CH694

Getting home that evening after a far too eventful number of days away, the first thing they found when getting back was Sonya, passed out on the couch after having finally made her own return from the hospital she’d been working with, making Thera hold a finger to her lips.

“I’m sure she’s been worked hard this whole time so if she’s asleep, I’m going to turn in early too. If you’re going to stay up, can you try and keep quiet?”

“No worries,” He whispered back. “I was thinking I’d head back to the shop after you went to sleep anyway so I’ll just go now to get some work done. I’ll come back to cook breakfast in the morning.”

“Mmh, you really do need to rest too, you know.”

“Who needs sleep when I’ve got stamina for days? Besides, I’ve seen I’ve made progress on my job so I want to get back to working on my materialization and I have a few other things to test too.”

“Just make sure you take a break from time to time or I’m dragging you back.”

“Yes ma’am, no worries. It should only take me a couple weeks to finish this, less if I really push myself.”

And man do I plan on pushing myself.

Sure, the more mana he pulled into himself to make souls with, the better the odds that he’d injure his own but with the progress it offered him, how could he resist?

A question Thera could see that the answer was clearly he wouldn’t.

“Just try not to get injured in ways I can’t heal.”

“You got it.”

He kissed her goodbye from there and ran off, making his way to the shop despite its late hour and immediately sliding back into his jacket, feeling well at home.

“Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” He muttered to himself before beginning the far less enjoyable act of connecting with it, pulling the mana it held to start materializing thousands of souls for the experience it would give him while the question of how to otherwise spend the night stayed in his thoughts.

He had his projects of course, from the summoning spell to Inux to the more recent one he was failing at in the form of creating a tool that could materialize by itself, but he’d come across a more recent problem he wanted to look at first. Namely, testing the limits of some of his skills.

It wasn’t always the easiest thing to do, either from the ethical reasons that stemmed from how hard it was to use hive mind on anyone for any reason other than trying to help the former prisoners of Oaun to the more practical problems of either not knowing what to test or how to expand on areas in the case of his soul source.

The latter especially he wanted to expand on a bit if he could. It was now a skill he used almost constantly for the mountains of experience creating a soul gave him but progress was slow. He would experiment as he did it of course, even then as thousands were coming in and out of existence, no two were the same and some things he attempted resulted in no soul being created at all, but he wasn’t sure what to do with the skill beyond what he’d already discovered, with there being a limit in that too.

Since awakening the skill, he hadn’t been able to grow the proportion of mana they would hold. Sure, as he grew his own pool, their maximum grew as well, but he was still only able to create anything with half of what he held, speaking of some fundamental rule or limit to souls he just didn’t understand.

It was an annoyance but not a major problem, and more importantly, it wasn’t what he intended to look at that night. No, that right was reserved for a skill he’d recently used to save his life, esoteric actualization.

Without the urgency that came with testing it while he plummeted through the air, Ben once more tried to make a naked force, something he could use to push or pull something to him as one would if they held telekinesis, only to fail no matter what he tried it on. He couldn’t use it on himself, he couldn’t use it on something like a hammer, and no matter how small he tried to force it on, it simply wouldn’t work. Not even dust shifted under the weight of his mind, telling him that for whatever reason, even if he could move things he was actualizing, he couldn’t move any genuine bit of reality. The skill simply didn’t work like that.

Given that failure, he instead used the skill in a way he knew it would work, creating a hammer with it and feeling the weight of it in his grasp.

He knew that if he let it the thing would disappear as if it had never been there to begin with, its existence guaranteed only as long as he willed it to be but what mattered then was what he could do with such a thing while it did exist. He’d already seen that even if it was poorly, he could carry his own weight but in what other ways could he influence the world?

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