I immediately went ahead and tapped on the religion symbol after chatting with the system. As soon as I did I received an alert that filled my vision with informative text.
[Dual Class Description:
The 'Patron' and 'God' classes are classes that govern how you grant religion-based classes to your servants. Paladins, dark knights, witches, wards, and warlocks are all left physically marked by you when you grant them their classes, or when they earn them after years in your service and you gain an ability to brand someone as your first class feature from these classes.
The 'God' class also has miscellaneous traits and features that are worth taking note of. Some of these include powers that aid your servants and worshipers in achieving their missions, and others are miraculous powers that do a number of things.
This brand is more than a physical mark. You use it to transmit your power to those to whom you've bestowed it, and can you use it to transmit emotions and sensations to those who serve you. For instance, you can use it to cause a servant of yours to experience great pain as a punishment for failure or to provide soothing relief after a heated battle that leaves them injured.
As a patron, you are given great power over warlocks, witches, and wards. You can give them enhanced blessings, directly restore their HP, and at one point you can bring them back to life to serve you.
You gain experience in these classes by causing people to become Paladins, dark knights, witches, wards, and warlocks in your service and by using these skills. As you level up you'll gain more abilities and features with which to affect your servants.
Dual-class features:
Branding: You can leave a physical mark on a creature who agrees to become your servant in exchange for power or a devoted worshiper of yours who has earned a class of great power. You configure the brand to look however you want, and any of your worshipers recognize it automatically as a symbol that whoever bears it is a servant of yours.
This feature is owned by both classes.
Transmit sensations: The brand is an extension of your power and no matter where a creature is in the multiverse a creature who is branded by you is vulnerable to sensations you transmit. This feature is owned by both classes.
Change: As a patron, when you brand someone you can cause them to undergo a change of some sort.
A lot of patrons who lacked your particular powerset opted to take advantage of the sick and made pacts with those who were suffering from deadly diseases. Others sought servants who desired beauty or love and used the 'Change' ability to make them beautiful or desirable.
The change that pact-beneficiaries undergo is determined by their masters, but was often negotiated in advance and was part of the initial investment made by the masters of the pacts in the past.
Conditional casting: As a god, you can grant your servants and worshipers magic. You can also cause such magic to require the fulfillment of certain conditions before it can be used. You can decide these conditions as you wish.
Prayer inducement: As a god, you can force a worshiper of yours to enter into a temporary state of forced prayer. While in this state the creature is forced to kneel and pray and reveals their deepest and darkest secrets. It can only be used on genuine worshipers of you, and more than anything else was used by those who had this class to help detect pretenders who only offered gods lip-service.
Desire sense: You can peer into a soul and see what it desires. This is an enhanced version of your 'Lust' power. What you see are the desires that define the person who experiences them. These desires are their goals and their dreams.]
I grinned as I read through these powers. They were all interesting and I couldn't wait to use them on people. I also went ahead and tapped on my grimoire. I figured I might as well check on the magic I had gained.
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[Greetings! You have gained countless new spells. Among them, you have gained alteration spells.
The school of alteration is the school that governs manipulation of the physical world, changes made to the body, and can allow for weapons, armor, and other items to be magically enhanced. It is tied to the domains of biology and physics as well as being its own subdomain.
You have also gained enchantment spells. Enchantment magic muddles the mind and senses. It is magic that is used to deceive people.
Gravity well: This legendary alteration spell alters gravity in the affected area.
Upon using it you select a fixed point in your vision and all gravity in the surrounding area up to twenty-five meters vertically and fifteen meters horizontally is affixed to that point. This spell can be mixed with other spells such as 'Weight of the dead' to create messy gravity-based situations for your enemies to deal with.
Charm: This enchantment spell causes a creature to become friendly towards you. It can be resisted but resisting it is difficult.
Stiffen: This alteration spell manipulates the body and causes it to cease moving. A living body is frozen by this spell.
Dominate: This enchantment spell is a potent one that not only charms a target but enthralls them. It can also be resisted but is much harder to resist than the simple 'Charm' spell.
Sharpen: This is an alteration spell that carefully sharpens a blade and increases the damage it can do. It increases both penetration and piercing damage.
Transfigure: This legendary alteration spell is the first of the true shape-shifting spells. When you use it you cause someone to undergo legitimate transformations and can alter someone's appearance in wonderous or terrifying ways.
Disguise: This is an enchantment spell that allows you to alter someone else's appearance. You can this spell to effectively cause someone else to shapeshift, even if it doesn't actually change their physiology.
Light of hope: This spell creates an orb of warm light that illuminates the area around it. This alteration magic is granted to you by the domain of light.
Invisibility: By refracting light and darkness around you or someone else you can turn yourself or someone else invisible. You, as a god of light and darkness, have a greater version of this spell that doesn't dissipate when you or someone else attacks while invisible.
False reality: This legendary enchantment spell traps targeted minds in a reality under your control. If they die in this reality they immediately awaken from the spell and will experience long-term health effects as they are traumatized by the experience.
Ravenous darkness: This legendary alteration spell creates an area of darkness that hungrily and greedily devours the life-force of anyone who steps into it or is in it when it is created, aside from the caster. This vicious spell transforms those who die from it into undead. Its range can be increased by using more magical energy than necessary when casting it.
You have gained access to dozens of other spells as well. These spells are just some of the new ones under your control. Use the 'search' function on the grimoire to find more specific spells.
New quest alerts:
Biology: To gain access to the first tier of influence over the domain of biology, use the legendary transfigure spell on a willing target to alter their appearance in a way they see fit.
Physics: To gain access to the first tier of influence over the domain of physics use the 'Gravity well' spell five times.
Alteration: To gain access to the first tier of influence over the subdomain of alteration use alteration magic to win a battle against an enemy.]
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One fortunate thing about a godly mind is that it allowed me to think about several different things all at once and learn so many different things at the same time. I was able to absorb so much new information, all while steadily processing the trillions of notifications I was receiving via "Domain-sense".
"I wonder if I could mix and match my godly abilities..." I muttered, while my mind was being alerted to all of the dreamers in this universe. I felt an incredible amount of knowledge flowing into my mind from every direction and from across distances that even I couldn't really imagine.
I was able to detect the dreamers of an uncountable mass of humanoids. And as I did so I learned the names of the worlds they lived on. A domain-sense notification looked like this:
[Name:
Species:
Name of birth-planet:
Alignment:
Class:
Distance to you:]
It was an incredible thing. I saw the names of tens of thousands of worlds, and the names of millions of species. And I was able to process it all instantly. But what I wanted to do, to safely experiment, was add another thing to the notification. I wanted to add someone's desire to it.
I had a scheme in mind, and in order to test it efficiently, I needed to know what someone desired. I needed to know what their hearts craved.
My scheme was a fun one, and I wanted to act upon it in a safe environment, far from my current location. I needed someone upon whom I could experiment with these new powers at my disposal. And in order to find the lucky person who'd be gaining powers soon, I needed to efficiently find someone who desired something simple.
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I opted not to ask the system if something could be done and instead try to experiment on my own. I envisioned the notification I received from the system gaining one extra bit of information. What someone desired.
I focused on that for a few moments, attempting to will it into reality, and then I checked if it worked. I did so by focusing on a notification I had just received alerting me to someone who had just fallen asleep.
[Name: Andrea Handsfall.
Species: Human
Name of birth-planet: Htrae
Class: None
Distance to you: 42,000,000,000 light-years away]
I hissed when I noticed that it was unchanged. In annoyance, I simply focused on Andrea's name and then activated my "Desire-Sense" power.
[Andrea Handsfall desires beauty and admiration. She is, in fact, willing to go to any length to get it.] The automated version of the system told me, seconds after I activated my power. Learning that brought a smile to my face.
I took a deep breath and then activated my "Dreamwalker" power. Upon doing so I willed myself into Andrea's dream and found myself standing in a place unlike any I had ever seen before.
I stood in the middle of a plain white hallway. The floor underneath me was made of some sort of tile that a voice in my mind whispered was called "Vinyl". It was white.
On the walls beside me were metal containers that were blue and a few meters long that happened to be stacked on top of one another. They were closed and I could see a sort of combination lock where someone would otherwise be able to open them. The ceiling on top of me was made of some sort of white tile, and occasionally there'd be some odd lighting fixture suspended in the ceiling that emanated harsh white light onto the ground below.
The place was eerily silent and my tremorsense alerted me to the reality that there were only two people here: myself and Andrea. I began to walk in Andrea's direction, curious as to the true nature of my present location, or at least its true nature relative to Andrea.
Andrea was located directly ahead of me according to my tremorsense. And so I had taken off in that direction. I walked and I walked.
And I walked some more.
And then I kept on walking.
While I was walking I noticed that this place felt sterilized. It felt unnaturally and impossibly clean.
I only stopped walking when I reached an end to the hallway I found myself in. I came to a stop right in front of a set of doors. They were odd things, made of glass and some sort of concrete-like material. I looked through the glass and saw that they led outside.
Beyond the doors was a path that led out to a grassy field. A dreamy sun was providing the grassy field with bright illumination. And standing out in that grassy field was Andrea. I walked towards and then through the doors, finally able to see the person I had come here to meet.
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Andrea or at least the dream version of Andrea that was standing out in the grassy field was a plain-looking girl. A part of me was surprised that she wasn't particularly attractive or especially ugly already.
She had back-length red-hair, a slim figure, was of average height for humans that I had seen so far, and her back was turned towards me. I took my first steps onto the path that laid out before me and waited a moment to see if she reacted. She did not.
I closed my eyes and envisioned my form changing. I quietly worked to construct a form of incredible handsomeness, and when I felt the subtle touch of the subdomain of corruption aiding me I was thankful to have its seductive touch imprinted all over the body I was giving myself.
My normal, somewhat middle-aged human form faded into ethereal nothingness. And in its place came a new form. One made of light the color of tanned skin, and that rippled with charisma and allure.
I felt my muscles swell and vibrant wings explode out from my back. I turned my head towards the wings, and noticed that they were bird-like wings with thick and brilliantly dark feathers protruding out from them. I mentally tried to flap them and after a few seconds I was delighted to see that they began to gently move, obeying my mental commands, albeit in a rather delayed way.
I had a new human-like body. My body was that of a tanned and muscular male. I was currently shirtless, exposing handcrafted and attractive muscles to the daylight that shone over the grassy field and I was quite tall. As my new form was being created and as I was donning it, I rose in height until I was almost twice as tall as she was.
I mentally examined myself and chuckled as I saw a few touches that were added to the form I speedily crafted by the subdomain of corruption. One of them was that the pants I wore were made of skin-tight leather and I had a noticeable bulge that strained the material that kept my most private body-parts out of view.
It took me a second to fully grow accustomed to this form, and when I did so I felt the bulge. It was a part of me that I wasn't yet super familiar with, but one that my other human form possessed. An intimate body part. I audibly chuckled when I realized fully what it was. And that sound echoed across the outside of the strange building I had just left, and captured Andrea's attention.
The young woman turned in my direction and I let her behold my new form. When she first saw me she audibly gasped. I chuckled and began to approach her, quickly going from the path before me onto the grassy field on which she stood. I made no hostile movements, and didn't match her gaze at first. I took careful, graceful steps, and felt thankful to my recent mastery over dexterity.
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My multi-faceted mind wasn't in Andrea's dream and nowhere else. I was also physically present in my tower.
I walked over to my transformed creatures, right as the earth-bear's head smashed through some of its earthen prison and thus freed part of itself from the cocoon of earth it had been inside. I walked to the thing and began to pat its head. As I did so, the creature sleepily looked up at me.
"Hello little one." I said to it, smiling. It was now a bigger and more powerful creature than before. It began to push itself out of the rocky cocoon that had entombed it. The creature moved its head against my chest, doing so with unexpected force and momentarily lifting me off my feet. I chuckled and a second later I was back on the floor of my tower.
I waved a hand in front of the rest of my minion's cocoon and watched as the thing crumbled, freeing my newest minion.
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"Hello Andrea." I said to the young woman in front of me, grinning as I approached her. She stood silently and examined me with a look of shock on her face.
"Are you not feeling talkative? I suppose that makes sense." I said to her, a few seconds after a thick silence fell over the air between us. She kept her gaze locked onto me and I kept smiling nonthreateningly at her.
"My name is Althos. And I am a friend." I told her, as I finished approaching her. She bravely stared me down, her head tilted almost straight upwards. Finally, she spoke.
"I'd ask how you know my name, but frankly I'm assuming you're just a part of my dreams." She said to me, speaking sternly. I chuckled, momentarily curious as to whether or not she was also a lucid dreamer.
"I always hear that from humans, it's somewhat annoying how skeptical your kind is." I explained, chuckling at her. This caused her eyebrows to arch upwards in curiosity.
"I am a friend, and I have the power to change your appearance. I can grant you the beauty you seek. It is indeed, why I am here in the first place. Your desires led me to find you." I proclaimed, a grin on my face as I said so.
When I mentioned the word "beauty" her body language shifted for a second. It was swift, even for my eyes, but I heard her heart hammer in her chest, a single loud heartbeat. She scooted forward, her face keenly locked on mine, and there was a glow in her eyes. A newfound intensity shimmered in them spoke to how powerfully she desired beauty.
Her eyes were thin things, barely visible against the sun's glow as it beat down on her skin. They were a bright blue color and were lovely to behold. They were perhaps the prettiest part of her face, and now that they were filled with desire they were even prettier than usual.
"Oh? I see that that intrigued you... I am not surprised that it would." I told her, speaking smugly. A flareup of anger flashed radiantly in her eyes for a moment, but it quickly passed. Now she took a bit of initiative.
"What are you?" She asked, curiosity and annoyance mixing in equal measure in her voice.
"I am a god. But I know that that might not mean much to you. I suspect certain civilizations have forgotten what gods are entirely." I explained, opting to go with a familiar strategy: honesty. She audibly laughed when I told her that I was a god.
"Oh? You're a god?" She asked, skeptically. Her tone was so indignant that I actually laughed at it.
"I take it that you're a skeptic?" I asked, smiling at her. She kept her gaze locked on me, and nodded. I shrugged my shoulders at her.
"Humans are so skeptical, all the time." I muttered, almost amused by it. I found that it was an interesting contrast with the way I was reacted too by goblins and dark elves. This garnered her interest as well.
"You said something along the same lines earlier. You muttered that humans were skeptical. The way that you said was odd... Have you encountered lifeforms that aren't human? Do you have non-human allies?" She asked, studying me cautiously. I began to smirk at her, knowing that she was curious now. I quietly used my "Appraisal" power on her.
[Name: Andrea Handsfall
Species: Human
Alignment: Neutral
Personal virtue: Diligence
Personal vice: Greed
Magic sensing: Htrea's humans have evolved in a peculiar way; they lack magic. Andrea is non-magical. Any magic she gains she would gain by virtue of your abilities to grant magic to your followers.
Faith sense: Andrea's loyalties are to herself, as befits her status as a neutral creature. She is also loyal to the general pursuit of knowledge, which is fitting since she is a student of the sciences. She is a student at a university, an institution dedicated to research and teaching on Htrea.
Authority detection: Andrea has no authority on her own but she is likely to earn such authority, given her status as a university student and the fact that she's studying what she's passionate about. Genetics.
Soul sense: Andrea's soul doesn't sync up to any particular religious class. She would most likely be a regular participant of any faith she could be convinced to join.]
After studying the amassed information I looked up at her, and began to speak.
"I do have non-human worshipers. On a different world." I revealed. Now her eyes genuinely widened in shock. But she took a deep breath and regained her composure.
"I don't believe you. Can you demonstrate your claims?" She asked, properly questioning and challenging me. I smiled at her, now a bit impressed by her dedication to her skepticism.
"I actually can. But tell me... what would meet your skepticism?" I asked, keeping my gaze evenly locked on hers.
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Another part of my mind wandered into a different dream. And so it found itself in a simpler place than the distant, alien dream Andrea was having.
That part of my mind found itself in my Cosechian form and stood in the middle of a large field. It was unplowed and lifeless. I could see the front of a simple and cute wooden house. I walked up to the front door of the pleasant wooden house and knocked on it.
I did so using my liquid-limb by transforming the thing into a simple frozen mallet and lightly tapping on the door. The door felt weak, and I suspected that if I had wanted too I could have bashed the thing down without much effort. After knocking on the door, I only had to wait a few moments before it was opened by the person whose dream I was occupying.
Gustavo came to the door and pulled it open. He had opened the door ready to speak but immediately shut his open mouth when he beheld my earthen legs. He quickly began to look up, his eyes drifting upwards and beholding my strange body. Unsurprisingly there was a look of amazement as he examined my body.
"Hello Gustavo. My name is Cosecha. You've met my servant, Althos." I told the amazed man, lying to him a tiny bit about my relationship to "the servant" I had just mentioned.
"Would you like to come outside? I think you and I ought to have a conversation." I explained, a wide smile on my airy face. Gustavo, quite shaken up by my sudden appearance, stepped through his own door and out onto the field.
"Althos and Alma spoke to me earlier today. They revealed to me that you have a pair of problems. I am here to help you with those problems. But first, I'd like to hear about the problems from you. I want to hear your point of view." I explained to the leader of the laborers and farmers. He took in my perspective and was quiet for a moment. And then he began to speak.
"Well... Cosecha. If you're serious about this, I'd be eternally grateful. I suppose the least I could do is oblige you by letting you hear my point of view." The kindly laborer replied, speaking to me with a tone that mixed amazement, disbelief, and gratitude together into a mixture that was deeply heartfelt.
The laborer than began to reveal to me the background of the dual tragedies affecting his life. As he did so, I listened attentively.
The truth was that I was doing this for show, as it was well within my power to fix all of this in an instant. That said I wanted to do so in a way that earned me the worship of this communal leader and those who trust him. Doing so would require that I act with patience and compassion.