Getting home that evening after a far too eventful number of days away, the first thing they found when getting back was Sonya, passed out on the couch after having finally made her own return from the hospital she’d been working with, making Thera hold a finger to her lips.
“I’m sure she’s been worked hard this whole time so if she’s asleep, I’m going to turn in early too. If you’re going to stay up, can you try and keep quiet?”
“No worries,” He whispered back. “I was thinking I’d head back to the shop after you went to sleep anyway so I’ll just go now to get some work done. I’ll come back to cook breakfast in the morning.”
“Mmh, you really do need to rest too, you know.”
“Who needs sleep when I’ve got stamina for days? Besides, I’ve seen I’ve made progress on my job so I want to get back to working on my materialization and I have a few other things to test too.”
“Just make sure you take a break from time to time or I’m dragging you back.”
“Yes ma’am, no worries. It should only take me a couple weeks to finish this, less if I really push myself.”
And man do I plan on pushing myself.
Sure, the more mana he pulled into himself to make souls with, the better the odds that he’d injure his own but with the progress it offered him, how could he resist?
A question Thera could see that the answer was clearly he wouldn’t.
“Just try not to get injured in ways I can’t heal.”
“You got it.”
He kissed her goodbye from there and ran off, making his way to the shop despite its late hour and immediately sliding back into his jacket, feeling well at home.
“Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” He muttered to himself before beginning the far less enjoyable act of connecting with it, pulling the mana it held to start materializing thousands of souls for the experience it would give him while the question of how to otherwise spend the night stayed in his thoughts.
He had his projects of course, from the summoning spell to Inux to the more recent one he was failing at in the form of creating a tool that could materialize by itself, but he’d come across a more recent problem he wanted to look at first. Namely, testing the limits of some of his skills.
It wasn’t always the easiest thing to do, either from the ethical reasons that stemmed from how hard it was to use hive mind on anyone for any reason other than trying to help the former prisoners of Oaun to the more practical problems of either not knowing what to test or how to expand on areas in the case of his soul source.
The latter especially he wanted to expand on a bit if he could. It was now a skill he used almost constantly for the mountains of experience creating a soul gave him but progress was slow. He would experiment as he did it of course, even then as thousands were coming in and out of existence, no two were the same and some things he attempted resulted in no soul being created at all, but he wasn’t sure what to do with the skill beyond what he’d already discovered, with there being a limit in that too.
Since awakening the skill, he hadn’t been able to grow the proportion of mana they would hold. Sure, as he grew his own pool, their maximum grew as well, but he was still only able to create anything with half of what he held, speaking of some fundamental rule or limit to souls he just didn’t understand.
It was an annoyance but not a major problem, and more importantly, it wasn’t what he intended to look at that night. No, that right was reserved for a skill he’d recently used to save his life, esoteric actualization.
Without the urgency that came with testing it while he plummeted through the air, Ben once more tried to make a naked force, something he could use to push or pull something to him as one would if they held telekinesis, only to fail no matter what he tried it on. He couldn’t use it on himself, he couldn’t use it on something like a hammer, and no matter how small he tried to force it on, it simply wouldn’t work. Not even dust shifted under the weight of his mind, telling him that for whatever reason, even if he could move things he was actualizing, he couldn’t move any genuine bit of reality. The skill simply didn’t work like that.
Given that failure, he instead used the skill in a way he knew it would work, creating a hammer with it and feeling the weight of it in his grasp.
He knew that if he let it the thing would disappear as if it had never been there to begin with, its existence guaranteed only as long as he willed it to be but what mattered then was what he could do with such a thing while it did exist. He’d already seen that even if it was poorly, he could carry his own weight but in what other ways could he influence the world?
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With the hammer being the perfect way to test it. Holding it in his grasp he went to the forge to heat up some iron before beating it into shape, feeling every strike with it flaring up as a brief but sharp headache each time, telling him that even with his most recent level, the cost of that skill hadn’t changed. It was still a mind skill, as strange as it was to consider it like that, and it still had a cost that meant he couldn’t replace the tools in his life entirely with mental constructs and he couldn’t help but pinch his brow as he looked it over.
Jake was right when he said this was like a psychic power, it follows its own rules and I don’t know how it interacts with the broader universe as a whole. I’m probably going to stumble on a couple more aspects of it that I can’t think to test too, there’s just too much I don’t know. Man, I’ll at least admit that this one is a weird skill.
…Although it’s not like it's my only one, if we’re talking psychic powers then connect is going to count too since it's powered by my soul instead of having a mana cost. Hell, based on what I know about it, since it works by linking my soul with another’s instead of having another medium to go through, doesn’t that mean if I somehow wound up back on Earth I’d still be able to use it? Or in any life-bearing universe in that case, if it’s a place where souls exist then it’s a place that connect should function in theory. Now that feels a little weird to think about.
Okay, I’m getting off track, I need to do a bit more tests. I’d still be curious about going into the gate network and feeding an insect a bunch of materialized seeds to see if it would starve to death or properly replace its body with actualized atoms and if that would translate to an actualized construct that could house a soul, but that’s a future problem. For now, I want to… Wait, now there’s something to test.
Could a construct hold a soul? It was something worth looking into and the idea opened up plenty more to test as well. Given that whenever he went to his god’s realm, he was in essence controlling something he was actualizing with his own, would such a thing be possible down below?
The only way to know was to try so pushing his thoughts to the limit, Ben actualized a replica of himself, as perfect as could be before reaching out to try and connect with it like he would any homunculus, only to fail in the end.
It wasn’t surprising, even if it was disappointing. While he didn’t know the exact process of how he’d create a body for himself when he went up a realm, with the entire process being at best subconscious, the mortal realm seemed like it would be different right off the bat.
With the biggest problem being that even if it looked like himself, it wasn’t actually a body. Ben didn’t know his own biology down to an atomic level. While he was uncomfortably aware of some of his physiologies finer structures thanks both to the disastrous final floor of the life tower as well as looking at himself through Thera’s eyes when she used her mana examination, there were emergent systems and finer rules his body operated on that he wasn’t an expert on and couldn’t replicate.
That meant he was going to be continuing to rely on Thera for any and all future clones but a living body wasn’t the only way to hold a soul, something he was already well aware of as he actualized the molecular structure of rainbow mana crystal as he understood it, another question coming with it.
“Is this thing going to absorb mana?”
It was a casual mutter, not something he expected to get a positive answer to but still one worth testing as he materialized some moribusial to set it in attached to a simple light enchantment, getting nothing but surprise when it actually worked.
“...I have no clue what to do with this piece of information.”
It seemed like it could be handy in some way, leaving only the question of how. He wouldn’t need to have any of the real crystal on him in an emergency to take advantage of it but considering he could already materialize it that wasn’t the biggest issue.
Perhaps if he needed an unreasonable volume of it that exceeded the limits of his mana then it would be worthwhile but even then he had some in his spatial rings, leaving the discovering feeling more like a novelty than anything else as he filed it away for later, moving on to his next test from there as he materialized a soul within it.
And again it worked, defying his expectations as the soul he materialized held within the barely existent crystal as it began absorbing mana from the environment, letting him grab it for himself.
“Okay, this could maybe be useful? God, I don’t know, we’ll see so next test.”
With what felt like the stranger idea out of the way he moved on, trying to actualize all sorts of things to see if there were any limits there and finding none, even with something else piquing his interest.
Making a cube of ice, his conception of such a thing detailed down to its molecular structure, he let it melt in his hand, watching as it changed to water while his flesh chilled under its touch until he thought he’d gotten everything he’d wanted from it and felt he was done, letting it vanish but losing something else with it, the feeling of cold that had transferred to his flesh.
“...That demands some more experimentation.”
The fact that he’d just lost the sensation of cold with it told him there was even more he didn’t understand about what was happening when he used the skill and switched to trying to actualize boiling water, maintaining it while he dipped a thin iron wire into it and feeling the heat travel up until he once more released the actualization, the temperature vanishing with it yet again.
Again it left him confused with more tests following. Actualizing just plain water and boiling it left the things that were boiled within it losing their heat when he stopped and he couldn’t use his actualization to change the temperatures of items that genuinely existed, all of it leading to only a single conclusion.
“This skill is weird as hell.”
It continued to fit the name esoteric to a T, with those few discoveries showing him some of the finer rules the skill played on, even if it lacked the underlying logic behind it and with him already so far he continued on his testing through the night, looking for what secrets he might unlock.