GREED: ALL FOR WHAT?

Mental Armament allows telepaths to wield their mental probes as weapons. They can transform their mental probe into defensive weapons to protect the mind or transform it into offensive weapons for attacking the minds of others.

Mental Armament is the first offensive means that telepaths gain. Not only is it powerful, it is also invisible. An enemy's mind can be stabbed without them knowing what happened.

So Gerald protected his mind from them. If they wanted to read his mind, they would need to break the shield created with his divine ability.

They didn't do that because they weren't hell-bent on antagonizing him and because they didn't have the tools to do so.

They have about the same spiritual power as he does, but Mental Probe is just not equipped for damaging the minds of others, so it will fail when it clashes against the Mental Armament divine ability.

They can't read his mind unless they use the mark of bondage to cause him pain and make him bring down his shield on his own. Apart from that, the best that they can do to Gerald is kill him, not read his mind.

Fortunately for Gerald, killing him was overkill for the situation. So they didn't kill him. But that didn't mean that they believed everything he said.

They don't trust Gerald for starters. Even if Gerald was speaking the truth, he might have also been fooled.

They find it difficult to believe that powerful telepaths would put in a lot of work to create the mindscape, but any telepath has the chance to win the ultimate prize no matter how little they do and no matter how weak they are.

Even if that were true, there is no way those powerful telepaths would let things go after they fail to win. They believe that because it is what they will do if they do all that work and still fail.

But they have mixed feelings about all of these.

On one hand, they only care about meeting their immediate needs of growing stronger. They don't care about anything else if they can get the divine flesh that they need. After all, that was why they met with Gerald and joined the Mind Hunters.

But on the other hand, they covet the authority of the pathway of the telepath. They want to have it, or, at least, prevent others from getting it.

They are not self-centered. selfish and greedy. They don't need to possess the authority since they already have a way to become gods. But they are not going to be at peace knowing that someone else might get the authority and become a true god.

They don't want a true god to appear in their pathway. So as long as no one gets that authority, they will be happy. This is why they are thinking of ways to sabotage the Mind Hunters.

When they thought about their plans for the Mind Hunters, Legion-4 couldn't help but chuckle and say, "There goes another organization that was foolish enough to hire us."

Legion-8 said, "Here is to hoping that the Mind Hunters don't turn out better than Sheckel and the others."

They chuckled about that for a while before they returned the focus of their conversation to important matters.

Legion-9 said, "So the bloody heart can be used to find the authority of the pathway of killing. Who would have thought?"

Legion-12 shook his head and said, "Despite how good that is, we have to stay away from it for now."

Legion-2 agreed. "We can control the bloody heart now, but we simply don't have the strength to control the complete corpse of a true god."

Legion-7 added, "Even if we could control the complete corpse of a true god, we need a lot of strength to find and acquire all the other fragments."

Legion-1 made some estimations and said, "According to my calculations, we need to be rank 7 legends at least to kill so many lamp bearers and escape the pursuit of their whole organization."

"Our actions might even alarm the god of justice. Surely, he would be concerned about the death of so many lamp bearers and the loss of so many fragments of the corpse of a true god."

The more they spoke, the more reasons they found for not going after the authority of the pathway of killing. They eventually decided to give up on it for now.

Their decision is based on the fact that the process is too dangerous, and they are too weak to take full advantage of the authority even if they got it.

If they succeed and get the authority now, they will have to keep it with them while escaping for their lives and waiting to reach rank 9 before they can use it.

If they were rank 9, they wouldn't have to wait at all. They would be able to use the Authority immediately to break through the series and advance to true god. That way, they would have a way to resist the god of justice if he comes for them.

They are currently too weak, so it wasn't worth it to go through so much danger for something they can't use. It becomes even less worth it when they already have a way to become true gods.

They didn't come to this decision lightly. It took a lot of effort to admit that they were weak and decide to shelve their greedy aspirations for the future.

As difficult as it was, the decision was the logical one, so it was a decision that they had to make. Once they view the decision like this, it becomes easy to make and even easy for them to put away the thought of gaining another authority.

While they were chatting, one of their consciousnesses was probing the virtual fragment of the corpse of a god that they were building and had come to a conclusion.

Legion-10 said to them, "Gerald was right. This corpse isn't a real body. It is phantom, virtual, and mental substance."