A Solitary God In A Dark Multiverse - 195 A Natural State

A lone office worker sat in a solitary chair at the top of his office building. In front of him was a small table for one, and on that table was a simple yet healthy lunch. It consisted of a sandwich which the man had taken a bite out of, an energy drink designed to give him the strength and energy needed to get through a boring meeting he had in half an hour, and an apple that he had yet to bite into.

The office worker stared blankly at the sandwich in front of him. The truth was that he had no real desire to bite into it. Nor did he have any particular desire to finish the rest of his lunch. And that was indicative of how he felt towards office life in general. He was sick and tired of working at his cubicle. A small part of him wanted to claim to feel unwell and leave the office early. He wouldn’t, he was far too timid to do such a rebellious thing, but he wanted too and that feeling would nag and distract him.

Had he been focused, he might have heard the first curious murmurs from others who were enjoying their lunches atop their place of employment and who happened to be closer to the edge of the building’s rooftop seating area. One of them murmured words of concern and the other murmured words of awe, as they stared at something unusual happening on the city’s streets. Or rather something happening to the city’s streets.

“Should we… go down there?” One of them asked, looking at the woman who sat across from him. Her eyes were filled with awe at the sight, having never seen anything quite like it. It took her a second but she managed to turn her gaze towards him and asked a simple question.

“Why? Do you want to see the sinkhole up close?” She asked. Her question stupified her coworker who stared at her blankly for a second. He was from the countryside, where sinkholes could easily swallow up buildings and roads. She was from the city, this city specifically, and wasn’t afraid of sinkholes but rather quite fond of them.

She liked infrastructure and an open sinkhole gave her a chance to look at sewers with a clarity, level of detail, and rarity that kept her happy to see them. Plus, no sinkhole had hurt anyone in this city in fifty years. She had no way of knowing the true cause of this particular sinkhole, nor did she know how much grief it would cause.

It was because she was so high above the sinkhole that she couldn’t notice something odd about it. This sinkhole didn’t show anyone who peered into its umbral depths a sewer, but rather a deep and seemingly bottomless hole.

It was at that moment that the gases trapped within the sinkhole would explode. The explosion was a powerful one, sending flames from near the bottom of the sinkhole up and out of it, lighting up the buildings that surrounded the sinkhole, dramatically heating up the air around the pit, and shattering windows of every building for almost half a kilometer around the cavernous pit.

Their third coworker, the solitary individual who had been eating by himself was nearer the center of the roof and had been blown clean off of the building. He was currently falling to what would be his death, his mind filled with regrets about how little charge he took of his life before it ended, and questions about whatever the hells was going on.

None of the three of them knew the true cause of the destruction that was about to be wrought on their planet and of them the two men had had the least terrible fates. They either had died, or would die, and quickly. Of them only the lone female would survive today, but not unchanged.

The planet was under attack. It was under attack by a strange, alien entity with goals that would have made no sense to its victims. And it didn’t care at all that these humans didn’t understand its goals. It was here for one purpose and one purpose alone: to complete a quest that demanded that it destroy the lone humanoid civilization that had arisen on this planet.

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[Blacksmithing subdomain details:

The subdomain of blacksmithing is a creation subdomain that governs the forge. It is a potent subdomain that comes with the power to artificially and instantly create armor, weapons, and other things made of metal with ease.

This subdomain is the one that historically most true artifact creators used in the creation of their true artifacts. It is a potent subdomain that is tied to civilization, war, life, death, art, fate, and other impressive subdomains and domains. If it’s used well it can easily create weapons that can cut through islands and armor that can withstand nuclear bombs. Being a god of the forge is no small feat, and to gain more power over this subdomain utilize its powers.

Blacksmithing subdomain passive abilities:

Alteration application: With this power you can apply alterations to items even as you create them! This handy ability allows you to create all manner of enhanced weaponry and armor with ease.

Aura: With this subdomain’s aura you become immune to attacks made from non-magical metal. Be it a bullet, a sword, a spear, an arrow, so long as this aura is active you are immune to attacks that rely on metals. You also generate an aura that inspires creativity in forging and causes every item forged in your presence to be forged as expertly as possible by the forger. This allows apprentice blacksmiths to forge expert weaponry and armor and allows masters to smith noteworthy weapons and armor.

Automatic creation: Thanks to the influence you have over the subdomain of alchemy, and the creation domain, as well as this subdomain, you’ve gained the power to automatically craft items anywhere you wish, even without a forge. These items, due to your current low influence over the blacksmithing subdomain, cannot be artifacts but they can be true and real weapons and armor. You can automatically create armor made of adamantine, and swords made from gold, and an unlimited number of them. With this you can outfit armies with ease!

Improve: You can take a forged item, be it a piece of armor or a blade, and improve it to its optimum state. This ability also allows you to repair a damaged item, such as a shattered blade or a piece of armor that has a dent in it from a particularly forceful blow.

Magnetism mastery: This is a synergistic power that owes itself to the intersections of the domain of physics, the subdomain of earth, and the blacksmithing subdomain. With it you gain the power to attract or repulse things that have magnetic materials inside of them and manipulate them in other ways as well.

Metal manipulation: You can manipulate metals, both to aid in the creation of new items through forging and also in a number of other ways. With this power you can use metal to attack enemies, and even unmake objects made of metal. You can also, of course, take on forms made of metal.

Blacksmithing subdomain active powers:

There are none at this level of influence.

Blacksmithing blessing and curse details:

By blessing a person with this subdomain you can greatly improve their smithing abilities. By cursing someone with it you do the opposite. By blessing an object with it you can greatly improve the object’s quality and longetivity. And by cursing an object with it you can greatly reduce the object’s quality and longetivity, even breaking something on the verge of breaking outright.]

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The planet named Ryths, the world Althos had decided to target to complete one of the quests he had acquired, was a small planet in a galaxy far from the galaxy that housed Htrae. It was further still from the galaxy that Torus a part of. It stood was one of three planets in its solar system, and Althos, for the time being anyway, was uniquely focused on it.

To date the god’s odd sense of morality, specifically his disdain for meaningless violence and destruction, had tended to keep him reined in. This was perhaps the one constant when it came to his morality, which aside from this was wildly fluid. It was because of this that the god hadn’t been fully aware of just how destructive his powers could be. On the day that he attacked Ryths, that changed forever.

High above the clouds, only his ability to peer past things which was itself one of the few powers he had constructed and requested himself, allowed him to study the state of the world he found himself floating above. He had activated his powers minutes ago, and in doing so had begun a truly savage assault on the world below.

He studied the world below him with intense interest. And what he saw was quite chaotic.

Beneath him, nature in all of its forms rejected the piddling civilization that the humans who inhabited this world had built. He watched with a curious fascination as the planet itself abruptly seemed to turn against the civilization of the planet’s most humanoid inhabitants. He wanted to unleash his true powers over nature without defaulting to unleashing volcanic eruptions, and as he studied the scene below him he realized that was absolutely a wise decision.

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Over the course of but a few minutes, entire cities built on plains collapsed into the planet, as the world itself opened up to shallow them. And that was only one possible fate that befell cities inhabited by this world’s particular form of humanity.

Other cities were flooded by oceans or even nearby lakes and rivers. In some cases the sizes of the rivers and lakes appeared to have increased exponentially just before the flooding happened, and swept away entire houses.

Some cities were destroyed by gigantic pillars of flame. These towers of fire came from either underground, the planet splitting open to expel these gouts of flames like some sort of impossibly gigantic dragon, or seemingly from somewhere above the clouds, descending on the tallest buildings and illuminating the sky for dozens of kilometers.

A few cities were buffeted by winds so powerful and so impossibly fast that they lifted entire houses as if they were balloons. Tornadoes over twenty kilometers in length and hurricanes with winds capable of moving over seven hundred kilometers per hour flattened entire cities, or redistributed the contents of cities across hundreds of kilometers, spreading chunks of buildings into forests and oceans or even mountains and deserts.

Some cities were destroyed by vast thunderstorms, where each burst of lightning was so powerful that they melted holes into the buildings they struck. This was the first time the god had ever seen his powers create thunderclouds and thunder and lightning, but this was just one example of his power growing.

All of this was just the fate of cities, and all of the cities were lucky. Cities were destroyed in moments, towns were not.

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A quiet miner flashed the lights of his helmet on the second after he swore he noticed a cloud of spores begin to gather in front of him, seemingly out of nowhere in the darkened cavern. He was quick and dexterous as he flicked the lights on, and was shocked when he confirmed that deep in the cave there was a mist-like cloud of spores the likes of which he had never seen in front of him.

The poor miner made the mistake of audibly gasping the second the lights illuminated the cave enough for him to fully make out the spores. And that mistake allowed a few dozen of the spores, which were beginning to surround him, to seep into his throat and seal his fate.

The spores were coming from fungi that, unbeknownst to him, were growing abnormally fast on the ceiling of the cave. Aside from the part of the cave that was visible from the outside, the cave, which was hundreds of meters long and entire kilometers deep, was filled with these fungi, especially deeper in the cave. And each spore these fungi released was a dangerous, mind, and body-altering menace to any sort of existing humanoid civilization.

For the first time ever Althos was unleashing his full fungal powers. He had quietly contented himself with destroying this world when he chose it, and so he didn’t feel bad finally allowing the fungal subdomain to “make some friends” as it often said it wanted too. These spores were the sort of spores that transformed those they infested into “friends” of the fungal subdomain.

The miner immediately began to feel the potent effects of the spores as they slid down his throat and began to cover and clog his lungs. The reason they did that was to block oxygen intake and to force the man to take deeper breaths and begin to hyperventilate, which would in turn cause him to swallow more spores.

In a matter of moments, the man’s insides were riddled with spores. At this point, he collapsed and began to undergo a startling transformation as the spores began to aggressively grow within him. He violently convulsed as his body fought a failing battle against the foreign, fungal invaders. Hyphae and mycelium began to feast on his unnecessary organs and spread through the human-being in minutes, swiftly transforming him into a fungal-entity who was in essence a colony of mycelium in the shambling, unsettling, guise of a human.

As the mycelium crept through the man’s body the man himself felt horrifying pain and the last conscious action he’d ever take of his own volition was to close his eyes. Within him the invasive mycelium fused with the man’s muscles, wrapped around bones, and crushed organs. The man desperately wished for the blissfulness of unconsciousness or even death, but a consequence of the true nature and source of the fungi being Althos was that the spores deprived their victims of reprieve from pain. Instead they forcibly kept their victims conscious as they took over their bodies.

Eventually, after perhaps ten minutes, the body of the miner stopped convulsing. The body was eerily still for a moment. And then his eyes abruptly opened, each and every motion controlled by the sentient and vicious mycelium that now piloted his body. His eyes were bloodshot and his eyeballs themselves moved around frantically, under the control of the mycelium that now possessed the rest of his body as well but utterly unnecessarily to the odd fungi. He was but one victim of the god’s thousands of patches of fungi throughout the planet. He got up and began to slowly walk towards the exit of the cave he had been mining in.

Throughout the planet thousands of creatures, human and animal alike fell victim to the spores. The god mutated each and every mushroom and spore-dispensing lifeform on the planet’s surface or in its depths to spray his parasitic spores and due to that was able to convert countless individuals into his fungoid servants.

Victims of this vile plot were transformed into one of the more aggressive victims of his spores that he could create, the monstrous and physically powerful fungal-zombies. These creatures were physically enhanced by the spores and they were cursed with an impossibly powerful urge to bite anyone who wasn’t Althos and who wasn’t infested with his parasitic spores. They were members of a carrier-class of parasitically-infested creatures.

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Thousands of small towns were swiftly plunged into anarchy due to the powers of the god’s dark spores. Those who fell victim to the dark powers of the spores were immediately turned into what were essentially vectors for a horrifying infection, and they immediately turned on any organic, non-plant or non-fungal lifeforms and attempted to bite them. And what’s worse is that for all of the simplicity of these terrifying creatures they were efficient.

For a few minutes, Althos turned his mind away from the annihilation of a few major cities and turned his head to look at a small town. This small town was especially unlucky, and not because Althos turned to look at it. Surprisingly, the quiet god was a neutral observer. He didn’t intervene to speed the destruction of the town, or step in to save it.

The reason for the town’s misfortune was that the town was built next to a small cave that housed a colony of bats. This cave, like many others, was one that swiftly became a home for thousands of spore-releasing fungi, and the bats were the first but not the last victims of that. After being transformed into fungoid terrors, the bats fled the cave in search of victims and descended upon the town in a frenzy.

Althos watched, an amused grin on his face, as his servants flew through streets and then into buildings in search of humans to spread their spores into. Whenever they came across humans or across other animals, they stopped for a single second and bit them just once, before resuming their wicked flight in search of more victims. The person or animal who was bit underwent the exact same transformation they had, just a more slow one. A single spore was enough, but those who only got bit by a single spore underwent a much more slow transformation.

The bat swarm swept over the town in minutes and the once tiny example of civilization was brought to a devastating and terrifying end as the last of its seven hundred and fifty human inhabitants were caught and bitten by one of the bats. Some of the bats died, the humans were initially slow to react but when they learned what the bats were after they stopped hesitating, but the number in the swarm had been in the tens of thousands. It was while the last human, a girl no older than seven, was being bitten that the very first humans arose as fungal terrors, unified in their purpose of serving the lord of fungi by spreading his spores into as many non-fungal lifeforms as possible.

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The spores had powerful effects on the mind. They swiftly took over the brains and minds of any and all lifeforms they infected, and connected them to other spores, other victims of spores, and to the fungal subdomain, as well as the quiet god of fungi himself.

The spores, once in a brain and controlling a body, sought to serve their lord. And at first they would do that by seeking out others to infect and to convert into creatures like themselves. This mission drove them, but each of them was constantly listening, constantly waiting, for an order from their god.

One of the worst aspects of the fungoid monsters was that they were intelligent. Once the monsters had finished spreading through and infecting each animal and person in the town, the humans who were infested didn’t stay still and they didn’t try and physically run to the next town like zombies might. Instead, some of them would calmly go to the cars they had once used in their old lives. They would enter and then start those vehicles, and they would silently wait for their cars to fill up with people. Once their vehicles were filled up they would drive out of the town and spread out in search of new victims to offer to their lord.

Others, were even more clever and were commanded by the subdomain of fungi to walk to the local graveyard. Upon arriving those ones were ordered to go and begin to dig up graves. This was because parasitic spores were potent enough that through Althos’ affinity with the dead, they could infest corpses of all sorts.

The zombie-like creatures in the graveyard would begin to dig up coffins, either with tools like shovels or by hand. And when they succeeded in retrieving the object of their desires they would greedily and wrathfully smash into the coffins until they burst open and the creatures could infect the corpses laying within them. The victims of the fungal spores would then spit onto and bite the corpses they had retrieved, and in doing so cause the corpse to begin to undergo a transformation that was eerily similar to the ones they themselves had just finished undergoing.

The more Althos watched these creatures, the more he liked them. The one mutation he bestowed upon them was one that both made them capable of photosynthesis and also freed them from thirst. He didn’t intend to let them die of natural causes. And he gave the bat swarm a special reward, in the form of transforming them into dire bats, their roughly bear-sized evolved forms. Unsurprisingly they retained their fungoid status, but were now terrifyingly massive and capable of sustaining far more damage they could have before.

It wasn’t long before the god received a single, longer notification that caused him to grin wildly after receiving hundreds of thousands of lesser, domain-based ones that were focused on the planet of Rthys. The longer notification was one that well and truly made him happy.

As he received it, he felt more power than he had ever felt before in his entire life surge into him. He felt the elements themselves further bend to his will, and he gained even greater awareness of the world around him. Power poured into each and every one of the pores on his face and he immediately began to cackle wildly as his pure, destructive might began to increase and reach ever greater heights.

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[Spiritual magic subdomain details:

Spiritual magic is an unusual school of magic that revolves around the usage of or interactions with spirits. This magic can be used to exorcise spirits, and is often thought of solely in that light yet in all honesty is used more often to produce a number of supernatural phenomena that mortal casters are incapable of doing on their own.

Your control over this subdomain is strengthened by using its odd powers. Use them cleverly and you may quickly advance in power over this subdomain.

It’s worth noting that this subdomain and the domain of spirits more generally are both necessary parts of becoming a spirit king, one of the types of higher beings that once existed.

Spiritual magic subdomain passive powers:

Absolute exorcism: With this power you can forcibly end any and all attempts by spirits to possess someone. This power comes in handy when dealing with certain types of incorporeal extraplanar entities who prefer to possess creatures over manifesting physically.

Class granting: You can now grant the classes of Shaman. As you’ve been gradually gaining power over the course of your life you no longer start off at level 1 for all of your classes, but rather level 10. The Shaman class is a class for spiritualists, individuals who interact with spirits in a number of ways. Most shaman commune and collaborate with spirits, using them to help in spellcasting, serving them, and mediating between them and humanoids or other non-spirit lifeforms.

Commune: You can commune with the spirits of nature, spirits who are largely too small and too weak to interact individually with larger, more powerful creatures, as well as other, lesser spirits. With this ability you can become a mediator between artificial communities and natural ones.

Limited barrier: This is a weaker version of a power you’ll gain through abjuration but with spirit magic’s barrier powers you can create barriers that keep out spirits. This is useful for protecting people from possession and places from inflitration by spirits.

Magic granting and negation: This is the easiest school of magic to grant or negate. Very few spells in this school are reliant on the user, beyond exorcism magic. As such granting someone the power to use this school of magic is extremely easy. As is taking away their ability to use it.

Paper charm magic: You can inscribe spells on paper charms and cause them to activate remotely.

Specific spirit creation: You can freely create tiny spirits like the spirits of trees and even of houses and use them to accomplish various tasks. With this power you can create duendes, shikigamis, aluxs, and other tiny, lesser spirits of homes, caves, trees, and other local places. These spirits are adept at completing chores and fulfilling small errands that angels are far too majestic to complete, and can even cast weak spells.

Tailsman creation: You can create tailsmans, magical charms that protect people using spiritual magic. Tailsmans are capable of allowing their wearers to survive blows that would otherwise kill them, give their wearers resistance to possession, and also improve the quality of their armor, natural or otherwise.

Spiritual magic subdomain active powers:

There are none at this level of influence.

Spiritual magic subdomain blessing and curse details:

By blessing someone with this domain you improve their ability to utilize this magic. By cursing someone with it you reduce their ability to utilize this magic.]

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[Evolutionary Alert:

You have completed the quest needed to ascend to the third tier of influence over the nature domain, and the elemental subdomains. As a result of this, you have also gained the second tiers of influence over animal subdomains and the assorted plant subdomains have fused into one, unified plant subdomain, which you have the second tier of influence over.

In addition to this you have evolved from being a lesser elemental overlord, into a true elemental overlord. This grants you the sort of power that can be used to shatter and destroy entire planets, or to remake them however you wish.

The last thing of note, but by no means the least significant is that you’ve acquired the second tier of influence over the domain of destruction. That is in and of itself a significant achievement, and it brings with it an immense upgrade to your destructive potential.]