CHAPTER 868

Once work was done at his factory he returned to the shop, making use of his warehouse and all of the clones he kept within as they started to move and make, leaving his true body to sit at the heart of it all and think.

Every second of the day he could feel a million different ideas forming in his head as different bits of knowledge were put together in a puzzle with no final form. There was so much to do and test and he needed to start somewhere, with part of that focus being directed first to a different bit of growth.

All of the parts of himself in his realm were actualizing up there but there was no reason not to do the same down below as well and he let different constructs flash in and out of existence as fast as he could think, creating what would look like a shifting blob to anyone with a standard thought speed as animals and structures and abstract shapes flashed in and out of existence, the goal he was feeling there clear.

As of a bit earlier that day, he’d become a contender for his esoteric actualization and that was something he could try to push beyond its limits. As far as he could see, it had no risk of merging into his connect or his enchanting if it somehow reached the third tier and it was something he could do on the side as he focused on his real work, but at a volume that would destroy its barrier to the third tier. It was a skill dependent on his mind and with the new shape of it, experience for it would come in almost endlessly, meaning acquiring the growth bonuses for it would be easily possible.

Which means I should consider taking the master actualizer job for my next run. He told himself. Although, I should have more than a few other new ones too, possibly some I can’t currently guess at. Really hope they get back to me about the setup soon.

While he did that though there were other tasks to work through and experiments to run, with Ben making something unlike anything else he’d created in the world until that point. A toy car, left to spin around the floor as it went, but what separated it from anything else that world held wasn’t the design but the power source. Using the information he’d acquired since coming to the world, what he’d built wasn’t a toy to be run with mana but instead chemistry, the reaction taking place with its batteries producing electricity.

For a result that was instantly worse than any of the base magic materials in the world. Sure, it ran just as fine as it would have if he’d constructed it with mythril and enchantments but that was only for then. Unlike magic materials which seemed to absorb and potentially even generate their own mana, a chemical reaction would run out, leaving them to die in the end and creating waste for that fact.

About as severe of a drawback as something could have in that world but not an overwhelming one. The vast majority of enchantments weren’t powered by a piece of mythril or mana crystal after all but by the user’s own store, filling whatever tool it was to power until it would run out and then needing to be topped up again. Even with all that Abrus seemed to endlessly produce, they were still rare enough for any common folk that left price as a prohibitive entry point. He himself could increase the overall flood farther with his materializers but a proper battery factory would be able to help plenty for so many items a person might not want to waste their mana on if they didn’t have to.

And it wasn’t like they’d have to necessarily become waste either. He was sure he could build a tool that would be able to break a chemical product into its base reactants again which could be a place where it would make sense for mythril to be used, either a household having that one mythril tool to in essence recharge their spent batteries or instead let them take them in to a central hub to be recharged, eliminating the need for then to turn to waste.

But batteries weren’t the only option. As much as he enjoyed using rainbow mana crystal, considering the amount of power it held he couldn’t deny how much of it was wasted on individual items but what about instead of that, any town or city were to have a central repository of it where the mana would flow to each home to be accessed through something akin to the electrical plugs of Earth, charging items with power for when they’d be needed and allowing them to be plugged in again when they weren’t? Such a thing would be just as sustainable, even if it would be a bit more work to remodel any buildings that were already around to take advantage of it.

“But then, how much do any of these ideas even matter?” He asked himself as he laid back, materializing a thin cylinder of white mana crystal as he did. “This is basically one of the first things I solved coming to the world, it just needs to be applied. Even if it would be expensive, everyone could have one or two mana batteries to insert into enchanted items if they’d only be made to hold them and then if one was in use, they could just use their own internal supply like they currently do for power. Building the crystal into an item has always been wasteful but… Well, I can worry about trying to change the way the planet sees magic materials in the future. For now, other things to try.”

Attempting to create a functional battery had been more of an application of his understanding of the world’s chemistry than anything else, using concepts he’d been taught and extrapolating from there to see if it was actually possible as a way of verifying his understanding and the rules of it he’d learned, with a different test coming next.

Materializing again, this time three items were made, one being both a receiver and a transmitter while the other two sat in his hands filling similar roles with different desired outcomes, two things he’d never thought he’d hold again as he looked at the two simple phones he’d created.

“And now for if it works,” He muttered as he pressed a button on one, getting no reaction from the other to tell him the call was being sent or received and left him to hang his head back. “Well, based on everything I know about the universe and how it functions, that should have worked, which means there’s either some part of physics I’ve got wrong or incomplete. Lame, I’ll need to think of a few more tests to have run then.”

Even if that hadn’t worked he was sure he could have successfully created something like a landline but given not only the invading demons but also the native life on the world, he doubted that such a thing would hold up for even a few days before something came to destroy it. He was sure he could make it possible on a small scale, having phone systems set up within any town or city but using them for worldwide communication would be a far bigger challenge.

“And if I wanted them to be functional for both terrestrial and aquatic races then that’s going to be even harder. Ugh, subterranean too I guess, why does it feel like I need to skip a couple major technological steps to make this work to the degree I want it? This really seems like it should be easier.”

“It seems so but this universe appears to have some annoying and hard to observe hurdles that are getting in the way of certain points of progress,” A voice beside him said to his rhetorical question, Quilith making an appearance that forced Ben to sit up.

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“Oh, hey, I wasn’t expecting to see you today.”

“Considering your rise to godhood, it was easy to decide that a proper congratulations needed to be made,” The alien said with a thin smile, dwarfed by the grin on Ben’s face.

“You all heard about that, yeah?”

“You have earned yourself more than a few fans on my world, the instant you started bleeding and your bones were breaking without rhyme or reason a large number of eyes started watching to see just what you’d done. I had faith, of course, but double godhood was more than even I’d expected.”

“And I’m going to let the fact that I’m being so heavily watched slide for now since I’ve at least gotten some privacy from the gods. Yeah, sacrilege and my mind have both grown but is that really what you’re here for?”

“I suppose a part of it is out of curiosity about the scale of the change you’ve gone through, though with neither being particularly visual skills it seems like it will be hard to judge.”

“Not quite, this has led to one pretty significant change in me that I’m working to verify I’m right about. I’ve decoded the summoning spell in its entirety.”

The grey blinked at him. “Come again?”

“I need to verify at least some of it through testing and I’m having my people run some experiments to see if they arrive at the results I’ve predicted but so long as they do, I’ll instantly be able to cut away some pretty large swaths of the spell we wouldn’t need,” He said with a shrug. “From there it’s just improvements which is going to be harder but I’m already working my way through. For the longest time, I’d thought the summoning spell was a masterpiece and I suppose it still is, but it’s not perfect. By taking some of the components and applying them to items then we’ll be able to cut some of the load on faith that the gods would have had to deal with and then I can apply the enchanting modifier to strengthen it in a way that its original creators hadn’t seemed to have discovered. Then, while I can start trying to figure out better configurations of modifiers to improve the base design, I’m also thinking about how I might go about discovering new modifiers that are either lost since I only have the two spells to steal them from or else might not have been discovered by its makers in the first place which, well, let me say that’s what I’m doing so I can feel a little smug but for now I’ll show you my work.”

A thick wall of papers covered in notes appeared, floating at his back for the grey to see and record with as much information as possible provided through words and diagrams to make up for the fact that they couldn’t view the mana structure itself as they observed that reality, leaving Quilith at a loss for words as Ben went on.

“As things stand, this isn’t enough for the gods of this world to save all of you in your totality but I’m sure that if in the next few weeks and months we’ll see some pretty massive improvements but honestly, even with just this I think you’ll be able to make it work if you wanted to go to a different god in the universe if you’d found any you think are worth approaching yet and they’d be able to take a healthy chunk of your race. Hell, even if it would mean your people would be spread out across different planets across the universe, it’s not like you couldn’t do it a few times until you managed to save everyone, even if you would be separated for it but still, I’d say this is good progress.”

“Progress?” Quilith said as he stared at all of the work being presented, his planet already getting to work analyzing it. “Ben, this is hope.”

“Yeah, well, if you guys do end up landing on this planet, make sure you remember this when you’re picking out gods to worship,” He laughed. “Ideally, I’ll see out my full lifespan so I don’t know how many of you would still be left by that point after being brought over but still, maybe make sure any children and grandchildren born here remember to give the great god Ben the occasional prayer. Never too early to start gathering believers as I understand it.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” He told him, far more seriously than Ben expected. “I meant it when I’d said you have fans. Your efforts are no secret to my kind, Ben, and no matter how you’re viewed on this planet, on mine you’re a hero.”

“Gosh, you’re going to make me blush.”

“I’m being serious. The efforts you’ve been putting forth to us haven’t been going unnoticed and with that attention, the work you’ve been putting to this world is being seen as well. If this world doesn’t fall and my people are able to join it, you can expect faith from a good portion of them.”

“...Well, thanks,” He said, a bit more seriously. “That’s kind of nice to hear compared to what I get from some of the gods of this world. Uh, is there anything else I can do for you while you’ve stopped by then?”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” Quilith asked back. “You’ve worked your way through most of the information we’ve gathered from this universe but I can provide you with all we’ve learned since our last meeting.”

“...Quilith, am I allowed to be a little greedy?” Ben asked, all of the clones he was working through stopping their tasks to focus on the alien, getting a nod for the question.

“You say you’ve given us a way out. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s more than we’d had before. If it’s in my power then ask for as much as you want, I’ll do my best to see it done.”

“Okay, thanks. So here’s the thing, with the way my mind has changed… I only have so much information in my head to work through and while it seems like the parts of my thoughts I assign to more basic problem solving and learning have become immune to boredom, I’m still noticing a, shall we say, suboptimal lack of stimulation and the easiest way I can see to fix that is to learn more.”

“I’m not sure how much I can assist with that, unfortunately,” Quilith said with a frown, disappointed to get a request he might not be able to help. “With what you’ve given us, I’m sure I can have more resources freed up to enhance our search of your reality but even then, I doubt I’d be able to get more than you’d be able to take in in a single evening of time.”

“I know, but you actually have far more than that, don’t you?” Ben asked. “You have the multiverse, information on all of the realities you’ve been observing since you first developed the power to do so and all of the information within your reality as well and to be honest, I want it all. Every piece of information and knowledge and story and myth and things I might not even be capable of understanding, I want to take it all in and see what’s there.”

“Is there something you’re hoping to find?”

“Maybe,” He shrugged. “I’m sure your own people have been looking into it some yourselves but now that you’ve had the existence of souls confirmed, I’ll admit to being interested in seeing if any places in the multiverse seem to have information on them that line up with my own observations and then if they’d have more information that I don’t have but just as big of a part of it is knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Maybe it will all be useless to me but if I don’t look I’ll never know.”

“While I’m not sure how the speeds you observe the universe have changed with your awakening, I can tell you that the limiting factor is going to become the speeds we can transmit it to you,” The grey pointed out. “And I can’t express enough, our observational data is vast. The majority of it is run by algorithms that observe, collect, and categorize information while marking specific points of interest for my people to personally study in detail later and we’ve been doing it for millennia. If it were all to be printed in books, the library it would make would cover your world a dozen times over at the very least.”

“And I can dedicate myself to absorbing it still,” Ben nodded. “I’m not limited by my number of eyes as you can see and I can optimize that even further in the future. All I need is to know if you guys will do it.”

“If that’s what you’re requesting then we will, you’ll get no argument.”

“Fantastic and in that case, no time like the present,” He told him, Quilith expecting as much as screens filled the room, each flashing with information at the highest speeds they could yet still left as a crawl before Ben’s various eyes. It wasn’t like he was getting information from the whole of the multiverse, he didn’t even know how big it could even be if it wasn’t just outright endless but to be able to get some peeks into a million different realities could be nothing if not exciting, giving him new bits of stimulation to think on in the endless time that filled his head.