Chapter Sixty
Joe woke the next morning, rested and ready for the day. He lay in bed for a few moments, reorganizing thoughts from decisions he’d made last night. With that, he stood and took a moment to relish the feeling of cleanliness. Right… bath time every night from now on! After stretching, he went to the mana practicing corner, as he’d now come to think of it, and settled in where he immediately began expressing his mana directly upwards even as he began planning for the day and the immediate future.
Need to figure out my next job. His mind wrestled with his choices. The best thing he could do for himself is to get some kind of priest job that would let him control his own job changes. Level up the skill. Get a ‘char:’ skill associated with it… permanent job change! Nice! The benefits really drove him, but his concern over how the priests all knew who was joining as well as how quickly they leveled up as they changed classes, it left him concerned. The less than helpful vague warning from the old priest back at the village didn’t help at all either. He was almost ready to dismiss his options when he came to a quick realization. Joining is normal… new ones every day! Three on just the day I joined Mimir. And that as a ‘faithful.’ Basic, entry level… just a member, as it were. I swap to another god or goddess and I’m another new member, nothing more. And they have no way to know me or contact me. Just a picture and a linked image displaying my current status as a basic faithful. Nothing else. As long as I just do one job today, nobody knows, so… then… OK. I can at least start. The information from the criminal boss should be here soon. It’s been… two days, right? So maybe tomorrow… or the next day. OK. I can start at least, then find out more. It’s not surprising for someone to join a temple. Just leveling too fast … that’s … that will catch attention! With his plan on better ground, he dove into understanding the various gods and goddess as he expressed and recovered his mana.
He’d gone over the various gods and goddesses, of which there appeared to be twenty. Some of them seemed familiar, although the only ones that really jumped out at him that he recognized were Loki and Eros. Just random chance they have similar names? Although Eros as a god of sex and sexuality seems a bit too… Why are there so many similarities? There were a bunch of other gods and goddesses that appeared familiar but Joe wasn’t able to quite remember if what he was seeing was memory or just something close that was twigging his thoughts. He remembered what the underground boss mob had said, letting him know about the animosity of Saga and Mimir, but Joe still wanted to take a deeper dive into the gods and goddesses himself. Always wise to double check.
Of the twenty available, Joe chose to focus his options on Sors, Angrboda, and Saga. He liked Mimir and Loki, both offering benefits that Joe found incredibly useful with Mimir the god of knowledge and Loki the god of growth and change. While he didn’t really understand what Loki’s benefits might be, anything that was for growth, especially in this leveling system, likely would be useful and give him knowledge and help specific to leveling. And Mimir, similarly, although more generically, would give him access to knowledge, hopefully, which was why he had chosen it originally. But since Mimir was Kukurnal’s god and Kukurnal could watch everything he did as he leveled, his fast leveling was something he’d been explicitly told to hide. As for Loki, as a heretic god destroyed by all other temples, it seemed unwise to seek out said temples for them to change his job to the heretical priesthood. Although… if there are no more priests… and the temples are dead… no one can watch me level up! He grinned at that thought, an inkling of a plan forming. But for now…
That left Sors, Angrboda and Saga. Sors was the god of luck, Angrboda the goddess of magic, and Saga the goddess of wisdom. He’d only chosen Sors as a last ditch backup in case anything else didn’t really work out with the other two, such as the priesthood only being women, or other such details, seeing as how the other two were goddesses. He preferred either Angrboda or Saga.
Goddess of magic… nice. Probably really helpful to learn magic! But specific to only magic, and despite the pretty amazing healing of Kilniara, I haven’t seen meaningful combat magic or some kind of 'insta' magic with anyone. Oooh... wait. The village priest... did that cool ritual magic, but... Hmm, If magic is useful, this would be nice, but it is specific only to magic, which would mean only magic jobs as well. Not much help in the education jobs or the other combat jobs I’m going to do soon. Saga, wisdom, seems like the best bet. Wisdom helps with making decisions and using resources to their best measure. Even in making immediate decisions as well, right? Joe took some time to ponder his decision, still leaning towards Saga as he’d been doing so last night, only helped on by the knowledge that the god of knowledge didn’t like wisdom. Ha! Counterintuitive… but… maybe? Not sure… wisdom could put a damper on things… say certain knowledge is verboten… something like that? His mana continued expressing and refilling as his mind wandered through the various points until he finally gave up the thought and simply accepted Saga as the best choice.
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Besides, I know next to nothing about magic and if I have to get into some kind of theological mystical debate about it, I’m so screwed. Mimir was my best bet for that kind of thing, but I’m out of luck with that now. I’m going to be making waves anyway, for a bit, and I don’t need someone knowing who I am. With Saga, I at least have a chance spouting bull with big words and faking it. Joe chuckled and let the decision settle, moving on to longer term plans, trying to figure out how to minimize any focus on himself, finally deciding that he would level up each priest job with a good dozen or so other jobs in between so as to keep his rapid rise hidden and hopefully also have his face disappear into the masses of job changes over a couple of weeks.
He also figured that as soon as he’d gotten the necessary job and level to gain the job change skill, he’d focus on skilling it up so he could use it even if he had a different job and then change temples to Loki. If Loki’s temple was wiped out, then there was nobody to get updates with his face on it, and he could run up the priesthood jobs as fast as he wanted without concern. Nobody would know. He could only hope that the job change ability came early in the line of priest jobs. He thought it was likely since there were a lot of job changers at the various temples.
Decision made, Joe let his conscious fade and simply fell into his mana practice. He continued his work allowing the mana to expel and regenerate while he focused on watching his mana… organ? Is it a separate organ? I don’t even know what I’m looking at? The mana exploded from the center of his chest and he could feel something there, but was uncertain exactly what it was. While he wasn’t a biology major, he had taken enough biology classes to know that there were no organs in the chest around or near the heart besides the basic known ones: heart and lungs. The stomach, spleen and liver could also be considered quite close, but they were far enough from what he considered ‘center’ that he could only think of heart or lungs. He stopped for a moment, a thought coming to him. What if … huh…
Joe immediately began having the mana emit from his body in spirals before settling on half spheres. He rotated the emission so that the he could find the plane on which the emissions were ejected from. As the half sphere rotated in a spray around his body, he was easily able to find the plane on which his emitting organ existed. Finding the location of height and width within his body proved easy enough as he was able to look down and easily see the perfect plane cutting directly through the middle of his chest. Finding the width was even a bit amusing as one of his eyes was blinded by the mana emissions while the other was clear of mana. However, trying to place its location front to back proved even harder, since if he emitted from the front, his sight was clouded in a wash of mana, and if he emitted out his back, he couldn’t really place the location precisely as it came out from his sides. Finding the exact distance proved hard as it was difficult for him to get a good glimpse of his side without bending and bending distorted his torso quite a bit. He ended up solving the problem by lifting up his arms and pointing them out straight from his shoulder in a Vitruvian man pose where his arms were parallel to the ground. Doing so allowed him to see the mana passing directly down the center of his arms.
It wasn’t as precise as his first discovered plane, but it seemed close enough as to put the emitting organ dead center of his chest. It wasn’t just under his sternum, but seemed to be in the middle of his heart if his biology knowledge was right, which gave him some concern, but he felt nothing untowards. Finally, he decided to complete the exercise and emitted a half sphere with the plane parallel to the ground. He ended up blinding himself for a bit as he first emitted the mana towards the top part of the sphere and had to flip the sphere, emitting towards the ground. It took him a bit to get the plane situated to appear perfectly flat, which was tricky until he realized that the plane seemed to pass just above his nipples by about an inch… maybe half an inch? It confused him for a bit, and made him rethink that the organ may be the heart, as it wasn’t perfectly centered in his chest, as he’d thought… although, it’s pretty close!
The only other piece of information that he really got was that the emission point seemed to be a literal single point, as in a single point in space. Which makes it zero dimensions… which is really… really weird! He was able to slowly rotate the plane of the half sphere and notice that the rotation did not fluctuate from around that single point. He then tried to thin the mana emission stream down into a narrow stream and was shocked to find it come out in a literal line. And it went a good distance from his body, a meter or so, before something in the environment seemed to break it apart or disrupt its laminar flow. Gas or liquid? Really acting like a liquid right now… except gravity isn’t affecting it, so it should adhere into a sphere… or… maybe it has no cohesion? Doesn’t seem like gas… still flowing in … well… not quite droplets… but … not gas either. What …
Joe shook his head in confusion as he stared at the perfect laser like stream of mana streaking away from him. It really was like a laser, except that it did break apart after some distance. Something in the environment was disrupting it, but Joe couldn’t see anything in the environment that would do so. This… it just… What is going on with this? Joe continued playing with the mana stream, spraying it across the room using his finger as a bit of a pointer guide watching how the flow would react given different movement speeds and directions.