Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube

Ogilt replaced the corpses Ben had made with fresh demons for Ben to look at their souls, letting any that held skills that might make them difficult prisoners feel the full force of his mind as he continued his experiments, seeing just what a delicate touch was needed.

He knew souls could be heavily injured without killing them, but what he had been trying was something deeper, with the attempts being too much for any living thing. It wasn’t the damage to the souls themselves killing his test subjects, but the extent of the pain it inflicted being too much for a mortal mind to bear, turning his testing facility into a slaughterhouse by the time he finally managed to figure out how to interact with their deepest components in a way that wouldn’t kill the demons he was working on.

But even that turned into more testing in and of itself. Just because they started to live, didn’t mean it had become a painless process and when there was a chance he’d want to use whatever he learned on the souls of people he knew and cared about, it became far more important that he master it in a way that would at least be tolerable, leaving him to continue to fiddle around and learn what actions would provoke what reactions, leaving more bodies to rot in the process until he was finally somewhat satisfied.

His ability to open up a soul to the extent he wanted to still wasn’t perfect, the pain it placed the demon test subjects under was agonizing, but it was bearable, and seemed to continue to be bearable once he restored it to its original condition, or at least as close to such as he could get. He’d still need to test to see how long it would take the pain to go away, but it was at least at a point where he could move on with some of his other experiments as he started rearranging the base components of the demon’s souls, shuffling them, twisting them, or even outright removing them to try to gain a deeper understand of what would happen, finding results similar to what earlier testing on some of his artificial souls had shown.

When it came to modifying souls, he could do things to existing ones that would be impossible for him to materialize, telling him that there had to be some rule about how a soul could come into existence but, once it had, they became incredibly stable, able to maintain their existence through even the majority of modifications he’d attempted and allowed him to conduct even more tests as dozens of modifications were made, all building up to the one particular one that took his breath away when he felt it succeed.

“Holy shit,” he muttered, shocked enough that it had worked, even when he had no reason to doubt it. It was something Myriad had told him the gods could accomplish long ago, back in the heights of their power, but was now lost to them, requiring far more faith than they could afford to spend, but he’d done the same thing through mana alone. Even if it was only by a single point, Ben had just raised the demon’s water affinity.

With that one point driving his next round of testing, leading to all sorts of other results. He could grow everything, any affinity and any resistance, but doing it by any more than one point immediately caused enough pain to kill the target, and no further experimentation revealed a way to lower it. That didn’t matter though; he felt like he’d just found a way to finally beat the limits of his soul.

He continued on, trying to find a way to lower the pain threshold but continued to fail, meaning that one point seemed to be the limit for how much any affinity or resistance could be grown at once, but that didn’t mean it would continue to be that way so, operating on the assumption that he might be able to do it again once they recovered from the change, Ben took a dozen of his modified test subjects and put them all into their own personal spatial prisons with enough food and water to keep them alive in the new cramped space they’d be kept while a time effect took place, speeding up reality within instead of slowing it down like in any of his rings to help speed up the healing process as best he could.

It wouldn’t be a comfortable experience for any of them, but he didn’t need it to be. They would be alive and, with his current level of skill combined with the minuscule volume of internal space he was speeding up, they would experience five days for every one of real time. He could check on them later to see the rate the pain they were under was weakening and whether it would be viable to continue improving their affinities and resistances, or if that area of testing would actually be a dead end.

“And while I’m on it, in the future I should see how I can enchant with my planar manipulation to see how I can make it pair with space magic enchantments, but… later project. I’ve confirmed the most important thing: that I’m not locked into the limits of my soul. Now to test to confirm that everyone else really does have a way better option than I do.”

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After all, despite what he’d just discovered, he’d long known that there was another way a person could improve their affinities and resistances, which he had already unfortunately blocked himself out of so, needing to confirm he was right, now that he was at least somewhat satisfied that a path still existed for him, Ben walked over to look at his next test subject before pulling all of the mana he could from his coat, overfilling his soul for what he had to create.

A new soul was made, the cost of it being tens of millions of points of mana rather than a fraction of one, materialized through the demon’s soul like he’d done the world over, but with the nature of it different as he looked at the results and sighed.

Yep, that worked, which means I really messed up by modifying my soul twice already.

In his earliest tests of soul modification, Ben had found that more than two modifications collapsed the minds of those he experimented on if done too quickly, or caused such a deep level of suffering that he wasn’t actually confident that even a soul mage could help treat it in the timeframe they had left, and while there was a chance that the consequences of that would be less severe on either a soul that had fully adapted to those changes, or else one like his own that had pulled in those changes during one of his third tier awakenings, there weren’t many good ways to test it. His own soul had changed too much, and carelessly trying something like that was risking crippling himself in a time he couldn’t waste trying to fix it.

But that didn’t change the temptation. The demon before him, before being modified, had air and time affinities in the high-twenties while the rest of them, along with its resistances, had been below ten. After modification, though, all of them were now sitting at values of thirty-two.

It was something he’d learned in his earliest tests of soulcraft. Now that he had a third tier ability to create souls, some of his previous limits in that regard had been removed, namely, his previous inability to create anything with affinities or resistances, but the trade off was that every single point led to a massive increase in the mana cost, where overfilling his soul and materializing with tens of millions of points of mana still left him creating a soul with values that were only passing thirty across the board. By all accounts, that did mean that he’d produced an incredible soul by mortal standards, something that anyone who held it could consider themselves outright blessed to possess, but still felt far below what the cost of making it had been.

Maybe when I’m a god one day and I can use faith, I’ll have an easier time with it then, he sighed. Doesn’t matter. I verified what I’d already seen in Foast’s soul. When a new one with better properties is merged into the original, the superior properties replace the inferior ones. I can now give everyone across the world the potential to become an archmage, or surprisingly good resistances if I don’t measure them against what I already have, which is pretty cool except for the part where that’s kind of useless currently.

Less than two months until the next wave, what most of the world was praying would be the last. There was no point in granting anyone new affinities when there was no time to learn new magics in a way that could possibly make a difference. Resistances could have value, as could raising affinities for anyone who already had a high level in a given magic, but that didn’t matter either. Ben had been able to modify billions of souls across the planet by that point specifically because each soul had cost him fractions of a point of mana to make. Souls with high affinities or resistances, though? He’d never be able to give such things to everyone, even if he lowered things a bit or made sure to constantly use his coat. The cost would be too much, and he’d be stuck till the very end of the world doing it.

But I can do this for people I care about, he told himself. At least that much is manageable, and depending on who I do it for, it could have some pretty significant results too. Okay, something to worry about later. I just had two significant bits of progress and discovery; time to see if there’s any more I can explore.

He continued on with his tests, exploring other paths of altering a living soul, with some working and others not, while most of it simply ended in demonic howls filling the untamed lands. He’d seen how much essence he could strip from a soul and he’d seen that he could double the amount of it, both among his countless tests, but while he would have to take some time to consider some of his results, he was running out of things to be explored, even with one rather large exception left.

Their skills.

Ben had avoided touching them; just thinking about it brought back his feelings about that aspect of the power he now held. He could steal people's effort, and that fact still disgusted him, but while he insisted to himself that he wouldn’t take advantage of that part of his power, that didn’t mean he could simply avoid experimenting with how skills interacted with souls at large, leaving a more hesitant round of testing to end things as he made use of the demons, not concerning himself about how many of them expired as he did.