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Chapter 6 Perception

Lucifer hovered in place before the dragon. She had expected a myriad of different reactions, from screaming to hostility to abject terror. What she hadn't expected was for the dragon's eyes to roll into the back of its head, and for the entire beast to just fall unconscious.

Now she hovered in place, her true form revealed, with no one to behold her magnificence. The dragon was unconscious and Marble lacked eyes.

“This is kinda awkward….” Lucifer mumbled to herself, her voice echoing through the cavern as if spoken by thousands of feminine voices.

With the dragon unconscious and marble fixated on the newly made obsidian floor, Lucifer had a bit of time. She focused on the visual input the eyes covering her body provided. She rallied her mind, causing the tiny white flame acting as her head to flicker.

Now that she was on a planet, especially one with sophont life, she had to take stock of her being. With another flicker of her face-flame, Lucifer used significant concentration to filter through her visual input. First she closed all of the eyes that were either hidden behind feathers, or in some fold of her being, thus unable to properly see. Once the eyes were properly shut, they no longer took up mental processing power. Next came the wings,

She flexed every wing at once, reveling in the feeling for a short while. The wings on her humanoid frame were mere decoration, nothing like those of her true form. While her humanoid form had two wings on her back, or sometimes six if she was feeling spicy, her true form was (made bold italicized) of wings.

Since it had been some time, Lucifer took stock of how many wings she currently had. Archangels like Lucifer and her brother Gabriel, grew new pairs of wings with age. Continuously flexing and relaxing her wings, Lucifer folded those that occupied the same space, back into her body.

Since she grew new wings every hundred years or so, sometimes new wings would grow where old ones already were. And since She was “created” to carry out her fathers wrath, it would be unbecoming for her wings to get in each other's way. And so, wings grew, even when her body no longer had “space” for them, by occupying the same space.

Lucifer herself did not know how that worked, but it just did.

With a sigh that echoed through the cavern, Lucifer folded those redundant wings back into her body, until she was no longer a space warping abomination. Just a normal Sphere of feathers, fire and eyes.

Now that she no longer perceived conflicting sensory information, Lucifer began to (look italicized). Something that had always been a part of her, had been the ability to (see italicized) the underlying fabric of reality. When she had been created, with just a few pairs of eyes, it had been simple stuff. Like most humanoids she could see light and its reflections with a normal pair of eyes. Another allowed her to see infrared and another ultra violet. With age came new pairs of eyes, until after a few hundred years she could see the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

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Afterwards came the ability to see magnetic fields. Then came gravity. Then the ability to see bioelectricity in living organisms. Lucifer grew eyes until she could perceive every detail of physical reality, but it didn't stop. New eyes grew that saw things she could no longer understand. Some eyes showed just absolute darkness, even if pointed directly at a light. Others showed moving tapestries of colors, while others still showed a tapestry of colorful strings connecting every little thing.

Over the millenia Lucifer learned of the usefulness of some of her eyes, like the ability to perceive the river of time, something even her father could not influence. The most useful were the eyes that showed souls and the ones that showed karma. Those had been invaluable in her time in hell. While the soulsight eyes had become something she used so much that she no longer noticed, the eyes that saw karma were a different matter. Just keeping them open caused a massive headache, as the tapestry of causality was revealed to her.

Even millions of years after opening them for the first time, keeping them open more than a few seconds was impossible.

Lucifer alternated between opening pairs of eyes that she knew would show things she comprehended, and eyes that had yet to show anything useful.

The 70 eyes that showed the entirety of the physical world functioned as normal, though they perceived some odd things. Lucifer had seen the planet before she crash landed, and it was about 15 times larger than earth. The gravity on the other hand was pretty much the same.

Eyes that showed more esoteric things, had different reactions. Her soulsight eyes functioned as usual, showing the dragon's soul, and not much else. While the state of her soul was concerning, that was something she would bring up when the lizard regained consciousness.

The eyes that showed karma on the other hand, were even worse off on this planet. The tapestry of strings was incredibly dense, and woven even finer than it had been back home.

A few pairs of eyes that had yet to work, showed surprising results. One eye showed a washed out version of the world, with different objects bleeding colors into their surroundings. The ground was muddy brown color, the wind was a light gray, and even the shadows bled a bit of black into their surroundings, like ink dropped into a glass of water. The dragon though, she radiated a lot of red. Her Form was barely perceivable, as a red mist flowed from every part of her being.

Other eyes showed similar sceneries. Some showed just the red colors, others only brown.

Again a headache crept up on Lucifer, which was surprising. The visual information wasn't as overwhelming as the strings of karma were, but it still cost most of her concentration. Keeping these eyes in mind, Lucifer closed them to save herself from a headache. She spent the next 30 minutes cycling through different eyes with little results. Until finally she found some that were new.

One pair of eyes showed nothing, until she looked at her feet. Then she could see the planet's core, which should have been impossible. She had on more than one occasion, destroyed planets while channeling her fathers wrath and seen those planets cores. But those had been actively malfunctioning or broken. This core burnt steady and healthy which was a beautiful sight to see.

Lucifer didn't know how long she spent staring at the core, but movement from the unconscious dragon woke her from her trance.

The remaining open eyes on her body locked onto the sleeping form of the dragon, and this time the visual input was way less straining. While having every eye open had been kind of overwhelming, now she could at least perceive the form of the dragon without her mind turning into white noise.

That's when one of her backwards facing eyes fell on the spherical form of her glass companion.

To most of her eyes Marble looked like an ordinary black sphere. For some he was a ball of very intense brown, and in Lucifer's soulsight he was a weirdly "handsome" ball of glass.

No,what really confused her, was that with one of the eyes, all she could see when looking at Marble was [Natural Glass Golem Tier 1] floating like an advertisement in the middle of her vision