Not needing to rush despite the task being the acquisition of a new third tier to put to work, while he went, first through his gate to Anailia and then to the gate within that city, Ben had other things to test, looking at his new awakenings while he did.
Some were clear, Ben needed no explanation for his unnatural strength enhancement or his perfect balance enhancement, but others required a deeper dive as he first turned his focus to one he was sure he knew, being defiler of gods.
With that skill’s growth being purely linear. Defiler of ambrosia doubled his attribute growth when consuming the gods, be it their bodies within their realms or else the products of his possessed plants, with the awakening not yielding anything obviously different. It seemed to have doubled the effect again, a clear boon, but no matter how he’d examined himself in every second since awakening that skill and taking bites out of whatever deity that had either attacked or annoyed him, there’d been nothing else to find.
And initially, layered alien sense seemed much the same. A more powerful version of the original skill, something that he was more than happy to get as it increased the depth of how he felt the world around him while also pairing incredibly with soulcraft, but that was all until he tried experimenting with the meaning he found within the new name.
Layered; with the act of layering the skill in the hells below granting it an unexpected multiplication of power. While the same thing couldn’t be done in the realm he made his home, he had another option as he warped and contorted his soul, turning it in on itself in a way that shrunk its overall range yet showed the same increase he saw in the hells, even if it was to a smaller extent. Even in its unawakened form, Ben had been able to layer his soul nearly two million times when he was below, but up above, he didn’t have the universe copying it to act on itself, and with his dexterity, he could only create four layers. An incredibly powerful boost, yes, but not the insane power that had left reality itself laid bare before him.
With that leaving only the final awakening with any mystery to it, planar manipulation, even if his results on that front seemed lacking.
He tried to break reality itself in the same way he had to escape the hells below but found his space senses still too weak, even as he layered them, leaving him not able to discover anything else he could do with the skill despite the name seeming to imply as much. All he could do was what the base skills it had grown from had always been related to. He was slowly increasing the size of his realm since discovering he could the day before, and he could still send souls to hell if he so desired, but there was nothing more.
Of course, maybe that’s enough, he told himself, hoping the latter application had been amplified and would continue to grow, even if it wasn’t immediately knowable. It might give me another option I hadn’t had much hope for before. Even though I escaped hell, it doesn’t seem like anything else has made its way out from down below in the past as far as the gods are aware, and if that’s the case, then maybe I don’t actually need to bet it all trying to kill Oaun. Maybe I can just condemn him.
If that really was an option, then his odds felt like they’d just grown significantly brighter. As much as he’d grown, killing the most powerful god in the universe didn’t seem realistic, but condemning him? Trapping him in hell, where he’d be split and too mentally burdened to figure out how to escape? That was an idea with an exciting level of potential, one that actually gave him some hope for the future. Even if they were talking about the most powerful god in reality, that would mean that Ben would only need to get close enough to banish him down below.
Which means I’ll need to see if I can trick one of the defeated gods later to practice on them, and let’s be real, it’s going to be Eneth. If I really can just condemn Oaun though, this solves literally all of my problems.
The main one being his repeated failure to awaken his enchanting, and when he added his sacrilege into the mix, he couldn’t imagine it wouldn’t work. Gods had souls, just like anything else, and while the fact that the god in question was one who ruled over both souls and survival, potentially lowering his odds of success, Ben had plenty of advantages of his own. With the level of his two authorities, he’d likely have no issue growing that skill to the level of a contender in the next few weeks, and even before awakening his condemnation, he’d been better at damning a soul than any of the divine. It was an ability the system had shaped in Ben using all of the experimentation and theorizing he’d done on the topic, and it was one that couldn’t help but leave him with a bit more hope.
Like that maybe I’ll actually survive the end of the war.
As much as he wanted to put his faith in that though, he couldn’t bet it all on that working so, condemning and expanding his realm as he went to raise his level, he continued on his way until he reached his destination, arriving at the untamed lands.
Flying far from any of the common gates to those wild areas, not wanting to be too near anyone else for what he was going to do, he found a quiet spot far from anyone else and created some fear enchanted items to spread around, ensuring nothing and nobody might get too close while he worked.
He wasn’t expecting to be bothered, nor did he think he couldn’t handle any creature that might sneak up on him. It was for a more practical reason than that. Ben simply didn’t want to risk anyone getting too close in the event they found what he was going to do particularly traumatic, considering his own sense for such things had long since been warped, leaving him prepared as he went to his next step and focused on his realm above.
He’d emptied it out, freeing it of any experiment he had going, along with all of the different instances of himself he’d usually have running around up there, leaving only himself as he examined the vast, empty plane before he got started and, with nothing else to prepare, he took his own mind and he shattered it, bringing the fragments out before him.
Ben was long used to having his mind destroyed by that point, he’d likely experienced it more than anyone else on the planet, and in ways a normal person couldn’t imagine, but what he was attempting to do was a replication of the last way he’d gone through it. When he’d first connected to Dewdrop’s mind, putting himself against something that had been born in an entirely alien set of physics, and had lost at first before he’d adapted.
But his mind had grown incomprehensibly since then. He was two levels higher in eldritch mind, and for a third-tier skill, the gap that much had created was incomprehensible. He destroyed the equivalent of his mind when it had been at the zeroth level of that tier, yes, but he had more than enough left to observe the rest with as he brought the fragments back into the forms they’d held before they’d been reincorporated back into himself, filling his realm with millions of mismatched creatures, possessing bodies that seemed more like the result of an evil life mage torturing the chimeras they’d made than anything else.
And, while looking at them all, he was immediately able to remove ninety-nine percent of them, the resulting minds too insane or too unusable to be worth considering. Minds that couldn’t think in a coherent manner, or minds that had no higher functions, minds that were nothing more than beasts, or in plenty of cases even below that. Ben had connected to insects and plants across the world, and those two categories made up more species than almost anything else he’d encountered. In the randomness of how they’d reorganized, it had been easy for the odds to make them too much of one or the other, unable to go and find more fragments to merge with and as such were useless to him.
After that came the next cull and the next reintegration as he focused on how the remaining set off both his evil and destructive authorities, not wanting any arrangements that surpassed a certain limit of either. There was nothing completely free of those aspects, there was always going to be someone who viewed one person’s sin as virtue or virtue as sin, and with so many gods with so many opinions on that world, it was easy for such ideas to get clouded, but it was a convenient enough guideline, and wiped out most of the demonic mental structures he’d incorporated, freeing the remaining of that bit of contamination and bringing his total left to only a couple of thousand.
Next came an examination of them on a deeper level, looking at the mental structures they’d ended up with and judging them one by one; their memories, even if they had never truly been theirs, and what they meant to them. How they felt to be who they were and how they’d felt when they all eventually realized that they were nothing more than a broken part of a greater whole, letting him reincorporate them one by one, returning those lost pieces to himself until he had less than a hundred left.
Of the remaining, he looked at how they felt to be changed, something they’d all gone through as they found and absorbed more memories, even if it had been in different ways, and how they reacted to potentially becoming less of themselves, letting him eliminate the ones who’d seemed the worst at it, leaving only twenty left.
Twenty minds, born from his own and all of the minds he’d touched. The lives he’d relived through other eyes, remade into a different whole. A collage of a person, pasted together fragments of thousands of lives, until he settled on the one he believed he wanted, pulling the rest back into himself but remembered their configurations so they’d be easier to recreate if he needed to as he stared at his choice.
Every bit of examination had been done at his maximum thought speed, leaving each fragment an existence of microseconds, unable to perceive themselves or the rest around them in any meaningful way and leaving the last to jump when he went to match its time, surprised at not only its existence but also its presence before him, all while Ben smiled politely at it.
“Hello there. You must be a little shocked, but you could consider me the maker you spent all of those months searching for.”
It shook its head and Ben, sensing what it wanted, gave its body a mouth that it had originally lacked as it had passed through endless doorways of shattered memories, letting it communicate freely for the first time.
“I am you.”
“Yes, you are,” his grin widened. “But you’re also not. Made up of pieces of me and the experiences I’ve taken from others and arranged into a person of their own. I’ll admit, I know everything you’re thinking, but that’s because I’m a mind reader. I’m not in control of your thoughts; I’m not puppeting you. I’d like to have a conversation.”
“What could you possibly want to discuss with a thing like me that you wouldn’t already know?”
“Ha, well, that gets a little complicated, but… hmm, how would you like to be addressed? He, she, they, it, perhaps one of the less common genders in the world too? I see you’ve tested out a few different ones for yourself.”
“Does it matter?”
“Depending on how the conversation goes, it might.”
“... I don’t have the memories of just one gender.”
“They works then; we can discuss the rest later. And name? Did you have one you wanted for yourself?”
“... I think I’d rather know where this is leading.”
“One more question first. Are you willing to have me alter your mind slightly? Even if you’re technically me, I’d like to try to treat you with the respect I can as an independent thinking being, but things can’t progress unless I instill a proper level of devotion and goodwill into you.”
“If you want something that matches your desires from the start, then why couldn’t you just make one?”
“I didn’t want too much that was meaningfully me mixed into it, and since I had millions of options created accidentally, you and the rest like you were worth reflecting on, but I suppose I can tell you what you’d be getting into if you did agree.”
They waited for a second while Ben considered how best to phrase his question for them, before giving up and deciding to just be direct about it.
“How would you like to have a real body?”