“Do I even want to ask?”

“I can’t imagine you not doing it,” Ben grinned at his god. “Go on, you were watching and everything, right? How much did you pick up?”

“I saw your two levels to eldritch mind, that was horrifying enough. Now you’ve managed to level all of your third-tier skills past anyone else on this stupid planet.”

“Sure, yeah, and that’s great and all, minus the part where it ended in failure.”

“Does that even matter at this point?” Helori asked from atop his god. “What did you even connect to to manage such a thing?”

“Huh? Myriad, come on, catch her up while I’m busy at least. The soul of the outsider. It only briefly destroyed my mind though, so it went better than I’d hoped.”

Helori blinked at him, processing the madness of what he’d just said against how such a thing should have affected him, with Myriad having had enough time to properly accept the matter to ask the things he needed to.

“And? How did that affect your mind? Don’t tell me your brain took in its thought structure.”

“It did, hence the part where it briefly destroyed my mind. Let’s just say that trying to apply a six-dimensional mind to a being used to thinking in three dimensions was rough. Wouldn’t recommend.”

“... What does that even mean for you?”

“It means that I’m now able to easily think about a lot of very cool ideas that can’t apply to a three-dimensional universe,” he shrugged. “Which is genuinely such a shame. The sort of enchantments I could place on a four-dimensional material, let alone a six-dimensional one, well, I’m fairly sure I’d be able to apply something like as complex as the summoning spell on an item the size of my head, but honestly, even now I’m still working through the changes. I’m forming theories on how enchanting would hypothetically apply to higher dimensional space and then seeing if there’s any potential to unfold them then lower dimensions that I actually could use, but even thinking about that, I’m basically building hypothetical enchanting systems from scratch. Even with the speed I think at, there’s a lot I need to work through first. On the plus side, there genuinely is going to be applications with this new mode of through for my space enchantments, I think I can make spacetime fold in a way that would give me a lot more room in my rings for example, but other than that, there’s not much I can really do.”

“No other changes to your mind then?” Helori asked, accepting the insanity she was hearing and let her curiosity take over.

“I think faster than I would have expected the two levels to allow me which I’m chalking up to the outsider’s mind’s influence, and my intelligence rose by nearly about ninety thousand points, but I’m not sure if that’s because of the outsider or as a result of eldritch mind leveling. Unnatural mind always grew my intelligence by about five hundred with each level so really, it shouldn’t be strange to think that raising it at the third tier would do more of the same.”

Again, she blinked at him, processing what she was hearing before eventually shaking her head. “I can’t believe I’m eventually going to have to live up here with a mind god like you.”

“It’s gonna be great, you’re gonna love it.”

“Mmh, I have my doubts, but fine. For now, a different topic. What of the outsider? These are things that exist basically as legends between the void gods. You’re potentially the only person who has been able to examine one, so considering that you’ve managed to hold onto what meager sanity you possess, what exactly did you find?”

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“Well, ignoring just how downright rude some of that was from you… innocence.”

“What could you possibly be talking about?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Ben shrugged. “The outsider had no ill intent when it got out of hell because it didn’t understand the concept of other thinking beings in the first place. It was the only thing in its original universe, that didn’t leave it with much room to figure out that other things could be alive with an internal experience either. When it was lashing out, it was from fear of its circumstances and the pain of having a foreign set of physics pressing in on that, and since we’re talking about it, there’s probably something I should let you guys know.”

“What?” Myriad asked, a premonition of dread in him that Ben was more than happy to fulfill.

“After talking with it for a bit, going over options on how to make things right, we’ve settled on making it a new body.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Sure I can. I killed an innocent person, I can’t just not try to make things right.”

“Why is it that what little bits of morality you have pop up in the most undesirable of ways?” his god groaned. “Was there literally no other option you could have settled on?”

“I did suggest that we could just release its soul and let it properly ascend to godhood, but it preferred this.”

“... Okay, fine, I suppose this is genuinely better,” Myriad gave in, the thought of having an outsider as a god among them too much stress to take. “Then how worried about its body should we be?”

“Not at all. It’s not like I can get a life mage to create something that would violate this reality’s physics. Besides, it wants to be small, it’ll be fine.”

“Small?”

“And pretty cute, as far as I’m concerned,” Ben laughed. “We’ve been talking, and we figured out a body it’s going to like. We just have to get it made first.”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll be looking after it; it will be fine.”

“Doubtful, but not the point. You went out of your way to risk your mind and life by connecting to the outsider in an attempt to grow your skill, and it failed. Even if you haven’t given me the details, I know you have other ideas too, so should I be expecting you to throw yourself into some other bit of insanity?”

“... Don’t worry about it. I need to get the outsider a body, and beyond that, I need to just think about things a little longer. Refine some ideas, you know? That’s a future problem.”

“Ben-”

“Instead,” he cut off, not wanting to think about the very option he wanted more time for. “Back to something more important. Me. Did anyone up here catch me leveling eldritch mind? Even if it was short enough that Thera couldn’t notice, I lost consciousness and my sacrilege slipped; any watching god might have noticed the change through Thera.”

“Other gods aren’t simply trying to find you every hour of the day in the hopes of discovering your secrets at this point, considering that you don’t seem to put too much effort into keeping them. I haven’t heard word going around and it most certainly would, but we both know it will, eventually. Yuzu tends to think about the changes she sees in you after each meeting for a while, and now that your partner is a soul mage too, while your child is the great soul spirit and your teacher is the soulsmith. For that matter, considering all of the spirits in your home at any time, you’re also being seen by the regular soul spirits. If anyone wants to find out what’s going on in your soul, eventually, someone’s going to slip up and think about it while a god is watching and it’s going to come out. There’s simply no getting around it by this point.”

“Mmh, well, compared to my other three skills, no one should have a problem with Eldritch mind, right?”

“The problem remains with the question of what sort of power you’ll wield as a god one day, although I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else notices the next obvious problem too. You’ve been speed leveling your authorities and sacrilege thanks to the power of your mind. Just how much faster do you think those skills are going to start growing now that you’re going to be thinking even faster?”

“... Well, let’s just say that you should try to prepare yourself emotionally,” Ben grinned. “Because no matter how anyone else is going to feel about it, I’m definitely hitting my ninth levels before the next wave.”