Well, this looks like it’s going to be a nightmare.

After spending the night using Verbum to gather as much information as he could, Ben eventually let the other man go and began making his way home, his thoughts filled with what he’d learned through their work.

With results as to how the talos had been made falling into two categories, both of which were worthy of years of research by themselves. First, the enchantments that had covered every inch of that artificial body had at least partially been placed to force different molecules to both exist and be stable despite their natures, and second, the use of magic materials in a way he’d largely only just begun to explore.

As for the first part, it was in essence a matter of using magic to cheat chemistry. Every atom had ways it would or would not want to interact with the atoms around it, with those different rules dictating what molecules could exist, but under the right conditions, be they different temperatures, pressures, or other environmental factors, those rules would change. The enchantments had then been used to stabilize arrangements of matter that wouldn’t have normally been possible to achieve on a standard terrestrial world, creating superior materials that had until that point gone unseen by the other gods and had degraded when those enchantments had begun breaking down.

Then there was the second matter that bled into the first: the use of magic materials in the talos’s body. Until recently, all known magic materials that could be found in the wild would be discovered in pure veins, as a result of ordinary matter that could be found in undiluted forms changing through eons of mana exposure, and while most of them were either metals or crystals that had set properties while in those pure forms, the maker of the talos had seen fit to explore what could be done with them in a far more complex manner, using those priceless components on that already extreme chemistry.

Leaving two subjects he could have happily spent a good couple years of research on, given all there surely was to learn on the topics, and he already didn’t have too bad of a start. Despite all the issues that could pop up with trying to pull information from the system, Ben had gotten a decent amount on both that he could experiment with, and when it came to the chemistry of magic materials, he had been doing at least a small bit of research already of his own, even if it had focused only on one. He’d learned the biology of Myriad’s world after all, the only known biological system that used mythril as a base, and what was biology if not messy chemistry? As he experimented in his realm with different actualized monstrosities built upon that form of life, he was also learning different ways that mythril atoms would act with other sources of matter.

And really, my realm is already the perfect lab, he told himself as he put his most recent horrors away to instead set up a far more normal chemistry lab to focus on more streamlined experiments up there that he could then confirm the results of down in the mortal realm for anything that seemed promising enough. A few hours of real time and I’ll have exhausted every experiment I can think of up there. I'll just have to check things down here after, but that’s doable, and then from there…

From there, how much of a gap would he still have? Ben was confident at least that his current enchanting system was better than the one of that long dead god. Even if the structure of it was different, it could fill the same role of stabilizing molecules, while having a far slower decay rate for the enchantments to boot. While he’d had Verbum, after those discoveries, Ben had gotten the record holder to access the system’s information on all of the common magic materials, letting his confirm things about their molecular properties and how mana had changed them, and with that had given him a more complete understanding of the matter of the universe for him to exploit, but was that going to be enough?

… Maybe? He sighed, still feeling less sure than he would have liked. From the way everything that went into them looks, if I had to guess, I’d say the god that made them spent thousands of years on their research before building the talos, and here I am, wanting to come close to the same feat in a couple days. I’ve taken all of the knowledge I can; I’ve got avenues I can quickly research, and I’ve got the foundation I’ve built up in all of this time. I know I’m not hitting the level of middle-mythic like Inux’s original maker managed, but does all of that together translate to something that can reach the heights of a lower-mythic item?

… Yeah, I’m going to have to go and talk to Killi about kidnapping Verbum again for a while. There’s other ways I could use his skill to try and bridge the gaps a bit.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

While he made his plans for the future though, Ben made it home, just a bit later than he intended, with the smell of breakfast already cooking, entering the kitchen showing him that Mora had taken it upon himself to man the meals while Thera sat down, trying to hide her embarrassment about not having managed to wake up to do the cooking for the boy herself, bringing a laugh to Ben’s lips.

“Smells great in here,” Ben said, ruffling Mora’s hair as he got in. “Everything go okay without me last night?”

“Everything was good,” Mora told him, Thera adding to it.

“Delair decided to come by for dinner, so we enjoyed her company a bit. And you? Learned everything you needed to?”

“Mmh, made progress. Might need to spend tomorrow on making some more, and then might need to take a little trip to see if all of this effort is worth it. For now, though, one other thing to get done first.”

A notification told Thera she’d just gained connect went off in her head, leaving her to give him a confused look.

“I mean, I’ll take it, but why?” 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

“Not gonna lie, you’re going to be getting a lot of new skills from me from now on,” Ben shrugged. “Hell, everyone is going to be getting a lot of new skills from me besides this one, and the only reason I’m not going to share connect left and right is because of its value. Giving it away too much might dilute the brand, you know?”

Even then, he was already putting the new power to use, attaching connect to the souls he was feeding into the Myriad construct, giving them the means to link together to see if that would finally prompt the merging between them that the original cube had experienced on his homeworld. Ben might not have been able to hand it out freely to any person on the street, but he could at least do that much without provoking his god’s ire.

<If you’d save me some time by gifting it to my new believers though, I’d appreciate it.>

Mmh, so long as they can make it to the gate network and you give me a few to do at once, then I will. Don’t pretend it’s just saving you time though; I knew you were going to start using me to get out of spending faith.

<I mean, yeah? I’d be a fool not to.>

Mmh, at least speed up on getting Dewdrop your blessing then.

<Do you have any idea how often your outsider is asleep for? I’m getting basically no faith from it; it never prays.>

It just looks so cute asleep.

“Still,” Thera said. “What am I even going to use this for?”

“I mean, not to put too fine of a point on it, but I did spend some time training you to enchant, which automatically means you’re one of the best at it in the world since your non-affinitied magic is awakened,” he pointed out. “If you level connect a bit, you could even become a significantly better enchanter-”

“Pass, I live with you.”

“There’s also the mind-reading aspect of it-”

“Ben, I’ve had enough trouble in life with people telling me to my face what they think of me; I don’t want to hear them thinking about it too.”

“And then there’s also the fact that it’s a soul skill, miss soul mage,” Ben settled on. “Meaning that it could potentially pair quite well with the other soul skills you have. Not even just your soul magic, though I am interested in seeing if that combination has any potential. You’ve got your mana empowering too, you can’t tell me that there’s no chance for some good synergy there if you level it up a bit first.”

“Mmh, level it up or awaken it?” Thera frowned, not wanting to admit that he was potentially right. Maybe not at the first tier, but at the second, when the skill would let her stretch her soul out of the confines of her body? Considering that she used her soul for passive effects, up to and including with her mana empowering, there was a reasonable enough chance that such a pairing might have gone well together, even if she didn’t want to go through the sort of training she knew he subjected the rest of Myriad’s believers to in the name of growth.

“Who’s to say, but you have a great resource right at home to help you level it, a super powerful, super relevant job that would make it even easier, along with your own magic too.”

“... Nope, no, not giving in,” Thera told him, shaking her head. “You’ve given me enough work by telling the gods I’m going to focus on my earth magic. I’m not awakening connect because you’re curious.”

“We could get it done in an afternoon.”

“Of real time, sure. I don’t want to know how many weeks or months in your head that translates to.”

“Alright, your loss,” Ben shrugged. “If you change your mind, let me know.”

If it came down to it, Ben was sure he could convince her to level it in a far more casual way than training under him would accomplish to sate his curiosity on the potential synergies that might exist there, but that wasn’t the priority. Now that she had it, Thera had potentially thousands of years to grow it, so with the skill given, his attention returned to the matter of the talos and what making a new body for one would mean.