Chapter 402

When he felt himself coming to consciousness, Ben thought he was going insane. He couldn’t move, but that was a passing concern compared to the main problem. The noise. The constant, thundering noise that seemed designed to keep him from understanding anything as he was assaulted by the power of his own thoughts.“Ben, Ben if you can hear me try to relax,” A familiar voice said soothingly, setting off a brand new wave of noise.

“Ben I’m not positive if you can hear me but I need you to listen carefully if you can. You’re alive and everyone is fine. Thera, Sonya and Falk are safe, it’s you we need to worry about right now,” His god explained gently. “I don’t know if you’re even aware of this, but you managed to awaken your connect and some other mind skills into two new ones. I need to keep my distance because it looks like the way connect changed lets you do it from a distance now, if you’re not careful you’ll hurt yourself getting exposed to me. More important is the second one. I can’t say for sure which one awakened and what combined with it when it did, but all of it is what you’re currently experiencing. That noise is just your thoughts, Ben.”

“With everything going on in your head I simply can’t pull it all apart to figure out what you're trying to get across, it’s like you’re trying to think with a thousand minds at once. For now, don’t try to move, just try to relax. They’re all your thoughts, you can control them, just give it time.”

He didn’t think he could, with a swarm of minds all saying as much. When he was at thirty-two it had felt like a lot, but what he was currently dealing with was outrageous. Like in the past, it wasn’t like he’d suddenly gained alternate personalities, every mind in his head was still him, connected at the root, but trying to manage them was the same as if he suddenly had hundreds of new limbs, each moving on their own at the slightest hint of stimulus and resulting in raw chaos.

“Alright then, instead try this,” Myriad suggested, able to pick up on the disbelief that he’d succeed in managing the change to him that filled Ben’s thoughts as the god made a suggestion. “Try your best to do as I say, alright? With every mind you have, pick a number between one and a hundred.”

He tried to do as suggested, wanting to trust the cube but not seeing the point, with that fact being clear as various whys echoed throughout his head as even more shouted numbers, with the answer becoming clear soon enough.

“If a mind did anything other than pick twenty-two, start meditating immediately.”

It was a simple order, but one many of his minds responded to, having months of practice doing just that as they essentially shut down while only a few resisted at first, before seeming to understand the point as things grew quieter as they followed that same order, leaving him with only seventeen active.

It was less than he’d had access to before the change, but each of them felt far different from a typical mind. They felt broader, in a way he didn’t know how to properly express. If a normal mind was composed of three or four individual strands of thought then what he currently had in each one felt like it was far surpassing that standard, being more like eight or ten but impossible to truly judge given that the nature of each strand seemed to have changed as well, almost as if they’d grown in length, with the end product being that was each mind was not a string, but a massive rope.

He could no longer claim to think in a way that was remotely human, but at that point, it was at least manageable as he was finally able to get up, the thing trapping him in place before being too many thoughts trying to act in too many different ways, with the hint of control he’d regained letting him speak with his own voice.

“What happened?”

It was a question with a lot of implications behind it. What happened to him as his skills awakened? What happened to cause it? What happened to those he loved and what happened to the battle as a whole, all of which Myriad swept away.

“Later. For now, we’re focusing on you getting used to your new minds. You just experienced how debilitating the change in you is Ben, if you want to be able to live then we’re focusing on this first.”

He wasn’t going to argue. He’d thought the change his mind had gone through at the eighth level of parallel thought had been huge when his thoughts had split, but that was nothing compared to what he was currently dealing with. The only thing he had to be grateful for was that despite all odds he didn’t have a headache from it all, with the last edge of one he’d carried from leveling mental expansion and parallel thought gone as well.

“Alright, so what do I need to do?”

“What you have to do is bear with me because there isn’t even anyone I can ask for advice on this, no other mortal has dealt with this sort of change. Your only benefit is that since this is your skill and you have the system you should be able to manage it like any other skill with some practice. The best idea I have is that you should try to mentally assign the ones you’re currently using as your main minds for the time being so you can shut down any others if need be. Just take some time and focus on what you have active right now, okay?”

“Alright.”

He did as he was told, sitting down and focusing entirely on the ones he could feel active, trying to create a divide between them and the ones simmering in the back of his head until he was confident he had them.

“Alright, now this part is going to be harder for you but try and stop only a few from meditating. If you stop too many then slowly try to switch more back to meditating till you can handle what’s going on in your head, okay?”

“Okay.”

Once again he listened to his god, only to immediately want to wretch as a hundred voices filled his head, the thoughts he wasn’t controlling overtaking the ones he was as one by one they did what his god said, going back to meditate until he was left with fifty active and under his control.

“Jesus Christ Myriad, how many minds do I actually have now?” He asked as he rubbed his temples, trying to keep his control over the ones he was currently using. “I know there’s a lot more going on in there than the ones that just went active.”

“I honestly don’t know Ben. If you want to, I think your best bet is numbering them as you go but for now, just get used to what you’re using.”

“Alright, I guess I’ll give that a try.”

“Fucking nine hundred and ninety-eight.”

He was pretty sure it had taken him almost twenty-four straight hours of practicing and adapting with his god, growing more and more accustomed to the new state of his mind in that time and counting as he went, but by the time he had a final number he had to go back and check again, just to be sure he hadn’t somehow added a few hundred by mistake.

“...It’s admittedly a lot.”

“Understatement. How am I even functioning? How am I alive? There’s no way my brain can handle all of this. Am I just some dead soul up here and you don’t have the heart to tell me?”

He still didn’t have perfect control of his thoughts and the sentiment was echoing around his head, but he could at least shut it down now as his god answered.

“You’re alive, don’t you worry about that. When I realized what was happening I discussed it with a few others and the best explanation we can come up with is that you’re thinking like a god.”

“Which means?”

“It means that you’re thinking with your soul.”

“...Which means?”

At that the cube sighed, coming forward now that the fear of Ben accidentally connecting with him was gone. “It means exactly what it sounds like. You’re aware that among other things, the soul is a record of the life you’ve lived. You’re simply now engaging with that record in a far more active way. It’s, well, it’s not exactly natural Ben, but it won’t harm you either. Hell, this was probably the only way it wouldn’t harm you. It’s genuinely impossible to properly express how shocking this change is. If I didn’t know all of the skills you had that went into it, I’d honestly think you were someone with a third-tier mind skill.”

“Has my mind really become that powerful?” He asked in shock as Myriad went to knock him down a peg.

“More like it’s become that freakish.”

“Rude.”

“Yeah, I picked up on that, thanks,” His god said dryly, before switching over to a more important topic as his tone took a serious edge. “So how much do you actually remember?”

It was a topic Myriad had been avoiding up until then, but one he couldn’t put off forever, so instead he ripped the bandaid off with Ben’s minds mostly under control as the apostle pushed them just a bit, trying to think on what happened.

“What do I remember? I was going through the wreckage of the weapon, hoping to find anything I could use to create something that might be able to help and I found its power source,” He said, grabbing his head in concentration. “From there I tried to understand what I could do with it and ended up connecting with it, and then…”

And then his minds had been ripped to shreds, broken down in a way they never had been before until everything he was disappeared. Vaguely he thought he could remember hearing some notifications going off, but he’d need to look at his card to be sure of what changes he’d actually gone through.

And that should have been in. He had to assume that the only reason he was even thinking as himself was because he was thinking with his soul at that point, but in those moments after his mind had essentially been gone, there shouldn’t have been anything for him to remember after.

Yet as he pushed further he found there was. Information that wasn’t lost for the simple fact that it had to do with his knowledge skills, binding the memory to him in ways that regular thought couldn’t be. Information that he couldn’t believe could be any more than the mad dream of a broken mind.

“Myriad,” He asked hesitantly. “Did I… make something?”

“To put it mildly,” The cube confirmed. “We actually didn’t even know what happened at first. All we saw was you firing things through the gate, and it’s not like that’s never been attempted before, but shortly after you did, not only did the gate to craftsman’s tower disappear completely, every other gate on the planet returned to its closed state. It wasn’t until some extremely horrified greys who’d been observing a few of the invader worlds that hadn’t shown any evidence of housing a god appeared to us in a panic that we were able to understand what you’d done, and even then they had to explain plenty since what you made hasn’t existed since the dawn of the universe, long before any of us came to be.”

“Antimatter,” He said breathlessly.

It wasn’t a dream and he knew exactly what he’d done. He didn’t know how he’d gotten to that point, all of the rational thought that made up his conscious mind had ceased to exist in that time, but he’d created a safe metal shell and expanded it to ensure there’d be no air within, materializing the outrageous material from raw mana and sent it all through the gate to sow its destructive properties against the regular matter of the universe.

It was the culmination of so much he had known in theory, yet would never have tried to put into practice in a sane state. He’d known since the early floors of Galwax’s trial that it was possible to materialize matter with non-affinitied magic and Quilith had been slipping in lessons on more hypothetical materials among his more common ones for ages, to the point that he couldn’t help but wonder if the alien had been hoping for this sort of outcome.

With those two facts combining in his head, they’d led to an altogether horrifying test that he couldn’t imagine actually taking for the risks involved if anything went wrong.

“Um, unless I’m mistaken, I made a lot. Like, a lot a lot. You said the greys actually saw it hit some places right? Is there…”

“Technically, there are still worlds there, though largely uninhabitable now. You didn’t create enough to annihilate all of the standard matter after all, but the explosions kicked up from the sheer scale of the energy released has left the surfaces of the worlds covered in a level of dust and debris that it would be shocking if the planets don’t freeze for centuries to come with any life that survived the strike already in the process of being choked out.”

“And uh, how many planets are we talking about?”

“At least two, though judging from what the watching grey told us about how many explosions they saw coming through against how many we saw sent, it’s pretty safe to say that at least one more world was hit that they weren’t observing. That does let us know that multiple worlds are connecting to a single invasion point which makes sense given the volumes we’re dealing with, but is still nice to confirm.”

While he had to keep his jaw from hanging down, he had no effort keeping his minds blank in that one instance; it was just too much to take in. The scale being spoken about was simply outrageous enough that it took time to process it, and not having the slightest idea of what one was even supposed to say to that, all he could do was crack a weak joke.

“Well, looks like the apostle has overtaken the god. If I’ve got three worlds under my belt then you need two more to catch up.”

“No, even if you left them uninhabitable those worlds are still technically there. Mine is gone so I’ve still got you beat in that regard.”

“Cool cool cool. No, wait, this is actually really cool,” He said, breaking out into a manic grin as he processed all of the implications of everything. There was no way to say if what he’d done would affect any future invasion plans, but it had tremendous implications for him. “So does this mean connect has grown in a way that would let me use mana from different objects? Oh freaking man, I’m going to be honest, a small, secret part of me had hoped it might let me borrow other people’s mana a bit like I tried and failed when I first got the skill, but objects? Do you think I could hold a piece of mythril or one of the mana crystals to use what’s in them or is it going to need to just be whatever the power source is? God, if it’s just that then I don’t care what it takes, I’m beating the information out of Iberu if I have to-”

“Ben,” Myriad spoke gently, cutting him off with a more sombre tone. “It’s more complicated than that. I need you to calm down and listen to me.”

“Oh boy, that doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not. It’s honestly a disaster, but I want you to know you aren’t being held responsible for anything. Neither is your teacher. All parties involved in this… act, have already been gathered and punished if they knew what Iberu was doing, but you are going to find out eventually so I’m telling you now.”

The way his god said act, the lower tone in his voice changing to pure disgust left Ben on edge. It was a way he’d never heard Myriad speak before and he stayed silent, understanding that whatever it was, whatever Iberu had done, it was bad.

“You were half right about how your skill awakened. We won’t know about all of the changes until you actually test it, but at the very least I’m sure you haven’t gained the ability to use the mana stored in objects. What you have developed is the ability to use the mana of others.”

He felt all of his nearly a thousand minds spinning with the implications. He wasn’t touching a person, he’d been holding a metal ball, what did Myriad mean he had gained the ability to use other people’s mana?

“Calling that thing a power source was only correct in the most depraved of ways. Trap would be the more accurate word, one that was meant to hold some of the most mana-dense beings on the planet. Spirits.”

He felt his gut twist like he’d been stabbed as he experienced a curse that came with his mind awakening that was just as bad as having to deal with the number of them that existed in his head. The ability to understand in an instant the implications of what his god had just said. A spirit’s body was made of mana, and it was that same mana they burned in any act. The moment they used it up was the moment they died, and he had used it liberally. The only bit he truly remembered was making the antimatter bombs and some of the materialization leading up to it, but there was no way he hadn’t done more than that which simply hadn’t registered as the lower levels of his mind were acting on their own accord.

“How many?” He asked quietly.

“Ben, you didn’t know, this isn’t your fault. No one is placing any blame on you, and your teacher was just as unaware of what he’d been working on.”

“Myriad, I’m asking you how many spirits I killed.”

His god was silent for a moment, experiencing the raw feeling coming from his apostle and knowing he couldn’t hide an answer that Ben would find out soon enough after waking.

“Three hundred survived, seven hundred died.”

He wanted to be sick. He wanted to get his hands on Iberu and tear the man apart. He wanted to talk to Thera and figure out how the fuck he was ever going to try and make up for that as all the while different minds did their bit of math.

He couldn’t find the answer in himself as he dealt with the emotions of hearing that flowing through him, eventually settling on rage. He wanted to murder Iberu and would if he got the chance.

“You won’t,” Myriad told him, picking up on the feeling. “The great spirits have already gotten their hands on all involved parties and are… Well, let’s just leave it at they’re being punished. The bigger issue is what else we’ve learned.”

“Ugh, god do I even want to know? No, scratch that I have to know. Tell me.”

“It looks like he and others had been working in secret on a collection of distasteful experiments and projects, all goals for saving the world and all things we’d stand firmly against. Just another thing we hadn’t noticed that’s rearing its ugly head. We’ve already captured most of them, but there’s a couple who we haven’t yet.”

“And I assume one of them is that mage that Iberu asked me to talk with?” Ben asked, seeing exactly where the conversation was going as his god confirmed it.

“He was.”

“So what the hell was the information I gave him about ritual magic going to be used for then?”

“Unfortunately, that we can’t say,” His god sighed. “While identities weren’t kept as secret as they could have been, projects largely were to keep word from getting out, with Naloth being the only one who seemed to know everything to keep track of it all. Of course, since we do know what the two of you talked about we have our theories, but that’s it.”

“I’m all about theories, try me.”

“The one we think has the most potential is the idea that they're going to try and capture a god.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s been done before,” Myriad explained, sounding as rough as Ben felt. “On a couple worlds actually. Mortals reaching across the boundary of space to bind one of their gods to their will and use their power for themselves. It’s what we imagine would be the most useful application of what you’ve discussed for the coming battles but honestly, we can’t be certain.”

“Cool, so I killed seven hundred innocent people and actively worked to help someone do who knows what?”

He laughed at it all. He couldn’t help it, what else could he do with the information he’d just been given? When there wasn’t even anyone he could seek revenge on as far more justified parties were already taking it.

“You know Myriad, sometimes I’m really not grateful for this whole second chance at life.”

The god didn’t know what to say to his apostle’s empty smile, nor what could be said to the feelings simmering just beneath the surface.

“You have been out for a couple days now, maybe it will help if you wake up and talk to the people you care about a bit. They’re all waiting for you.”

“...If it’s all the same to you, I think I'll stay up here for another hour or two. Just to give myself some time to work things out.”

“Of course, take all of the time you need.”