A Solitary God In A Dark Multiverse 140 Manipulations

While in the presence of my cultists I allowed my mind to wander and recalled the notification I received that informed me of the variety of new powers I received as a consequence of gaining the second tier of influence over knowledge. It was a bit of a longer one, but it wasn't hugely verbose.

[New Knowledge Domain Primary Pa.s.sive Powers:

Confession: This pa.s.sive power synergizes the knowledge domain and a number of subdomains. It allows you to learn secrets from targets by gazing into their eyes while they are in pain.

Corrupting Whispers: You can share knowledge with a target in the form of a sinister whisper that inspires them to behave maliciously and slowly turns their souls towards evil.

Dark Destiny: This power takes from the domains of evil and fate as well as the knowledge domain. It allows you to inspire evil people by infusing them with knowledge of their possible futures. This power is addictive and corruptive as it shows someone at the height of their power and evil. Using it on someone is an evil act that can easily make someone dependent on you. Currently alignment-locked.

Eldritch Secrets: By synergizing the powers of the eldritch and knowledge domains you gain the power to whisper maddening secrets into the minds that sap their sanity while giving them either conscious or unconscious knowledge of horrifying abominations.

Faith Awareness: Your domain-sense and ties to the domain of faith and knowledge have increased in potency to the point that you can sense the actions of your cults, especially sacrifices, and gain notifications pertaining to meaningful actions undertaken by your worshipers. This power is hyper-sensitive to sacrifices, but it is also sensitive to rituals and the creation and celebration of holy-days devoted to you.

Heroic Vision: This power takes from the domains of goodness and fate as well as the knowledge domain. It allows you to inspire good people by infusing them with knowledge of their possible future. This power strengthens the mind and resolve of the one being affected by it. Currently alignment-locked.

Memory Receiver: If a target is willing to share their memories with you, you can create copies of their memories and automatically absorb and experience them as if you lived through them yourself. You can persuade targets to share their memories with you in a number of ways, but you must be given explicit permission to select the memories at your current level of power and influence over memories.

Language Sharing: You gain true mastery over all languages, which differs from the universal language you've been speaking to date. This power also allows you to bestow anyone with the ability to speak any mortal language, but not with the ability to speak the languages of extraplanars.

Tactile Teaching: You can share knowledge via touch. For you "touch" isn't limited to physically touching someone either. If you are in the same body of shadows as someone you can "touch" them, which is especially potent underground. At the moment you can't share knowledge related to the fact that you are a higher being, but as you gain greater influence over the domain of faith this restriction will ease and eventually be lifted altogether.

New Knowledge Domain Active Power:

Cla.s.s Manipulation: This synergistic power manipulates the soul, knowledge, and fate domains. With it, you can forcibly alter someone's cla.s.s level, or even delete a person's cla.s.s altogether once per week. This power is a potentially life-changing one depending on the circ.u.mstances under which it's used. Someone's cla.s.s grants them knowledge, alters their souls, and more often than not alters their fate.]

I was also subconsciously aware of various new abilities that had emerged within me as a consequence of my increased powers over knowledge. The powers I had just remembered were all abilities that were marked as primarily knowledge-based, rather than every single power that I had just gained access too.

These powers were all handy ones and I had been having fun using them to alter Torus in a variety of creative ways.

________________________________________________

Nearly a month has pa.s.sed since I left my tower. That said I did not idly sit by in my tower, growing lazy and complacent during that time. The overwhelming majority of my powers had no range constraints, so long as I had a means of accurately targeting wherever I wanted to hit. And thanks to my powers over the domain of stars, I possessed the perfect power to aim precisely.

My "Stellar Awareness" ability was my greatest detection-based ability. Thanks to it I essentially had no limited range on my abilities. And I had been using it, indirectly, very regularly over the last few weeks. Over the course of the last month, no one in the world had starved to death. Nor did they did from illnesses.

This irrevocably transformed the world. A world without starvation and illness was, as I had learned, one rife with chances to create social change.

I started off slow and experimental. One thing I was fond of doing was picking and choosing people to groom into followers of mine. I gained druidic followers and practiced my agricultural abilities by initially restricting my usage of my powers to farmers and manipulating their lives in a number of ways.

In the beginning, I was careful and I used things like "Abundance Manipulation", a power I had successfully transformed into a pa.s.sive power, subtly. I increased a harvest noticeably, but only to the extent that the affected farmers only doubted their initial counts rather than wonder if something supernatural was at play. But then I began to target dreams.

I was quite fond of infesting the dreams of farmers. By doing so I was able to introduce myself to the farmers and see if they would worship me as a G.o.d of fertility, the earth, and agriculture. Oftentimes I paired this inquiry with a promise to demonstrate my powers the next day. If they were interested I would cause their fields to overflow with crops while they slept and grant them the druid cla.s.s which invariably ensured they would worship me if nothing else as a surefire route to power and security.

Farmers who willingly agreed to worship me would get to witness their farms blossoming to life. Animals and crops alike would grow in greater numbers than ever before, and I would even bless them with things like fruits of life; crops that would actually increase their lifespan, and sapient animal companions. In some cases, I would even create dryads and alraunes for them to befriend and fall in love with.

If they were hesitant I would destroy their fields, activating the famine part of the agriculture subdomain, which was its original form. I would then plague them with nightmares and restless sleep until they begged me to stop. I would only grant them a reprieve if they sacrificed an animal to me and then vowed to serve me.

Farmers who had to be coerced into serving me would still experience significant boons to their productivity, but that was it. I wasn't about to waste time and powers like my "Fruit of life and fruit of knowledge", ones that were still only a few times an hour, on farmers who wouldn't have willingly worshiped me. In fact I had devised a special punishment for them that would only bear fruits months from now.

Any farmer who resisted my overtures, even those who gave it without much struggle was a victim of an unusually cruel form of revenge. Over the course of the last month I have gained a few thousand incubi and succubi servants. I had gained many of them as part of a strategy to create half-demons and I created a special test as a way to test members of my new tiny legion of seductive s.e.x-demons.

Whenever a Torunian farmer resisted me I selected a new member of my legion of demons and ordered them to exact an act of painful revenge. The selected servant was sent out to seduce the wives of the farmers and impregnate them with a half-demon. So far this special form of revenge has been levied against thousands of farmers and I've gained thousands of loyal incubi servants as a result of it. In the months to come it'll result in the creation of thousands of half-demons.

Succubi were sent out to seduce the sons and daughters of the farmers, something which I did partially to give my armies busywork and also to begin to cement my role as a deity of fertility by playing a direct role in the creation of the next generation of farmers and half-demons. Many of my succubi servants were currently pregnant, including Lilim, the very first succubi I had ever summoned who was currently pregnant following a tryst with Ygaynth and divine intervention on my part. And many of my incubi servants were fathers-to-be

Farmers were just one of the groups of people that I began to recruit to my side over the course of the last few weeks. That said, I value them and so I absolutely went out of my way to recruit as many of them as I could, happily rewarding those of them wise enough to willingly join me.

________________________________________________

Returning to the present, I spent a moment studying Ava. The dwarf was a curious creature, even though I knew everything about her. She was the first mortal to grant me all of her memories. As a result of that, I knew more about her than I knew about almost anyone else.

She spent her early childhood in a dwarven community not far from where Sombra was first summoned to Torus. It was one of several dwarven communities destroyed by the dark elves of Aronms and the other dark-elven city beneath Puerto Rico. Her childhood was a mundane, pleasant one. It was when her community was destroyed by the dark-elves I now ruled over that her life began to take a darker turn.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked the strange creature. She turned to me and I watched as a number of emotions washed over her face in rapid succession. I saw conflict, hatred, dissatisfaction, and more rapidly shift her facial expression until her face was a hard mask of hate and other negative emotions. She was silent for a moment longer before she finally spoke.

"I was thinking about my sister." She confessed, which was rather unsurprising. Ava's gradual descent into the darkness that eventually transformed her into a "dark dwarf" was a result of her hatred of her sister, the dwarf named Aoife.

Over the course of the last month, I had occasionally thought about Aoife myself. She was a skilled miner and one of the leaders of the underground town of Oscuridad. Oscuridad was a town I had created days after I first came to life, which was currently populated by a healthy number of freed slaves as well as a handful of the oldest members of the Swarm, an intelligent collective of evolved ants, bees, and wasps, I had elevated from a base existence into an intelligent and complex theocratic civilization.

"Master... Is there a way I can convince you to give me the power and permission needed to exact my revenge against my sister?" Ava asked, and in a move of uncharacteristic bravery locked eyes with me. There was a look of anger and bitter hatred shimmering in her gaze as she thought about her sister.

I recognized that the woman in front of me was possessed by a fierce hatred for her sister. The hatred she felt for her sister was one of the most intense emotions I had heard felt in my entire life, and I had experienced it every bit as savagely as she did thanks to my newfound powers over memories. She was willing to fearlessly bargain with me, a creature she knew to be a powerful and thoroughly evil being if it meant she could exact her revenge. I almost admired the depths of the emotions she felt towards her sister.

As I pondered what to tell her, I began to remember the moments in Ava's life that led her to have such an obsessive hatred for a family member. They were moments that had utterly transformed the dark dwarf's life and led her to her current circ.u.mstances in very real ways.