Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube

“Holy fucking shit,” Ben muttered to himself as he finished up his last bit of testing, not having expected to get any significant results but was proven tremendously wrong as he expanded on a few of his preliminary tests, driving him to go back to run the same modifications on another demon again, just so he could be sure it wasn’t a fluke and left him then pushing the results from there, again and again and again, all to get the most of it by the time he’d finished, leaving a wide smile stretched across his face.

In that test, as with every other, he’d been in the minds of the demon test subjects he’d been using, and in the first where he’d gotten a result, he’d heard a particular notification directly connected to his actions. The demon’s strength enhancement, when manipulated in a particular manner within its original soul, had become a blessed skill.

With the implications of such being huge on multiple levels. A blessed skill was fifty percent more powerful than an unblessed one, and that difference alone couldn’t be understated, but as much as that was the simplicity of doing it. He didn’t even need to cut a skill off a soul to do it; instead, he could manipulate the soul itself to alter it, and unlike so much else he could do to a soul, it didn’t leave any pain.

Both factors made doing it to anyone else far more viable than so many other ways he would modify a soul, but what he’d managed to learn hadn’t ended there. Normally, a person could have up to five blessed skills, and it seemed that he could give up to that many to anyone without issues, but he could also push past that number too. It ended with a growing level of pain he’d come to expect of anything he’d do to a soul, but considering it only happened once he surpassed the natural limits they were meant to have, as far as he was concerned, that was fine. He only had three blessed skills, which meant he could comfortably do two more, and could likely handle two others after that. For demons, it was a struggle, but he was far more used to handling soul pain and he could compartmentalize it, forcing only portions of himself to deal with it while the rest worked. It would be manageable.

Leaving the last discovery in those tests. The flexibility. After confirming that he could make something a blessed skill, he’d confirmed that he could turn it back into a regular skill as well, meaning that, if he needed to, he could swap out skills to empower them, but even that test had led to a different discovery. When a soul changed to a blessed skill, it was strengthened in a way that he didn’t fully understand, but when it was changed back into a regular skill, some aspects of it could maintain that strengthening effect.

That result hadn’t been immediately obvious, and it seemed like it didn’t hold true for the majority of skills, but in his tests, Ben had converted a demon’s parallel thought into a blessed skill and felt some of the change to its mind stick, even after it had been undone. An incredibly small result that had led him to even more testing to find that, while uncommon, such persistent changes could occur, and opened up a world of possibilities before him.

So, with nothing else he could do, Ben created a few more spatial prisons for some of his test subjects before he stored them away, letting him kill the rest before he focused on what mattered most, himself, as he sat down and seriously considered what skills would be best to convert to blessed ones in a more permanent manner, before he started with the ones he was indifferent about, just for whatever small bit of strengthening they might maintain when they were changed back, as he touched his own soul and began shifting a portion of it to a different region, twisting it as he did before a notification went off in his head.

Sweet god, is there anything better than forcing the system to create a new notification? Ben smiled to himself, feeling the entire process as it happened, with nothing seeming to be different from what the demons he’d tested on had gone through. There was no pain, not even as little as an itch, making it the smoothest way he’d ever modified a soul until that point, and left him to reverse the process, getting another notification as a result.

“It has ‘divine’ in the name, I don’t think that common is the right word for it, but whatever,” he said to himself. “No obvious issues; it lines up with everything I saw with the demons, which means I can safely get the rest of them done.”

With that discovery, his head filled with notification after notification of skills rising and falling, until he’d gone through the majority, even if he wasn’t sure how much any of them had really changed. There were a few he wasn’t even sure changed when they became blessed skills, given that his soul expansion hadn’t provided him with a massive boost to his overall mana pool, and some such at his modifier compatibility and his artisan’s soul gave him weaker results than he’d expected, with no levels coming with those skills temporary boost in power, but what matter was that he had tried, and that hopefully, he’d get at least a few little benefits from all of that once he finished up, the remaining options filling his head with different notifications to go with them.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Lot of payoff for letting my affinities become blessed skills temporarily, that’s a good sign, he told himself. And as for evil god of sacrilege… even if it’s my most powerful skill, I don’t actually need it until the third wave. Better to change it out then, rather than let it fill one of my limited slots.

It was the smart move, given he didn’t actually need to empower it until he was actually standing in front of Oaun, but it still felt a bit disappointing to weaken it. Every single skill he’d temporarily boosted, he’d felt a change from them in the milliseconds they’d been blessed, but his sacrilege was on the edge of the fourth tier. A fifty percent increase in power had been incomparable to what he’d felt before.

At it, it felt like all of the faith in the world was observable to him, with even the nearly non-existent trickle that even the simplest of life would give on in the world having its path clear, while the realms of the gods felt like something he might have been able to break into from that lower realm, even without his planar manipulation to crush and dominate as he saw fit. It was a difference in strength incomparable to something as simple as leveling up, and it was addictive, leaving him wanting to feel that strength again, even if he forced himself to hold back and instead, go for the options that were about to become permanent fixtures of his status.

“Okay, incredibly fucked up that a fifty percent increase to the power of the highest authority on the planet didn’t just give me a third tier awakening,” he swore, ignoring the intensified feeling of all of the evils in the world to focus on how much more power anyone who would benefit from his authorities would feel. “But that’s okay, I have another.”

“Motherfucker! Seriously?”

The changes that authority brought were nothing compared to the level of eldritch mind that had come with it, leaving him to feel his head pound for a moment as the depths and horrors of his mind grew once more, a skill he had never expected to raise as much as he had since awakening it, with even that not being the main problem. With his authorities at a level of power incomparable to anything else in the world, at that point even likely to be providing even greater growth factors than all of his blessings, they hadn’t pushed any of his skills to the third tier.

That fact alone left him feeling closer to going insane than the change to his mind had. After all of the levels empowering his affinities and authorities had brought, Ben was a contender for twelve skills, yet somehow that still hadn’t been enough to drive any to the third tier. Even his material manipulation, a skill that had grown from one called destruction, hadn’t managed to awaken when he’d turned his destruction authority into a blessed skill. It felt like the universe was playing a cruel joke on him.

And the worst part is, my stupid authorities let me feel how freaking close I am and… It doesn’t matter, he told himself, forcing himself to calm down. It’s the same problem as before, but now I’ve taken two very big steps to passing it. Even if I didn’t get the results I wanted, this is still good, which means I just need to focus on what’s next.

With those two, he was now at five blessed skills, what should have been the mortal limit, but with what he’d already proven with his experiments earlier, he knew that he could push things. Even if only by two more, he could empower more skills and he could keep them empowered, leading to his next choice.

His soul burned, and with no new levels or awakening coming with the pain, the results were underwhelming, but that was one he wanted to keep. It would be directly acting on his enchanting, so more power to it meant better chances of awakening the skills he was so desperate for, and with it, he considered stopping. It hurt, but not unbearably so; it was well within the manageable range, but that very fact meant he had no choice but to push himself further. Time was so short, he couldn’t get by by being cautious, so with that, he picked his next skill and moved it within his soul, hearing the expected notification and more ring in his head by the time he was done, along with one other with it.