“FAIL! FUCKING DAMN IT!”
Another disastrous test since his conversation with the galwaxian only the day before and Ben couldn’t help but feel it weighing on him as he mentally went over each one, hoping that his memories would reveal to him something that he hadn’t seen before, only to continue coming up blank. There was nothing, no sign he missed or hint waiting for him to be found, all there was was more testing.
“But who cares, here we are at test number two thousand, at least it’s going to be a big one. Got a hell of an idea, right here and waiting to go so this is it!”
He materialized as he spoke, pretending it wasn’t a pep talk to help with how constantly wrong all of his other attempts had gone as he put far more faith in his next idea, not just making any old thing but something far more unique, a substance he was willing to bet that not even the demon god had come across before, no matter how powerful he was and how many worlds he’d helped conquer. Spending his mana, Ben created a thin knife of faithstone.
A substance that ripped faith from the gods themselves through the people they had a connection to, he had high hopes for what it would do against a barrier containing divinity and stabbed into it the second he could, wanting it to cut or tear but instead feeling the blade itself break, leaving him to fall to his knees.
That had been his best shot yet but he’d still failed to get anything. It wasn’t like there weren’t ways he could try to improve from there, at least half of the other enchantments he’d tested could be applied again on the knife after he repaired it to see if they’d show any effect when joined with the faithstone, but from all he’d done he was growing more and more certain it wouldn’t be enough. He may not have known for sure how many gods the demons had but stretched across untold thousands of worlds, the one he’d already seen was more powerful than anything he could imagine. How was Ben supposed to put his own minor strength up against it in comparison and come out on top?
The thought left him to sigh as he let himself fall back, staring up at the ceiling above him and looking at the nearly comatose prisoner the upper cell contained, in that state after being held for an unimaginable length of time. A fate Ben would share eventually if he didn’t come up with something.
I need more power so what do I do from here? He sighed, feeling the few options skate across his head, with the main one that held any chance being completely impractical. I could slowly materialize as much rainbow mana crystal as possible, creating bags to hold it all and applying spatial enchantments on each one so they could each hold even more and try and direct the enchantments I’d place on the crystal itself to release as much power all into one point to break through, but how long would that take?
He materialized a piece as he thought of it, using nearly his whole mana pool to create what was at best a small bead of the stuff. Better than he had been when he’d first started materializing, creating less than a grain at the time, but it was still far from a generous amount.
It used nearly his entire mana pool to get even that much and took roughly thirteen minutes to regenerate it all to do again. Even considering the mana regeneration potions he still had in his ring or the food he had from the divine chef, if he did nothing but materialize and let his pool regenerate for a week he wouldn’t even have a handful.
No, it wouldn’t work. Or maybe it would, but it would take too long. He had enough potions to last him a month to help speed things up but after that, his progress would slow to a crawl and even if he didn’t slow down after losing his regen buffs, what he was looking at was going to be a matter of years to get to the point where he might have access to enough raw mana to do anything with it. By then his world would have already been long conquered.
It will be conquered whether I’m there or not. His pessimism whispered in his ear. Why not give up already when it’s not going to work? Stay here, trapped but alive. Maybe if I’m really lucky then in another hundred years I’ll be able to escape or maybe the demons will encounter a threat they can’t beat and I’ll be freed. My mind hasn’t driven me insane yet, I’m sure I can put up with the tedium of being here for a while.
It was a thought that left Ben hitting himself again. Maybe he didn’t believe in the world’s odds of overcoming that threat. Every piece of news and information he heard about it only ever made their chances seem worse, but so what? He would struggle, he would live, and if things had to come to it, he would die among the people he loved, not off on some alien world where everyone around was either insane or inclined to see him as a snack.
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So then what was the answer, what could he do?
I need more mana, plain and simple.
It still came down to that in the end but there were only two ways to solve that problem. Either he could go with his first thought, use what he had to materialize as much rainbow mana crystal and moribusial as he could to make a tool powerful enough to escape, or he could put in the work to grow his pool as much as possible, spending who could guess how many years to grow it to the volume he’d need.
It left him wishing that he could pull mana into himself from materials the same way he could people, but those were the only realistic options. What should have been his only options, and yet, from the depths of his subconscious where his deeper mind had been turning over the problem ever since he’d first been trapped, another path emerged. A mad, impossible chance that seemed sure to fail but picked at him like a siren’s song as he first questioned if he was even going to bother wasting his time on such a ridiculous attempt, but then, what did he have to lose?
It was only going to take his mana and a bit of prep, none of which would be hard as he grabbed what had previously been a job crystal from around his neck and placed an enchantment on it, holding it tight in preparation for his act of materialization.
Grabbing hold of the power within him and using his material manipulation to see if there was even a hint that such a delusional idea could work while his minds flashed across all the various examples he’d seen of such things in the past, Ben spent his mana, and failed.
But that’s just one failure and I have nothing but time. Try again.
And again he failed as he tried to bring into being the simplest example he’d seen of his goal, needing to wait for his mana pool to fill up again each time before he tried once more amongst the screams of his fellow prisoners around him, only stopping to re-examine what he was attempting after an hour of work.
He was already one of the closest things to an expert on the topic the world had anyway, he just needed to apply that knowledge. Instead of trying to perfectly recreate examples he’d seen in the past, it made more sense to take pieces of everything, finding the least complex part of each structure across a thousand different cases and fit them all together into something new, the model sitting in his mind as he tried again, with one more failed attempt to his name.
Failed, but closer.
It had felt as though his mana had wanted to come together in its grand act of materialization, only falling through thanks to some lack of knowledge on his part.
But that shouldn’t stop me. Mages across this whole bloody universe have managed great feats of materialization to make regular elements without anywhere near the same knowledge I usually have to put towards the same things, the fact that I know a little less than I’d expect to right now shouldn’t hinder me, so how do I get around it? More importantly, how do they get around it? Let’s say I knew nothing about iron, how would I possibly bring it into being?
As it stood, his method involved using everything he understood about it at once, looking at its physical and chemical properties along with his basic sensory inputs to force its existence upon the world, a regular mage just had less. They could understand it through their senses and a few of the physical properties, maybe if they really looked into it they could understand one or two of the ways a given substance would react with other things, but they could succeed while knowing less overall.
So when I look at it that way, a problem becomes apparent. I don’t think what I’m trying to make even has physical properties and there’s absolutely no chemical ones. Hell, I haven't even technically experienced it with my own senses, only seeing it at all by looking through the eyes of three others. So where does that leave me? How do I make up for that?
While he lacked those core properties, he did have other ways to make up for it. He was aware of at least some of the purposes behind its structure and he knew it was a shifting, growing thing. He knew that they functioned as records, sources of growth and power and more, and he knew that they were one of the few, if not the only, constants across the multiverse and even the space between. He felt he knew so much about them compared to anyone else, but he didn’t even know what they were made of.
“But if it doesn’t have a name then I’ll just give it one,” He muttered to himself as he tried another attempt, feeling all of the mana within him move. “From now on, the thing I’m trying to make is essence, and a proper arrangement of essence is…”
The simplest form of the ever-changing thing he could imagine, one that any creature with the misfortune to be born with in such a state would curse compared to all others. One that would be even worse than his own, and in a unnatural act of materialization the likes of which the universe had never seen before, Ben used his powers and created a soul.