With that small training session over, they weren’t allowed to leave with everyone else until he fulfilled a request from his apprentice, Delair wanting him to do the same thing he’d once done during Abel’s spar with Foast as he reached into the minds and memories of everyone there to create a three-dimensional recreation of the fight as it played out for her to run around and look at from different angles, while Mora showed equal interest in Ben’s recreation of events as well. While there had been risk of injury, nobody had genuinely been in danger, and when it was recreated like that, it became nothing more than a show to be enjoyed.
With that finished though, they went home from there, doing what bits of work they still had for the day while Ben continued with different bits of experimentation in an attempt to surpass his tier before eventually retiring for the night, lying down with Thera beside him.
“Do I even want to ask how many other things like that you could make?” She questioned, with memories of his monstrosities still filling her thoughts.
“I guess that depends on what you mean by ‘like that’,” Ben told her, with entire eons of evolution among different ecosystems stored in his head, along with the various life that would fill it. ‘Like that’ could have meant something along the same evolutionary strain, either something that had changed naturally or that he’d personally modified, it could have meant constructs that would do similar things, or it could have just as easily meant everything he could create, meaning that the numbers were close to endless. He had thousands of distinct simulated ecosystems he could pull from and the countless bits of life that made them up, and he was always modifying them as he saw fit or applying different selective pressures to see what results they would yield, leaving the current end points he had for everything to defy classification, with none of that being the answer she wanted.
“You know what? I change my mind; I’m good. I don’t want to know,” she told him. “Instead, is there literally any way to use any of the madness you’ve got in your head for good?”
“Oh, yeah, loads, don’t you worry about that. I could materialize and drop a seed or two out in a demon swarm if it ever comes up, and I have a few ideas that I want to test in one hypothetical future, but… well, the odds of that one are slim enough so let’s not worry about it. No need to get too hopeful.”
“Mmh, how frighteningly vague,” she told him as she nestled in closer despite the nature of the conversation. “I feel like seeing those things is already going to give me nightmares tonight. How are the kids so much better at handling this?”
“Mora’s always been pretty unbothered about these sorts of things,” he laughed.
“Mmh, and Delair takes way too much after you.”
“She can’t take after me; I’m not her parent. Blame her mother or a tree.”
“Nope, Fontesh is perfectly reasonable and their forest is innocent. Even if you didn’t make her, you’re her teacher. You’re definitely contributing to how she’s growing up.”
A point he couldn’t entirely argue, there was a chance that some of his personality was rubbing off on the girl, but he still viewed the majority as being free of his influence. She’d seemed bold enough since he’d first met her; he’d certainly played no part in that.
Talking a bit more, though, Thera eventually closed her eyes, ignoring any fears of nightmares and let Ben do something small he would each night before going to bother his god. He reached his hand to his neck and touched the crystal that hung from it.
What?
Ever since he’d run out of meaningful jobs, it had become a habit, just to see if anything new had popped up, and until then, he hadn’t received anything unexpected. When he’d gotten his third-tier awakenings, he’d known at least one job would come from them, but that time, something unexpected had made itself known.
Father of abominations.
A job clearly unrelated to either the blessing he’d gained, or any of his levels or awakenings that day, he wasn’t so dumb as to not immediately have a suspicion, but there were aspects of that line of reasoning that went just as unexplained, leading him to bounce the thought off others for answers.
“Oh great, two of you today,” Ben said when he arrived, seeing Helori with her place perched atop Myriad. “Got a new weird job option I want to talk about and-”
“And that can wait, because genuinely, what the hell were you thinking?” Myriad asked him in despair. “Did you really think nobody was going to check how your meeting with the contenders went? Why did you think it was a good idea to reveal to the world that you could create a swarm of monsters without even needing to spend your mana? For that matter, how did you know you could do that? I know for a fact you’ve never done anything like that before!”
“I mean, I do it in my realm all the time. If you guys ever want to see, you’re welcome to swing by-”
“Pass.”
“Absolutely not,” Helori agreed.
“And I knew I could do it because I can actualize things that can mimic living things. Myriad, you’ve seen the results of me doing that myself.”
“Ugh, I guess I can at least count my luck that the things you made down below were less slimy than what you decided to fill my realm with,” his god complained. “But that doesn’t change the fact that what you did was horrific. Genuinely, at what scale can you manage that?”
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“I mean, the things I made this time couldn’t reproduce, but that was a pretty deliberate choice,” Ben shrugged. “Add in the fact that there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to ensoul them and I could in theory materialize a seed that would grow something like the tree I made today, only it would spit out breeding organisms of a hundred different species. I’m pretty confident in saying that if it came up, I could have the ecosystem of this planet overwritten.”
“... Okay, I accept it,” Myriad told him. “The fundamental nature of this universe is wrong if you could destroy the world that easily.”
“Calling it easy when this is the result of eons of experimentation is actually offensive. Besides that, this sort of study is actually building to something I think you might even appreciate.”
“I doubt it.”
“While it obviously wouldn’t be the same as what you’d lost, I could make… let’s call them terraforming seeds, based on the biology of your world, if you’d just teach it to me,” Ben explained. “Drop it on a dead planet with the right conditions, and we could have a new world that’s at least based on your original biological systems. I know you saved cells from your planet, so that’s gotta be something you’d like, right?”
“...”
“Well?”
“Don’t rush me, I’m thinking,” Myriad told him, the god weighing the idea of how much that would shorten the task of revitalizing the life of his lost world against the undeniable horrors his apostle was likely to create with that information. “If I thoroughly explore and teach you about my original world’s biology, you won’t use it for anything nefarious, will you?”
“Kind of a rude request to make towards a god of evil and destruction, don’t you think?” Ben grinned.
“I’m being serious here.”
“Then serious answer. If there’s anything particularly useful in it, either to be found in whatever you teach me or discovered in my own experimentation, then yeah, I’m going to use that information in whatever way I feel is best. Considering that life from your world could convert iron directly into mythril for its biological systems, I even have a fair degree of hope that there’d be something interesting in there just waiting to be discovered too. Having said that, it’s not like I’ll go out of my way to do anything bad with whatever I might learn.”
“... Fine,” Myriad gave in, feeling very much like it was against his better judgement. “I’m examining the cells I’ve saved now, so look at them through me.”
“Got it,” Ben grinned, looking in his god’s mind and seeing the full biological structures of the cells Myriad had so carefully saved and preserved, left preserved within himself since before his world’s end. “I’ll apply a few different biological pressures for a few million years and see what I can come up with. If I imprint the structure of a terraforming seed on your mind, do you think you’d be able to use it? I know you’re different enough that if you dropped down on a believer, you’d die pretty quick, but if you were to pop down for just a second to materialize it-”
“I’ve got a couple potential avatars on this world by this point, if it comes to it I’ll simply use one of them,” Myriad said, with both numerous statues that perfectly mimicked his form, the lost prototype of his home world, and now the recreation of his finished design that Ben was still pouring souls into within the bracelet on his wrist. “Full offense meant, even if I could adapt to you or anyone else who believes in me, I honestly think it would feel disgusting. You’re all too alien.”
“Hey, trust me, I wasn’t volunteering. Having said that though, if you did adapt enough to me in particular and you needed to go down there, I could at least accept the use of one of my clones.”
“Your biology and nature keeps changing. At this point, I doubt I’ll ever learn to handle a human body.”
“And while that’s all well and good,” Helori cut in. “The point still remains that your actions today have left plenty of gods with a fair degree of horror.”
“And there’s nothing I can do about that,” he shrugged. “It was good to test and try out down in meatspace; now I know it works. With that done, though, the actual thing I wanted to talk about. I got a new job option. Father of abominations.”
“Somehow simultaneously both one of your more and less surprising jobs,” Helori muttered. “Exactly what part of it, beyond the horrific naming sense, were you looking to discuss?”
“Its acquisition.”
“Genuinely, it could not be more obvious, and is directly related to the previous topic of discussion.”
“Sure, yeah, but at the same time, I should have gotten it earlier, then. I’ve been creating these things and more in my realm for ages. No offense, but you guys and the other gods think what I showed off down there was bad? The things I made below couldn’t breed and had basically no combat potential because I wasn’t trying to murder anyone. The monstrosities I could make if I put my mind to it would be in a different league.”
“Well, for one, never ever say that in front of anyone else. Preferably, never say it to either of us again in case anyone chooses an inopportune time to come here for a visit, and two, it might just be that the system is viewing the things made in the mortal realm as more real. Constructs with genuine substance, rather than things that can be made or erased with a simple whim.”
“I feel like saying that the things down below are more real paints a troubling picture about you guys, though.”
“Pfff, no need to worry about that, the gods are some of the few things within this realm that are substantially real. We aren’t things so easily erased. Ultimately, don’t pay it too much mind. Different layers of reality have different properties and the scale of your creation would be horrifically different when used down there compared to up here, that difference in scale is likely enough to have demanded acknowledgement in the form of a job that the simulations you do above would not. It’s basically the difference between the idea of something and a proper action.”
“Mmh, I guess I see what you’re saying,” Ben gave in. “And it’s not like I don’t agree. It’s just… well, I suppose it will be an interesting one to take.”
“Oh, empty skies, do you have to?” Myriad asked, the thought of Ben taking a job with such a name making him sick.
“The next time I take a job, I’ll be in a party with Thera and linked to the majority of the planet to share experience. Given that from how impressive the name is, it’s probably a second-tier job. I kind of have an obligation to take it, just so I’ll be able to help more people.”
“Don’t try to sound noble about it, you just want it because you’re curious!”
“I can have more than one reason,” Ben shrugged, not able to completely deny his god. The results of taking jobs had gotten a bit dull recently, with few truly exceptional results, but he couldn’t deny that with each interesting one that came along, he couldn’t help but hold out some hope that an equally interesting skill might come with it.
