A Solitary God In A Dark Multiverse 41 A Miracle

"Cosecha!" Said one of the encampment's inhabitants, a tiny, blue-skinned male goblin. He made eye contact with me, accidentally, and then hurriedly dropped his head. He was the same goblin who had spoken to his sister earlier, wondering about whether or not I could heal. I suspected I knew what he would have asked if he hadn't meekly lowered his head to not make eye contact with me.

I targeted him, by focusing on his face, and activated one of my mental powers, my ability to read surface-level thoughts. I envisioned his mind opening up to me, and a stream of consciousness slowly making itself audible in my mind.

I imagined the sensation of his surface-level thoughts being read off to me by someone with a voice like his. And I smiled as his words began to worm their way into my brain.

"Oops, I didn't mean to look directly into its eyes! Oh goodness, oh goodness, what if it turns me into one of those skeletons?" The little thing frightfully thought, his mental voice speaking manically. I chuckled and opened my mouth so that I may calm the little one.

"Yes little one? What do you need?" I asked, speaking slowly and calmly. "I am not here to harm you. I will not harm you. Remember that even the goblins who opposed me and rose their weapons at me were just prevented from harming me." I told the creature, reminding it of my neutral treatment of those who opposed me.

I waited a few moments, silently, as the creature considered what I told it. He took a few moments to gather his courage but he was able to successfully muster the bravery needed to look me in the face and begin to speak.

"Can you heal? I have a friend, his arm got bitten off by a creature a few days ago. He's sick. We... we think it might be infected, but we don't have a way to heal it or save him from the infection." The goblin explained, clearly frightened and also tired. There was a weariness, one that felt born from fear and from exhaustion in equal parts, that hadn't been present in his voice earlier.

I smiled at the little guy and nodded. As I did so his eyes began to light up. They were deep brown orbs and were ma.s.sive on his small face. "Really? Let me go and get him!" The goblin almost shouted, excitedly before turning around and das.h.i.+ng towards a tent. As he took off, I received a message from my first and most consistent companion. The system.

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[h.e.l.lo Althos. The domains and I have been talking.] My companion told me. I had always listened when the system spoke to me, and over the course of the last few days, I had grown familiar with the nuanced inflections of its voice. It sounded excited.

[Based on the work you've done and the ways you've managed to interact with people, animals, and undead without losing yourself or changing completely, we've decided that you deserve a reward. A real, substantial one.] The voice revealed. And now I understood and I even shared the thing's excitement. The single second or so it took the system to finish and send its next message felt like an eternity.

[To be clear, the tutorial isn't over. But we've decided that you deserve to be able to use at least the tutorial versions of the powers granted to you by your influence over the domains and subdomains that you came to life being able to somewhat control.] The system announced. And as it did so I felt something change within me.

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The sensation of some of my powers being unlocked filled me at once. It flooded me with confidence and self-a.s.sured belief.

It was odd to recognize that those two feelings were alien, or at least were hidden from me, but I knew they were. I knew this because of the speed of the two emotions. They weren't there one instant, and the next instant they came. They came the instant that I felt that the powers that had always belonged to me become mine to command.

I was smiling when the notification came. And as I began to read it, my smile only widened.

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[Alert: The system hasn't freed you from the tutorial but it has done something else instead. You have earned the right to exert your influence over the remaining domains and subdomains you hadn't yet been able to influence. Preparing the lengthy notification needed to break down what you've gained as you read through this notification.

Details about the chaos domain:

The domain of chaos is the domain of freedom, art, creativity, change, mutations, shapes.h.i.+fting, entropy, and anarchy. To be a deity of chaos is to be a lord of mutations and rule over instability. It is to pierce through the facade of lawful, ordered societies, and see the fragility on which their so-called stability is built.

Gaining the first tier of influence over chaos grants you the power to change others, to shatter and replace order with something that is at once old and new; chaos. It allows you to see what has stagnated and give those things new life.

To gain greater influence over chaos you must bring together people and convince them to work towards undermining the law, and if you can convince law-abiding people to do so all the better, and to leave disordered, organic change wherever they go.

You must use your powers to spread change and free those who willingly bind themselves in the chains of order and law, as well as those who've been unwillingly bound and are manipulated by the forces that prattle on about law and order.

Chaos domain pa.s.sive powers:

Identify mutations: This power allows you to see what, if any, mutations someone has. Mutations are more spontaneous and less ordered than templates are, and their effects tend to be more diverse and less common than those of templates.

Entropic manipulation: This pa.s.sive power allows you to manipulate entropy, energy which disintegrates, decays, and disrupts that which it touches. You can infuse your fists or weapons with entropic energy, you can disrupt technology and shatter buildings with entropic gazes, and so much more.

If you wish, you could also do the opposite and halt entropy, preventing things like aging, or even reverse it, granting you an incredibly potent tool in manipulating mortals.

Manipulate shape: Using this allows you to modify the physical forms of your followers or objects. This is one of those powers that increase in potency over time, eventually allowing you to curse your enemies into forms you desire them to possess. This is an upgradeable power that grows stronger as you gain more influence over the domain of chaos.

Alignment detection: This power allows you to detect someone's alignment. Since you already possessed a way of doing this, this power is redundant.

Chaotic aura: This protective aura breakdowns structured things that are hostile to you, like arrows fired by foes of yours when they reach a meter of you, and can even weaken spells, serving as a magic mitigation field with regards to enemies of yours specifically.

Chaos kins.h.i.+p: This unique pa.s.sive power makes other chaotic creatures view you more favorably. You can also detect chaotic creatures more easily and are more attuned to their desires and needs.

Inspiration: You can inspire creatures, causing them to feel a burst of creative fervor. This improves the quality of the artwork they create while causing them to fall under your influence. This power applies even if they don't know the source of the inspiration.

Chaos domain active power:

Chaos inducement: This active, once-week, power allows you to afflict a lawful foe with an urge to behave chaotically that lasts for a full day. This power can result in an alignment s.h.i.+ft if used in schemes to nurture chaotic tendencies within lawful people.

Chaos domain blessing and curse details:

Blessing someone with the chaos domain improves their luck, nurtures things like creativity, and improves their ability to react to chaotic situations.

Cursing someone with the chaos domain causes them to experience more chaotic situations than usual for where they live, reduces their ability to adapt to chaotic situations, worsens their luck, and saps them of creativity.

Details about the nature domain:

The nature domain governs the natural world. It governs animals, plants, habitats, the relations.h.i.+ps between living creatures, and elemental forces.

This domain is a powerful one that bestows those who can influence it with abilities that have ma.s.sive range. Some of the powers this domain grants are powers over environmental disasters, and the ability to induce rapid changes to the weather.

To gain influence over it, gain the wors.h.i.+p of nature spirits, animals, and plants, protect nature, and build cults dedicated to your rulers.h.i.+p over nature.

Nature domain pa.s.sive powers:

Disaster generation and control: This is an upgradable power that for now is limited to earthquakes and famines. You can cause minor earthquakes and create and manipulate famines.

Terrain control: Another upgradeable power that allows you to manipulate the terrain. As of right now you can manipulate stones, rocks, and soil, and can modify the terrain by affecting how fertile it is, therefore canceling out famines, or causing them.

Weather control: You can't use this power yet, at least not meaningfully. When you gain the ability to influence the subdomain of liquid, you'll be able to cause rain and snow. As you gain influence over the subdomain of air you'll be able to create clouds, and eventually thunderstorms. Other subdomains and domains may grant this power a wider range of usages.

Nature domain active power:

Charm the environment: This power temporarily grants sapience to five nearby plants or animals and dominates them to stand by you and fight as your warriors. This is a once a month power, at the moment.

Nature domain blessing and curse details:

Blessing someone through the domain of nature causes plants grown by them to speed up their growth, improves their relations.h.i.+ps with animals, and grants them improved resistance to the elements.

Cursing someone with the domain of nature causes plants nurtured by them to suffer and be damaged while in their presence, worsens their relations.h.i.+p with animals and makes animals aggressive towards them, and weakens their ability to endure the elements.

Details about the civilization domain:

The civilization domain governs the sort of societies built by all manner of creatures, leaders.h.i.+p, social behavior, culture, and architecture.

This domain is a highly influential one, though it isn't a greater domain. In the past, this domain had been used by G.o.ds to construct all manners of societies and to aid their mortal wors.h.i.+pers in a creative range of ways.

The powers granted by this domain are related to social behaviors and the easy construction of societies and communities. To gain influence over it, create or modify civilizations, create or modify buildings, and build cults that fuse religion and society.

Many powers this domain grants are positively influenced by the domain of creation, which in time will boost the overall quality of the things you build.

Civilization domain pa.s.sive power:

Create building: This power allows you to automatically create a building out of material types that you can manipulate. In your case, you can create buildings out of stones and out of soil.

When you activate it, you are asked what sort of material you want it to be made out, and to design the exterior and interior.

Civilization domain active power:

Aid: This is a once-an-hour-power. When you use it you can help creatures who are building furniture. In the future, you'll be able to create furniture via this domain, but for now, you must either make it by hand or have your followers create it.

Civilization domain blessing and curse details:

This domain's blessing and its curse are some of the few that can be cast upon entire communities or civilizations. If you bless an individual with it you increase their ability to be an effective leader, organizer, and community or civilization builder. If you bless a community or civilization with it you can increase their overall health, numbers, and strength.

If you curse an individual using this domain you cause them to be shunned by their peers, cause them to behave in ways that harm their reputation, and make them a worse leader. If you curse a community or civilization with it you cause it to suffer blows to their health, strength and improve the probability that some of its members will die.

Details about the subdomain of purity:

This subdomain is in some ways the inverse of the subdomain of corruption. It is the subdomain that governs behavior that is generally considered good, generally in alignment but these behaviors, aside from the virtue of kindness, are not necessarily in pursuit of goodness or kindness.

This is a tricky subdomain to try and gain influence over, as it requires both nurturing these traits in some of your followers and for you to exhibit these traits yourself. Oddly enough, you often do demonstrate these traits, but it's selecting groups of your followers for you to nurture these traits in that is hard.

Similar to how corruption has the seven gateway sins, the subdomain of purity has the seven virtues. These virtues are chast.i.ty, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility. Each time you gain a tier of influence over the subdomain you select one of these virtues to become the lord of, adding it to what you can influence.

These behaviors, if nurtured carefully, can be part of changing a creature from a neutral, or even an evil alignment and moving them towards a good alignment. If that happens then they will become considered a wors.h.i.+per of yours, and will serve you in ways that are helpful for you to maintain your status as a neutral G.o.d.

Your innate virtue is patience, which explains why you are willing to forgive those who attack you. Patience is related to forgiveness, the ability to endure difficult situations without anger, and tolerance of all manner of people and beliefs.

Purity subdomain pa.s.sive powers:

Pure heart: This power allows you to detect a creature's personal virtue, the virtue they most exemplify. All creatures have a virtue that most resonates within them.

Purity infusion: This power allows you to infuse concentrated purity into food. You can use this to ensure that your food cures conditions and that it encourages creatures to behave in ways that embody the virtues.

Aura of patience: This is a mind-alerting aura that fills those around you with calmness, and improves their ability to shrug off other mind-altering effects. It reduces hostility towards you and even causes creatures who were hostile towards each other to reconsider their hostility, creating the possibility of reconciliation in cases where the hostility isn't insurmountable.

Patience palm: You can cure conditions that cause rage or hostility simply by tapping someone and quelling the rage they feel.

Purity subdomain active power:

Status change: This once a day power allows you to target someone who is hostile towards you specifically and change that an hour. For an hour, so long as you don't attack them, they aren't hostile towards you, though they aren't friendly either.

When the power ends, if they would still be hostile towards you their hostility returns, though only the most intelligent creatures can be aware of this as a power, and even they can't resist it.

Purity subdomain blessing and curse details:

Blessing someone with the purity subdomain makes them more likely to behave purely and increases their ability to resist temptations.

Cursing someone with the purity subdomain does the opposite, and increases the severity of the consequences they'll have to endure for their impure behavior.

Details about the agriculture subdomain:

The agriculture subdomain is the subdomain of nature that governs the effectiveness of the practices of sapient creatures related to plant growth and animal rearing that is done for the purpose of surviving and making life easier.

This subdomain is tied to animal rearing and crop growth. It grants powers and blessings that make sapient creatures more effective farmers and animal-handlers. To gain increased influence over it, aid farmers and build up agricultural cults. You need more influence over it before you can manipulate domesticated animals and the process of domestication itself.

Agriculture subdomain pa.s.sive powers:

Crop growth: This power allows you to cause crops to bloom instantly. If you would like you can even do this when crops aren't planted in soil, transforming seeds in someone's hand into the fruit, vegetable, or other plants they'd eventually bloom into, even out of season.

Crops you grow this way are of incredible quality, restoring health, stamina, magical energy, and possessing incredible nutritional value. They are also fully living crops, not like the magical food you create when you use your legendary magic.

Crop and soil devastation: Using this allows you to decimate the crop life. If you use it you can cause famines as you wish.

Agriculture subdomain active powers:

Abundance manipulation: This twice a day power allows you to increase or decrease the amount of a crop available at a whim. If you use it you can duplicate a crop up to one hundred times, allowing you to turn one apple into one hundred. You also infuse the crop you manipulated with your influence, causing those who eat it to fall under your influence.

You can also use it to reduce the amount of a crop, either reducing the size of an individual crop or reducing the total amount in a group by up to a quarter. This power's potency will increase as you gain more influence over the subdomain of agriculture.

Agriculture subdomain blessing and curse details:

This is one of those odd subdomains wherein you don't target an individual, instead you target land. If you bless a specific place with the power of this subdomain you increase the overall effectiveness of attempts to be agricultural that take place there.

If you curse a location, you cause attempts to be agricultural there to decrease in their overall effectiveness.

Additional notes: You can now use your ability to manipulate healing energy to regenerate lost limbs and to heal minds. Your healing spells are now twice as effective if you opt to use them. Your unlife energy manipulation can be used to cause limbs to rot and fall off and can be aimed at the mind to cause brain damage or induce insanity.]

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The moment the lengthy notification vanished from view, I felt an indescribable power flow into me. I was now capable of acts that were undeniably divine. That realization filled me with a powerful sense of arrogance, one that I spent several moments working to suppress.

In the time that it took me to read the notification and suppress the powerful sense of arrogance that filled me at the moment that it vanished, the goblin I spoke too earlier had come back. And he wasn't alone.

He had dragged a goblin along with him. The goblin he had brought along was one who had a somewhat older looking face than he did, one that had lost some of its youth to the chisel of age, and who had a surprising amount of gravitas to his steps, even ones made hesitantly.

This newcomer had red skin and was missing an arm. His left arm ended in a brutal looking darkened nub, at the edge of his left shoulder. The skin exuded a foul odor, one of pus and blood, and even at a glance, it was obviously infected. The newcomer looked at me, his eyes a vibrant green color the same color as well-maintained gra.s.s, and began to speak.

"Cosecha, I am not expecting you to do anything and I apologize for wasting your time. I was dragged here against my will." The goblin, Xiax, told me. He spoke with maturity, and was calm.

There was disappointment and annoyance audible in Xiax's voice, but not aimed at me. It was aimed at his companion, a goblin named Atix. That same goblin hadn't introduced himself, but my tremorsense allowed me to learn his name anyway.

I smiled at the pair of friends and instead of responding to them with words I used this as an opportunity to test my powers. I silently reached out my favored limb for interacting with people and objects: my watery tendril. It drew close to the infected skin and then stopped just short of touching it.

"I am going to do more than just prevent you from getting sick Xiax. I am going to demonstrate my power, once and for all." I told the pair of goblins. As soon as I said this a hush fell over the goblin encampment.

I felt dozens of eyes fall upon me and chuckled. This was a perfect moment to test my newfound powers and to witness with my own eyes the damage I could undo if I wanted too. I closed my eyes and envisioned a potent wave of restorative energy surging out of my palm.

The darkness that greeted me as I closed my eyelids, even as the not-so-mini-map surged into view, was powerful. But not as powerful as the life-altering burst of healing energy that escaped the tip of my tendril.

Even with my eyes closed, I could tell what happened. As the energy escaped from me and surged into Xiax, not only was the infection undone but before the eyes of dozens of goblins, an astounding event took place.

Xiax's bones began to grow, escaping the nub at the end of his shoulder, forming all of the bones needed for a fully functional left arm in the span of time that the average goblin experienced three heartbeats. And then an instant later muscle was formed and stretched tightly over the bones.

The completion of the magical and miraculous limb generation occurred when a layer of normal goblin skin matching the rest of Xiax's skin was formed and surged over the bone and muscles. I opened my eyes and saw the fully formed left arm and smiled at Xiax.

"Now all I need is for you to test it." I told him, smiling and looking at him kindly. As soon as I said that, I received a new notification. One that informed me of the magnitude of my actions.

[Alert: You have just completed your first miracle.] The thing read as I felt the awe of dozens of goblins wash over me at once.

Xiax himself was silent as he simply stared, dumbfounded, at the limb. His mouth was open. And I watched as he began to move the thing slowly, and even practice making fists.