Rise of the OtherGod Apostle: Not a Cult Leader, but a Serf?!

#144Reader Mode

#144

I clutched my head as the message window popped up, letting out a scream of pure frustration.

“Are you actively trying to screw me over? F*ck, why! Why! Why the hell would you pull something like that right before leaving?”

“You literally could’ve just kept your mouth shut and slipped out later!”

Why meeeee?!

I was so pissed I could barely breathe.

Was this just some sick joke to him?

…No. He’s not that reckless. This was intentional.

Because when the dust settled, Pandemonium was the one who’d take the biggest hit for this stunt.

Taking a deep breath to calm down, I pulled up the virtual keyboard.

「 You realize this could blow back on you too, right? Your family’s already on edge because of what happened with the former heir. 」

The last thing they needed was another scandal. The drama with the crazy heir who ditched her family to run off with her lover had barely cooled.

And now here’s her little brother, handing out a meaningful ring to some Reader he just met?

That was like grabbing their family trauma and stabbing it with a red-hot poker.

If I were them, I’d be foaming at the mouth right about now.

And here’s the real kicker—Pandemonium wasn’t even the real heir. He could never inherit the household himself. His future daughter was the one who’d take that title.

Even if an emperor rules a nation, legitimacy still belongs to the empress.

The only reason he was allowed to serve as acting head was because of a daughter who didn’t even exist yet. If he started making moves that suggested he had no intention of producing an heir, he’d be stripped of that position in an instant.

And to make matters worse? The current head of House Teres wasn’t even dead yet.

Just too old to pop out any more divine-bloodline babies himself.

If the family was already nursing a collective headache over his sister’s crazy love story exit, wouldn’t they rather cut their losses early if the only son started showing signs of going off the rails too?

And what if the current head suddenly changed his mind and decided to take one last shot at producing a divine heir while he was still in decent health?

「Right now they’re just throwing marriage candidates at you, but if they decide you’re a lost cause, they’ll go straight to Plan B—the family head himself.」

>>「Are you worried about me?」

「Just stop trolling and tell me why you actually did it.」

>>「Something this small isn’t enough to threaten my position.」

…Is he sitting on some kind of trump card?

Even if he was, this move still made zero sense.

The risk-reward ratio was absolute garbage. Barely anything to gain, but way too much to lose.

「Either way, you’re gonna catch hell for this. You’re always complaining about not wanting to get married, so why pull this stunt now?」

>>「I just felt like it.」

「If you don’t want to tell me, just say that.」

>> 「You really don’t believe me, huh? 」

Who in their right mind would?

After a moment of silence, he finally gave me a proper answer.

>> 「I had to stir up some controversy. Lately, some archbishops have been watching me a little too closely, and now, nobles are prying into the reasons behind my sudden appearance at the Cathedral.」

「The Inquisition, though? They seem perfectly happy to let the Council run its course without stepping in. 」

>> 「Even the priests don’t have a damn clue what the Inquisition is up to.」

…Wait. The archbishops are just as lost?

Could it be because this situation involves the beings beyond the stars?

Only the Apostles and Inquisition Commander Casimir know about the existence of the Othergods.

So if Casimir’s just walking away from this Council meeting without making a fuss, does that mean this was all the Saint’s doing?

What’s he planning?

Is he just watching, waiting, because this is still the Tutorial Phase?

Or is this part of a larger, calculated plan?

I absently spun the ring between my fingers.

「So your plan is to let your vassals think this was all just for show?」

>>「 I won’t have to tell them. They’ll assume that on their own. 」

「And this ring… you want me to hang onto it until later?」

>>「I gave it to you to use in case of an emergency. It’s yours to keep.」

「Yeah no. I’m giving it back before you leave, end of discussion.」

>>「If you’re worried about the rumors, don’t be. Once the Council wraps up, nobody’s gonna care where some ring went.」

…What in the actual hell is about to go down at this Council?

F*ck. This was seriously terrifying.

Still, if it was something proposed by Rider of Civilization’s player…

Wait a minute.

「The Rider of Civilization… the player presumed to have gotten a Game Over. He’s ‘House Lizard,’ right?

>>「Yeah.」

Knew it.

House Lizard.

His actual username was DomesticReptilian, which translated to “domesticated reptile.” But when a Korean translator got their hands on his strategy guides, they went with “House Lizard,” and the name stuck. Before long, that was what everyone in Korea called him.

House Lizard described himself as an IT guy—a professional in the industry. Initially, he picked up Conclude out of curiosity, drawn in by the game’s tech. But what started as idle interest quickly spiraled into full-blown obsession, particularly with the Dark Realm’s lore.

At one point, he became fixated on a single question: Why did a single-player game require a constant internet connection? Most people wouldn’t bother questioning it, but House Lizard wasn’t most people. He dissected the game’s network packets, tracing how it fetched data in real time. The discovery? Conclude didn’t store its text locally—it streamed it straight from the server, updating dynamically with every session.

Even more impressive was his deep dive into the game’s AI. By breaking down its computational complexity, he uncovered how the world reacted to player input, adjusting itself with a responsiveness that seemed almost alive.

“ST Games is probably hemorrhaging money just keeping the servers running,” he once speculated. “With every new player jumping into Conclude, their costs must be going through the roof.”

The way he tested Conclude’s adaptability to player choices? Absolutely insane.

House Lizard built a custom AI to handle dialogue interactions, then fired up 100 simultaneous instances of the game—all running on a personal workstation from hell, a high-performance rig designed to juggle absurd workloads.

Of course, there was a problem: Conclude didn’t allow multiple logins on the same account. So what did he do?

He bought 100 separate copies of the game.

This guy burned thousands just buying multiple copies of the same game.

And that’s not even counting what it must have cost to build and maintain that monster workstation.

House Lizard wasn’t just a power player—he was in a league of his own.

A staggering 80% of the Conclude Wiki cited his blog as their primary source.

He rarely appeared in official highlight clips. His gameplay was mostly trial and error, not flashy combat montages, but…

Whenever House Lizard hit a knowledge gap, he wouldn’t just speculate. He’d design entire experiments to test it in-game. And that’s why any time players got into heated debates, someone would always say “Let’s just ask House Lizard.”

His contributions were too vast to summarize in a few lines. He didn’t just play Conclude—he decoded it.

But his most legendary achievement?

The Dark Realm Weather Forecast.

In Conclude, the weather in the Dark Realm followed a fixed cycle, unaffected unless players directly intervened. No one really thought about it… until House Lizard did.

He compiled and uploaded a 30-year weather forecast for the entire in-game world.

People took one look at it and collectively decided: This guy is completely unhinged.

And that was just the beginning.

He also created the Dark Realm Ecological Map, an exhaustive catalog of every biological entity he could document, sorted by region, ecosystem, and environmental conditions.

If anyone’s famous even among the Othergods, it’s him.

Mother Aelusia had recognized a post I wrote while I was using a VPN.

Which meant she definitely knew about House Lizard’s blog too.

Even if he wasn’t chosen by the Rider of Civilization, he was the kind of person who had to have caught the attention of another Othergod. Someone, somewhere, would have made him a player.

Because House Lizard wasn’t just obsessed with Conclude—he was devoted to it.

At one point, he even theorized that the Dark Realm was a fully simulated universe running inside a massive server somewhere.

And then, as if that wasn’t wild enough, he started questioning the ethics of studying lifeforms that didn’t realize they were just data.

「House Lizard was the first to figure out that NPCs were copies and not real, right?」

A being that could be replicated like data couldn’t be granted natural rights—the kind of rights humans are born with.

But knowingly causing senseless suffering to lifeforms that didn’t realize they were just data? That was something else entirely.

Even in scientific research, test subjects aren’t discarded after an experiment ends. Ethical guidelines ensure they receive humane treatment.

By that same logic, if a cloned lifeform had to be sacrificed… shouldn’t it at least be given a chance to live first?

Thinking back on it now, that logic felt like something House Lizard would say.

>>「Are you two close?」

We had exchanged a few emails. That was it.

If that counted as a close relationship, then academic conferences might as well be social events where scholars just hung out for fun.

「Not really. I just happen to know about him, but it’s one-sided. Then again… is there a single player out there who doesn’t know House Lizard?」

>>「Rider’s player talked about you often, actually.」

「Wait… Really?」

>>「Yeah. He said you were someone seriously impressive.」

…Me?

What’s so impressive about me?

Could he have meant… that?

House Lizard had dedicated himself to creating an artificial Apostle—one that could embody the traits of multiple gods.

He must have tested countless combinations, searching for divine traits that wouldn’t reject each other.

In the end, he only managed to create a chimera capable of wielding two divine authorities—powerful, but with an unforgivingly short lifespan.

And just when he was searching for a way to extend that chimera’s life…

I completed Divine-Cancer Cells.

A perfect evolution of Trait-Chimeras.

The moment House Lizard learned of them, he abandoned his previous research entirely and pivoted to replicating my work.

At the time, he had called the concept “a stroke of genius.” I remember feeling pretty proud when he introduced the theory.

…Now it just feels kind of embarrassing.

「It’s unfortunate. I would’ve liked to discuss this with him in person.」

Honestly, that theory had only been possible because House Lizard had freely shared the details of his own failed experiments.

But now, with the Dark Realm no longer just a hypothetical and instead our grim reality, all those discarded ideas had become invaluable.

The weight of that realization made his absence even harder to accept.

>> 「Apparently, when someone asked him why he did it, he just laughed and went, ‘Because it’s fun.’」

…Huh?

>> 「He figured that even if the people in the Dark Realm had souls, their only real purpose was to entertain players. So the only logical thing to do was to have fun with them.」

Oh, for f*ck’s sake.

「Back then, we all thought it was just a game. Because it was!」