The eye above vanished silently as if it was nothing but a mirage revealing a sky that seemed almost too wide and filled with multiple worlds with various bright colors, some of them so massive that they almost took an entire section of the horizon, but he did not look at these fantastic sights, his gaze focused on what lay ahead and once again he fell to his knees in shock.
Cornelius heard a dull sound beside him, dimly aware that the woman too had collapsed. Their size was so massive that every movement from them caused the earth to shake.
"What are those?" he whispered.
Inside his head, he heard a single word, "Power!"
"Are we to choose?" he heard the woman beside him mutter aloud.
It took some time before he nodded, "I think that's the idea. There is so much here, how do we make the right choice?"
"Is it not obvious that you go to the one where your heart draws you towards? I think I will go for that one," She pointed into the distance and her body faded away. In the distance, Cornelius saw a brilliant flash of light from the position that the woman had selected. He braced himself as a wave of power erupted from that position and pushed him a few hundred feet back.
Cornelius grinned, "So, this is what it's like to become a god."
window.pubfuturetag = window.pubfuturetag || [];window.pubfuturetag.push({unit: "64ce79d606107d003c23ea27", id: "pf-5140-1"})Following instincts, he pointed at his choice and everything faded to black as he embraced power.
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Rowan watched the two survivors of his experiment as they walked towards the area for their ascension. The process of making a god was easy and incredibly complicated, but Rowan had the ability to create the right conditions to make it all possible.
He had various methods he could use but he has opted for a new and experimental process which should reap him the most rewards. It would lead to an incredible waste of resources if he were to fail this experiment.
However, his experiments had worked and he had benefited greatly from it, although the losses were far greater than he expected on the number of survivors that made it through the process, clearly, he had overestimated the tenacity of mortals.
On second thought, he realized that even with all his powers, creating a god was a feat that was so difficult and went against the natural order that gaining two gods from a thousand mortals was already a trillion times more efficient than what the universe was capable of.
This experiment was essentially mimicking a bit of how Rowan had hypothesized that the universe created Immortals. Rowan realized that since he was now a Dimension, he should think of himself like a universe.
As he had told Circe, for any Immortal—be they gods, Arch mages, or Demons, what gave them the ability to live what was considered to be forever, was their Immortal Soul.
window.pubfuturetag = window.pubfuturetag || [];window.pubfuturetag.push({unit: "64cc9e79c7059f003e4ad4b0", id: "pf-5109-1"})With his countless experiments on gods and mortals and having devoured untold billions of souls at this point he had discovered some fundamental differences between the souls of a mortal and an Immortal.
If he wanted to be able to easily create gods disregarding the constraints of a bloodline, then he needed to understand the process of how a mortal soul transforms into an immortal soul. He needed to understand all the distinctions between them.
When he understood it, he could then change it.
He had made great progress in the study of the soul, but the true breakthrough in his understanding of this difference was when he acquired Soul Origin.
Rowan did not understand all the intricacies behind Soul Origin, but his Nascent Primordial Bloodline was one whose dominion was over the Soul. This gave him an instinctive understanding of the soul where his knowledge ended and completed the gaps in his insight.
From the Soul Origins of the mortals, he had collected, ranging from a one-day-old baby to a nine thousand-year-old Earth God, he had discovered that they were virtually the same but for one small difference.
In the case of the one-day baby, its Soul Origin was heavy, as if it was filled with nothing but endless potential, this was a metaphysical weight that could not be detected on any scale, but Rowan could tell, and for the nine thousand-year-old Earth god, his Soul Origin was a fraction lighter, almost undetectable.
It told Rowan that there was a cost for living, no matter how small it was, the Soul Origin was being drained, the question was if this drain could be reversed or if it was permanent.
window.pubfuturetag = window.pubfuturetag || [];window.pubfuturetag.push({unit: "663633fa8ebf7442f0652b33", id: "pf-8817-1"})Although he placed this question aside for the moment, it had no concern with his present project, and he believed that if he needed to know the truth about this, it would likely take him trillions of years to experiment with Soul Origin.
However, from this one clue about the weight of a Soul Origin, Rowan created the basis for the first part of his Ascension process.
He split this process into three parts. The first part was that there was a cost for living, and this naturally led to the second part.
The second part of this process was concerning the purity and mass of the Soul.
The Soul of a normal mortal human without powers who lived to old age was filled with all the flavors of the life they had lived. Be they emotions, memories, traumas, and so many others. This made every mortal unique, a process more distinct than a fingerprint or DNA.
He had discovered that when mortals lived together for a while, whether via a community or a home, the flavors of their souls intertwined. A happy couple who have lived together for most of their lives would have shared most of their souls with each other.
This process was remarkable to witness, with his Soul Sight it was like looking at countless beautiful rainbows intertwining in harmony.
Rowan had noticed that the bodies of mortals were filled with what he thought of as holes, and indeed the first time he understood the complete physiology of a mortal he was amazed that such fragile creatures could carry a powerful force like a Soul inside their fragile shells.
It was this enlightenment that triggered his first evolution and opened this new path to manipulating and understanding souls.
Well, it turned out that this fragile shell of mortals was the reason why the souls of a mortal could easily intertwine when they came together, and as the mortals began to climb the paths of power and lived longer lives, their fragile shell became more closed off, and when they reached the state of an Earth god which was the peak of mortality, there were hardly had any holes left in their body.
Rowan figured out that the reason mortal creatures could easily give birth to newborns of their kind was because of the easy access created by their porous shells which allowed their souls to easily intertwine creating something new or something incredibly old.
Rowan had wondered if every newborn was given a new Soul Origin, or was everyone a reincarnation? Clearly, the fusion of the soul energies between two mortals could not give birth to a soul origin, or could it? These were questions to be answered in the future, Rowan focused on the present.
For mortals, the ease of childbearing was the only advantage such a porous physique gave them.
This mingling of soul energy caused the purity of a mortal soul to fall. Take for example an old man of eighty who had lived a full and rich life would have a soul that was filled with so much light of different colors, that it would be blinding.
Since the soul energy of mortals cannot be renewed, every time a bit of themselves rubs off on the soul of another, they lose that part of their soul forever.
The soul energy of an old man would be filled out in so many colors, but it was like a wisp of a candle flame that could be easily blown out.
He had lived a long life, and his Soul energy was exhausted, naturally that led to his death, that is, until his Soul Origin once more ejected another wisp of Soul Energy and he would be reincarnated once more, perhaps in the next minutes or many Eras from now.
