Oh, this is so freaking aggravating.

That entire first day had been devoted to reading through books, trying to find whatever he could on the two magics he possessed as he searched across all three floors, and in the end he’d only found one book each with anything on them.

It shouldn’t have been shocking, he knew they were rare with his skill learner title giving him an affinity for uncommon options like that, but he’d still been expecting more.

Even worse than that though was just how little there was to learn from either book he’d found. For the one on the material user skill, it was written by someone who had the same theory as him regarding non-affinity magic, that it was capable of doing anything that an affinitied magic could and more, and they’d gained it through their desire to have earth magic, an affinity they weren’t predisposed to, as well as the luck of being born with the non-affinity magic empathy as their blessed skill, giving them a sense for how to use unflavoured mana as they worked to push it to match their desire, ending up achieving the material user skill in the end.

From there though, the book was less useful, not telling him anything he didn’t already know and being written when the author was at the fifth level of it, a whole two levels lower than where Ben currently stood, meaning that unless he was able to find out more about it in some dusty corner of the library, he was out of luck.

Destruction had proven to be a bit more successful at least as he got to learn that he wasn’t the first person to awaken it with enchanting, the author of the book managing it as well and attributing it to training the same way Ben had, using the destructive aspects of the skill to practice their enchantments early on.

More interesting was the fact that they’d gone farther than Ben ever had, trying to use it to destroy things he hadn’t considered. While it seemed more equipped to working on physical things such as wood or stone, as well as mana to destroy enchantments at a greater level of speed than could normally be hoped, the skill holder had conducted rigorous testing in other areas too, using it to put out a small flame, as well as going so far as to sit in a box with only a pinprick to let natural light through, destroying it for a few seconds as it came in to leave it dark despite the sun continuing to shine. In both examples, the mana cost seemed to grow so much as to keep it from being remotely worth it, but it was still an area that Ben had been unaware of that he found to be plenty worth learning.

But then that was it. He was sure there had been more than two people in the world to get either skill in the past, with the likely issue being that only two of them had gone on to study the skills in an academic sense and record their findings, but it still left the fact that there was nothing else to read up on the topics, meaning that if there was more to learn about either skill he’d need to discover it for himself.

Oh well, tomorrow I can read up on everything they have on enchanting and beyond that I can just grab whatever catches my interest. Maybe I’ll find something interesting.

Of course, randomly stumbling across something interesting felt like looking for a needle in a haystack. Even if he could stay there for most of each day, barely sleeping to read more and use the time he had before going for the trial entirely for getting through books, he would still manage only a little over a thousand in that time, when the building had what must have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions of then available.

To that end, he needed to make sure he was being properly selective with what he read, especially since he wouldn’t be able to read that much anyway. Thera wouldn’t let him miss out on that much sleep when they were going to be throwing themselves into danger immediately after and there were other things to do in the city too.

He knew that Thera enjoyed checking out the local sights and culture and he wanted to be doing it with her, so he was just going to need to divide his time appropriately.

And in the spirit of that…

“How are things going Quilith?” He asked the alien projecting himself into his room as the grey looked tired and defeated.

“Exhausting. We aren’t exactly putting helping your world on quite the same level as working to save our own, but we’re doing our best with horrifying results.”

“Do I want to know?”

“We found one of the invader’s gods,” The alien told him. “We aren’t exactly pleased with how it turned out, to the point that some of the higher-ups started to feel flighty and wanted to abandon our work with this planet.”

“Wait, what? What the hell happened?”

He couldn’t imagine what could possibly justify such a response, but the alien with him gave a good enough reason that if he was in their place he’d have responded the same.

“It’s not like you don’t know that we can watch you without actually going to the extreme that is projecting our image into a reality, it’s how we’ve observed the various life-bearing universes we’ve found, as well as looked at the ones lacking it. The issue is that as we were investigating your invaders we found a world with something being worshiped, and as we watched it turned to look at us.”

“What?”

Ben couldn’t begin to guess how such a thing was possible. The grey weren’t even in the universe in any real sense and if whatever they saw was really that powerful then Ben was happy to just call it a game over as things stood, but Quilith spoke to calm him down.

“We believe it actually isn’t as bad as it sounds, but to be cautious we won’t be viewing that world again. Our best guess is it was somehow able to detect the change in energy around it that let us observe it, but seeing it react created a strong impact. Your current world is only allowed to be contacted by select individuals, but before there were no limits on what could be watched, and after finding what seemed like a god that had descended upon that world, plenty tuned in. The moment it focused on the camera, following it no matter where or how it moved, people got scared. I don’t think I need to remind you that this is the first reality that we’ve seen able to interact with others on a deeper level than the little we can do, we’d rather not find out what a being worshiped by thousands of worlds of people could do to us if it put its mind to it.”

“Alright, noted and going to do my best to not add that to my current nightmares. And while I’m certain I’m going to regret this, when you said you’d found one of their gods, one of how many are we talking about?”

The grey could only shrug at the question. “We have no idea, we’re just assuming there’s more based on what we know of the nature of your reality. If worlds before the system was put in place had a fifty percent chance of spawning a god from a mortal in their history, then doesn’t it make sense that with thousands of worlds of people, you would get more gods no matter how slim the odds are? Especially given their particular innate magic?”

“Okay, yeah, that makes sense and I hate thinking about that too.”

The more he thought about what they were up against, the more he wanted to stop, so rather than continue on with that thoroughly depressing topic they moved on to his lessons for the night while he tried to ignore what the future held.

“I knew that no-good alien was tricking me into learning physics,” Ben grumbled to his god. “No wonder I got that with scholar instead of something like language knowledge since he’s been making me freaking study it for so long!”

“I mean, haven’t you ever heard that chemistry is just dirty physics? You’ll probably level it by learning what you really want to.”

“Mmh, I don’t know, he’s talking a lot about fundamental forces of reality and he’s been shoving more and more math into it and I really don’t know if any of it’s actually going to help me make things.”

“But it’s not going to hurt either,” Myriad pointed out. “Besides, you never know when something might come in handy.”

“Maybe, but I think hearing about the structures of particles that either no longer exist or could only hypothetically exist in this reality has its limits. I’d much rather focus on something like weapons tech. Even if I’m just one guy, I wouldn’t mind figuring out how to build something like a missile to fire off. Maybe something to think on if I don’t die in the first wave.”

“Yeah, well in the spirit of keeping you alive longer I have something for you,” His god told him, perking Ben right up.

“Oh yeah? What?”

“Before that, I just want to complain about how hard it was to get this since a certain somebody decided to act out in front of all of the gods to an outrageous extent. I had to cross out a third of them right away who consider you either too unreasonable or insane, and then of who was left I needed to talk to the ones that were actually in a position to make this and had the correct properties as a god, and that isn’t even mentioning-”

“Myriad, I appreciate all you do for me and I’ll be very receptive to hearing how much work it was after you tell me what it is we’re even talking about,” Ben said as he cut off his god, getting what felt like the best news of his life in return as Myriad brought forth what seemed to be a small ball of dull light.

“Something that should bring the recovery time for your headache and soul down by a month after you eat it,” He said as Ben rushed forwards with those words to scoop it up and shove it in his mouth.

In the instant after he felt relief. His headache wasn’t gone, but it had dimmed more than anything that Lux had done and he walked forward and hugged the cube.

“Myriad, I really, really love you. Do you have any gods you're not fond of? I’ll go destroy their churches immediately, just ask.”

“What? No, obviously don’t do that! If you’re going to do anything then work on getting me more believers! Infinite hells, why are you like this?”

“Shhshhshh, I’m just so happy right now. What was that and how do I get another?”

“You don’t. Consider it to be the same sort of minor blessing you once got from Jagal, only instead of giving you any noticeable bonus it was made from one of the world's soul gods to help soothe your soul, which has the lovely side effect of taking a bit of the strain off your mind.”

“Tell them I love them too.”

“Pfff, they were paid well in faith, don’t you worry. You’re just lucky I had so much extra before from gambling on your survival.”

“In that case, I’m going back to directing one hundred percent of my love to you.”

“Yeah yeah you suck-up, just remember to keep avoiding using those three skills as much as you can, at least until you’re back in top shape. Honestly, with the way your mind seems to work, I’m sure they’ll level up eventually, but the consequences shouldn’t be that bad by the time everything has settled in you.”

“Done, at least five of my minds are on meditation duty for the rest of my life. I’m going to become the world's first tier three meditation holder before I let myself go through this again.”