Running down the mountain as it crumbled, faster than his body would ever want to move, he could see his freedom close by. An exit that helped each ache and pain vanish from his mind, the blood pouring from his gaping wounds not even a distraction as he lunged, only for the trial to have one last nightmare in store.

Beneath him the earth split, a chasm forming and pushing the exit back as a bottomless pit stretched on under his feet, his hands desperately grabbing at any edge he could reach, only for them to fall short, his fingertips brushing the sides before he plummeted down as he screamed, every mind in his head desperate to find a solution that just wasn’t there until it finally ended. He felt an impact as knife-like spikes plunged through his gut-

Ben shot upright in bed, doing his best not to scream. He was soaked in a cold sweat as his migraine came back in full force and he did his best to take stock of things as his heart rate and breathing slowly started to come down.

He wasn’t in the trial. He was at home, safe, and severely annoyed that he’d listened to his god and actually gone to sleep instead of to Myriad’s realm as he laid back and closed his eyes again, waiting for the worst of his headache to subside before he did anything else.

Of course a stupid freaking nightmare managed to level up mental expansion.

He didn’t know if the sleep he had gotten had been enough to do anything for the lingering headache he’d been dealing with before since the level-up had brought it back in full force, but he resolved to work even harder on not raising any of his problematic mind skills until it went away completely. Even if he could live with it, he didn’t want it to get any worse when it would already be feeling almost debilitating for the next few days.

As all but one mind in his head focused on meditating, he eventually opened his eyes. It was still deep into the night, with him unsure how far off morning was, but since he was awake there was something he wanted to check.

Turning on a small light, doing his best not to look at it for the havoc it would play with his head, he pulled out his card, hoping to see if there were any noticeable changes from his experiment with the potions, and finding that while there had indeed been some growth, it had been nothing like what he would expect from a potion made from the body a god had died in.

It looked like with the exception of his recovery rates, all of his attributes had grown by three, which wasn’t the thrilling result he’d been hoping for when he’d tested it but was also far from nothing. There was no way to get a permanent growth through potions unless they were made from a god, so the fact that he was able to get three free points to everything was incredible, the issue was just that he was comparing it to the god bone potions he’d made earlier.

While Sonya hadn’t maintained her fifty percent growth rate with each one, she had managed to get her various stats above a thousand by drinking them, and even the ones Ben had made for himself from leftover condensed water had been better.

Despite that though, there was one area where the potions he’d just made were going to be superior in every way. Availability. Instead of something as rare and limited as the bodies of gods, he was able to keep making the potions so long as he had their souls, which meant that instead of a one-time growth, he could use it constantly, he just needed to determine how frequently they could be drunk without a decay to how much growth he would receive each time.

With that idea in mind, he took a breath, preparing for what he was sure to be an unpleasant experience as he forced his mind into his god’s realm.

“Fuck!” He yelled out as soon as he got there. The first thing he saw when he arrived was Helori sitting on Myriad, but that was becoming a common sight to him. What really made him swear out was the light in the area making his migraine flair up as the two gods there turned to look at him.

“Ben, you promised me you’d actually sleep tonight,” Myriad tisked in disappointment before he was able to pick up on the pain his apostle was under. “Wait, what’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that I actually did go to sleep and had a fun little nightmare that messed me up so bad that it leveled my mental expansion,” He said through gritted teeth. “Don’t suppose you have the ability to lower the light in this place, do you?”

At his request his god did exactly as he’d been asked, the entire area growing dark and dim and giving Ben just a bit of peace as the two gods came up to him, looking him over.

“You really are an interesting mortal,” Helori said with a level of purely academic curiosity. “If I wasn’t so worried about your ridiculous sacrilege skill I’d want to check your soul again.”

“Hey now, don’t be afraid, feel free,” Ben told her, opening his arms wide. “I’d kind of like to know what’s going on in there too.”

She looked at him, filled with suspicion, but eventually her curiosity won over as she placed her hands on his chest, beginning to push in and feeling resistance as a notification rang out in his head.

Yes, allow.

All at once the resistance she was feeling vanished and Ben watched as her eyes scrunched up, peering at him in concentration as she took a hand out to place on his god.

“Myriad, look at this.”

“Hmm, that’s… Hmm.”

“Uh, guys? Maybe less concerned noises and more telling me if there’s anything worrying going on?”

“I wouldn’t say worrying, though it’s not going to be the most pleasant for you,” Helori explained. “I’ve already told you those skills are interacting with your soul on a deeper level, but now it’s just doing it at the deepest level I’ve ever heard of for any tier one skills. That isn’t a problem in itself, nor is the fact that it’s going to keep growing deeper a problem either since plenty of tier two skills can interact at a similar depth, the issue is just that it isn’t happening in the same way a tier two skill would.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning instead of having it happen instantly, my best guess is that it will be maybe eight months before all of the strain you’re under vanishes.”

Hearing that, all he could do was look at her blankly for a minute. “Are you saying I’m going to have this migraine for another eight months? I’ve already been dealing with a constant headache for months now!”

He didn’t want to be grouchy, but the pain was making it hard to deal with. Blissfully though, Helori shook her head. “It should slowly fade with time so long as you don’t gain any more levels to those particular mind skills, and it won’t take the full eight months to fade. Let’s see, if I had to guess I’d expect it to be maybe five more months before it’s completely gone?”

“Ugh, well I guess that’s better than nothing.”

As long as it would start to fade eventually, Ben could learn to deal with it, he just expected the next week to end up being exceedingly unpleasant as he got past the beginning stages of it.

It will be gone by the start of the invasion at least so that’s something. Just gotta not think as much as I can.

Helori pulled her arms out of him as he sat down and closed his eyes, fighting off waves of nausea as he finally got to the reason he’d gone up there to talk to them to begin with.

“By the way, my potions were far from as useful as I hoped, but at least for the one I took, all of my attributes grew by three points.”

“What!” Both gods yelled, quieting down as Ben grasped his head in pain.

Neither of them had really known what to expect of his attempt. Nothing like that had ever been done before so they couldn’t begin to imagine how it would turn out, but the fact it had any success was incredible. Just three free points to every attribute could end up being the difference between life and death.

“Yeah, so obviously I need to test to see how often it can be drunk to repeat the effect or if the effect is repeatable at all for that matter, but for the time being let’s just assume its non-repeatable and go from there cause I obviously can’t keep all of this for myself.”

The obvious goal would be to make as many as possible to be able to distribute potions across every army and adventurer's guild worldwide, with them eventually making them to the public too.

To accomplish something so big would require the aid of a number of plant mages to make possible as Ben envisioned vast forests made up of what would really be a single fruit tree, multiple trunks being forced to grow from the same swarm of roots to keep it as a single organism and hopefully make it so the effect would carry out to all of them to make harvesting on a scale that otherwise wouldn’t be possible a reality.

After that, it would just come down to the logistics of it, and more importantly, how much he would make.

“So I’m thinking I hand off four of the soul crystals and the tool for forcing them into plants to the gods to deal with all of that, but let’s be real, this was my discovery and I want to make at least a bit of money off of this. What do you guys think would be a reasonable takeaway?”

“How do you put a price on an easy and permanent boost to one's strength?” Helori sighed. “With the scale you’re thinking of, the availability is going to be fairly wide but anyone would still pay a fortune to receive such a thing. In favour of not bankrupting the planet for this I’d say keep it to around ten times the guild recommended price of a lifeblood potion, no matter how ridiculously cheap that is compared to what’s being gained.”

Ben felt dollar signs filling his eyes as he heard that when his god spoke up. “Or you could consider the fact that you’re already wealthy and go lower instead,” Myriad almost begged. “Ben, I agree you should be paid properly for your work, but you don’t need the money that badly and at this point, it would basically be war profiteering. Please, let's go for half a lifeblood potion instead. You’ll still make a fortune off it and going for such a reasonable price should go a long way towards making some of the gods that view you less favourably see you in a better light.”

He wanted to dismiss Myriad immediately. This was his discovery, why shouldn’t he make what such a thing was worth? But in the end, he pushed that greed away. Myriad was right, plain and simple. The fate of the world was at stake and it would be outrageous to try and profit so much from that when he wanted as many people as he could to have access to it in the end, so fighting against the part of him that wanted to see him grow all of the profit there was to be made, he instead gave in.

“Alright, sounds good. In that case, would you both do me a favour and work out things with the other gods? I don’t think I’m going to have the patience for anything like that, plus I need to find out the results for Ceselee and Falk, maybe make some sunglasses to deal with the light, work on my robot body… Scratch that. Sunglasses then hiding in a dark room for a week where I’ll practice my enchanting in peace. Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic plan.”