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Chapter 77

  Notifications finished, Dei started experimenting with his new powers when Clever came over to him, indicating he’d finished scouting out the future.

  Shaking his little Korgonda head, he told Dei “No, the Accipere is still strong enough to kill us all.” Then, looking at Dei funny, Clever said “Though it was a close match… you released the curse, I think, and tore yourself to shreds trying to win. Don’t release that curse.”

  Dei nodded and stood up. “Well, nothing to do about that now other than return to Aloran.” he said without commenting on the second part. He believed that was his future self using his new [Growing Rage] to let the power run through him in a last-ditch attempt to win

  Fendrascora behind him, Fang in hand, and Clever on his shoulder, they set out.

  ‘Clever’s getting a little big. How large is he now? Half the size of a monitor lizard?’ with his current height, Clever had to stand at an angle on Dei’s shoulder. Nonetheless, this wasn’t too bad.

  * * *

  On the way to Aloran, Dei started experimenting with [Growing Rage]. Not using the Wrath Curse, but Fortitude.

  He imagined that Fortitude would both make him more durable, and protect his mind. If he could get enough of it, then he could withstand the effects of the Wrath Curse without going crazy.

  The moment he started, there was the familiar feeling of his Skill drawing concentration from within Pandora’s Box, then running it along his body. Similar to what it did with the Wrath concentration, the Fortitude Concentration followed the scars left behind from Lani’s Wrath mana coursing through his body.

  ‘I dont think they’re just scars anymore. Instead, it’s perhaps similar to when electricity carbonizes or fractal burns wet wood if it runs through it, creating a path where other electricity follows as well. Some of my flesh got mana-nized, and now its a lot easier for Mana to run through that. How that’s going to change anything, I’m not sure.’

  As the Fortitude Concentration went through all his muscles, Dei had to focus on keeping his balance as it didn’t quite hurt as much as Wrath did, but it felt hard to walk as his muscles tensed.

  The process slowly but surely ramped up while he ran. It became a struggle to walk, and Dei was tempted to give Fendrascora his [Homeostasis] Skill again, but he had other plans.

  “Hey Fendrascora,” he got her attention through [Meaningful], “Can you hit me with small- small amounts of vibrations? I want my body to adjust to the feeling so that I’m not debilitated again.”

  “Enough to harm you?” she asked.

  “Just a little bit, but slow enough that my body can reheal from it as well.”

  Immediately, he felt his entire body begin shaking slightly, and an incredibly painful sensation of being pulled apart ran through his system. Dei chose to imagine that the lack of hesitation on Fendrascora’s part was because of their near-death situation before that showed how necessary covering his weakness would be, and not Fendrascora mad at him for getting them into that situation in the first place.

  On top of that, he asked Clever to send a scout into the future, as far as one could go. “We need a heads up for who and what is going to track us down. If they’re going to attack soon, we need a forewarning.”

  “Okay, I will try, but I can’t keep a scout in the future always. I think ten hours into the future is my max right now, and it takes twenty minutes to get there. Also, I can only keep it there for like… thirty more minutes before I get too tired.”

  “How long does it take for your soul to regenerate?” Dei asked.

  “Ummmm… three hours?”

  “Well, that still gives us- at minimum- a seven hour heads up. I want you to look ten hours into the future, then immediately stop and let your soul regenerate before doing it again. It’ll be good practice, and you won't overtax your soul in case you need to use your fire and rewind time on yourself.”

  Nodding, Clever hunkered down to rest a bit. He’d check the future later, because he just finished, and his soul was still a bit strained.

  ‘Vibrational training? Check. Growing Rage Fortitude rebuilding? Check… Now I need to test out increasing the strength of a bond, and dispersing the damage. Bond first.’

  “By the way Clever, do you want to test something out?”

  Clever sent back an expression of confusion.

  Dei then explained his new Skill, the ability to strengthen a bond with one another. Clever was excited for it, and more than happy to be subject to the experiment.

  “Alright, I suppose just tell me what happens.” Dei said, then pulled up his Meditation world using one of his split minds, leaving the main portion to watch for threats and control his body.

  Before him the strings to all appeared. It was limitless in number, but he could only perceive so many. At any given point, Dei believed there were around two hundred strings, but focusing on any cluster of them resulted in more appearing out of nothing. It was like looking at a badly AI generated image, where you couldn’t exactly pick out any one thing.

  Except, if he focused hard, he could pick something out. Some strings were stronger than others, and it was through these that he searched now. Naturally, his strongest connections were to the affinities. Below that were his parents, and below that, his friends. ‘I wonder why my parents are still so much stronger than my friends. Is it something instinctual, or is the bond between child and parent inherently stronger? I’m sure I know my friends a lot more than my parents by now, but at the same time, I feel like it is fitting? Very curious…’ he thought, but managed to find Clevers.

  Meditating on his bond with Clever for a second, he produced the fog of Visible Presence, and inspected it. What was Clever to Dei?

  The fog seemed to say that Clever was Dei’s closest friend, a warm presence, and proof that his situation would get better. He met Clever at a time in his life when he was horribly alone, weak, and grappling with an identity crisis. Since the very start though, Clever was friendly. He matched Dei well, they agreed on a lot of things, and he always felt happy, no matter the situation. Sometimes, Clever was stressed, but he trusted Dei to find a way through it.

  Dei smiled. If anyone would be the first bond to strengthen, it had to be Clever. Taking hold of their bond, he brought forth a strength it begged to show him. It started to shine brilliantly compared to the other strings, and Dei felt the change. His warm presence became literal in nature, and Dei felt his fire resistance grow slightly stronger. Aside from the practical benefits, the charged connection to Clever helped Dei find a piece of himself, slotting into the gap between his mind and body.

  [Skill Leveled Up: Solidity (93) -> (95)]

  The main mind glanced towards Clever once it was finished and asked “Feel any different?”

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  Clever perked up and nodded. “Yep! It feels… Strong! It made me tougher, I think.”

  Dei smiled. “Strong? Thats cool, maybe its because I’m larger than you right now and have more muscles. For me, I got a bit of your fire resistance.”

  Clever shook his head. “No, not because of your muscles. It’s because you’re strong. I got stronger because you are.”

  Dei raised his eyebrows. ‘Is it perhaps directly based on what that person thinks of me? Or what I think of them? I think Clever is warm, so I get fire resistance. He thinks I’m strong, so he gets stronger too? That’s awfully nice of him.’ Clever thinking Dei was strong felt a bit unearned. Dei struggled with every fight, and lost frequently too. Still, he could not doubt that he was objectively strong, physically. Perhaps the benefits were a combination of literal and metaphorical reasons.

  Either way, today's use was up. Dei felt the Skill go into a twenty four hour cooldown. He hadn’t actually run into a cooldown before, so it was interesting that there was one. He sort of wanted to ask what dictated the cooldown, but knew it would be some mystery that he would only figure out through a very situational encounter.

  Next, he wanted to test his damage dispersion, so he gave Clever another heads up. “I’m gonna send some heat towards you buddy. I don’t think it will hurt, but tell me if it becomes too much, okay?”

  Clever nodded, and Dei once more split a part of his mind off. He had five parts meditating, one part focusing on his connection with Clever, and now a seventh that started heating his lungs through [Homeostasis] using Convection mana.

  His body was constantly growing tougher and, by this point, it took a long while for enough heat to build up that he started hurting. When he did though, he tried shunting the damage off to Clever.

  Dei saw Clever startle for a moment, but relaxed fairly quickly “Not hurtful. Gives me heat too.”

  Dei nodded. Not all of the damage was negated, but a portion of it. Some was taken care of by his new fire resistance, while a second portion was given to Clever, and the last ended up damaging him. Like this, the maximum amount of heat he could handle was raised, but he also noticed that it raised a lot slower too.

  That wasn’t a bad tradeoff, really. Once the Convection mana reached a certain amount, it would produce more of itself far quicker than he could get rid of. In a long drawn-out battle, being able to release explosion after explosion would make him very dangerous.

  The only issue would be the powerful vibrations and light released from those explosions. Vibrations he was working on, Light he’d have to find a source of. Maybe stare into one of those bright glowing rocks or something.

  Cutting off the extra heat and letting himself cool naturally, Dei continued to run towards Aloran. It’d taken him around twenty hours to get from the Garden to Checkpoint two, he was positive it wouldn’t be even that long this time around.

  * * *

  [Since the Fall: 10/28/809 - 18:48:23]

  Around twelve hours later, Dei was almost at his old Garden. Clever had actually given an odd report when he scouted the future timelines.

  “It’s like… the extra timeline can’t find where your old den is. Or maybe that it doesn’t exist. Your extra timeline was actually starting to panic a bit with how he couldn’t find his old Den, so I shut down the Skill because I felt bad.”

  Dei nodded thoughtfully at that. Apparently, Aloran’s cloaking effect expanded far further than Dei had ever considered, but that made sense. If someone were scouting with parallel timelines, they would simply never find Aloran. You needed to be there, yourself, in order to get in. Aloran was a level six hundred God, a little bit of Time protection Skills were almost guaranteed. It was interesting to see and confirm, though, that there were Skills that could negate Time abilities, and that they couldn’t just rely on the Skill to find all the dangers, just most of them.

  Clever even told Dei that the scouts he’d sent to the timeline where they attacked the Accipere started getting blurry and acting funny. He couldn’t properly see the timeline, only glimpses. Dei suspected that was because of the spatial distortions from the Geometry affinity, and the Space and Time affinities interacting with one another.

  ‘So Geometry is a Derivative affinity of space, I wonder what the difference is? How much more does the actual Space affinity affect Clevers timeline ability, and why?’ All good questions he hoped to find the answer to outside of combat.

  Putting that aside for now, he finally stood in front of the crack in the wall. Previously, when Clever told him the results of his future sight, he was worried that Aloran would actually be gone- moved, somehow; he saw now that was an absurd worry though, the Deity really was just a stationary microbiome.

  Adjusting himself to squeeze through the much narrower crack, he told Fendrascora to leave her peripheral body outside, it would be far too cramped in the Garden.

  Then, he began to press himself through. His chest and back scraped the edges now, but Dei was glad to see he actually still had a bit more clearance before he’d need to widen the crack. He remembered his mom having an even harder time than he did now, and wondered if Aloran had purposefully built the entrance to be the perfect size for Gem Dwellers, knowing the area he was in.

  Nonetheless, he eventually passed through that invisible threshold, and his [Tremor Sense] opened the space before him. Seconds later, he was free , standing tall in the small cave. Looking around for a moment, he saw the familiar [Greengrow Beetles], and smiled.

  Aloran hadn’t yet called out to Dei, despite him holding Lani and Jasmine, so he took a moment to look around.

  A bundled tarp sat off to the side, untouched, and Dei knew that was the eight ration bricks he’d left here last time.

  The small stream in the side of the wall still flowed into the spongy moss at the bottom, disappearing somewhere else rather than pooling at the floor.

  The little indent, where he and his mom had cuddled for the last time before she had to leave.

  When asking his [Tremor Sense], Dei was even able to find the original [Greengrow Beetle], sending out a Kindness Identify and checking to see how it’d been

  [Greengrow Beetle - Level 212

  Greengrow Beetles are a niche species of beetle that appears rarely in caves with no large predators and a hyper-charged mana environment. Feeding on smaller bugs and various plants, these beetles contain a significant quantity of mana for their little bodies.

  HP: 224/224

  MP: 448/448

  SP: 193/224

  Physical: 112

  Mental: 2

  Spiritual: 4

  Magical: 1]

  Now that he had a better frame of reference, the insects' stats made him chuckle. They were both impressive, and wildly disjointed.

  They were impressive because the beetle had a four-times multiplier on its MP, but it didn’t have a stunted HP and SP. He’d seen in other creatures that when one stat was boosted, one or both of the others tended to suffer, even in himself. He didn’t even have a times-four multiplier, either, only three. Dei knew for a fact that this beetle had something magically very unique about it, and that there were probably some alchemists out there stomping their feet and pulling their hair out trying to find such rare specimens.

  Too bad for them, Dei wasn’t going to harm even the elytra on their backs, and he’d never share the location of them either.

  It was also interesting to note that its name didn’t change, despite undergoing an evolution. Still just a Greengrow Beetle.

  What didn’t impress him were those God-awful Mental, Spiritual, and Magical stats. Poor guy was so unequipped for any kind of danger it wasn’t even funny.

  Ensuring to display his “Friend of the Beetles” Presence, Dei gently pet it, much to its annoyance.

  Finding a place free of any bugs that might be crushed, Dei gently sat down, leaning against the spongy moss, and finally decided to get Aloran’s attention. Dei thought the God might be asleep, perhaps a hibernation Skill like his own was in place. Last time, Aloran hadn’t spoken until after being woken up by Jasmine. He’d rather not recreate a situation like that if possible.

  Setting Lani down off to the side and leaning Jasmine against him, Dei spoke audibly for the first time in a while.

  “Aloran” he said in a low, rumbling voice.

  ‘Whoa, when did that happen? Did I go through puberty without even knowing it?’

  Nonetheless, his words got a response. Dei didn’t sense a difference, but Clever said a new mana type was entering the air, albeit slowly.

  Over time, Clever said that he was able to identify the new mana type as Refuge mana, and Dei knew he’d succeeded in awakening the God.

  Several minutes passed as the Refuge mana slowly ramped up, until eventually Dei heard a familiar voice groggily say “Dei?”

  “Aloran.”

  Immediately far more alert now, Aloran said “My name?! LANI?!”

  Dei smiled. “It’s been an eventful couple months.”

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