After the Trojan War, Troy successfully resisted the Greek coalition and did not meet the fate of destruction that originally awaited it.
But in reality, this did not mean that Troy had truly won.
At the end of the day, both sides in the war suffered heavy losses.
Although Troy achieved victory, it was merely a hollow one.
After all, Greece had been the attacking side, and the entire war had taken place on Trojan soil. So even in victory, the damage inflicted upon Troy's land was completely irreversible.
In the early stages of the war, after the Greeks failed three times to capture Troy and the Trojans did not dare to sally out recklessly, the Greeks turned to occupying nearby city-states subordinate to Troy.
This included Tenedos, Lesbos, Pedasus, Lyrnessus, and others. Even the great city of Thebes suffered disaster, at the time ruled by Eetion, father of Hector's wife Andromache, and in the end, this legendary city also fell beneath the Greeks' iron hooves.
But did the Greeks achieve victory?
Not at all.
The ten-year-long expedition drained the manpower and wealth of the Greek states.
Even plundering the Trojan city-states could not compensate for such enormous consumption of resources, let alone the fact that attackers suffered heavier casualties than defenders.
Waves upon waves of Greek warriors perished beneath the walls of Troy.
And in the end, Greece did not gain victory from these sacrifices. On the contrary, they were defeated and lost many of their heroes.
Among the commanders, only Odysseus managed to return home. It could be said they lost both "the bride" (referring to Paris) and their army.
Because of the failed war and the lack of sufficient compensation, the Greek states that had formed the coalition weakened drastically.
The political landscape of Greece changed dramatically, with old kingdoms gradually being replaced by new ones.
And what were these new states?
Most of them were forces belonging to the Argonauts, for example, Corinth under Jason, Salamis under Telamon, and Arcadia, the homeland of Atalanta.
These states, under the pretext of worshipping Athena, refused to heed the summons of the gods. Because they had not participated in the war, their strength was preserved.
If the Greek states had won the war against Troy, it would have been another matter, even modest gains could still inspire national morale.
But since they had lost, they had to pay the price.
Thus, the balance of power in Greece shifted. States that worshipped Apollo, Artemis, and Athena gradually grew stronger, while those devoted to Hera, Ares, and others began to decline.
At the same time, the views of the Argonauts toward the gods began to spread along with the rise of these states.
Combined with the exposure of the absurd causes behind the Trojan War, the attitudes of mortals within the Greek divine domain toward the gods gradually began to change.
Many people, especially certain scholars, started to feel dissatisfied with the gods' arbitrary actions and their blatant interference and exploitation of mortals.
Some even began to believe that the power of the gods was unnecessary for humanity.
In the past, such "heretical ideas" were mostly confined to circles of magi.
This was the first time ordinary mortals began to propose such thoughts, and soon, these ideas spread among humanity.
States that had weakened due to the Trojan War began to accept these ideas, as their participation in such a ridiculous war, instigated by the gods, had led to their current plight.
Meanwhile, states that had grown stronger due to the war also accepted these ideas, because they were ruled by kings dissatisfied with the gods.
Their prosperity, achieved by defying divine authority, seemed to validate such beliefs.
If at this moment a figure like "Kratos" were to appear…
Of course, the Greek gods of the Type-Moon world were not so easily overthrown.
But now, the seeds of thought had already grown into towering trees.
Although mortals still could not challenge the gods directly, once True Ether disappeared, the Olympian gods would lose the foundation of their existence.
Their decline and eventual demise would be inevitable.
But this alone was not enough.
Alaric understood that to achieve his goal, his plans could not be limited to just a few divine domains.
The overall situation in the Greek divine domain was already more than halfway complete. All that remained was to maintain the current trend.
And so, after that, Alaric began a new journey.
Alone, accompanied by one black cat and one white cat, he set out to travel the world.
In the days that followed, Alaric's footsteps spread across the entire globe.
On the African continent, he encountered lands ruled by countless indigenous deities.
There was no unified pantheon here, only innumerable spiritual entities with weak divine power, or even mere demigod-level beings, governing each region.
They were not particularly strong. Most had not even fully grasped their own domains, functioning more like local deities, mountain gods, river gods, and the like.
There were even ordinary spiritual entities without complete divinity, including divine beasts and Phantasmal Species.
They were collectively referred to as "essence spirits."
These essence spirits were quite weak, yet each ruled independently, controlling their own tribes and waging constant wars against one another, devouring each other to grow stronger.
The entire continent existed in a state of perpetual chaos.
Perhaps the rise of human civilization truly depended on guidance from gods, Africa's long-standing primitiveness was not without reason.
But none of this concerned Alaric. He traversed nearly every leyline across Africa, bringing them all under the domain of Hecate's magic network.
Of course, even for Hecate, bringing an entire region's magic network under her control required time.
In the Greek divine domain, she had taken control all at once due to her apotheosis.
But merely occupying Egypt's leylines had taken her nearly a century, including the period during which Nitocris ruled Egypt.
Only after fully securing Egypt's leylines did she begin expanding into Africa.
Thus, unwilling to wait, Alaric had no choice but to accelerate the process through time-jumping.
After traversing Africa, Alaric traveled to the American continents.
At that time, North America, like Africa, was ruled by independent essence spirits, while South America was dominated by the Aztec pantheon, a system similar to ancient Egypt, where gods ruled directly as kings among mortals.
There, Alaric even encountered the king of the gods of that era, Quetzalcoatl, the famed Feathered Serpent.
Alaric couldn't help but remark that its original form looked almost identical to the wind serpents he had seen in the World of Warcraft universe, for a moment, he even thought he had encountered the blood god Hakkar.