“... Welp, that freaking failed,” Ben sighed, trying to keep the sheer scale of his disappointment from his voice by instead focusing on the thing he’d made.

Not mythic despite all of his hopes, the item Ben had created was technically a knife, he’d designed it to be shaped as such, but more than that, what Ben had created was in a sense an atom of sorts, a thing made up of that reality’s subatomic particles but carefully arranged in a way that they never would have in nature, the arrangement not ending up as some common element that would be invisible to the naked eye and instead creating tight bonds between them to create a far greater whole.

Basic in shape, it had to be when, at the scale Ben had been working at, despite the power of his mind, he’d had to settle on making shortcuts for the arrangements, finding repeating patterns and end points he could depend on instead of having to consider a number of individual pieces that stretched beyond the duodecillions, the end product would fit comfortably in his grasp once the handle was wrapped, but everything else about it was strange. Ben hadn’t been able to perfectly predict its properties when it was done, but even with the minimal light it got, it sparkled with an oily sheen while the bit of light that was pouring through the portal seemed to darken, as if it was being absorbed. He’d built it because once he figured out the form he knew that, in theory, it was going to be stable but anything beyond that was too much to predict when the finer bits of physics in that universe still needed to be worked out, and with it not granting him any sort of awakening like he’d desired, he couldn’t help but feel his motivation drop, even if he couldn’t let it.

Let’s just do my tests then and get this over with.

The rest of them watched with interest, trying to understand what he’d made but before he explained, he first reached out with his mana, confirming he could control it, feeling it move perfectly to his will, even if the cost had been a little higher than he expected. It wasn’t like stopstone, and given that it wasn’t a magic material, there’d been no reason to assume it would be, but with that done came the next part: seeing if he could break it.

With immediate failure being the result of that attempt, at least when it was tried through mana. He couldn’t bend it, such a thing would be as nonsensical as trying to bend an atom, and while the destructive aspects of material manipulation should have worked, he wasn’t ready to try that yet. Better to eliminate more likely tests first before he’d need to have a brand new knife and gate made, leaving him to turn to Thera to make a request.

“Could you try moving this with your earth magic?”

“Hmm? Sure, I… it’s not working.”

“So, this doesn’t qualify as coming from the natural world then. Which, well, fair. This is about as unnatural as it gets without coming from outside of the universe. In that case, I’ll just need to test it against a few other things to see how it stands up.”

Thus began a new round of materialization, though on a far simpler scale as Ben gave shape to all of the base elements of the world, along with many of its magic materials as well, even pulling voidstone from his ring to include as all of them, one by one, were put up against the new knife, both trying to break it and seeing if it could be cut by it, as the first ended in constant failure while the second largely ended in success. The only thing it couldn’t cut was orichalcum, the metal still requiring mana to work it like it normally would, with no other result either. It was strange, and it was strong in a way a normal material wouldn’t be, thanks to the arrangement of subatomic bonds, but there was nothing else that immediately stood out. It was unique in all the world, but it hadn’t accomplished his goal, and it still possessed dangers he wasn’t willing to deal with.

Those dangers still focused entirely on the results of its destruction. A structure like that had far too much potential energy stored within it that, if anything did manage to break it, the results would have been devastating for everyone around. It had taken nearly fifty thousand points of mana to create, and while that didn’t leave room for a perfect scale of comparison, Ben was sure that he could have used all of that power to completely devastate a city. All of it being converted to raw energy, though? It would likely go well beyond that, leaving that worry for the very end.

“Alright, time to break it then,” Ben said, having gotten all the testing he could think of done after the success of making such a thing. “Um, let’s see, I know I said that it should destroy the gate with it, and I’ve got a barrier set up and everything, but just to be safe, why don’t the rest of you step to the side of the portal?”

“Gods above, Ben,” Thera sighed, dragging the two children with her despite how clearly his student wanted to watch. “If you kill yourself doing this, you’ll get to hear me complain about it for eternity.”

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“Genuinely, there should be no major injury. I’m just worried that a flash of light might make it through and blind someone. You can fix my eyes if that happens though, right?”

“At a certain point, it’s almost like you’re trying to level your resistance enhancement to make me worse at treating you.”

“Ha, is there anyone else you can get such high-quality practice from in the world though?”

“Mmh, just don’t kill us all.”

With all of them out of the way, Ben could begin, using the destructive aspect of his material manipulation to destroy the knife he’d spent so much mana to make, feeling it fight against him as well. The mana cost still managed to be higher than what it should have, but it wasn’t impossible, and with the first fragment done, the rest of it crumbled under Ben’s eyes.

He was the only person in the world who could have watched it break though; to anyone else it would have been instantaneous. Subatomic bonds released as light and energy, barely managing to slip through the gate before it was destroyed on the other side, closing the portal behind it.

And yet, that didn’t mean his chance to watch had stopped. It was still bright in Anailia but, despite the clear sky, what would look like an unusually large star briefly appeared, lasting for only a few seconds for everyone to see before fading away, a small gust of wind coming with it that Ben told himself couldn’t possibly have been his fault, while the rest he was with saw it as well, leaving eyes on him as the only people in the world who knew he was the one who caused it before he clapped.

“Right, that’s done. The attempt worked, but my desired outcome failed. Still, thanks everyone, appreciate the help.”

With that finished, they could go home, but that failure left Ben’s head a mess in ways that the rest of them couldn’t see. He’d felt confident that such an attempt would awaken his material manipulation, and while there was no guarantee that the skill would have taken in his enchanting like he’d hoped, the fact that it had given him nothing couldn’t help but be a disappointment, narrowing his options for what he should attempt next.

“Now Ben, this sounds a little silly; I’m actually hesitant to even bother asking,” Myriad started when he arrived that night. “But, well, the gods were talking because an eighth of the planet saw something and, well, just to be sure, you didn’t cause a new star to briefly appear in the sky today, did you?”

“What? No, of course not. Don’t be insane. If I had the power to create a freaking star, don’t you think that everyone would already know?”

“Right, yes, of course, that would clearly be insane,” Myriad sighed, granted the slimmest speck of peace for the answer before Ben ripped it away.

“What I did was create a giant explosion in space that could apparently be seen by an eighth of the world. And I honestly can’t begin to express my disappointment with that either. Seriously, I can do so much with my sacrilege and my authorities; I need to find a way to cheat time for my other skills in a meaningful way. Except my actualization, which I technically can sort of cheat time for too since I do it as fast as I think and my realm is filled with actualized constructs that I’ve been working on for basically eons by this point while still failing to get that to the third tier too, and… I’m just a touch disappointed.”

“... Dare I even ask what you were trying to do that led to an explosion in space that so much of the planet could see?”

“Made a fancy knife. Don’t sweat the details of a failed attempt.”

“I kind of went to sweat them if you’re telling me a knife caused that.”

“Well, technically, breaking it was what caused it, but that’s not important. Okay, bear with me here. What else can I do?”

“Start with not designing cutlery that could destroy a continent if you break it.”

“It probably only would have destroyed a small city-”

“Minus the ecological effects from all of the dust it would throw up in the air.”

“Yeah, minus that. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, and let me complain. How am I supposed to get any of these skills to their third tier? Genuinely, do I have any hope?”

“If you don’t, then things are going to be looking pretty bad for anyone else’s odds.”

“Sure, but… I don’t know,” he sighed. “I still have ideas. Hell, I have endless ideas, but they aren’t worth anything unless they come with progress. I can feel myself getting closer, my authorities are telling me as much, but… ugh, I should have made you guys up here give me a different inclination than crafting. Is it too late to change my mind?”

“Undeniably so. Nare and the other crafting gods have been hard at work preparing it.”

“Ugh, and that’s great, and I want it, and it will help me, but… awakening enchanting is the goal but maybe it would have been better to ask for an inclination that I could hypothetically use on the forbidden gods until I pushed myself to godhood again. Claim the growth bonuses for it and hope that when it reaches that tier, it would have somehow applied some of its growth factors to the stuff I want to awaken.”

“I can’t imagine what else you could be doing to them that would apply better than what you already have.”

“Yeah, I know. I just want something to work right, especially now.”

“... Why especially now?”

“Because,” Ben sighed. “There’s one more thing I could try that I kept telling myself I would do once I was significantly better, and now it looks like if I want to reach the third tier, I need to stop putting it off.”