Kneeling on the dull rocky ground, Thomel gazed blankly at the lacklustre stones, mind devoid of any thoughts.

He’d been able to endure the majority of the shards with comparatively little issue but the final one had broken him.

Any willpower he might have mustered up after those eight torturous experiences was firmly put down by the final shard.

It sapped him of energy, of hope itself, even sadness and regret. He didn’t feel anything, there was no chemicals in his brain to motivate him to do anything.

Even when a tendril grasped his chin and lifted his head up gently so he could witness his God, nothing stirred within his emotionless mind.

He could barely even process what was happening he was so disinterested in everything, it wasn’t boredom for that was an emotion, it was something far deeper and greater than that.

Like he wasn’t real, like none of this was real, it was just a dream that he had no input in and soon he would be awake.

His God’s appendages wrapped around him and began to merge with his own body, little feelers penetrating his skin and sliding into his veins.

It was a disturbing process to go through but Thomel didn’t mind, he was too drained to care.

Pumping an awful cocktail of various chemicals into his bloodstream, Thomel regained his sense of self just as the God began to condense, its horrible meaty form revolving in on itself like a collapsing star. It was a mind-breaking sight to see, Thomel simply couldn’t process it.

Many of the eyeballs burst and the liquid sprayed out into the air, circling around to form arcane symbols and angelic shapes, the likes of which defied the laws of the third dimension.

He was being shown something no human alive was meant to be capable of witnessing. Other worlds had been revelled to him one after the other but now he was staring into an entirely new dimension.

Time consolidated, like the God was a mediaeval lord forcefully centralising the nobles and taking away their power.

It bent easily to the eldrich beings' whims, being fashioned and moulded into a great point of infinite sharpness, which was used to sever the strings of fate and break the laws of cause and effect.

He knew how gravity worked, he watched it happen every single day countless times but now that law was stripped bare and presented before him, the knowledge was deafening.

It wasn’t just a mind-altering experience, his entire state of consciousness was rapidly evolving and adapting to cope with this impossible reality he was now confronted with.

The rotting meaty aberration was neither alive nor dead, nor anything in between, it was everything and nothing. Somehow existing simultaneously in every state at once.

And then it stopped and Thomel’s understanding scattered like shredded paper being cast away in heavy winds.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

When he regained his fragile mortal sanity, he was standing firmly before a throbbing and ever-shifting gelatinous blob.

“Absorb us.” The voices whispered soothingly.

“Why, why are you doing all this, can you not simply do it yourself?” Thomel cried out.

“It is required.” The voices assured him.

“How did we even beat you, how did you ruin this world with something like you protecting it?!”

“You killed our worshipers, deprived us of our food and power, pillaged our temples for our divine remnants. We are not one being as I’ve already said before, we are many, Gods, mortals, inanimate objects, all bound together. We are beyond anything that your council faced but it has cost us. We will restore ourselves and our creations and you will make that happen for you wish to remain free.”

“What about the scanners? I am meant to go back to the facility right? They make sure to analyse our genetic makeup every time we do so and I’m confident there’s some soul technology involved.”

“Our apostle, you are the same person, merely freed. Worry not about those false eyes for they cannot see reality for what it truly is.”

“If you say so.” Thomel answered blankly, he was just too mentally drained to ask anything else.

He wasn’t even sure if what was happening was actually real anymore, he’d been awake for well over a full day at this point none of this seemed to make any sense.

Mechanically slitting himself open again with only a slight wince to showcase his pain, he stepped forward and grabbed ahold of the floating crystallising mass and smushed it into his heart.

“This is so stupid.” He murmured.

Unlike all the other ones, there was no pain when he absorbed what had originally been this world's God of life.

Rather there was a tingling feeling that spread throughout his whole body, kind of like how it felt to regnereate.

This sensation quickly grew in intensity and before Thomel knew it, tendrils of his own were sprouting out of his body.

Groustuge and formed from rapidly decaying and regenerating skin, these thin tendrils waved around in the air like body hair.

Thomel was considering if he had to take his pants off to spare them from the fate of being torn asunder by his mutating body but before he could make up his mind he lost the ability to pull them off, his hands morphing into bony maces.

A single long and powerful wing grew outwards from his back and his vision expanded as rows of deformed eyes started to pop out in between each feather.

They had no nerves so he thankfully didn’t feel the irritation of having sickly feathers constantly brushing against them but the experience was still incredibly disorientating.

Every scent imaginable suddenly became perceivable to him as dozens of noses shifted into existence across his entire body.

A hand burst out of his chest and transformed into a misshapen foot, before becoming a series of pulsating organs surrounded by blobs of fatty tissue in the span of just a few seconds.

He was an undulating mess of organs, fatty tissues and sinewy muscles.

Throughout the entire process, he remained calm, unaffected by the dysmorphic changes occurring across his whole body.

Eventually, they receded, the hair-like tendrils plunged back into his body and the other appendages and extremities retreated as well. Even the bone maces that’d replaced his hands disintegrated and collapsed, fleshy fingers taking their places.

Somehow Thomel knew this wasn’t the end of his metamorphosis though and a moment later his assumption was proven correct when his mind evaporated like water being left out in the hot sun.

His physical body had already evolved multiple times, now it was time for his mind to ascend.