God

***Heavy spoilers, read with caution.***
God is a made-up construct in the Release that Witch novel whose origins in sentient beings' culture are somewhat similar to how it was in Er Mu's real world, as expressed by Roland. It is more amply propagated by the Church as the creator and the one responsible for the implementation of the Battle of Divine Will. However, later the Demon Civilization and the Underground Civilization also appeared to believe in its concept as a very powerful being detentor of potent magic, and possibly its creator.

Its demystification came with Roland's understanding of an alleged God by its Apostles and by his eventual talk with it. He eventually came to understand that the universe they were living in was created due to a singularity and its Big Bang, but after billions of years, several civilizations altered it due to the execution of Project Gateway turning into what it currently was.

## Church

It is first mentioned by Roland in chapter 2,

Church claims power from God.

## Project Gateway, The Scientist and The Custodian

Millions and millions of years previous to the begining of the story, a group of over 170 thousand sentient civilizations from trillions of galaxies fomed a humongous initative which came together  to try and reverse the flow of entropy, allowing for life to continue existing indefinitely. This initiative was known as Project Gateway, Gateway Plan or Project Door and as a consequence teared a rift in space through which magic came and interwove with the entire universe.

This plan's inception was done by a scientist of a very advanced and now extinct civilization which after the plan was executed died along with most of the sentient life of the universe. However, he was also responsible for the creation of an artifical sentient being which would later be known, erroniously, as **God**. This being calls himself the Custodian and was responsible for supervising Project Gateway and its subsequent steps, such as helping life to visit continue progressing and to help it visit the world on the other side of the rift.

Due to the extinction of most sentient beings, it created an isolated environment known as The Cradle which was supposed to create beings capable of living on both sides of the rift. Aiming to create these beings, it started to foster new life in similar environments so that through competition they would evolve faster. Soon after, however, he realized that the process would take too long and so to speed it up, it judged inevitable to implement external forces like the incentive provided by the legacy shards. Therefore, with the duty of creating a civilization capable of adapting to the laws of both sides of the rift the competition known as Battle of Divine Will started.

## Monotheism

When civilization had not yet developed to a certain extent, these sort of strange things would always happen. Even without personal gain, people would automatically attribute man-made, natural disasters or any unexplainable phenomenon to the invented culprit behind the scenes—historically speaking, the blame fell on witches.

And in this world, if witches possessed powers of unknown origin, it was even easier to become the target of the church. The church could allow for the witches to be ordained as saints by saying they were the gifts of God or the witches could be hunted, proclaiming they were the demon's advocates. However, once the former was chosen, monotheism would greatly lose its power—because the appearance of the witches had nothing to do with the church. If churches that believe in other deities also recognised the witches as saints, and everyone was the chosen one, which church's God was the true God?

The prerequisite for the coexistence of polytheism was that the gods were real and could restrict each other. Since Gods did not exist and were only hearsay icons, why should the other party share the world? So any faith would claim that they believed in the true God, and the infidels would have to be eliminated. So they could only choose the latter, to spare no effort in destroying the witches. This was irrelevant to preference, it was all about gain.

## References

1. ↑ Chapter 2 (novel)
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chapter 1488 (novel)
3. ↑ Chapter 1486 (novel)
4. ↑ Chapter 1413 (novel)
5. ↑ Chapter 15 (novel)