The grounds of the nunnery consisted not only of the actual buildings affiliated with the sisterhood but an area around them that was roughly half a mile wide. In this area, lots of greenery was planted and maintained to help keep the area beautiful, and also to help showcase the reality that the nunnery was unlike the city which surrounded it.
The existence of the plants helped to dampen the noise which made its way into the nunnery. They were an effective but imperfect sound barrier, due to the fact that the nuns were ultimately a group of mundane women and lacked any actual supernatural means to truly block out the noise. Though the nuns themselves actually liked having a subtle reminder of the world they willingly left forsook when they took their vows, whether they had already taken their perpetual professions or not.
The greenery of the areas around the nunnery also helped ensure that no random visitors made their way to the home of the sisterhood, giving them a level of solitude that befit their status as a contemplative order. Contemplative orders were among the ones that were the most useful for power-seeking gods who created monotheistic faiths, as contemplative orders were focused on prayer rather than works, and fascinatingly not all monastic orders or sisterhood were contemplative! There was a surprising breadth of monastic orders and sisterhoods in existence, though when many thought of a monastic order or a sisterhood they likely envisioned a contemplative one even without meaning to.
The young god who was intruding upon the nunnery had once been ignorant of the various types of sisterhoods and monastic orders that existed and had been one such person who innately envisioned something akin to a contemplative order whenever he pictured nuns or monks living out their vows. Now as an actual divinity himself he was far wiser and could appreciate the specifications of what he was seeing when he visually studied the nunnery's buildings in the distance.
I had arrived outside of the nunnery's actual buildings but on the grounds of the place. The physical body I was using here was but another clone, though it was one that had much more purpose and intent behind every step than the one at my college, feigning normalcy did.
The clone began a slow walk to the actual buildings of the nunnery, ready to interact with the sisters, even as I considered the vast arsenal at my disposal. By being here and acting in the way that I was planning to act I was subtly but firmly declaring my intentions of stealing humanity's piety from Earth's other gods and that was significant. Thankfully I had the power to back up my moves, and I was going to be using those powers quite freely beginning today, even if I was planning to do so in such a way that I remained an unknown force.
As I crept towards the actual nunnery I activated one of my more ambiguous powers; "Anomaly". With "Anomaly" I had power over the impossible, the unexplained, and all sorts of phenomena. This, as of yet unused power, was one that allowed me to be strange in how I utilized my vast powers to achieve my goals, and today I was going to use it protectively.
As I activated the power my left hand began to drip red, anomalous energy. It pooled in the palms of my open hands and flowed downwards until it reached my fingertips. When it did it would drip down in scarlet droplets that suffused the ground at my feet with impossible power.
The power seeped into the ground and began to spread across the area I had already designated that it would protect by spreading underground, weakening Felmoco's hold on this place. It'd eventually break his hold on the place altogether and prevent him from using his powers here.
To really ensure that this place was safe though, I added a secondary protective measure by beginning to cover the grounds in the sort of potent energy field which nullified the powers of anyone who sought to harm the sisters living here. I would not allow anyone I was going to upset by converting these women into my followers to hurt them in an attempt to retaliate against them for choosing to follow a new god. A better god, who actually aided his servants.
Along the way to the nunnery's physical buildings I also utilized my powers as a "Living Hyperion" to weave a permanent nullification field that allowed me to permanently depower anyone, and very importantly any sort of technological device, in the area whose powers or effects I wouldn't want working on the sisters. For the sake of creating as powerful a defense as possible, I made that anyone who wasn't myself, ensuring that truly no one would have the means to harm the sisters so long as they lived a contemplative and isolated lifestyle.
As my powers worked in unison to begin to rewrite the very nature of reality in this area the air around me began to take on a bit of a red tint, which was a curious color. It wasn't one that I minded, but it was a curious color. Eventually, though I made my way to the beautiful building which actually housed the sisters of the nunnery.
In the depths of the divine dimension which was Felmoco's seat of power, the corpulent deity sat atop a glimmering golden throne. His truest form was that of a gargantuan human-like creature who had long grown lazy and slothful feeding on the powerful prayers offered to him by the billion-plus people who devotedly worshiped him. His divine body was surprisingly obscene to conceptually represent his laziness when it came to the idea of gaining more worshipers through the active conversion of non-Felmocists.
He was now a being of pride and sloth, and he was a bit of a voyeur. He enjoyed watching humans live their lives using his potent powers to observe events on Earth a continent at a time. At the moment he was amusedly watching events unfolding on Africa, the continent with the largest concentration of his followers. He was staring into an ornate bowl made of gold and celestial metals. The scrying bowl was filled with holy water through which he was channeling his own, lesser kind of nigh-omnipresence. In doing so he was able to see events occurring throughout the continent with ease.
The man eagerly watched humans living full and complex lives. In some places, he saw presidents and their spouses living out House Of Cards-style political dramas involving affairs, blackmail, and high-stakes political power. In other places he watched boys fall in love with boys and girls fall in love with girls, and curiously watched as some of his more conservative followers attempted to tear such young, innocent loves apart. His victory over the other gods of Earth, as far as the acquisition of power went, had caused conquest and more active things to lose their interest to him and now he was largely content to live a recluse-like life.
Now, just because life had lost much of its interest to him didn't mean that his faction wasn't constantly working. It only meant that he wasn't constantly working. His angelic servants, members of his very own angelic host, were perpetually working. They were being worked to the bone and their work was often thankless, usually going unrecognized and unacknowledged, both by their creator and by his worshipers. And they weren't the only ones whose work was going unrecognized.
In many ways, the mundane Felmocists who worshiped the god were not being thanked for their prayers and for the tidal waves of divine power they sent to their god hourly. And that was a mistake on the part of both Felmoco and his angelic servants. A mistake that could one day come back to haunt them.
Not every god was the same and I was intent on proving that. A god could be deserving of worship, and not feel entitled to it on the basis of the fact that they were a god. I was determined to never get so high on my own power that I forgot about three of the most important fonts of power for gods lesser in might than Living Gods; worship, sacrifice, and invocation, fonts of divine might that required supplicants.
As I stepped into the nunnery, activating "Spectral Form" to phase through the door rather than just asking for permission, I focused on that. I was here to earn worshipers through my actions, and to become a potent shepard of my own flock of worshipers. That was why I had opted to come here in person and not to call upon my small but powerful angelic host to come here in my stead. I didn't want to be like Felmoco and other existing Earth divinities who sometimes sent a half-baked vision or dream to their followers and called it a day, I wanted to be an active participant when it came to recruiting prospective worshipers.
As I glanced around the entryway of the nunnery I found my mind filling with knowledge regarding the history of Felmocism. The building was steeped in said history, and so the walls were covered in an immaterial, fully invisible to mundane beings, psychic residue that was the distilled essence of the unconscious and half-remembered thoughts of dozens of nuns who had lived here over the last few decades. It made it even easier than normal for my psychometry to allow me to learn more about Felmocism than I had learned throughout my life until now.
I could sense the love the women living here had for their god and that... made me angry. Their god did next to nothing for them! He had the worship of billions of people throughout Earth, and thus surely had a vast amount of reality-warping power, at least as much as a planetary-grade divinity could, and yet he hoarded it. I was slow-acting, sure, but I was actively using my powers.
I was channeling my powers into Imani and other servants and they were acting in my stead in real, life-altering ways for the people of Redsville. Even now Imani's clone was inside of a hospital, spreading one version of my good word while also healing people in ways she previously had not been able to. Her clone had also been affected by my bestowal of the gift of vampirism and so she was actually doing this at a far faster rate than she had done it yesterday, especially with the added impact of things like "Power Boost" bolstering her ability to heal the infirm.
There were criticisms that one could charge me with that had some basis in reality, but no one could accuse me of doing what Felmoco was doing. I was actively putting in the work to spread my influence and to give people a reason to worship me. Whether it was a deal I struck with someone, or my power being the thing that healed them of an otherwise incurable disease, I was ready to give mortals a legitimate reason to fall to their knees in praise, and I was intent on continuing that tradition I was setting for myself.
As I moved towards one of the walls that stood between myself and some of the women in the nunnery I fully unleashed some of my abilities. For one, I stopped holding back as far as "Celestial Substance" went, which meant that my countenance took on a small but not insignificant portion of my actual divine beauty. This transformed my body and made it so that even laying one's eyes upon me would forever change one's perception of all beautiful or handsome things. I also activated some of my other, newer abilities.
The chief power I activated was my "Aura of Joy". As the Anael, one of the beings I had become while I spent the early hours of the morning using "Power Architect" I had the ability to project an aura of resplendent, irrepressible, divine happiness. This was due to the Anael's role in the proliferation of happiness throughout existence. Heck, even the term "Anael" is both the name of a specific, fictional archangel whose purview was that of happiness, joy, and pleasure, and also the name for a new entity created by someone who was akin to an overdeity of joy, pleasure, and happiness.
As I allowed myself to manifest more fully than I had to date, aside from when I used "Emanation", I felt my surroundings change in response to my presence. And as I phased through the walls of the nunnery's entryway I made my way into the edge of the abbey, where some of the nuns were located and were in the midst of conducting a bit of self-study and introspective musings on their god's holy word.
A definition of the word "Miracle" as thought by someone who wasn't a clergy person could have been something akin to "An occurrence that wasn't explicable by natural or scientific laws and is thus considered to be supernatural, or, more commonly, divine in origin". And as the strange, impossibly handsome being phased through the wall separating the nunnery’s entryway and its abbey, the most pious and observant of the sisters in the room turned and saw the handsome face seeping into the room and fell to her knees in joyous prayer, considering the event to be a welcome miracle and manifestation of her god, Felmoco.
As it turned out this reaction meant that Antonio's earlier caution and decision to seal the place off and undo the connection it had to the potent god was a wise one. During the time it took for the god to creep from outside of the nunnery into the abbey, "Anomaly" had done its job and severed the connection the place had to Felmoco. It was so easy for the power due to the vast difference of might between Antonio and Felmoco.
Antonio's severance of the nunnery to the god to whom it was consecrated meant that no one was empowered by the sister's reaction to Antonio, aside from gods of love within range of the event, a range which depended on the god themselves, who felt a tiny droplet of power suffuse themselves due to the love the sister felt for what she believed was a manifestation of Felmoco and not the actual body of another divinity. Antonio himself felt the droplet of power more keenly than any other local god would, due to the fact that the nun felt not only love but also lust for the divinely attractive Living God, and thus fed the inheritor even more power than she would have otherwise. This was pleasing to him, causing him to smile as other nuns noticed their sister on the floor on her knees and turned to look for the cause.
His smile only amplified the effects of his conceptual attractiveness even further, and thus he had an even more dramatic effect on the other nuns who gazed upon him and mirrored their sister's reaction. Antonio could tell he was going to enjoy this.
Thanks for the chapter