Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube

“... What exactly is going on here?” Thera asked as she and Mora came through a gate, getting to the shop and getting to see Ben lying face down on the floor when they did, even with other Bens still hard at work around him. “Did you really get one of your clones killed and couldn’t even be bothered to clean it up?”

“This is the real one and I’m not dead,” he said, face pressed against the floor. “Just understimulated.”

“Taking the lack of chores that hard still?”

“Mmh, I don’t want any more stupid work from the stupid gods but I’m hitting different walls in different projects that I won’t be able to start getting past until I get some experimental results back from my research center or the grey which means my usually busy mind is feeling pretty empty. I’m only thinking half as much as usual.”

“That’s probably more than the rest of the world combined by this point, Ben. So what exactly is lying on the floor helping with?”

“Just something to do while I try to think of other things. As things are, for fun I’ve been trying to translate every conversation I’ve ever had and every piece of media I’ve ever consumed into every other language I know, including a bunch I was able to learn from the grey from the broader multiverse, which I believe let me find a few minor translation errors I’m going to have to talk to them about. Since that also means I’m now going over every book I’ve read at the magic towers again too, I’m further refining and categorizing ideas I’ve read there. Genuinely, I think I could condense it down significantly which I kind of already did with the books I wrote and donated a while ago but those really just had the heart of what matters for a bunch of concepts, if I was doing it broader while covering every topic the library held then I feel like I could do better while keeping it to a few shelves so maybe that will be something to send to Killi and the mages guild and to set up in the different churches of Myriad. I’ve also been inventing some new spells for funsies, even if I can’t cast any of them.”

“I feel like I need to worry most about that last bit.”

“I wouldn’t too much.”

“What are they then?”

He materialized a thick book into her hands, the title being the first thing she commented on even before opening in.

“Ben’s big book of unethical spells? Really?”

“I thought it had a good ring to it. If we’re going to see Jake tomorrow to check on my last few awakenings to finish then I’ll force him to try a few for me then.”

There had been a handful of people at their seventh levels who’d gotten his help near enough to the end of his soul modifying that he’d been willing to go back after that week so they could practice in the hopes of reaching the eighth but as far as he was concerned, that last journey was the end of it. It could take the day, but anyone who hadn’t reached the level to awaken by then could instead get the benefits when he’d do one last mass awakening just before the start of the next wave. With Thera’s focus moving to the pages she held as she flipped through the book.

“I feel like if the gods got to see it, this entire book would instantly become illegal.”

“That would be a little harsh; plenty of those spells are purely hypothetical. There’s no way to know if they’d actually work until they were tried.”

“Plasmafication?”

“Oh, you spotted a good one. In theory, there’s no reason there shouldn’t be versions of petrification for different affinities of magic, even if it seems like different ones are going to have different strengths and weaknesses. The horrors that might come with reversing them for one. Iceification is the water one for example, but I don’t think you need me to explain what might happen if it was reversed if you let them melt a bit first.”

“For the sake of keeping my lunch, I’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Ha, fair. So plasmafication is the fire affinity’s version, only the mana cost is going to be insane and the result’s a little…”

“Horrifying?”

“Cataclysmic,” Ben corrected. “Converting a body’s worth of matter directly into energy is the sort of thing that would leave a sizable crater anywhere it’s done. Think about the results of me making antimatter, only on the scale of a person.”

“Yeah, this book should definitely be illegal.”

“Well, it would take an awakened life and fire mage that holds over thirty thousand points of mana to do it, so I personally wouldn’t worry too much. Of all the possible petrification variants, it’s the least possible by far. As for the others, I won’t be able to test until tomorrow, but… wait, no, a handy person just entered my connect range, so we can try a couple things out today. Okay kids, who’s ready for a field trip?”

Before anyone answered, Ben was already opening the door with his magic before Sachel on the other side could knock on it, surprising her as he did.

“Sorry, am I interrupting?” she asked, suspecting it was so from what just happened. “Since I was walking by, I thought I’d check on how Delair’s doing, but-”

“She’s doing great and you’ve made perfect timing,” Ben told her, putting his clones away and getting up to pick up the kids. “Come on and help me out with something.”

“Um, alright. What?”

“Gonna teach you some experimental new spells.”

“Ben, I feel like this is going to traumatize the children,” Thera sighed when they got out to the training grounds, flipping through his spell book the entire way there to see what other horrors it held. “There’s something wrong with your imagination.”

“Mora’s been seeing everyone dragged into the hospital with you each day, and I had to actively stop Delair from watching Abel transform. Compared to that, everything I might do here is going to be fine. Now, as for test subjects, you up for making some cloned Bens?”

“And this feels weird too,” Thera told him, shaking her head even as she gave in. Raising some dirt up, she made a knife to take his blood before changing its nature so it would start to feed, Ben producing meat with his magic to grow them away from the eyes of the others and clothing them before he brought them out, four new homunculi ready to be used.

“Perfect,” he laughed, overall thrilled to have them before he and the new constructs focused on Sachel. “Then for now, I’m going to teach you a couple of new spells. One you’re probably going to need my help with, but we’ll make this work, so for now, can you cast iceification on this one?”

“I don’t think I like that I know this spell now,” she answered, also thinking about the logical implication of what would happen once it started to melt.

“Just once, and if you don’t like it, you’ll never have to do it again. Please, you’re the only person I can ask today.”

“How long until you could ask someone else?”

“Tomorrow, but there’s a few new plant spells in the mix too, it’s not like you’ll get nothing from it.”

“Mmh, fine.”

Even the water-life spell she was being asked to cast first would do something for her, given her current magic had grown from those two affinities along with earth. She had her focus and was interested in getting to it, casting the spell Ben wanted first to turn one of the Bens into an ice sculpture, with everyone looking at it once she did.

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“Alright,” he nodded. “In that case, let’s leave this one off to the side and see what it looks like after it melts a bit-”

“You can look at that in private,” Thera told him. “Even if you want to see it, I don’t, and we’re absolutely not letting the kids see, no matter how good they are at taking these things.”

“Aw, why not?” Delair asked with big, begging eyes, holding plenty of her own curiosity on the topic that Thera was more than fine with denying.

“Because if it turns out you’re not fine with it, I don’t want to have to talk to your mom about how Ben traumatized you. Ben?”

“Sorry, kiddo, but I actually agree with Thera. For my eyes only. Plus Sachel since she’s going to need to be the one to undo it.”

“Great,” the oracle said dryly, having as much desire to see the results as Thera when they felt disturbingly predictable. “In that case, what next?”

“Next, is a spell I’m lovingly calling plantification. I’ll have to let you use my mind to do it, but with your current mana pool, it should be possible to pull off otherwise, so on to clone number two.”

He linked to her as he said it, directing the eyes of the other three to that particular Ben as Sachel began to cast, the magic she held burning thousands of points of mana and nearly emptying her pool by the time she was done as the body before them was remade, flesh turned to wood and bark as it was converted to match the biology of the dryad seed Ben could materialize, leaving him to look it over in detail.

Man, if I could ever get life magic for myself, then I’d be able to do this with my material manipulation, he thought with a sigh. Hell, I’d be able to convert any living thing into any other bit of matter. Absolutely tragic that I can’t.

As much as he enjoyed the fact that he’d not only been able to gain magics since coming to the world after thinking he’d never get anything more than his enchanting and gaining both rare and previously non-existent magics at that, looking at what other options could do left him feeling the limits of their potential. As exciting as soul source was and all of the applications of it he could find, ultimately it could only create souls. Same for material manipulation, he was making the most of it, but in the end, it would only create and manipulate materials.

So maybe I should take a page out of my apprentice’s book. It’s not something I can focus on right now, but if I live then I could try gaining four new non-affinitied options and awaken them into a proper non-affinitied magic too. Then, no matter how hard or obscure the spell, I’d be able to do anything. Okay, yeah, that’s going somewhere on the to-do list.

A future consideration that had no place in his current experimentation, he instead focused back on Sachel, filling her soul with mana.

“Alright, and now that it’s a plant, let’s use some normal plant spells to grow this into as large of a tree as possible. I’ll cover the mana so you’re free to go wild, okay?”

“Alright,” Sachel agreed, having a sneaking fear of where that was going to lead as she did as he asked, watching as the Ben shaped plant took root and grew up and out, sprouting branches and leaves and making its original shape almost unrecognizable in comparison, with only a vaguely human form hidden within it, looking more like a coincidence of nature rather than a result of those magics, leaving Ben satisfied when he saw it.

“Great, this is some fantastic work. Now let’s just undo that plantification.”

“Somehow I knew this was coming,” she muttered, jealous of the kids whose eyes Thera was proactively covering, even if Delair fought against it, with Thera’s eyes turned away as well, leaving only Sachel and Ben to see what the result would be as she started to reverse the spell effects and to her horror saw it work, new branches of wood and leaves being converted back to flesh and leaving a result that looked like the mad experiment of a twisted life mage, with even Ben frowning when he saw it.

“Okay, you know what? Let’s just recast the plantification spell to make this easier to get rid of. Preferably before it dies.”

He’d been able to connect to it when it had been reversed and had managed to be made uncomfortable enough by what he’d found, what had been a copy of his body having been stretched out in the process with new structures added. While there was a shocking lack of pain from that twisted monstrosity, he was able to feel new organs and bones within it, presumably duplicates of what had originally been there, but he wasn’t going to dissect it to find out.

Worse though was that those changes extended to its brain too, creating new ones in different branches and reshaped the one it had originally held that, even though there was no soul housed within, just by the brief connection he could feel it adding to his eldritch mind, incorporating aspects to it the same as any time he connected to a new species.

It’s almost enough to make me wonder what this thing would become if I put a soul in it since it doesn’t seem like the changes are killing it, but that feels like it might be an ethical line too far.

Inflicting such an existence was too much to do to any soul, even the ones he would create himself, so instead he watched as meat and bone changed yet again to wood and leaves, ending the horrors of that particular experiment.

“Okay, so we can move that into the forest later instead of leaving it here.”

“I feel like burning it to the ground would also be an appropriate option,” Thera chimed in, with the small glimpse of it she’d caught too much as it was. “And I know I’m going to regret asking this, but are there no spells you want me to test in this?”

“Ah, well, the thing is that any ones I’d get you to test would be pretty unethical, even by my own standards.”

“... Like what?”

“Well, earth is actually fairly limited as an affinity in what it can do. I could teach you some ways to modify petrification to decide which element you could convert living flesh to, but that’s pretty harmless-”

“We have different definitions of that.”

“Compared to anything else, at least. Life actually has a lot of potential, but as things are, what can be done with the affinity by itself is actually pretty well studied. There’s room for some research of course, I might get around to opening up a new institute to explore a few different ideas in the future if I can, but based purely on known variables there’s nothing that someone else hasn’t already explored before. As for dark, by itself, again, there isn’t much more depth to plunder without doing some more advanced research on the topic to try and determine various underlying effects which would be all of the harder to do given that magic’s complicated legal status across pretty much the entire planet but as for areas life and dark meet instead… Okay, so I may have figured out a few different ways to permanently change the way someone thinks instead of just while they’re being mind controlled. Most of those spells involve some degree of restructuring the target’s brain, but-”

Before he could say more, Thera had turned the spellbook he’d materialized into dust under her power.

“No.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to do it; it was designed through purely academic curiosity.”

“And it can stay in your head then because I don’t want anyone to hear that you know how to do that, and I don’t want you writing it down to get out in the future either.”

“Okay, okay, fine,” he agreed as he materialized a new book without those offending pages, feeling as it was stared at in his hands.

“Before you think about publishing anything else in that, have a good long conversation with your god first.”

“Oh, don’t worry, this was never really for publishing. Just for killing time.”

“The fact that you made this because you were bored is somehow worse. Is it just one more spell now?”

“Yeah, just one more to see if it will work. Sachel, I’m going to be putting a few complex concepts in your brain, and I’ll go through them with you while you cast, so let’s get started.”

Since her magic had grown from water, earth, and life, that meant she still had a strong power over those affinities. Strong enough that she could likely grow a homunculus if she so desired, but what he had in mind was instead something more complicated, a plant variant of it.

Taking both Ben’s blood and a newly materialized seed, in a similar way to how Thera would make him his clones, he got Sachel to modify the structure of his blood but took it a step further by merging it into the seed before dropping it and letting it sprout as the expected bush began to grow, only with pulsing, fleshy bulbs at their ends of its branches.

“And it’s officially time for the two of you to stop watching again,” Thera said as she once more covered Mora and Delair’s eyes as those fleshy fruits continued to grow, developing skeletons and limbs before all too soon, ten new Ben clones had been made, just waiting to be plucked.

“Ben, no offense, but I don’t think I want to try any more spells you figure out,” Sachel told him, the sight of a simple bush being used to grow people imprinted in her mind.

“That’s the last one; you’re good. Still, you should consider practicing it a bit more. People who can create homunculi are valuable, and you officially make that list.”

He’d materialized clothing around them as they grew, but with them finished, he went in to inhabit them, filling their flesh with his soul before pulling away the branches still connected to each one’s belly button, flinching a bit for the feeling of it.

Still, they’d be usable enough and, more than that, they were a proof of concept, an interesting one at that. Even if there were natural users of them in the world, combined affinities were the area he viewed as the second least explored when it came to magic, falling only behind non-affinitied magic and the branches it held. With even rarer combined affinities still, it made him wonder just how much more there could be to find, but that was a future concern. If he wanted to experiment with that, he’d need to take the time to find and possibly help grow anyone with the specific skills he was looking for unless he wanted to constantly be taking all of Jake’s time for research, but with that done, there was just one final thing to do before wrapping up.

“So,” he began, looking bright as he did. “What do you say we see what happened with that iceified one?”