CH328

“Awe Ben, you can be such a good boy when you want to be,” His god cried, interrupting his lessons with Helori. “I’m going to make sure to show what you said to Thera to everyone, that should be plenty to show that you’re not actually as bad as you act.”

“Or you could not, that was kind of a private moment you know. Not that I actually have any of those. I wonder if I can use my sacrilege to keep the gods from watching me in general?”

“If you aren’t planning on doing anything bad then I wouldn’t try it,” Helori told him. “If you can, it’s likely to make you seem more guilty to the gods that don’t like you and it might sway some of the neutrals too. More important than any of that, how do you think the potion turned out?”

“Sonya seemed to feel an immediate effect which isn’t exactly shocking. As for me, no change in my status yet but I think I felt something. Of course, that could just be the placebo effect, I’ll know for sure in the morning.”

“Good,” The goddess said approvingly. “It was a good idea after all, it’s sad that it’s wasting time, but the other bones are being sent back to the alchemist since it would be good to raise the power of a few more mortals in the end. I have to say though, spending your whole share on that one woman is ridiculous. Everyone else who’s getting any will be getting one or two bottles only.”

“What can I say, I want Sonya to be okay. Hell, I want them all to be okay, but there’s no way Falk’s attributes are low if he’s a contender, and as much as I care about Thera, it’s hard to worry too much about powering someone up who has nearly half a million in mana, at least in comparison to the far more humble ones Sonya has.”

It wasn’t like Sonya’s attributes were bad originally. In fact, when he’d found out what they were he had to admit they were shockingly good. All of them were in the mid three hundreds with the exception of her mana which was low five hundreds. She was an allrounder in that sense, her mana only being so much higher than the others because she’d given up the combat she’d been doing when she was an adventurer to focus on her magic, and with how much the clinic relied on her, she’d been able to see far more practice then she’d likely expected when she’d first joined.

He couldn’t deny that he wished that he’d had some other way to quickly raise his stats, but it wasn’t like he was completely lacking in ideas on that front either.

“So what are the odds we can get another god to descend on the world? We could open up a vein, get a couple awakened life mages to keep them safe and just keep shoving food down their throat so we can keep collecting blood for potions.”

Helori looked horrified by the suggestion while Myriad just came across as exhausted as he spoke to the goddess in his realm.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread around the fact that my apostle is like this.”

“What? I think it’s a pretty darn good idea!”

“Would you be happy if someone suggested you be made into potions?” Helori shot back.

“If I was going to survive basically unharmed then yeah it would be fine.”

“Ben, the gods need to save their strength. The only reason three descended when they did was because of just how big of a deal what happened with the demons was. Nobody’s coming down to bleed for you.”

“Lame, but fine. I have other ideas anyway.”

“Why does your mind feel like it’s actively trying to hide whatever they are?” The cube questioned.

“Because you’re being paranoid.”

“Then what are they?”

“Not important.”

He could feel the stress coming from his god but was sure it wouldn’t be an issue, at least not a big one. He couldn’t deny what he was planning was arguably unethical, but there was a better than not chance that it would yield some benefits and he was equally as sure that some gods would get a kick out of it.

Still, he did his best to change the topic. He’d need to get Thera’s help for buying some of the equipment for it anyway and both gods would see soon enough.

“Anyway Myriad, Falk asked me to do a write-up on ritual magic, go over the finer details of it with me again while I’m practicing Helori’s language with her, would you?”

It felt like more and more was falling onto his plate, not that he minded. As his mind skills kept growing, the more he had to do to keep himself busy the better.

Waking up earlier than he needed to, the first thing he did was open the archive to spend an hour in it. An hour in real time that was, but with the massive time dilation effect upon it, it was more like he was spending four days there.

It was an interesting experience. So long as he wasn’t hungry or tired before he went in he wouldn’t grow to be as the time passed, the state of his body having more to do with the real world than anything else and it gave him all of the time he needed to focus on any interests that didn’t involve physically training his skills. He spent hours upon hours writing things and ideas out any time he went in there.

From hundreds upon hundreds of ideas for potential enchantments to a dictionary and a translation guide for the language Helori was teaching him, and of course what little he could of his god’s ridiculous language to try and help him remember and process it, even if he didn’t think many of the sounds could be properly expressed in the characters of this world or his last.

I suppose I could make my own to try and capture them, He mused. It would probably be easier than learning whatever sort of writing system Myriad would use. We’ll put that as a maybe.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

It was an interesting idea, but one he could fiddle with using only a single mind. The majority of his thoughts were going to be devoted to the same thing that had been stealing every bit of his interest more and more as time went on. The summoning spell.

Back while they were with Vividus, one of the things he’d painstakingly done was trying to recreate it within the archive, drawing out every single bit of it by hand using the pen provided, going back to Myriad’s realm a number of times to try and make it look as close and perfect as possible, and he’d been pleased to say that he’d done it. Its already huge scale had to triple in size due to the limitations of the size he could work in, but he was confident it was nearly close to perfect and he felt he’d actually learned a bit more about it in the process, even if it wasn’t enough to be immediately helpful.