CH813

“So?” Ben asked the god before him, tapping his foot and waiting for a response while they cleared their throat.

“Ahem, it’s good to see you doing well, Ben,” Nare told him, looking as uncomfortable as he felt. “Congratulations on clearing a new tower.”

“Yeah, no thanks to you, Mister challenge and crafting god. Just out of curiosity, how much of the design did you contribute to the first floor of that one?”

“Ah, we built it so many thousands of years ago at this point, who can really say?”

“I’m sure,” Ben told him dryly. “Myriad tells me you and some of the other crafters had to fix it after our run too, did you guys at least patch up that little design flaw you built into it or are you just going to keep it there to test future participants’ luck too?”

“Ah, altering a trial that’s already been placed in the mortal realm is no easy thing but we did our best and added a ten-second delay for the attacks at the start. Since everyone should be going in to face each tower prepared from the beginning, that should give them all more than enough leeway to react if need be.”

Ben continued to look at the god through narrowed eyes before ultimately shaking his head. “God, I hate trials so fucking much.”

“Alright, but enough harassing Nare about it,” Helori cut in. “We have something a lot more significant to talk about. What are the effects of your new skill already?”

“Mythril blood?” He asked back with a grin. “Still not sure, I’ll hopefully find out when I talk to Verbum tomorrow.”

“Don’t be coy, it isn’t cute. You know what we’re curious about.”

“How did that reveal go up here anyway?”

“Not as bad as I’d thought,” Myriad sighed. “A few unhappy voices but honestly, since we don’t know what might come of it it’s hard for anyone to be mad on that front and as for the idea that it should be disrespectful to us as a basic concept… Well, it’s hard to really say that this is so much worse than how you and we are already using the souls of the forbidden gods for potion-making. As a test case though, however you’re affected by this is going to dictate both how we’ll view this in the future and if we’ll try to do the same thing again before the next wave.”

“That reminds me, what did Quox rule over?” Ben asked, referring to the one whose soul had been trapped in his greenhouse for so long. “I’d thought he was a magic god since he gave Thera a mana regeneration enhancement before I offed him but getting his heart raised my vitality enhancements along with giving me my new blood skill.”

“Growth and gain,” Helori answered. “He’d be compatible with any attribute enhancement, probably inclinations too. Honestly, he would have made for such a handy addition to the world if he wasn’t such a bastard.”

“Okay, interesting and tells me I might be able to claim a few more of both which would be neat but I’m not immediately seeing where my new blood skill comes in.”

“Who’s to say?” The goddess shrugged. “It could be anything. It could even be mostly unrelated. If we assume the name of the skill is literal and that the iron in your blood has been converted to mythril then there’s a chance it’s more related to your connection to Myriad than the heart.”

“Wait, why?”

“He’s the sum of the only known mythril-based life and the biology of his world was able to convert standard iron into that magic metal without the centuries and millennia of mana exposure to make it happen and your connection to your god is a fair bit deeper than most. You hold what? Two titles bearing his name, his blessing, an awakened version of his gift skill and the destined holder title for being the first to awaken it. Hell, given you spend basically every night with him, even if you can’t feel it you’re bathed in his divinity in a way most mortals simply aren’t and it seems like your sacrilege doesn’t deny you any potential positives that there might be to that. That alone could be plenty but when you consider the fact that mana exposure is what alters materials into their magic variety against both the amount of mythril you wear at all times along with the fact that all of the blood in your body had briefly been passing through a mythril heart and it only feels more likely.”

“Okay, an interesting idea and I see what you’re saying but there’s one problem. The skill name can’t be literal. Once an element is converted by magic its physical and chemical properties change. The iron in my blood would stop carrying oxygen and I’d almost instantly die as a result.”

“Then only some of it has changed, it doesn’t need to be all or nothing. More importantly though, we’re getting off topic. Have you found any effects from the skill yet?”

Ben thought for a second, considering his body throughout the day and how it had felt before shaking his head. “Not sure, it might be too soon to tell and honestly, with the way my soul hurts it would be hard to say either way, except… My soul is beginning to hurt less?”

He hadn’t noticed it at first but his soul was slowly beginning to feel better since he’d gone to sleep, with the goddess before him shaking her head.

“The soul spirit you’ve decided to raise is obviously healing it right now, stick to the matter at hand.”

“...I think the fact that the kid I’m looking after keeps trying to secretly use his magic is also kind of important but whatever I guess.”

The fact that Mora was bad at keeping it a secret was a whole other issue but he let it pass. He and Thera had already decided to wait until the child was ready to talk about it but if he was going to keep doing it so plainly then that was potentially something they’d need to reconsider, for the time being, he focused back on his new skill.

“Other than that then, as soon as I got it it felt like I'd been lit on fire for a second. Every nerve I had screamed and then it was back to normal, just as fast.”

Helori narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure you were just feeling the change in your body?”

“What, you think I might have felt it in my soul too? Hmm, possible but if I did, it disappeared immediately and didn’t fix any of the pain false Ben is causing me.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Myriad asked.

“Oh, false Ben is the name the skill got when I merged the tower copy of me into my soul. It came with a whole host of benefits too, aside from the fact that I remember the fucked up way he was created and trained to be better at my skills, it’s a big plus.”

Even though his copy hadn’t been able to materialize souls, the way it had learned to think about materialization in general would reduce the cost of creating matter and essence alike, with a few additional achievements found in improving the way he enchanted a well but neither of those was the big haul. No, the real reward he’d claimed from his other was that his copies had found a new way of interacting with his alien thought structure.

After Ben had forcefully transitioned the skill after it had briefly driven him insane, he’d been content to ignore it from there. Letting it grow as he touched more minds was inescapable but otherwise, he hadn’t seen anything to do with it. His replicas though, forced into an endless death match until the real him arrived, had.

While normally, the skill’s existence meant that a small part of him within every one of his minds was thinking in a way that combined all of the lifeforms he’d connected to, under the pressure of their circumstances, one of his copies had discovered that they could apply the thought patterns of specific species to the totality of his minds, strengthening the way he’d think in certain aspects to make him better at fighting or planning or magic or whatever he needed to so long as he could find the right aspects, with the small bit of testing he’d done that day showing him just what a valuable strategy it could be.

Combining the thought patterns he’d gotten from both Mora as well as the wraith he’d saved from the demon’s world, Ben had instantly been able to add yet another reduction to the mana cost creating souls had for him with the effects only going to multiply once he got his coat back to do it even more. Soon there’d even be a chance that he’d be finishing multiple third tiers in a day as the skill grew as well and with the new strategy for his mind, there were plenty of places he was going to start trying to apply it in his work with all areas of crafting and research having the potential to be improved upon as well.

As he was thinking all that though, Helori could only shake her head. “I can’t possibly imagine what will happen if you ever awaken a skill named after yourself.”

“Eh, could be interesting but I don’t actually have any hopes doing something like that would do more for me than some better attributes, which would still be great but whatever. Unless you guys have anything immediately important now, I’ve got some questions of my own.”

“Yes?”

“I want to hear everything I can about craftsmans’ tower.”