Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube

Even in the days since her awakening, walking through town was a surreal experience for Thera. Everyone’s soul was in sight, and through that, everyone’s system information was visible. Ben may have been able to see soul structures and a person’s skills, but now she could see everything. Affinities and resistances, the jobs people had taken, the few of them with a title and the many with blessings, even if basically all of them had come from Myriad. It just felt like people were so exposed to her now in a way she hadn’t been prepared for, and while it was possible to suppress the sight that came with her new level of power, she didn’t. She had the knowledge she needed, but she still required practice, with the town around her becoming her training grounds.

Life spells flowed from her naturally, curing the minor aches and pains anyone in town held, Thera now able to perceive them on a deeper level than ever before, while treatment became as natural as breathing. She would see or sense something that needed correction and like that, it was done, but adjusting to acting on souls required a bit more.

Even with Ben transmitting not only all of the spells of past soul gods directly into her head, but also all of the information he’d learned and discovered about soul structure and function, bringing her newest knowledge skill to its ninth level immediately, and even with the new passive nature of her power, it still required practice, with the same people she healed becoming test subjects for those same spells.

Bonuses were applied to attributes and skills alike, the latter occasionally setting off levels in the people around her as she did it, and while each time she’d cast, those newly practiced spells would then be applied passively from there, though they’d start off in the crude state of any newly learned spell, meaning she still had to act with intent. She had to master each one to ensure that when she was blessing people with her power as she drifted by, they were getting the best she could give, making practice a necessity as she examined one other person benefitting from her spells; herself.

For good or ill, Ben had bent the gods to his whims once more, and in that, created a new goal for her as well. She needed to become more powerful, and she needed to work towards awakening her earth magic, a goal that threatened her with a new headache after what she’d done to awaken her life. And yet, she’d been paid well for efforts that would be spent directly on herself; she couldn’t just not devote herself to the task.

Yeah, that’s about right, she sighed to herself, the application of soul magic at least contributing to a skill that would help lower her blood pressure. Doesn’t matter in the end. Ben’s right… well, right enough. I don’t know about other contenders, but when it comes to the prospects of awakening my earth magic, there can’t be any around that are currently better than me.

Much the same way he could roughly judge how close a skill was to growing through his authorities, she became more and more aware of it herself as she slowly mastered her new power. Her earth magic wanted to grow. It was basically begging for it, with her affinity practically trying to drag it to a higher realm of power. If she had a decade then it was guaranteed it would be done, easy, but she had months. Her odds were surely better than they had been for her rise to soul magic, but without a proper stimulus, that could mean nothing.

Even as it is though, my earth magic will be useful in the next wave, she told herself, materializing a simple stone ball in her hand and lightly tossed it in the air as she walked around, morphing its shape each time it went up to land back in her hand as plates or rings or small figures too, whatever she could think of without taking up so much effort that it distracted from her soul magic. If I could safely see what’s currently possible with all of my mana without terrifying anyone near enough to see it. Mmh, I might have to try and make a trip to the heart of the untamed lands at some point, and even then, see if Anailia would be willing to make sure there isn’t an army around for me to accidentally hurt.

Endless chores and things to do, she was going to need to extend her practice to some tours of other cities in the future as well, once she got the hang of things slightly more, but for the time, she could exert herself plenty with things in Stonewall, with more goals still to go.

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Like eventually, I’m going to have to try and give someone a blessing, Thera sighed, the thought of cutting off a part of her soul to do such a thing fairly unappealing after all the pain she’d seen during her hospital work of patients who’d not only had their bodies but also souls damaged from demonic attacks. But even that feels more possible than some other spells too.

It was hard to tell if the spells she was applying to the few in town who held ninth levels skills were working, spells aimed to help lower their awakening thresholds and allow them to get greater attribute bonuses for those awakenings, and in a similar vein, it was hard to be sure how well the spell that made it easier for people to acquire new skills was working until she’d actually see someone develop one thanks to her power, but there was more than that too. Those spells she just needed to be there to witness the evidence of her success to confirm that she really was casting them correctly; spells that required some certain abstract comprehension she just wasn’t getting were a whole other matter.

A spell to copy and essentially materialize a skill on a person’s soul, Thera shook her head just thinking about it. No wonder only one soul mage has managed to pull it off before, this feels incomprehensible, even with their knowledge forced directly into my head.

Something that would be no doubt powerful, both for herself, as well as everyone around her, it was also the spell she was farthest from achieving. In essence, it was akin to materializing a soul itself, even if it was in a far more simplified form than what Ben was constantly doing to a horrifying degree. Whatever epiphany the past soul mage who’d managed such a thing had achieved to make it possible and whatever unnatural understanding her boyfriend held when it came to similar matters, it just hadn’t been transferred to her in a way that she could immediately take advantage of.

And if even Ben thinks they were a genius, there’s no denying it, Thera admitted, going over everything her boyfriend had told her about the creation of that particular spell. Someone who was a contender for both life and death magic before awakening and a unique hybrid that seemed unnaturally suited for using soul magic as a result, even if I have a unique variant of soul magic, I’m not at the same places as them.

Of course, soul mages who had access to both affinities weren’t rare, nor were ones who held duel awakenings for those skills at the second tier, but to reach the level of a contender on both fronts really did put that previous soul mage into another category than all of the others, and with what seemed to be a unique mental structure resulting from the complex family history of hybridizations she’d held that left the woman unusually suited to the endpoint of those branches, even with the raw information planted in Thera’s mind, reaching that level herself was going to take work.

And after last time, I don’t exactly want Ben giving me a new alien thought structure just so I can try to master this one spell. Ugh, Ben says the soul is made of essence but that’s just putting a word to something, it’s not making it any more comprehensive to me, she thought, trying to spend both her affinitied and unaffinitied powers to materialize even a wisp, but to no avail. It’s just so… annoying.

The fact that upon her awakening, instead of the normal soul magic, her power had received the name soul goddess magic meant it should have been more powerful than the typical variant, likely significantly so. Even if a skill at that tier meant she was now destined for godhood herself, to have it in the very name was significant enough that it painted a picture of what she should be capable of once fully adapted to the new skill.

“So maybe I just need to adjust more,” she muttered. “Or maybe I’m just missing something and the differences between me and her mean I’ll never be able to do it, or maybe I need to live long enough that I even get a level or two first before I can. Doesn’t matter in the end. It would be interesting, and it would be helpful, but if I’m being realistic, it’s not more worthwhile than the core soul spells. Raising skills, raising attributes, lowering awakening thresholds, and increasing awakening bonuses. I’ll need to practice healing souls if I get the chance too, but other than that, those are my focuses, the rest are just fluff.”

She could have all the time in the world to master any of the stranger or more esoteric soul spells, for time before the next wave though, that didn’t matter. So long as she developed enough proficiency in those four, she could move on to devoting herself to her earth magic next for what felt like a new impossible goal so soon after completing her last one.