While part of himself stayed with his gods, the rest below focused on different tasks. Discovering that he could access two different levels of reality at once was a boon that he knew he’d be exploiting, even if Myriad was already trying to limit it, and with Thera asleep beside him and a few hours of the night still to go he finally had some time to look at some of the changes in himself.

With the simplest being to examine his card, taking it from the nightstand beside him to fully look it over for the first time since reaching the third tier and glancing down at it for all of the changes it held.

So my mana, stamina, and vitality have all grown enough that I’ll have access to their king jobs. Sweet, I knew I’d be getting them for the first two with how much they were going to grow from two awakenings but it looks like Yuzu’s help made sure I wasn't just under that threshold for the last one. Looks like she was able to make sure my growth bonuses were five percent higher than what they should have been, even with my resistances weakening her spells but… Some of the math here isn’t mathing. My intelligence is way too high.

It was to a point that there was a chance he’d unlock an embodiment job for it the same way Thera had for her mana, with him holding over one hundred and fifty thousand points to it, forcing him to work through the math of how that value must have changed before arriving at an answer.

Awakening to eldritch mind didn’t double the value, it tripled it. Interesting, I remember when Myriad first taught me about awakening bonuses he mentioned that some skills could technically raise them higher but I’ve never gotten to see that since none of my first ones did that and I’ve reached a point that my second-tier bonuses are too low for me to notice, even if that might’ve happened for anything else I’ve awakened.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that this is awakening growth and not leveling growth either. It looked like every level of unnatural mind was giving me about five hundred points to intelligence when I got it, maybe at the third tier, every level of it I get is going to give me another thirty thousand points. The only way to see would be to raise it so I doubt I’ll be able to find out before the third wave unless something crazy happens but still, worth remembering, even if I don’t necessarily need it.

…But I really should check out the effects of all of this mental power.

He stretched out his soul with the thought, through the wall to connect to a bird sleeping in the backyard and woke it up as he began puppeting its body, mainly wanting to see through its eyes as he actualized a new building to sit in that space, a perfect house out there and leaving no strain on his mind for the experience.

Yep, actualization is absolutely beneficial for all of this new intelligence and probably from the new state of my mind too. When it comes to pairing it with my materialization it doesn’t seem to be reducing the mana cost more than it already has been which is a bit of a shame but that just means that particular feature has more to do with my skill level if I want further improvements on that front. Okay, what else should I test?

When it came to the second-tier skills he’d awakened in the tower, he already knew that the bands of moribusial and deathstone he’d been using to train his mana and vitality had officially become useless to him thanks to both his divine defense enhancement as well as his perfect absorption resistance but even as he thought it, answers came to him instantly with both bands being pulled from his rings and enchantments placed down, strengthening their original powers to far greater heights as he calibrated both to suit his regeneration rates, left satisfied by the end, even for the new problem it brought.

The goal’s to awaken my connect and pray that it will take in my enchanting when it happens but with the way things look, there’s actually a very real chance I awaken my enchanting instead. He thought with a sigh as he examined his work, expertly woven with mana modifiers placed in ways he never would have been able to manage only a day before. Enchanting relies on both knowledge and technical skill while connect only relies on the latter. The changes in me have already left me far too good at applying the things I know and figuring out what I don’t.

There was always the chance that enchanting itself would pull in connect if it was the one to awaken but he didn’t want to place his hopes on that fact when it felt just as likely that it would merge into his crafting instead. In an ideal world, the three skills would combine together given the way he used them but that really was too much to hope for, he needed to be at least somewhat realistic and if things just happened to go his way then he’d celebrate after, as simple as that.

With that done though there was another aspect of his body he hadn’t gotten around to testing yet that he needed to examine before he’d come across something that would push his limits, just how much divine defense enhancement would protect him. It was already impossible to separate some of what it could do from his absorption resistance and a few of his other skills that for whatever reason hadn’t merged into it but the limits of his body needed to be understood and to do that he materialized a sharp iron pin, pressing it into his arm and feeling it bend against his flesh.

An already positive result considering that it would have gone through before, even if it would have taken effort to make it happen but that meant the tests needed to go on as he made new ones, gradually increasing their material strength as they bent or broke one by one until something was finally strong enough to pierce his skin without being damaged, leaving a grin to stretch out on his face.

I didn’t have to put all of my strength into it but considering how sharp I made it, the fact that took a fair bit of effort before I saw any damage is a very good sign. I might actually be able to get away with not being murdered for the next few months.

He watched as the small wound closed before his eyes, a clear sign of how his integrated divine body had grown as well before moving on, with the night still young and tests still to run.

The second tier skill he’d gained for awakening eldritch mind wouldn’t be tested till later, if he was going to attempt to figure out something named mind break of all things then he needed to be sure he had the proper experimental materials for it, but as for what his sacrilege had gifted him, the grand-sounding skill that ended up only being first tier despite his expectations based on its name, he left different parts of himself to try and figure it out.

While he may have no longer measured his mental structure based on number of minds, that was more due to the meaningless of such a thing compared to the past. He could have as many or as few as he needed, his mental power itself being divided to different tasks rather than being a structural factor to who he was and it was something he could control freely, left to contend with what those changes in particular meant for him. Even if he was still himself despite it all, he could no longer pretend that his thought structure was anything remotely human. Questions he had could immediately be given answers based on the information he held, leaving what had previously been grand problems feeling almost trivial.

The fact that he’d been able to finally decipher the two grand spells was enough of an achievement to show that and even the act of refining them was only going to take some time based on the fact that some things would need to be tested and confirmed before progress could be made, a job for his research center with entire books of projects already being written in his head. Really, he was sure there were going to be more strengths and quirks to how he now thought too but on that front, he could only wait to find them. It seemed like only the part of his mind he put forth to interact with the world around would really experience time, giving the rest of himself years since he’d awakened it to think and explore the thing he now was.

And then deep material sense and unending extraction enhancement are both clearly altering how I feel the makeup of the world around me and artisan’s soul should be lowering my leveling thresholds which is another reason to worry about accidentally awakening my enchanting or maybe even my crafting because it would suck just as much it that took in my enchanting and left me still needing to raise connect but considering how much it’s reduced my mana cost for all of my magics it’s worth the trade-off which mainly just leaves discovering all of the functions and limits of evil god of sacrilege.

The fact that it meant he could actually get some privacy felt like a far grander blessing than he’d expected but other than how it left him sure he could harm the gods around him, he hadn’t actually yet had a chance to experiment with it. He couldn’t exactly harm the gods he liked in the name of testing but he couldn’t just attack the ones he didn’t either, meaning most progress on that front would be slightly delayed until he got around to using some ethical test subjects.

…Which Thera isn’t going to like either but I’ll actually need to tell her about it because I literally just promised and oh my god, I’m going to need to put literally everything I’ve got into breakfast tomorrow and… Yeah, I’m going to have to ask her to do something for me and I’m absolutely not going to escape her wrath for it. Ugh, the worst part is I’m totally going to deserve it too.

Okay, for now just focus on what you can test.

In the past, he’d managed to both fill himself with his sacrilege and spread it out around him and since he already knew he was capable of both he tested to see what changes there might be to his skill in it, leaving both his body and the room around him feeling thick with his power in a way that lingered even after he stopped, needing a conscious effort to clear it out unlike how it would simply disappear before he’d reached the third tier.

Both options he could easily imagine being useful against the gods if it were to come up but it was something else that caught his attention more as he felt some of it cling to the bands on his arms, leaving him to try loading them with his power and feeling it hold.

Almost like bestowal but it does seem to slowly be dissipating, just like the other two ways I used it. He analyzed. Still, as far as I can tell, loading it doesn’t cost me anything? Or at the very least, if it does the price is so low that I can’t even tell what attribute it might be pulling from. So any weapon I can get my hands on can officially become an anti-god weapon then, huh? Interesting, or at least it would be if I had any actual combat skills. I’ll have to experiment with using this with my magics but I should at least be able to apply this to marksmanship. God killing bullets, I’m sure something like that will come in handy. Besides that though-

Oh cool, looks like I’ve got my answer.

Switching to the part of himself that had been trying to discover exactly what realm access did, a discovery had been made in the form of a path, not one to any god he knew or had seen before but instead somewhere entirely new that, when traveled, brought a part of himself to a vast, empty space in a higher level of reality that he could feel in its entirety.

The instant he arrived he could instinctually tell it was his, a place carved out in a higher realm for his own use alone as he perceived what of it he could, diving deeper into what it meant.

While he’d never noticed any distinct boundaries to the realms he’d set foot in before he could tell his own was small compared to the rest of them but that wasn’t saying much. Half of a kilometer in all directions from him was his alone to control and with nobody to tell him no there, he began filling it up, actualizing things he wanted visuals to work on and bringing in more instances of himself too, utilizing the vertical space by creating giant buildings as a small town of Bens slowly came together, one main question on his total mind despite all he found himself doing with the space.

What exactly does it mean for a person who’s still technically mortal to have their own realm?

It was something he was sure would only cause more controversy, especially considering that it was a skill that could grow, but he tried not to let himself worry about it too much. Ultimately, it was a space to use, one that he could take advantage of constantly without having to worry about any of the gods getting tired of his presence, meaning it was the perfect place to forge ideas and even train a few skills too, his actualization being the prime one.

“And if I can move as fast as I can think up here then that one in particular is going to be getting a hell of a lot of practice done. Looks like I’m going to become a contender for another skill before I know it.”

ESOTERIC ACTUALIZATION LEVEL INCREASED

REALM ACCESS LEVEL INCREASED