Going through the gate from the shop back to his warehouse, Ben took over his clones once more and got back to work on making materializers, placing a special focus on making ones for himself.

Even with his jacket, he was getting to the point that trying to create all of the souls he needed for his leveling while also materializing other items in their entirety was becoming a new sort of strain, one that was going to slow down how long it would be for the next level he wanted so badly and he moved to change that by creating tools to materialize any major substance he might need.

Perhaps as a limit of his own soul reflecting in the ones he could create, he learned he couldn’t produce a materializer for any of the affinitied magic materials, meaning voidstone and deathstone were locked away from him, only to be created when he could borrow Jake’s mind and soul, but as useful as those would have both been to have endless access to he was much more concerned about the more basic ones.

He’d already created something that could make rainbow mana crystal and from there he made sure to make something that could handle the white one and then mythril and moribusial as well before going to the more common metals like iron to help in his work, meaning that one of his bigger mana costs in the form of all of his materialization could shrink to something significantly lighter by only needing to shape the substances instead, either with his hands or his mana in a way that would still be a significant savings.

It was only once that was done that he began, creating soul crystals en masse for all of the uses he’d already found for them while holding a single one in his hand, a question forming in his mind while so much of himself was working around him.

To what extent could he modify an existing soul?

It was seeing Ralia that had made him wonder that, her strange soul clear in his eyes as the question of if he could in any way repeat the work of the ancient soul mage that had radically altered the destiny of her kind. Could Ben materialize a soul in a way that would merge it into another soul?

It was a question he couldn’t deny himself the pleasure of investing a few hours in, doing everything he could to build on the simple soul he’d created and in the end having what he would describe as meaningless success.

The soul he was testing on was the simplest he could produce and when he tried, Ben was able to build it up to an extent, bringing any of the strange aspects of its structure to the maximum he could make when materializing them and a few aspects even beyond that, though far from enough for his liking.

Namely what he considered the core ones. Sure, he’d found he could increase the scale of some parts of a soul whose purposes entirely eluded him but that wasn’t actually helpful. It only really mattered when he tested an idea significantly more relevant to himself as he tried to build up its affinities and resistances and that had ended in failure, telling him he was still as trapped as he’d ever been, locked away from the more common magics of the world and not even in a position where he could improve a few of the more beneficial resistances he had.

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So it looks like I’m not going to raise my fire resistance above one hundred to beat out the magic. Lame but it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it no matter how thrilling it would have been to be wrong. But with all of that done, time to start trying to test the big one.

The big one being to merge two souls together. He could already materialize them in such a state but what he wanted to know was if he could build on top of something that already existed, letting him bring forth something more for all of the potential applications that could have for both him and the world at large depending on what the results ended up as.

Given his results from just combining what he could already make with a beastform skill, he was at least hopeful that it wouldn’t be outright harmful but he first spent a while mentally going over what he’d seen in both Ralia and the true shifter’s souls to try and determine how he wanted to do it before making his first attempt, ending up in failure when it was over.

Not that that discouraged him and he tried again, constantly working and tweaking how he tried to blend them together, constantly failing until he felt a configuration that clicked into place, giving him the result he craved as he looked it over.

Different from a beastform skill, it was undeniably what he’d been looking for, even if he didn’t let that be the end. If it looked different from a beastform skill then that meant there were likely multiple ways to potentially merge the two. In the case of what he was seeing, he was sure the difference lied in the fact that he was materializing a soul in a way that it bound to another compared to attaching a normal one but there was no reason to end his experimenting there when he wanted to see the limits of what was possible, with two examples he knew of already telling him there was plenty of room to go.

He’d already been considering the true shifter as he did his tests but his own god was an even greater example. Billions of souls joining together as one with multiple deities added to the mix on top of them, the structures he saw when looking at Myriad were worth considering and he kept going while keeping his successful example to look at in greater detail later, enjoying the simple process of experimentation the entire time.

For every success there were a dozen failures but nearing a hundred successes was enough to give him plenty to look at for the future as he tried to replicate them again before going even further, trying to add more and more souls each time and blending the pattern of what worked and what didn’t, with the obvious question forming in his mind by the time he was done.

What would happen if I tried this on an actual person’s soul?

It was a step too far to try and use Skoe as a test subject again but the question scratched at the walls of his mind, begging to be let out as he looked at some of the Lovecraftian constructs he'd ended up with. Things he’d never seen before in a mortal of any sort but still continued to exist in the end, telling him that no matter how bizarre they looked, they were all acceptable configurations of essence, even if he didn’t know how that would translate to anything inhabiting a proper vessel.

“And if I want to test it out then I’d want to be doing it on something with system access and it just so happens that the world is currently overfilled with completely ethical test subjects. Okay, tomorrow is planned out then from the looks of it so long as Thera can give me a hand so for now let's just get back to it and see if there’s any other configurations I can find.”

With hours left in the day, it would have been a waste not to experiment all he could and he did it with gusto, trying to find the limitations of what he could create and how far it could go while the hours wore on.