This was… interesting. I hadn’t originally considered it high on my list of possibilities, but what Green had said had suddenly made it jump to the top. She seemed to be saying that normal human beings weren’t capable of recognizing divine beings. Or, more likely, were being prevented from recognizing them. I had strictly considered it, but didn’t think it was likely.

It would explain what my blood knowledge was telling me perfectly, but there was one major factor that didn’t fit. I had no idea who could have done it. I couldn’t see how something like that could just happen by accident. For humanity as a whole to be completely oblivious, it would require an incredibly complicated system that would have to have some level of intelligence. Either it was an intelligent being managing it, or a created system that was so complicated that it was basically an intelligent being.

Either way, only a divine being with magic that even I would struggle to mimic would have to be putting an enormous amount of primordial light into manipulating the perception of billions of humans. To my knowledge, chaos magic was the only thing that could manipulate human minds. Even then, it was difficult and limited. Add to that the fact that none of my siblings could use it, and it seemed even more impossible. They were the only beings with enough power to throw around like that, so I couldn’t really see who would have both the power and skill to do this sort of thing.

Of course, there were my children. The daemon princes could use chaos magic like me, but most of them used it more instinctually than consciously. There were also the lesser daemons, but they had even less conscious control. Plus, even the princes shouldn’t have that much power unless they worked together, which was… technically possible?

I supposed there were also my other children, but I was pretty darn positive they were all dead. Plus, I didn’t think they could do this either. There was only one likely solution. There had to be someone new. I wasn’t sure where they would have come from, but it was the most likely possibility. Someone with the power, skill and motivation to separate humanity and the divine. Someone I was going to have to mess with. Okay, so I didn’t technically have to, but it wasn’t like I could resist.

I was still thinking about the possible implications and how I could use it when I finally reached the edge of the woods. I had put my clothes on once they were sort of dry, discarding the battered coat that was both unnecessary and blood stained. The pants were still pretty bad, but they were already a color that made the nature of those specific stains hard to discern. Between the cleanish shirt and unclearly stained pants, I didn’t think I would be immediately accused of murder. Even if I was, I could always say the car crash killed him, which was philosophically true.

I left the trees to find an open field with what looked like cattle fencing. I could see buildings off in the distance and what looked like a major road leading in the vague direction Green had pointed. I figured that was probably where the town was, since people rarely make roads that don’t go anywhere. This was going to be a fair amount of walking, but I was definitely going in the right direction. At least my clothes would be nearly dry by the time I got there.

I reached the town itself a few hours later, having kept up a rather fast pace the whole way there. By my old standards, this was a pretty large settlement, although I knew that it was tiny by the current ones. I would have also considered the buildings impressive for mortal made work, but realized that they were also pretty average. All in all, it was a random mountain town without any obvious signs of major growth. Perfect.

I walked down the convenient side of road walking path. The phantom taste of blood filled my mouth again. Sidewalk. Wow, did they actually call it that. That was like calling a centaur a horse man or a platypus a duck beaver. I paused, why did humanity know about platypuses if they didn’t know about any other type of daemons. I finally shrugged to myself. Maybe it was an error in the system?

This was the first time I had been exposed to a significant number of people, not counting the cars that went by on the road I was definitely not walking on on my way here. It was… interesting. The best way I could describe them was… complacent? I had objectively known that they didn’t need to fight to survive anymore, at least in this culture, but it was a different matter to see it in person. People, even those I knew weren’t the wealthy of this society, were all fat and flabby, something that had been uncommon for humans in the wild.

In fact, it seemed to be the ones that I knew were richer that had the least fat. Or, at least, looked less sickly with it. It wasn’t that they were diseased. In fact, they looked as if very few of them had any notable infection, likely ever. No, it was more that they looked… feeble. There were still quite a few that were fit-ish, but it was more of a groomed fitness than had clearly been sculpted. I was used to seeing two types of humans, the sickly ones and hardened ones. These new varieties were interesting. Honestly, I had to say I approved of the variation. It was always good to see them come up with new things.

Of course, they were all either ignoring me or glancing at me with discomfort. That wasn’t unexpected. I did look like a hobo, after all. In fact, I probably am a hobo. Although, I preferred to be a murder hobo, it was usually more fun. Admittedly, I haven’t quite managed to technically kill anyone, so I was probably just a normal hobo. There was the driver earlier, but I was still going to ignore all responsibility for that.

I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for, since my blood knowledge was proving completely useless for anything humanity didn’t know of on mass. I figured Green was probably right about there being human fey somewhere in the population, but that didn’t mean they would be obvious. Even if humanity’s perception was being influenced, that didn’t mean the daemons here would be any more apparent. Most types of daemons that would live as mortals would be able to pass as them. After all, there hadn’t been anything external hiding them when they were created.

Of course, I had better ways to tell the true nature of something than its visual appearance. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but I started to try to activate my divine senses. If I had been clothed in incorruptible flesh, this would have been on constantly. However, I was a long way from that, and this was going to be a bit… tricky.

My vision jumped and swam as another set of not exactly sight tried to run through the same channels my eyes were using. I frowned, that wasn’t right. Those two senses should have run on completely different systems. I couldn’t say why, but it seemed like my divine sense was trying to overlap with my physical sight. It technically worked, but was… annoying.

As my sight stabilized, I could see two different versions of the world, one material and one completely other. My old vision showed me the town as it was to everyone else, a road bordered by various businesses. But, the new vision showed me the primordial light that made it all up. The inanimate objects were pretty boring, with only a stagnant dirty gray glow of the ambient power stuck to them. However, the people were a lot more interesting.

Their forms were packed full of crisp grey light, moving in a constant tangle of translucent ribbons. There was far less variation in their colors than the inanimate objects, mostly because the objects had only accumulated the divinity around them, but it was still there. Most of their light was the crisp grey that natural humans had since the very beginning, but every one of them had at least a little of a new silvery metallic light that wove through their souls like serpents. Some of them had almost none, while others had almost none of the grey left. I smiled, happy to see all was going well on that front.

My smile quickly gave way to a contemplative frown. Everything looked right, but I wasn’t sure why I was seeing like this. My divine senses should have been an independent awareness that had nothing to do with vision. In fact, was this divine sight? Why the fuck would I have divine sight?

Divine sight was the way nephilim see magic, but why would I have it? The only reason they saw like that was because their human brains have trouble managing their divine abilities. That didn’t make a lot of sense for me, since the brain in my skull was just a dead lump of flesh. I wasn’t using it for anything, let alone running my divine senses through it. Was this just some sort of glitch in my divine senses created by the rather… abnormal nature of my current existence? I would be able to analyze what was happening when I had more power to work with, but I couldn’t do much now.

Either way, this would work. All I had to do was… there. I spotted a soul that was completely wrong. The only problem was that I had no idea what it was. When I focused on my physical sight, I could tell that it belonged to a twenty something woman with nothing making her obviously different than everyone else around her. However, I could see the true alien nature of her soul, and I had absolutely no idea what it meant.

Now, there are only a couple types of soul I’m used to seeing. The first is human, which was a combination of the grey of their own divinity and the metallic influence of their sin. I knew from studying nephilim that elohim souls should look like gold and the fallen had silver ones. The only other type was dragons, who apparently looked like burning fire. Daemons, of course, have the golden magic of elohim, but in smaller amounts. Although, I suppose they probably had silver magic now.

Regardless, there shouldn’t have been a creature with a soul that looked like roiling orange storm clouds with bolts of green lightning dancing through it. However, that was exactly what I was looking at. Either the nephilim I had questioned on the subject gave pretty bad descriptions, I wasn’t seeing things quite the way they did, or this was something new. I smiled, this was fantastic.