'So physical sensations don't translate when I'm just a passenger,' Rick thought.
The young man-no, Rick's test subject-was laying on the ground, groaning in pain and choking on blood from a punctured lung, not to mention the host of other broken bones in his body beyond the ribs. But Rick didn't feel a thing, marking it a successful, though dangerous, test.
Looking at the thread of belief stretching off into the distance, he saw no changes in it. After briefly considering a test involving what happens if he was a passenger in a body when it died, he discarded the idea as the test was simply too dangerous. With a thought, he willed his consciousness to begin the arduous journey back to his own body, leaving one last sentence behind for the boy.
"You've worked hard. Rest now, and if you survive this, I'll visit you again," he said, pushing it into the teenager's mind with a few hundred pulses of light. Whether the boy heard it or not, he didn't really care.
When he returned to his own body, he began the recovery process again. This time, it only took him a minute or two, compared to what felt like hours earlier, when he had readjusted himself after leaving Katrina's body. He guessed that it was likely because Katrina was a woman and he was a man, though it was also possible that it was because he hadn't fully occupied the test subject, while he had completely taken over his assistant.
'Further testing will be required,' he thought, making a mental note.
Once he had fully settled into his body again, Rick looked at the thread he had just traveled through, monitoring it for any changes. Soon, the intensity and frequency of the light pulses began dimming and slowing as the thread itself darkened. After a few minutes, the light pulses had completely stopped and the thread itself had turned completely black.
'That explains all the black threads-they must belong to the sheep that I convinced to martyr themselves. Good thing I didn't use any of those threads for the last test,' he thought. Even though it had been a necessary sacrifice, he couldn't help but mourn all of the lost power, both from the imbeciles who so happily went to their deaths in the wave of global attacks and from the loss of the teenaged test subject, no matter how little that boy provided him.
Finally opening his eyes and leaving the purple world, he murmured, "So that's what it meant when it told me to gather faith."
Another of his discoveries from his second test was that anyone who even just had a positive thought about him would be connected to him by a thread of belief. The only difference was in how "lucrative" that belief was in terms of sending him faith.
A sinister smile spread across the cult leader's face as he came to that conclusion and he couldn't help but look forward to the future where he ruled over humanity as a true god.
A week later.
Rick had finally finished finding all the answers to his questions and satisfying his curiosity. Well, truth be told, it was more like three days of testing, three days of debauchery in various womens' bodies, and a full day, combined, of splitting headaches. Still, even the headaches had taught him something. After all, he had to discover the limits of his power sooner or later, and what better time than while his cult was already laying low? Though he hated pain, he had an idea now of how to avoid it, even if he didn't understand exactly what caused it or if there were any other means of resolving it, but he had at least learned how to sense when his limit was approaching.
He was currently sitting in the same conference room he had been in when he had first received his blessing. Filling the other chairs were the same people, bar one empty seat. The person who had previously occupied it had mysteriously committed "suicide" the week before, citing his remorse and leaving behind a letter describing how he had already betrayed the cult and his plans for another upcoming betrayal.
At least, everyone in the room, even Katrina, thought so, though she had some slight suspicions regarding the incident. She herself had been experiencing mysterious lapses in time, almost as though she had sleepwalked from place to place, and she was having difficulty figuring out how she had run through so many pairs of underwear and sheets. Waking up tangled in sheets that absolutely reeked of vaginal secretions and semen every night was weird enough, but a few times, she'd even suddenly realized that her clothes, including her underwear, had changed and she was feeling rather "full", as though she'd just had unprotected sex with someone. Other times, she tasted the lingering aftertaste of semen in her mouth, or smelled it emanating from between her breasts, or on her hands. A few times it was in even stranger places, like her armpits and hair.
She had since taken to doing random "sniff tests" of her various body parts just to double check that, no, she was not, in fact, going insane.
When the news of the person handling the cult's finances committing suicide had spread, the rest of the leadership hierarchy of the cult had all exchanged glances, each of them with weird looks on their faces. Katrina's suspicion arose from those very looks; it was possible, or even likely, that everyone currently in the room had experienced the same weird lapses over the week.
But none of them thought it had anything at all to do with their shepherd; instead, they attributed them to the sudden relief they felt when he had finally woken up. Thus, the only emotion they were feeling regarding their leader now was curiosity as to what his new blessing was and what he would have planned for the cult's future.
The meeting they were having right now was to satisfy that very curiosity.
