A Solitary God In A Dark Multiverse 136 Practice And Training

The town was currently infested with the walking dead, but somehow they managed to be the least strange of its invaders. The strangest creature to invade the town, the genocidal-ent.i.ty who had maliciously commanded them to annihilate it, was a being who was fully and horrifyingly alive.

The ent.i.ty whose wors.h.i.+pers had invaded the town had a deceptive appearance. He looked human. He looked like a tall, older, tan-skinned human man and he even walked like one. He was leisurely exploring the ruins of the town, and as he did so he performed odd actions.

He stood in front of the wreckage of one of the houses. The G.o.d was silent, and behaving oddly even for him. He was in a "playful" mood after having listened to a prayer by a particular mortal in another world, and when G.o.ds were "playful" entire worlds could be left changed.

His mind was an eerie thing, and it was currently connecting him to the life that was left in the town. Such life was unlike most of the life he had interacted with before. He was interacting with fungi.

Life remained in the invaded town in two forms. Plants and fungi. For the first time in his life, Althos was utilizing his fungal abilities.

Another, smaller, part of his mind was also thinking exclusively about the strange dwarf who had prayed to him. He was wondering what to do with her. He had an array of options at his disposal, now that his powers were diversifying.

He could turn her into some form of undead. He didn't doubt that she'd make a great vampire if that was the route he went.

He could also infect her with his parasitic spores. Normally he wouldn't even consider using that power on someone, but he was trying to be open-minded to his darker-powers, but she didn't want freedom, so he wasn't taking it off the table unnecessarily.

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I found myself standing still in front of an empty house. The house wasn't what I was interested in though. I was only standing still because doing so was convenient. It was my mind that was at work, and not my body after all.

"This feels... odd." I mentally muttered as I studied what my detection-based abilities had revealed to me. The buildings in this place were made from wood and from stone and such buildings had a fair amount of fungus contained within them. I focused on the thousands of patches of fungal matter that existed within the town and began to smile.

I focused on them for a moment longer before I mentally reached out and did the mental equivalent of stroking the fungal patches and related lifeforms found throughout the town. Doing so was easy like I was petting a dog that was right in front of me. And the fungal patches immediately reacted to my gentle, mental touch.

The eerie lifeforms reacted to me joyously. Such creatures weren't usually emotional beings, but something about my actions filled them with a strange energy that left them amusingly active. I could sense them react to me in a purely internal way, but more than I could also sense their physical reaction.

Actual mushrooms, a few of which could be found throughout the town in small, relatively isolated patches, began to almost bounce in fungal delight. They impossibly bobbed up and down in a mad dance. I smiled as I saw some of them do so, my incredibly powerful vision allowing me to see them effortlessly despite the distance that separated them from me.

"How delightful..." I muttered, amused by the display. For a moment I considered reaching out to the fungal patches and fully evolving them. That was something I could do, if I wanted too, thanks to a power I possessed ent.i.tled "Lesser fungal manipulation". I thought about it for a moment, before deciding not to do it.

"No need to create new, complex life here." I told myself, aware that such a choice would, in a way fly in the face of my choice to annihilate the people of this town. Instead, I allowed my powers to wash over the fungal patches that existed here and awoke them.

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Awakening a lifeform was a strange process. The truth was that it involved flooding a non-sapient ent.i.ty with some form of energy, a normally dangerous process, in a controlled, precise way. When a G.o.d did it they flooded whatever they were awakening with the divine power that coursed through their deific veins, but it needn't be divine energy that floods whatever is to be awakened.

When Althos reached out to the a.s.sorted fungal patches, in and out of houses and other buildings throughout the town, he initially established a simple and stable connection. Now he was making use of that same connection to flood countless fungal patches with an equal amount of divine energy. It seeped out of him, not at all affecting the G.o.d but boosting the patches it was entering quite dramatically.

The energy seeped into the patches and infused every cell within even the smallest mushrooms with energy and complex life-force. The energy was greedily absorbed by each fungus who received it, and it did... something to them.

The energy caused the fungal lifeforms to increase in complexity. It caused them to spontaneously generate minds that were comparable to the minds of awakened animals as well as awakened plants. This was a strange phenomenon, and even indirectly Althos sensed it as well in the form of a strange feeling filling him. The minds of the fungi were immediately attuned to the existence of Althos and their first complex thoughts were praises to the glory of their frightening G.o.d.

As he was doing this a voice spoke to him.

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"Althos! Are you having fun making friends?" Asked a chipper voice. It spoke directly into my mind and was a voice I was loosely familiar with. It was the voice of the fungal subdomain.

"Making friends?" I asked, curiously. It wasn't difficult for me to piece together a possible meaning for its question, that in my awakening of the town's fungi I had somehow made them my friends, but I wanted to be sure.

"Yes! You've made so many friends just now! And they are the best kind of friends! Fungus! Like me." The voice replied. I chuckled and nodded, despite the subdomain's voice being in my head and not coming from a physical ent.i.ty in front of me.

"Yes. Yes, I am having fun 'making friends'." I told it.

"That's great news! You should let them be friends with each other too. That way they're never alone!" It told me, speaking excitedly. I realized, almost immediately that it was talking about my new mastery over hive-minds.

I considered the suggestion for a moment. And then I shrugged my shoulders, almost subconsciously, and decided to follow the advice of the subdomain. It wasn't even difficult for me to begin to construct the complex web of mental connections that would form the hive-mind, thanks to my experience creating such things.

Creating a hive-mind was a simple process. All I had to do was initially tie my mind to that of others, whosoever I desired to include in the hive-mind. Once I had created the initial connection tying myself and whoever I wanted to include in the hive, I merely needed to tie their minds together. And from there I could tie others into their link.

I was already linked to the creatures I had awoken. For me to tether together all of the local fungi, all I had to do was "select" the minds that were linked to mine and link them together. What was better though was that my mind was strong enough that I could easily tie all of the thousands of patches of fungal matter I had awoken in a matter of moments. I did so with a soft grin on my face.

"Wow! You really did it!" The fungal subdomain declared, speaking joyously. Delight was audible in its voice, and I smiled, finding its happiness a bit contagious.

"Fungi throughout here will never be alone again. How delightful! With your powers, you could already awaken every single patch of fungi throughout the solar system and make them never be alone again. You could also construct a single mind s.p.a.ce that ties together every fungal being in the solar system. Just think about it... No fungi, no matter how remote, would ever feel alone again..." The subdomain told me, fantasizing about a supermind the scale of which exceeded anything I had ever even heard of.

The childlike subdomain was strange to me. I sensed that it desired for me to tether together every fungal being in the solar system. I considered this, but ultimately decided not to do it, yet. That said, for the first time I fully predicted something: this was gonna be a quest in the future. I shook my head and refocused on the situation at hand.

"I should... continue practicing my powers." I muttered, after mulling over the realizations I was making about the strange subdomain.