So that was Nick's current plan: get stronger, get famous, get strong allies, become an Immortal and finally either force the Gods to yield him a place atop Olympus or, like Cerci, carve his own place into the world where even the Gods wouldn't dare to enter.
Though from Circe he found out some troubling news, it was about an issue caused by faith in the demigods as a concept.
The faith generated by the old stories still influences the demigods of today, even if they are somewhat protected from it by their mortal bodies; still, this belief generates defects in their personality, causing irrationality reminiscent of what can be found in the Primordial Deities.
In the myths of old, the demigods and Heroes of Greece were not undone by monsters, nor by the whims of the gods alone, but by the quiet flaws that dwelled within their own hearts.
Achilles, born nearly invincible, was betrayed not only by the arrow to his heel but by his wrath and pride, which blinded him to reason until it was too late.
Heracles, the strongest of mortals, carried within him a rage he could never master, a fury that drove him to both glory and tragedy.
Oedipus was doomed by hubris — the belief that he could outwit prophecy itself — and so walked straight into its jaws.
Humans, through the repeated retelling of old myths, came to believe that such a flaw existed in every Hero.
And so that belief manifested, causing actual flaws in demigod personalities; in the original novel, they were called the fatal flaws.
And unfortunately, it appeared Nicholas was also not above such issues, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he knew his fatal flaw was Arrogance.
He couldn't allow that. If he wanted to be able to become a God in this universe where the classes have been solidified for thousands of years, he would have to be smarter and better than anyone else.
Nick couldn't allow for mistakes to happen due to his fatal flaw, and so he went on to research how he could go around this.
Asking Circe, he learned that if he were to create an artifact to "hold" his faith temporarily, not only would his flaw be fixed, but it would allow him to increase his faith and influence.
So the first task on his roster was to get stronger by creating an Immortal artifact to raise his authority while also maintaining his mortality in order not to alert his mother, and doing so also had a bonus of erasing his fatal flaw.
And so, Nick bid farewell to Circe and set off to find Laima, Karta and Dekla, the Goddesses of fate in Baltic Mythology.
When parsing through his knowledge of ancient Mythology, he wanted to find a being that held authority over fate and was also sufficiently weak to allow him to hunt them down to make an artifact.
He chose the fate authority due to the fact that he would need to become really famous, really quickly, while also controlling what he was famous for. Considering how uncontrollable public opinion is, to Nick, it was essential that he had a hand in choosing how that particular coin flip lands.
Through parsing his vast library of mythological histories and stories, he settled on one that seemed likely to allow him to do so. Laima and her sisters, Karta and Dekla, were a trinity of fate deities, similar to the Norse Norns or the Greek Moirai.
Laima would make the final decision on an individual's fate and is considerably more worshipped as the leader of the three sisters.
While all three of them had similar functions, Dekla is in charge of children, Karta holds control over the adults' life, and Laima is more associated with mothers.
Accordingly, Laima was the most worshipped out of the 3 of them and thus also the most powerful.
Unfortunately for Nick, according to Circe, she was long ago captured and made into an artifact by Hera, for which Hera now wears her Immortal Essence as a bracelet on her wrist.
Her sisters, Dekla and Karta, on the other hand, were sufficiently weak to be ignored by the pantheon and thus free to slink off to enjoy obscurity in some unknown part of the world.
And, fortunately for Nick, that now meant that they were weak enough to be made into artifacts by him.
Also, given that their alternative option was the scattering of their souls by way of fading, Nick thought that he might even be able to make them willingly refined into an artifact if he promised to provide them with faith to stop their Immortal Essence from being destroyed by their authority and keep their consciousness intact inside the artifact.
Nick didn't want to kill innocent people, but in his mind, all was permissible in order to ensure his survival. If they wouldn't take the carrot, then they would take the stick.
If he wanted to survive and be spared a fate worse than death, he had to be smarter and more ruthless than his enemies, and that means not concerning himself with morality; they sure as hell won't.
Before he left the island, he performed the same ritual he used to find Circe and what he got back was way clearer than when the ritual was performed in search of Circe, given that they were too weak to even take care of themselves, let alone create privacy wards like Circe did.
The ritual gave him their location; they were apparently still in the Baltic region, Latvia specifically.
"Probably still surviving off of scraps from the local folk stories and myths,trying desperately not to draw attention to themselves, not even daring to create cults in their worship to become stronger, just in case the Norns or Morai decided that they were taking up too much of the fate authority and should be dealt with." Nick thought, lamenting their miserable existence.
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