We returned to the portal where a camp had been set up with one side of the camp being reserved for mine and my Guardians’ use.

Once I was safely inside the tent and away from prying eyes, I summoned my jade book and watched it turn to a new page to show the newest entry in the book.

The picture of the demon Anomaly appeared and in that picture, it showed that it only had two arms.

That’s odd... Does that mean the extra two arms were fake?

Wait... Maybe...

I tried to imagine two more arms appearing and almost instantly, I felt a new sensation connect itself to me. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

It suddenly felt like I had two more hands above my current set of hands.

When I looked up, I realised that I did indeed have another pair of arms floating above me.

Unlike the demon Anomaly’s extra arms, this pair was not connected to my shoulders but were just disconnected arms that were floating in the air.

It’s like there’s a person floating above but every part of their body is invisible aside from their arms.

I tried to control them and it was certainly tricky as I had to focus on moving the extra set of arms instead of my original pair.

Still, it seems like I could swing them around and even use them to grab and hold stuff.

Then I tried to move them around and they actually managed to fly off away from me and I realised that the hands were capable of operating far away from me and did not need to be connected to me at all.

Hmm... Let’s test this out a bit more...

Though I was restricted to only testing it out within the confines of the tent, I found out quite a few things.

First, as I had already figured out, the hands could fly around the air freely without needing to be near me.

I’m not sure if there’s a limit on how far it could be separated from me but at least it was fine within the confines of the tent.

Second, the materialised hands seem to have the same strength as my real arms, or at least close to it.

It was hard to tell but I could crush a rock with both my real hand and the conjured hand so it was at least quite strong and thus usable in real combat.

The third thing I learned was that I could actually change the size and, to a certain degree, the shape of the hands.

Instead of being human sized, I could make it even bigger to the point that the hand could easily wrap around me in its fist. Also, I don’t need to materialise the entire arm but could just materialise only the hand up to the wrist.

And the shape doesn’t need to be human as I could create a metal gauntlet hand instead of a human hand or even just a black coloured, shadowy hand as well.

The next thing is that there’s actually tactile feedback from them where I could feel what the hand feels.

So I could at least feel the shape of what I’m grabbing with them, though I’m not sure if I could feel pain through them since I wasn’t going to just hit myself with it.

The next thing I figured out is that I’m not limited to materialising only just an extra pair of hands. I could actually create more hands than just one pair of them.

I’m not even sure if there’s a physical limit on how many I can summon because the limit seems to be tied to whether I can concentrate on controlling them.

The moment I lose my focus on the additional pairs, they will dematerialise. So if I could concentrate on controlling a hundred pairs of hands... I might be able to conjure a hundred of them?

For now, my current limit seemed to be at just three extra pairs of arms but that required me to do nothing but concentrate on moving the extra arms.

The moment I try to do anything else, I would break concentration and two of them would disappear.

That means for now, I can only conjure up one additional pair of arms reliably with two more in case I really need to.

I guess if I want to get more arms, I would just need to get used to controlling them.

Hmm...

I materialised two of the floating arms in the shape of armoured gauntlets and about five times bigger than a normal hand to float above me.

With the arms above my shoulders, I walked out of the tent, right into the camp site where my Guardians were still gathered around.

All of them turned to look at me, only for their gaze to move towards the pair of floating arms above me.

Kris was the first one to speak up, "Errr... Mortal God? I don’t want to scare you or anything but... You have two hands floating behind you right now..."

I crossed my real arms and made one of the new ones wave at him, "Yes, I know. You like them?"

Ava figured out what was happening immediately, "Oh, could that be a new power you obtained from fighting the four armed Anomaly, my Divine?"

I made the hands clap above me, "That’s right. Seems like I can do this now."

The elf came over to me, her gaze inspecting the two hands closely, "Fascinating~ Oh my~ Do you know what these are made of, my Divine?"

I tilted my head, "Since you’re asking... I’m guessing it’s probably mana?"

"Hmm... That is partially correct. It seems like you have made use of what you had called Qi as well to make them. It’s like a mix of the two. How interesting~"

"I’m thinking that this is supposed to be special or something?"

"Ufufufu~ This is basically something a God has made, my Divine~ Of course it is special~ Just like how you are~"

I’m not even sure if that was supposed to be her flirting with me or she was actually being serious about that.

Since she was looking at my new arms when she said that, I’m going to assume it’s the latter.

She reached up and ran her hand over one of them and I extended its fingers so that she could touch them directly.

"Can you feel this?" She asked, her fingers running along my palm.

I nodded, "I can. There’s tactile feedback at least so I can feel if I’m grabbing something with them. But interestingly enough, I don’t seem to be able to feel pain from it. Or at least I don’t think so. But it could just be me not being able to damage myself."

Kris hopped over to me, "Ohhhh~ Can I try?!"

Right... I don’t know why you are so enthusiastic about it to the point you’re already waving your greatsword around and fully prepared to attack me with it...

I admit I’m curious about it as well so I guess you can go ahead then.

I moved one of the hands over to ’stand’ on the ground with its palm facing towards Kris, the cat boy looking especially excited as he raised his sword to point the tip at the palm.

Olivia quickly stepped in, "Hold on... My Lord... Are you sure this is wise? What if you get hurt by this? I cannot allow this."

Kris lowered his sword and pouted, "It’s fine, Olivia! That’s just a construct isn’t it? That’s different from Mortal God! It will be fine!"

She scowled at him, "You don’t know that. And why are you so enthusiastic about this? Do you actually want to hurt my Lord?"

"Oh come on, it’s not that serious. I just want to see if I can break something that the Mortal God made!"

Err... That’s oddly specific but ok?

Olivia still didn’t look like she was going to let him do it so I called out to her, "It’s alright, Olivia. I’m also curious about this and I’d like to test it out as well. Let him try."

Olivia pursed her lips but chose not to argue with me and stepped aside.

Kris raised his sword again and I could feel all the other Guardians watching the scene closely as Kris approached the hand before swinging his sword down with all his might at it.

I was expecting him to slice through the hand but...

The sword bounced off the edge of my palm with a loud clang, causing Kris to fall over on his haunches.

I felt bad for this but... The sight of him falling over and him letting out a cute "Nyaaa!" when he fell was a little funny.

Also, I didn’t even feel any pain when the sword hit the hand either.

"Ow, ow, ow~ As expected of Mortal God to be so hard..." Kris groaned while rubbing his butt.

Ava chuckled, "Oh, I know exactly how hard he can be~"

This ero elf...

Well... At least I know I can use this hand as a shield if I need to...