Chapter 713

Chapter 713

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?

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.

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.