Chương 1075

CH1075 Deep in the untamed lands, Jake and Amy sat, catching their breath. Like so many others, they were still being sent out to clear the demons' numbers and the team they'd been sent with had found a swarm of hundreds, leaving them in a prolonged battle that had only just ended, with the two of them having taken on the majority they'd come across. There was no choice other than that though.

They were both powerful, some of the mightiest on the planet thanks to all of the towers they'd taken on and the support they'd received from Yuzu, and they both had expectations on them too. Even if it was almost certainly too late for them, they still needed to try to reach the third tier in what little time they had left, as impossible as that may have been. If they'd had a decade before the invasion, then there was some hope, but now it really was more a matter of desperation.

With their exhaustion and such matters weighing on their minds enough to completely cloud the two's focus, leaving them to jump as Ben sat down beside them.

"Hey guys, I need a favour."

"JESUS!" Jake yelled, completely unprepared to see Ben out in the middle of the woods, with Amy's reaction being only quieter, though no less shocked.

"Ben, what the actual hell!"

"How did you find us out here?" Amy asked him.

"I'm an apostle. I have friends in high places I can ask."

"And this couldn't wait?"

"Not really. Anyway, Jake, let me borrow your soul for a bit; I need to make some things."

"Seriously?" Jake asked.

"It's important. I'm trying to build a guy a new body and also make a mythic item to fulfill that one quest."

"... Okay, but only because that sounds cool," he gave in.

"But if you succeed, I want details. And food. You can't just want unlimited access to my soul and not bother paying for it."

"Then you can eat now," Ben said, pulling two plates from his rings and seeing their eyes light up as the scents touched their noses.

"But while you're eating, you're going to be materializing, and honestly, I'm looking for a lot, so things might get a bit uncomfortable for you."

"Yeah, yeah, fill me up while I'm filling up then," he said, knowing the drill as Ben began overfilling his friend's soul before putting a circlet on Jake's head to let him work on materializing multiple things at once as the magic materials of the world were all brought forth. Really, it was just the affinitied ones, Ben could do any of the non-affinitied by himself, and of those, it was only the ones he had a complete understanding of.

His work with Verbum the previous night hadn't been for nothing, even if there were still plenty of gaps, he'd been able to determine a few more effects that some of those unique magical elements held, but for the ones he had an incomplete understanding of, he couldn't risk it.

While he'd been able to learn the subatomic information on everything, much to his pleasure, and as a result was able to test the chemistry of different ones to some extent within his realm, without knowing any potential long-term effects of some of the more esoteric samples, he couldn't carelessly apply them to a body that was meant to protect people.

And, while he wouldn't be able to use the affinitied ones within any broader molecular sense given that he couldn't materialize them himself, that didn't mean they wouldn't have other uses he could exploit for the project, with it all just coming down to the final design, and with Jake's help, he'd have everything in spades.

"Uh, buddy?" Jake said, materializing while he ate as Ben took over and controlled one of his split minds.

"How much are you looking at making here?"

"Hmm? Oh, I'm just making a bit extra," Ben said casually, with the goal being to produce cubic meters of everything for both that project and any future use, with triple that for both void and deathstone.

"Don't mind me, really. I'll be done and out of your hair before you know it." It was what he said, at least, but the look in Ben's eyes was enough to tell Jake that he'd traded his services for far too low a price for everything his soul was about to be put through.

"Okay, I'm basically set," Ben said that night, Jake having been kind enough to shorten his trip home by opening a portal in space to the gate network so he wasn't out so late yet again.

"There's things I'll have to materialize and other things I'll have to do by hand, but by tomorrow evening, I should be good to go off and see if this will work or not." If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. <MAX LEVEL OF THE FATHER OF ABOMINATIONS JOB ACHIEVED>"... And also start my next job run. You guys have the next team ready for us?"

"We do," Myriad told him.

"Ready and eager. There's a lot of satisfaction over how things have gone so far."

"There'd better be, because I should have just taken a healthy bite out of all of the available jobs in the world. Just a shame the experience is going to be less for the next one, but, well, it's not like we were expecting me to have a third-tier option for this one either, so we'll focus on the bright side."

"And then we're out," the cube sighed.

"Even if there was no way to guess something like this would come up, to have used up all of our experience sinks beforehand-""Eh, I wouldn't say that," Ben told him, having ideas for other ways to fill the massive volumes of job experience that Thera was currently being used for.

"But, that's also not super important right now. Come on, you've been keeping an eye on me, how do you like my odds?"

"Of making a mythic item? If anyone on this planet was going to manage as much, it's going to be you."

"Okay, yeah, sure, but that's not really an answer. Do you think I have a chance?"

"... I don't know," Myriad answered honestly, sighing as he did.

"Maybe if you had another year or two, then it would be different, and I could give you a confident yes. You're the exact sort of monster who could pull something like that off in less than a decade in this world, and as far as mortals go, there's really nobody closer than you, but it's a matter of scale. Even at the second tier, you're enchanting better than anyone at the third, and your other crafting skills are just as well developed, but this has always been the realm of gods for a reason.

If you were already at the third tier for your crafting or enchanting, then I wouldn't have a single doubt you could do it, but as things are, the only reason it seems like it might be possible is because it's you."

"Yeah, I'm kind of feeling in the same boat," Ben groaned.

"I know this is possible for me, but… I've been doing everything I can to lower my awakening thresholds. When I stretch out my soul all around me, I materialize and shape things high in the sky or deep underground where it's not going to be noticed by anyone, and I make and break countless enchantments on everything I create and all over town too.

Enchantments so good that I could place them on a firm ball of dirt and have something that the system would consider ultra-rare at least, but even doing the sort of practice that would drive others insane, I'm just not feeling closer. Genuinely, why do I always have to feel right up to the wall with all of this crap?"

"I can assure you, you're far from the only person who feels that way," Myriad chuckled.

"Just do your best. You're still growing in other ways, after all."

"True. If I completely fail at this, then I always have the option of betting it all on my sacrilege and then presumably dying the most brutal death in the universe."

"At the risk of inflating your ego, do you genuinely still think that you couldn't kill Oaun as you are? Your skill set is genuinely horrifying by this point. On a subconscious level at least, all of the other gods have to know you don't actually mean them harm because if they believed otherwise, they'd be instinctively fleeing in terror."

"Awe, Myriad, you little charmer. That's very sweet of you to say."

"Wasn't meant to be."

"But," Ben went on.

"I cannot stress enough how much a galaxy worth of believers has to mean, faith-wise. Even with all of the demons on all of the worlds basically half dead, starved from the wastelands they're turning each planet they take into, and only occasionally sapient, we're still talking potentially billions of times the faith being generated on this one world going to one god. You know it, I know it, all of the gods have to know it, and the ones that don't are just living in denial.

Even if they're different, if I was to try to convert a rough estimate of the amount of faith Oaun might be able to access into mana, if I had that much at my fingertips, I could probably materialize an entire planet, life and souls and all. Hell, not just wanting to reach the ninth level of my sacrilege and not just wanting to awaken my enchanting, in a perfect world, I'd want to awaken even more skills to the third tier too.

Ugh, figure out how to delay the third wave by a decade and I'll have turned myself into someone with dozens of third-tier skills."

"Dozens, really?"

"Conservative estimate," he shrugged.

"If I did have a decade, then either I'd awaken my crafting skills and finally be able to make a mythic item, or I'd make a mythic item and awaken my crafting skills as a result, but either way, it would get me the crafting gods' full blessings. Basically ten tower blessings all at once? My awakening thresholds would drop to nothing. Hell, there's a decent chance that getting that would push some of my other skills to the third tier immediately.

Seriously, I really do deserve so many more blessings than any jerk up here is willing to give. The fact that nobody ever wants to be agreeable about it is driving me insane. God, I should just…"

"What?" Myriad asked, suddenly filled with worry at the way his apostle fell silent, a grin slowly creeping up his face with the realization that came to him.

"I've got an idea, which means I have an arrangement I'm going to need to make real quick for… let's say, after changing jobs tomorrow but before going to try and build Inux, which I guess I should actually be pushing to the next day anyway because I might be gone for a day and I never got around to asking Fontesh to babysit but… Yeah, okay, that gives me time to do a couple more experiments so it works out fine, this will be great."

"Uh, Ben?" Myriad tried again.

"Against every fibre of my being telling me I don't want to know, what are you thinking?"

"Hmm? Oh, just a fun little idea to get a couple more blessings. Trust me, it's going to be great."