to a Totem.

Even the outsiders are not spared.

Only seven living beings can resist its influence—the Six Superior Totems, and the Former God.

The Superior Totems do not understand what is happening, but the God whispers with a twinkle in his eyes, “My world has a genius.”

The dream world grows more bizarre and absurd, drawing Merin’s consciousness deeper, until it threatens to drown him completely.

Just as he is about to be lost within it, a rune flashes in his mind.

Light spreads, bringing order to the dream world.

Merin’s consciousness awakens, and he slowly takes control of the dream world, embedding himself in the world’s origin.

The world hums and releases energy toward him, refining his divine energy further, while his totem swells to the size of a large egg, like a mother’s womb.

The energy continues to flow.

The eggshell cracks.

A hand emerges.

The egg parts.

Merin steps out in human form.

He looks as he did on Earth, but now his body is entirely formed from divine energy.

He can shift into any form he wishes, for he has become a superior totem.

The seventh superior totem of the world.

Merin suddenly gazes beyond his region as he feels the world’s origin stir again—another totem is being promoted to a superior totem.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep