Markus stood within the cathedral's inner sanctum, the air thick with the scent of aged parchment and burning incense. The intricate magic circle before him pulsed faintly, a testament to centuries of ritualistic practice. Activating his Insight, he delved into the labyrinthine complexities of the runes, each symbol unraveling its secrets under his scrutiny.
For an hour, he meticulously deconstructed the arcane script, discerning the function and intent behind every line and curve. The ritual, he discovered, was a sophisticated conduit, channeling the supplicants' essence into a specific dimensional coordinate. With the final piece decoded, Markus pinpointed the exact locus of this realm.
Assuming his Divine Reaper form, a manifestation of ethereal darkness and sovereign authority Markus initiated his traversal. Reality folded around him as he phased into the interdimensional pathway, rendering himself both invisible and intangible to conventional senses.
Emerging into the newfound dimension, Markus was greeted by a realm bathed in a perpetual golden glow. Fields of resplendent flowers stretched endlessly, their petals shimmering with an inner light. At the heart of this paradise stood a palace, its architecture an intricate dance of delicate arches and luminous spires, exuding an aura of serene beauty. The ambiance was one of tranquility and gentle harmony. A stark contrast to Markus's own austere preferences.
Navigating the opulent corridors, he arrived at an expansive chamber where the deity resided. Seated upon an ornate throne of woven vines and blossoms was a figure whose appearance was both unexpected and, to Markus, disconcerting.
Seraphiel appeared as a childlike figure, her manifested form mirroring that of a girl no older than seven or eight. Her baby pink hair flowed around her like strands of divine cotton, faintly glowing as if woven from ambient light itself. It danced slowly in the air, weightless and untethered, as if the very laws of gravity refused to lay claim to her.
Her eyes, impossibly expressive, brilliant azure blue orbs that shimmered with layers of star like fractals, each one reflecting depths of cosmic wonder. They radiated innocence yet veiled a power so ancient that it defied comprehension.
A perpetual aura of soft white light surrounded her delicate form, its radiance gently scattering into orbiting floral petals that never wilted nor faded. These petals floated in slow, elegant spirals, composing an unending wreath of purity that accentuated her unearthly grace.
Her attire was a silken celestial gown of pristine ivory, trailing behind her without ever touching the ground. Lavender ribbons and golden threads stitched subtle divine symbols into the flowing fabric, which seemed more ethereal than textile. An expression of timeless elegance rather than mortal fashion.
Seraphiel's entire being emanated an impression of sacred stillness, like a living relic cradled by eternity. Holy, untouchable and pure. A brilliant way to complete her facade.
Suppressing a surge of irritation at the embodiment of certain aesthetic tropes Asian anime and manga favors, Markus reminded himself of his purpose. While he harbored no illusions about his own moral standing or lack of it. He maintained a clear boundary regarding the sanctity of children. A clear and bold line he would not cross.
Focusing his Insight upon the diminutive goddess, he sought to unveil the depths of her essence and capabilities. The information coalesced before him, revealing a comprehensive profile:
[STATUS]
Name: Seraphiel
Race: Proto-Goddess
Titles: Cradle Weaver · Thread of Blessings · Shepherd of Souls
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Realm: Sanctuary of Aetheris
Age: ∽2.7 Million
Core Attributes
HP: 1,200,000
MP: 950,000
SP: 600,000
Divinity: 1,750,000
Innate Powers
Sanctified Cycle: Upon death of a contract bound soul, their essence and developed skills are harvested and purified. The accumulated skill essence reinforces Seraphiel's divine infrastructure and expands the Skill Weave Codex.
Divine Concord: Initiates a spiritual contract during the Ritual of Stone. Skills granted are selected from refined templates within the Codex, based on the child's soul pattern. These contracts also bind the soul to her cycle upon death.
Graceful Dispensation: Allows Seraphiel to assign fantastical abilities to mortals, including elemental affinity, support type magic, or passive traits. Capable of applying soft personality shifts aligned to her domain's moral design.
Loom of Fate: Manages fate threads of all souls under her system. Can gently alter probabilities to favor outcomes beneficial to her domain's growth or stability.
Memory Veil: Suppresses divine interactions from mortal recall. Ensures skill awakening rituals feel seamless and sacred without revealing higher manipulation.
Divine Infrastructure
Sanctuary of Aetheris: A secluded, radiant micro realm adorned with celestial flora and crystalline architecture. Time flows at a decelerated divine ratio. Serves as her administrative core and observation hub for the soul network.
Skill Weave Codex: Contains over 400,000 unique skill patterns gathered from millennia of mortal development. Continuously refines and recombines traits into new templates for efficient recycling.
Armed with this knowledge, Markus contemplated his next course of action, formulating strategies to engage with or manipulate the goddess to serve his overarching objectives.
Markus focused on the goddess slowly, calm, deliberate, regal. There was no need for spectacle. With a thought, the ethereal threads of Rule activated, weaving unseen tendrils of authority across the dimension. His gaze, cold and unwavering, remained locked on the diminutive goddess as the ability took hold.
Within Seraphiel's essence, the divine race template, Proto Goddess was extracted, its structure dislodging like a silken lattice being unraveled. Her body trembled, her vast cerulean eyes widening in confusion, though not in fear. She could not yet comprehend what was happening.
"How fragile the foundations of divinity truly are," Markus murmured, letting the divine code hover before him in translucent, cascading lines of light.
With surgical precision, he invoked Bestow, directing it inward, into his own soul. The two race templates, Godling and Proto Goddess, collided within him like opposing waves meeting in violent confluence. The reaction was instantaneous and immense.
A corona of deep violet and deathly silver flared around him. The celestial space began to warp, as if even the dimension itself recoiled in reverence. Markus's form was briefly consumed by spirals of raw, cosmic data threads of soul craft, death binding, divine channeling, and interdimensional dominion, all converging in harmony.
The fusion was complete.
[Race Updated]
New Race: God of Creation and Death
Description:
User gains 1000 stat points to every attribute on each level, additionally another 3000 stat points to be distributed freely.
Enhances Reality Domination by ten fold. Enables user to asses and repurpose the souls of his subjects from his domains.
Grants supreme dominion over ruled realms, subspace dimensions, and the death cycle of any soul not bound to another deity.
Ensures the creation, reshaping, and population of micro realms tethered to user's soul core.
Grants absolute authority over necrotic, shadow, spectral, and soul bound magic.
Passive ability to detect, sever, or rebind soul tethers and spiritual contracts across all dimensions.
Divine perception now extends to the thresholds between life and death.
As the transformation settled, a pulse of silent power emanated from him. The chamber shuddered. The floral petals orbiting Seraphiel fell lifelessly to the ground.
Markus remained motionless, his expression impassive as always, yet his aura had shifted. It no longer carried the quiet echo of a wanderer nor the weightless curiosity of a thief of power. Now, it was a throne. An immovable axis around which the worlds tilted.
"You gave form to prayer and fed upon it like dew," he intoned, looking down at Seraphiel. "But you never ruled. You only tended. And in your sanctified cycle… I found a very convenient harvest."
The realm around him dimmed, Markus turned his gaze upward. It was time to claim the rest.
Markus extended his hand toward Seraphiel, invoking Rule to siphon her core attributes. Her once vast reservoirs of health, mana, stamina, and divinity plummeted, each reduced to a single digit. Deprived of her essence, the realm trembled violently, its foundations unraveling.
Sensing the imminent collapse, Markus asserted his dominion. The realm resisted briefly, then yielded, reshaping itself to reflect his will. Golden hues darkened to deep purples and blacks; the serene gardens withered, their blossoms dissolving into stardust. The sky transformed into a vast expanse of space, stars scattered like distant embers.
At the realm's center, space twisted violently, birthing a black hole. Its event horizon, a perfect sphere of absolute darkness, consumed all light, creating a stark boundary between existence and oblivion. The surrounding space warped, distorting perceptions and drawing everything inexorably toward its core. The palace's remnants, the throne, and the fading garden succumbed, spiraling toward the singularity.
Markus stood unyielding at the precipice of the event horizon, the immense gravitational pull seemingly ineffective against him. With a mere thought, he enveloped Seraphiel in an unseen telekinetic grip, drawing her frail form to his side. As she hovered before him, he deactivated his Divine Reaper and Wraith abilities, allowing his true form to materialize.
Standing at an imposing 2.5 meters, Markus's physique was a testament to raw power. Broad shoulders, chiseled muscles, and an aura of palpable dominance. His eyes glowed with a cold, merciless turquoise light. Shoulder length, silver white hair flowed behind him, unaffected by the gravitational chaos surrounding them. Clad in obsidian royal robes etched with runes of death and creation, he embodied the very essence of his new dominion.
In contrast, Seraphiel's diminished form appeared even more delicate and vulnerable. Their position facing each other, with his towering presence against her slight frame underscored the seismic shift in power. The goddess who had been harvesting the cycles of this small world now hung powerless before the newly ascended God of Creation of Death.
Markus's voice slithered through the void like serpents over dead leaves, each word a venomous whisper. "Seraphiel," he intoned, his gaze piercing the diminished goddess. "For eons, you've leeched off this world, harvesting it under the guise of divinity."
He paused, a cold smile playing on his lips. "Do not misjudge my words 'Goddess'," he continued. "I admire the architecture of your design. However, its inefficiency grates on me. I will assume control."
With her core essence depleted, Seraphiel lacked the strength to resist as Markus invoked Subjugation. The remnants of her will crumbled, leaving her vulnerable to his dominion.
Delving into the goddess's consciousness, Markus unraveled the mechanisms governing this world's skill distribution. He discerned the process by which humans acquired their abilities. Yet, the question of the monsters' endowments lingered.
Probing deeper, he unearthed the truth: monsters, by mere virtue of birth, were inherently soul bound to the world's fabric. Unlike humans, they required neither prayer nor ritualistic contact with sacred stones. Their skills matured naturally, emerging as they reached adulthood.
A satisfied smile curved Markus's lips. He intensified his hold on Seraphiel's psyche, methodically dismantling her autonomy. His intent was clear, to mold her into an administrator, a divine instrument wholly devoted to his vision.
As her consciousness yielded, reshaping into a selfless entity aligned solely with his directives, Markus turned his attention to her physical form. With a mere exertion of his will, he accelerated the temporal flow around her, aging her corporeal vessel to approximately twenty years. The transformation complete, he regarded her anew. Now, he will not feel like a molester by simply holding her in his telekinetic field.
Markus fixed his cold, imperious gaze upon the newly transformed Seraphiel. Now aged to a refined twenty years, whose once ethereal innocence had been remolded into ethereal beauty, a subdued, devoted servitude, to be assigned to be the administrator, personal aide, a maid or a bed warmer. With his omniscient awareness humming at his fingertips, he began to unravel the delicate tapestry of her divine abilities. In the quiet sanctity of his newly evolved realm, surrounded by vastness of space and majesty of the blackhole, he initiated the fusion process.
First, Markus directed his focus to the Loom of Fate, the ancient power that once allowed her to gently steer the destiny of souls. With a mere thought, he melded it with his own Fate's Edict. A tool of precise, cold determinism. Thereby creating a formidable new ability. This hybrid skill now granted him the power to manage the delicate threads of destiny with ruthless efficiency, bending probabilities and future outcomes to his whims.
Next, he shifted his attention to her Memory Veil, the ethereal shield that had concealed divine interactions from mortal minds. A mental maneuver later, it was fused with his Subjugation, transforming it into an omnipresent dominion over memory. Now, not only could he erase, alter, or fabricate recollections at will across entire populations in his domains, but he could do so with surgical precision. Each modification weighted by his unmatched intellect and refined wisdom.
Finally, Markus turned to the vast repository of knowledge contained within her Skill Weave Codex. With an almost disdainful smirk, he witnessed as the skill integrated itself with his Bestowal function, thereby empowering himself to distribute, reconfigure, or suppress skill templates with a mere thought. This synthesis granted him the unprecedented ability to shape the inherent capabilities of every soul within his domains, transforming his authority into that of a living god. Both a creator and a destroyer, whose dominion over life, death, and the threads of fate was absolute.
A surge of raw, inexorable power radiated from him as the fusion completed. The once sacred aura of Seraphiel, now subjugated and reformed into a tool for his design, dwindled to a mere echo of her former glory. Markus, with a final, imperious glance at the subdued goddess, allowed himself a rare, satisfied smile.
Markus stood at the planet's zenith, surveying the realm that had once existed in a sheltered, unchanging bubble of mediocrity. With his newly elevated godhood thrumming in his veins, even the stars overhead appeared to bend at his merest thought. The domain Seraphiel once oversaw was now his playground, its fate woven into the tapestry of his will.
He began his work in silence.
First came the reshaping of the world itself. Reaching out with Reality Domination, he allowed the planet's crust to heave and groan in protest as its size doubled. Mountain ranges crumbled under the shift, only to be reformed into grander peaks. Oceans boiled with fury, churning violently as new landmasses tore free from the depths. In mere moments, two distinct continents stretched across the globe, each bristling with unfamiliar coastlines and rolling plains.
Between these newly formed landmasses, Markus raised a colossal island. An expanse of black and grey stone that bridged both continents via towering, ancient-looking roadways. The carved roadwork resembled causeways of cyclopean blocks fitted with impossible precision. The entire structure looked as though it had existed for millennia, even though he had conjured it just seconds ago.
"It's time to segregate them," he murmured, his tone tinged with an icy determination. One sweeping motion of his hand, and across the world, every monster—be they goblin, orc, slime, or beast—felt the inexorable tug of a new destiny. Whisked away by lines of arcane compulsion, they vanished from their old habitats, reappearing on the second, newly raised continent in a swirl of translocation magic. This land would be exclusively theirs. It was the territory of monstrous tribes, warlords, and would be apex predators vying for survival.
Across the channel of stony causeways, the original continent remained in the hands of humanity, the kingdom the brat called home. Its cities, farmland, and trade routes remained largely intact, albeit shaken by tremors of a planet suddenly doubled in scale, many falling to their knees in prayer to the deity clearly at work.
His plan unfolded in precise detail, as though reading from a cosmic script only he could see. Every living being, human or monster would face an annual trial of bloodshed upon the newly raised island. Once they passed five years beyond their adulthood, whether the age of adulthood for humans was fifteen or eighteen, whether a monster matured at one or ten. It mattered little, they would be compelled to journey to the island.
And there, in the perpetual twilight gloom of that rocky battleground, they would fight to the death in an endless cycle of violence, each clash offering up the souls of the fallen, fueling Markus's ever growing power. A "soul grinder," as he cynically termed it. War eternal, harvest eternal. A monstrous loop demanding mortal lives in exchange for cosmic currency.
No mortal mind could comprehend the subtle, arcane compulsion that drove them to travel and fight. It was coded into the very fabric of the planet itself, courtesy of his divine rewriting. He had no illusions about the morality of this plan. This was a manga world focusing on a Hero somehow getting a harem. Now at least it will serve a worthy cause.
Finally, as all was set, Markus enacted his final stroke: the creation of a secure subspace domain for the planet. He closed his eyes in regal poise, letting the energy of Unique Subspace Creation and his newly heightened dominion flood through him. In the cosmic hush, he enveloped the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, forests, mountains, monstrous dwellers, and hapless humans alike in a transparent sphere of reality altering power.
The sphere shimmered, then dissolved, taking the entire globe with it. A flash of silent brilliance lit the starry void, leaving no trace behind in that corner of the universe. A heartbeat later, the world blinked into existence within Markus's newly fashioned pocket reality. Its sky now a mirror of cosmic emptiness, ringed by swirling energies he alone controlled.
Within that subspace, time would flow at whatever rate he dictated. War could rage in accelerated loops, or be slowed to a crawl for his observation. He would reign unchallenged over life, death, and fate, shaping the planet's evolution as he saw fit.
Standing in the twilight of his pocket realm, Markus flexed his power, verifying every inch of his "soul grinder." The colossal causeways, the monstrous continent, the human lands, and the central island already bristling with ominous potential.
"A crude spectacle," he mused with a sarcastic edge, "but effective."
He allowed himself a moment of reflection, scanning the horizon: the faint glow of burning torches from human cities, the ruddy eyes of prowling beasts in the distance. The stage was set, the performers unknowingly cast, and the script written in blood and ambition.
In the hush that followed, only a dark, wry chuckle escaped his lips, echoing like a mocking lullaby across the nascent domain. For better or worse, this world and its perpetual harvest was now irrevocably under his hand.