Sacrifice was not set on one thing. It could be anything: a bowl of rice, a woven garment, the life of a goat, a bundle of herbs, a blade once carried in battle. Whatever was given with intent and reverence did not remain in the mortal world.

It appeared here.

Keles had watched in fascination as objects materialized in the hands of long-departed souls. At first, they stared at the offerings in confusion. Then recognition dawned.

With recognition came memory. Each gift carried fragments of familial remembrance, restoring clouded identities. Faces solidified. Forgotten dialects returned to their tongues.

But that was not what intrigued Keles most.

It was what came after.

One day, a simple offering was made: a pouch of rice seeds.

It appeared in the palms of an ancestral matriarch within the clan’s claimed territory. The seeds shimmered faintly, still warm from mortal hands. For a long moment, the souls simply regarded them.

Perhaps it was instinct. Perhaps it was habit carried across the grave.

They planted them. The underworld had never known agriculture. Its gardens grew from memory, not biology. Yet when those rice seeds were pressed into the twilight soil, something unprecedented occurred.

They sprouted, thin green shoots pierced the ashen ground, not as spectral illusions nor constructs of belief but living growth.

Many things that crossed from the mortal realm did not remain as they were once they reached her realm.

Steel lost its weight but retained its edge of intent. Cloth unraveled into threads of memory that could bind wounds of the spirit. Animal offerings dissolved into currents of strength that flowed through ancestral veins.

Everything changed, everything became useful and at the center of this transformation stood the clans.

They alone had mastered the method. Through the death shamans, through sacrifice, through ancestral bonds, they had become conduits between worlds. What entered Keles realm through them did not scatter randomly, it accumulated, organized, and was repurposed.

The rice fields multiplied. Seeds became harvest. Harvest became sustenance. Sustenance became power.

When the glowing grain was gathered and shared among the clan, the effect mirrored sacrifice itself. Not as potent as a direct offering from the living, but still powerful. When consumed, the rice restored clarity, strengthened form, sharpened memory. Souls who partook grew more defined, less like drifting mist, more like solid beings of purpose.

And the clans did not hoard entirely. Some among them began distributing small portions to wandering souls, those who drifted near their marked territories. A gesture of charity. Or perhaps strategy.

The results were undeniable.

Where rice was shared, stability spread. Souls regained themselves faster. Small communities formed around clan territories. Work began to divide naturally, tenders of fields, keepers of stories, defenders of boundaries.

Civilization was emerging and organizing itself in her realm, but structure always casts a shadow.

Not every soul had descendants who remembered them. Not every name was spoken by a death shaman. Many had lived obscure lives, left no lineage, or were forgotten by time. These souls watched the clans grow in strength, watched their lands flourish, watched their members sharpen into something almost… living.

They wanted in. But without a mortal connection, there was no steady offering. Without offering, there was no stable growth.

Resentment began as slow murmurs then it gathered and gangs were born.

They were not bound by lineage but by circumstance. Forgotten soldiers. Abandoned criminals. Unclaimed laborers. Souls who remembered enough of themselves to know they had been denied something in death as they had in life.

Unlike the clans, they did not wait for offerings. They fight and take it from the clans.

At first, it was small theft, handfuls of rice stolen from racks. Seeds taken from storehouses. A harvested bundle vanishing into the twilight.

But when those stolen grains were planted elsewhere, something new occurred.

They grew but not as brightly or steadily as the one grown by the clans.

Power, even diluted power, was still power. The gangs realized they did not need shamans, they simply needed access.

Raids became organized. Skirmishes erupted along the borders of clan territories. Fields were trampled. Spectral tools became weapons. Ancestral halls, once places of quiet counsel, now was filled with strategic planning.

For the first time in her dominion, conflict carried ideology. Clans defended tradition, lineage, and earned strength.

Gangs fought for equality through force, believing power should not belong solely to the remembered.

And Keles watched all this unfold.

From her throne, she observed the currents of her realm like a queen surveying a thriving kingdom. Each clash, each alliance, each new planting sent ripples through the foundation of her existence.

She did not feel anger at the

disorder.

She felt joy. Her realm was no longer static. It pulsed. It reacted. It adapted. The feedback flowing into her divine consciousness was richer than ever before. Growth, tension, ambition, fear, cooperation, emotions and structures layered upon one another like the beginnings of history.

Her underworld had gained something akin to life, not biological life but civilizational life.

Through that feedback, clarity dawned upon her, clarity about herself, and other origin gods just as it dawned upon Ikenga upon his return.

About the path they walk as Origin Gods. It was small but Keles felt it, as he realm continue to grow and evolve, understanding of souls won’t be far off to her, it was already astonishing to her of the changes that took place in a empty husk of soul of a few memories.

As for the clans and the gangs, Keles favored neither.

From her throne, she watched their movements with equal fascination. The clans stood for continuity, lineage, structure, earned strength through sacrifice. The gangs embodied disruption, adaptation without permission, power seized rather than granted.

Both were necessary, both were growth.

The clans anchored her realm. They stabilized regions, cultivated land, and accelerated the restoration of souls. They were architects of order.

The gangs tested that order. They exposed weaknesses, forced innovation, and ensured that power could not stagnate. They were catalysts of change.

If she crushed the gangs, the clans would grow complacent. If she suppressed the clans, chaos would consume potential structure.

So she did neither.

Instead, she observed.

She was curious, deeply so about what their tension would produce. Would the gangs develop their own methods of summoning power? Would the clans formalize governance, perhaps even appeal to her authority? Would a new system emerge entirely?

At last, Keles shifted her attention beyond her twilight dominion.

Her gaze pierced upward, through the thinning veil between realms, and settled upon the mortal world.

Specifically, upon the eastern continent. Upon the mortals who had birthed this innovation.

Death shamans.

They had done what few in any era dared attempt, not merely speaking to the dead, but forming structured exchange. They had stabilized a bridge between life and death without her direct instruction.

They had altered the mechanics of her realm. Such audacity deserved acknowledgment.

Such achievement demanded reward. At first, she was uncertain what form that reward should take. Blessing? Protection? Power?

Then her perception narrowed.

She saw them clearly.

Four fifth-tier peak death shamans, seated in ritual formation beneath an ancient cedar grove. Their bodies were mortal, frail compared to gods but their souls burned with disciplined intensity. Their threads extended deep into her domain, cleanly woven and reinforced by ancestral cooperation.

As she gazed upon their souls, understanding unfolded effortlessly within her. She saw the structure of their profession, the spiritual pathways carved through repetition, the ancestral sigils etched into their essence, the small fragment of her authority they unknowingly borrowed each time they invoked death.

Dealing with death always came with a price. These shamans knew that.

But they underestimated the scale.

Their advancement to their current tier opened a path, a gate formed. a thinning of boundaries. A channel through which influence could pass in both directions.

They had learned how to open it. They had not learned how to close it and so the gate remained, subtle but persistent.

Through that unattended aperture, things could slip.

One of the four shamans caught Keles attention as he had succeeded in marking ancestral land within her realm, but not cleanly. At the critical moment of invocation, when his spirit descended to anchor the claim, something else had answered.

A foreign soul, not one of his lineage had slipped into the tether, masking itself as an honored forebear. It now wore the ancestor’s identity convincingly, drawing offerings, strengthening itself quietly within the clan’s territory.

But that was not what Keles wished to intervene in.

The foreign soul masquerading as an ancestor… the imbalance within one lineage… those were problems born of growth. They would correct themselves in time.

Her reward was something else entirely.

It was simpler and far more important to these shamans than they realized.

As Keles noticed earlier, the souls of the four fifth-tier death shamans did not merely glow with spiritual strength, they functioned as apertures.

Small portals.

Each time they reached into her dominion, they threaded their essence through the veil. But unlike ordinary mortals who brushed against death and recoiled, these shamans left something behind. Their souls remained partially aligned with her realm, like doors left slightly ajar

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