Chương 1105

CH1105

"So, dare I even ask how the gods feel about what you did today?" Thera asked while laying next to him, knowing that he'd made a believer out of what had once been a demon having managed to distract her at least a bit to keep her from thinking too much about the day prior, along with the other concerns that had been on her mind.

"It doesn't matter how they feel about it. I made things pretty clear that they don't get a say in what I do anymore."

"Myriad then?"

"Was lucky enough to gain a friendly new third-tier believer who's completely devoted to him. Nothing to complain about."

"Hmm, and any chance of them going all demony?"

"Considering that the majority of life has to think with their brains instead of their souls, the things that make demons the problem they are is a biological inability to experience anything like love, kindness, or mercy. The mind I imprinted on Tress's soul is completely capable of such things, and the brain I designed them seems to manage it fine as well. All that happened is the planet got a super powerful new citizen. I'd personally call it a win.

Hell, if I find any other demons who've made it to the third tier, I'll have to seriously consider doing this again."

"Mmh, well, if you're sure that it's not going to lead to another Foast situation…"

"It won't," Ben reassured.

"Foast was taking in demon souls, and I solved that by deleting the minds attached to them, didn't I? The demon's mind on Tress was removed before they were added, even any relevant information and knowledge of the skill was filtered through me instead of being left behind in the soul's original memories. We're absolutely fine, so instead, tell me how the day went for you? What did you and the kiddos get up to?"

"Before you ended up finding us? Just a nice walk around, stopped for lunch, nothing too exciting."

"Ha, I don't know, that sounds great to me."

"That's because you haven't let yourself have a break, even after everything that happened."

"Getting dropped into hell has taken away my ability to have a break, if anything. Now I have so much more to do."

"Workaholic."

"Don't say that like you're trying to get me a title."

"It would be well-deserved," she yawned.

"Just watch, the second I close my eyes, you're going to immediately start practicing something else, aren't you?"

"I mean, I don't need sleep. It would be a waste of time not to."

"Ha, definitely a workaholic," she teased, still very much needing rest herself, even considering her growing level of skill in resisting it.

"In that case, the night's all yours." It wasn't much longer before she drifted off, letting Ben immediately prove her right as, with his soul stretched out as far as it could go for the safety of his family, along with the town around him, Ben began trying to practice his new magic high in the sky above, wanting to confirm just how he could manipulate the plane he was in. With results coming almost instantaneously, at least from any perspective other than his own.

In his practice, taking less than a single second, Ben drained his mana and had to pull some from the rest of Stonewall to refresh his stock, but through that brute force approach of testing and experimentation, found the beginnings of how his magic could be used.

Even if he couldn't feel reality to the same extent as when alien sense had been unnaturally amplified, he still held senses linked to it and, when mana was applied, could act on it the same way, leaving a flicker of will to break through that realm to the hells below, along with a grin on his face. In the same way he could break through, he could also repair it before the plane would naturally do so by itself, and with that, he felt like he had another option.

The day prior, he'd thought of damning Oaun, but if he couldn't do that to a god of souls, then he had the same option that had just been done to him. Open a hole there and drop him in, leaving the god where he could do no harm. Ideally, that would even be enough to kill him in proper. One of the few ways there was to kill a deity was to murder it while it wore one of its believers, and if what he'd seen firsthand still held true, Oaun seemed to want to stay in one.

If that was the case, though, if Ben dropped the god in its entirety, eventually, its flesh would die, leaving its soul to pass on if it was ever released from the plane. A perfect trap, letting him increase his estimate of success by a few more percentage points and a surprising amount of hope for the future. He could do it. It still didn't seem easy; his victory was far from guaranteed, but it at least felt winnable, closer to rolling a die compared to his previously far more abysmal odds.

Ben could think faster than anything else he'd encountered; he could now damn people in their entirety instead of just their souls, and he was in essence the natural enemy of the divine for the powers he'd grown. There was still plenty of room for things to go wrong, something always went wrong, and he knew his theories and expectations wouldn't be perfect, but all of that was letting him feel just a bit of hope that he'd actually have a future to look forward to.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. God, having a real future feels more like a dream than anything else, he thought, letting himself imagine how far he could go if only he'd be allowed to live out his total lifespan.

Becoming a third tier for a few dozen new skills, figuring out how to reach the fourth tier as well to see the sort of power I'd get and just what that would let me ascend into when I die, inventing entirely new skills and new skill categories to go along with it, and… yeah, let's not get carried away. There's still other testing I need to do on this one skill before I let myself start thinking about how I'll grow even more in a year or a century. Planar manipulation. Basically planar magic.

To me, this sounds like the non-affinitied version of space magic, so let's see how well that comparison holds up. Space magic was one of the more costly of the affinitied options, and considering that non-affinitied would always be higher, that spoke plenty of just how much Ben would be spending for any spell, but he believed he'd be able to cover it.

He was nearing sixty thousand points of mana, far beyond what any typical mage or even second-tier would enjoy; the quantity only looked small in comparison to his girlfriend beside him or Mora sleeping in his room. His family was an outlier, though, and not people he should have been measuring himself against.

Once he figured out how to use it for any spells, he could then practice and refine it to lower the cost, so with that belief firm in his thoughts, he got started, seeing how he could warp the world around him. With some immediate successes and some devastating failures. There were stand outs of course.

Ben could warp space itself to either make objects move faster or slower by stretching or shrinking the distance between two points which, while among some of the beginner space spells, was still exceptionally handy and something he could easily see himself making use of, if only to save himself some time by reducing how long any non-gate based travel would take him, but that was the greatest victory he held.

Warping space itself to seal a section off for the purposes of storing items in was possible as well, but not remotely worth the effort. While maintaining such a warped space had a comparatively small mana cost, well below his regeneration rates, using his total mana pool to warp reality gave him less room than a single one of his enchanted rings.

Enough to be amazing and endlessly useful to anyone else, but to Ben, it was nothing, leaving him to create a much smaller one with an even lower maintenance cost, if only for the sake of training, given that was now a power he wanted to level before the next wave. But, while making a private inventory for himself had been disappointing, teleportation was worse.

He wasn't going to leave bed to test it, getting to rest with Thera each night was an important part of his life, even if he'd be awake for it the entire time, but given that casting anywhere his soul touched had the same mana cost as if he'd been doing it right in front of himself, that meant he could simply make a stone replica of himself in the back yard, matching his size and mass to let him practice on instead, with the results being abysmal.

Ten thousand points of mana and he could move himself a foot, meaning spending his entire pool would transport him the same distance he could spit. Opening a hole in space itself required a far lower cost to maintain once it had been started, but it still beat his regeneration rate and increased the farther the distance was as well. It'll improve as I raise my level, and there's always the option of overfilling my soul as much as I can if I need to travel a couple hundred meters, but…

yeah, sadly, as things are, this does not leave teleportation as a viable travel option for me. A shame. The fact that he could do it at all was exciting, and he could already imagine ways he might pair that new ability with any of his space enchantments to power them further, but for himself, the actual benefits were low.

Growing his realm was likely the most useful to him by far, so long as one didn't consider his hope that the condemnation aspects of the power might let him get rid of the most dangerous god in that universe, but growing his realm was an aspect of the magic that wasn't even costing him any mana, more of a strange bit of side growth from the way it had awakened with realm access. There were uses for all he'd learned, and he'd be applying plenty, but compared to a proper space magic, it was underwhelming.

Of course, there's two more things I need to try. Given how the skill's name related to material manipulation, he couldn't just not test an equivalent to how he most used that prior magic, and with his examination during his time in hell, he was far more equipped to than ever before as he began spending his power, not trying to materialize matter, nor to bring forth something like a soul.

No, Ben's mana went to creating the fabric of reality itself, feeling his mana snap into place but left a result that was invisible to him, only a few of his stranger senses confirming he'd done anything at all before what he'd created merged into the wider universe itself and a notification ringing in his head. <PLANAR MANIPULATION LEVEL INCREASED> Huh, interesting. That might actually have some applications too that I'll have to experiment with, but for now, one last thing to test.

I've already gone down, so what about up? The path to his god's realm was a well treaded one for him by that point, leaving it the perfect destination as he felt reality itself and tried to break through, feeling the wall crumple with ease in the same spot he'd done all of his experiments, high up in the clouds above, but with a different result, as Myriad took notice, the instance of himself up there chatting with his god not enough of a distraction.

"Ben, what the fu-" Instantly the Ben below patched the hole, but the damage was done. Two kilometers up, Ben had heard his god speak with his own mortal ears so much further down, as had everyone else in town.

What had seemed like his normal tone to the Ben within that divine realm had been more like crashing thunder to Stonewall, combined with the intense feeling of divinity that had grown from all of the faith Ben had gotten him having woken the entire town up as he did his best to sooth all of their minds, leaving Thera alone to stare at him, the only person sure of what she'd just heard and felt before Ben's power could suppress the aftereffects.

"Do I even want to ask what you just did?"

"Apparently, learned what might happen if a god pokes through a bit without a vessel," he admitted, fully prepared to be scolded both above and below while he got to take in the unexpected result, ending his experimentation there for the night. He'd learned everything he wanted to about planar manipulation and what uses it might have for him, leaving only a thorough talking to about just what sort of tests were appropriate to perform.